Homeward Bound

by Peter Ames Carlin

  No matter which grade-level students crowded into its overstuffed and understaffed classrooms, the place ran thick with academic and social ambition. Located at the hub of Flushing, Kew Gardens Hills, and Forest Hills, the school for many years had drawn from a mix of wealthy, up-and-coming, and stable working-class neighborhoods whose families demanded the best of their children. The recent influx of upwardly mobile Jews and other immigrants in Kew Gardens Hills, the quasi-suburb that represented what many of them viewed as only a midpoint on their journey to the American bourgeoisie, made the atmosphere that much more intense. These families knew that there were bigger trees to live beneath, fancier homes with lawns that sprawled and groomed hedges that hid swimming pools and private tennis courts. To get there, they wanted rigorous classes for their kids. Not coincidentally, Forest Hills High sent more of its graduates to Ivy League colleges than any other school in the city.

  Although at least a year younger than their classmates, Paul and Artie fit easily among the tenth-graders. Paul could be funny and charming, and he and Artie were often found at lunchtime singing with the doo-wop fans by the flagpole at the front of the school. He wasn’t a campus hero, but Paul usually had a girl or two to flirt with: Donna, Pam, a few others. He played the field in that teenage way: obsessed one day, quivering with excitement the next, then broken up and back on the hunt. He went for looks but also required intelligence, working knowledge of baseball, and at least some appreciation for pop music. When he and Artie double-dated, they would play off each other’s jokes and reduce one another to squinch-eyed fits of giggles. Later, the boys and their dates would head back to Artie’s place, lower the lights, and settle into separate corners of the basement. The hot breathing and smooches and whispers didn’t stay secret for very long—not between Paul and Artie, anyway.

  When he had time to himself, Paul liked to wander. He’d wheel his bike around the borough, baseball glove tucked into the handlebars, and look for action. If he couldn’t find a stickball or baseball game, he’d explore the streets and buildings, taking in the smells from the restaurants, the voices and different languages, the music drifting from apartment windows and barroom doors. Irish, Italian, Puerto Rican, the Caribbean—all those lives unfolding just a mile or three from his own front door, people living in the same place, feeling so many of the same things, only in completely different rhythms. Paul had the same experience roving the radio dial at night. New York had it all: pop, rhythm and blues, jazz, gospel, country, Latin. And when the weather was right, he could pick up signals from Philadelphia, Baltimore, Boston. In those days, every city and region had its own distinctive sound. Philadelphia soul had its own kind of swing. The rural towns in New Jersey played a reedier, twangier brand of country music, as Appalachia as it was Nashville. The patchwork spirit of the old days still survived, a quilt of rural hollers, industry towns, ethnic neighborhoods, social clubs, and large extended families.

  Artie focused on the hit parade, ears tilting to a pretty love song, his schematic brain tracking the curvature of the melody, the contrasting gradients of the harmonies. The relatively obscure rhythm and blues duo Robert and Johnny (“We Belong Together”) had an upside-down blend that put the melody on top and the harmony voice below. Nobody could match the streamlined Kentucky twang of the Everly Brothers, the sound of chrome-plated hickory. There were others: the Orioles, the Moonglows, Frankie Lymon.

  Late into the night, Paul and Artie would be alone in their respective bedrooms, but listening to the same songs and feeling the same irresistible pull to do it themselves. They’d take what they heard into Artie’s basement, or to the even cozier space beneath the Simon house, and pull it apart and put it back together again, working until they could match the singers syllable for syllable, note for note, breath for breath. Sometimes, when they pulled a song apart, they’d shuffle through the component pieces and find ways to snap them into new and slightly different forms. These were silly little songs, teenage fantasies of dream girls, silky romance, and heartbreak. Half the kids in New York were probably up to the same thing on any given day. But these two voices, so sweet and high and tightly knit, could cut through even the worst clichés. And if their run through the Brill Building two years earlier with “The Girl for Me” had turned out to be disappointing, the experience did nothing to discourage them from writing and copyrighting more original songs. Once they had a tune they figured was as catchy as anything else on the radio, they’d head back to Midtown with Paul’s guitar to see if they could charm one of the gruff men lurking in one of the Brill’s cell-like offices to publish or maybe even let them record it. Nothing came of it—beyond Artie’s realization that he was far more uncomfortable with rejection than Paul. No matter—when they got back to Kew Gardens Hills, he would pick up his guitar and get to work on a new song. Paul and Artie copyrighted “Rock with Me Tonight” not long after, and then “Now Is Goodbye” (“… If you have trust in me / Please know that I will love you faithfully…”). They were just getting started.

  * * *

  But where were they headed? That’s what worried Louis Simon. He’d wandered down the same path when he was Paul’s age, and where had it taken him? What had started as a fun way to make money for school had become his career, and now he was stuck in his cookie-cutter house on the cookie-cutter block of a working-class neighborhood in Queens. He’d lost track of who he was supposed to be. This Lee Simms character, the smiling, tuxedo-wrapped entertainer, was little more than a glorified servant: a follower of orders, a reader of scripts, a living ornament at the parties where other intelligent, ambitious men were celebrated, not employed. Yet Louis Simon was an intelligent man, an intellectual with serious ideas about education and philosophy. The work of his life, still ahead of him, was not going to be done with a stand-up bass anchoring him to the floor.

  This realization first hit Louis in the mid-1950s, when he was still in his thirties, not too old to make a change, but definitely not a young man by any stretch of the imagination. From there the path was obvious: he would go back to New York University and, at long last, get the advanced degree he should have pursued right after he graduated from college in 1939. He started work on a master’s degree in education and made steady progress, earning his MA in the early 1960s. Louis continued supporting his family with music until then, and it would take another decade for him to earn a full Ph.D. But he already felt like a new man, and wasn’t shy about telling his older son how thrilling it was to realize that he wouldn’t have to be a working musician for the rest of his life.

  Louis Simon would be a teacher, one of the most honored professions in the Jewish tradition. Education had been a central pillar of American Jewish culture since 1889, when the primarily upscale German Jews whose parents arrived in the mid-nineteenth century created the Educational Alliance, a privately funded group dedicated to teaching both English and the fundamentals of American society and social etiquette to the waves of unschooled Jewish workers and farmers washing in from eastern Europe. It was an exercise in organized altruism—one freighted with condescension. If you’d picked up a copy of the Jewish Messenger from that period, you’d have read pro–Educational Alliance editorials that dismissed the unsophisticated new arrivals as “slovenly in dress, loud in manners and vulgar in discourse.” Louis never achieved that level of smugness, certainly not in public, but he made a point of telling his son, repeatedly, that the highest calling in life was to teach others the things you’d learned for yourself. Otherwise, you’d spend a lifetime enriching yourself to the benefit of no one else—and then what was the point of your presence on earth?

  Paul was dutiful enough to listen to his dad, but he had no intention of heeding him. He had long since figured that his father’s career in music was the coolest thing about him. He liked Louis’s fellow musicians, who were funny, quirky guys, and he already knew he was a different kind of musician from his dad. He wanted to write his own songs and be the guy who stood in front of the musicians in the orche
stra. He wanted to be a star. The Cleftones were on the Billboard charts—in fact, the music shops were full of records made by teenagers. So why them? And why not him?

  Louis didn’t get it—he didn’t want to get it. But Charlie Merenstein did. Paul was playing less baseball these days, but he was still a regular at the Merensteins’ dining room table on the evenings Louis was at work. The bond that began with baseball had deepened as Paul grew up, and if baseball was Charlie Merenstein’s hobby, music was his business.

  Charlie’s sister Bess and her husband, Ike Berman, along with two other friends, had cofounded Apollo Records in the early 1940s. Bess had been running the small independent label for several years, but she grew sickly in the early 1950s and invited her then-unemployed brother to come to New York and take it over. Although a perennially underfinanced operation, the label had a reputation for finding and building careers for under-recognized talents, including the gospel great Mahalia Jackson, rhythm and blues singer Dinah Washington, R&B songwriter/performer Doc Pomus, and others in the African American music world.

  Most of the label’s biggest artists eventually abandoned Apollo for the gold-plated major labels, but Apollo’s reputation for finding new hit makers persisted even after Charlie Merenstein took over in 1953. Charlie may have had no musical experience prior to that, but he proved to have excellent ears, discovering and producing records for, among others, Solomon Burke and Jimmy Jones. He cowrote Jones’s defining hit “Handy Man,” which went on to become a global smash when James Taylor recorded it in 1977. The Cellos’ hit “Rang Tang Ding Dong (The Japanese Sandman),” the Delroys’ “Bermuda Shorts,” and the Chesters’ landmark single “The Fires Burn No More” bear Charlie Merenstein’s mark.

  Charlie had heard enough of Paul and Artie’s compositions to know that Paul would eventually be as capable of writing hits as any aspiring young songwriter, though maybe not for Apollo’s African American–dominated roster. Charlie did what he could to help the boy see his way into the music business—and it was just as it was with baseball, really, the other passion they shared: you needed a core of God-given talent to get started. After that, it was all hard work: honing your tools, practicing the skills, forever pushing at the boundaries of your abilities, then going right back to hone, practice, and push even harder than you did before. Actually, Paul didn’t need anyone to explain that to him; he never had—which was another reason Charlie was so sure about the boy’s future.

  * * *

  Around Kew Gardens Hills, Paul had become the kid with the guitar. He’d take it to the playground, to the park, onto the subway for the long ride to Coney Island. While his buddies tossed a ball around and called out to girls, Paul would shoulder his instrument and belt pop songs. Friends would drift over, then strangers, too. Girls, especially. He was already a good showman, witty and crowd-conscious, always happy to take requests and goof on himself when he fumbled a chord or didn’t know the words. He had a strong rhythm hand, and when things really got going he’d have his friends clapping and singing along. They’d applaud when he was finished, and maybe a girl or two he didn’t know would hang back later and ask where he went to school. Sometimes he’d go home with a telephone number stuffed in his pocket.

  It was even better with Artie on board. When they did their Urban Everlys act at the Forest Hills High School talent show at the end of their sophomore year in 1956, the cheers were so wild they could only look at each other and laugh. Amazing! They were both famous in the neighborhood after that one, and to Paul, the feeling of being known and recognized was intoxicating. People called out to him on the street—and not just kids; the grown-ups knew who he was now, too. He started selecting his clothes with more care, and investing a bit more time in the construction of his piled-up-and-swept-back hairstyle. He felt attractive on a good day, even given his increasingly chubby cheeks, heavy brows, and thickening adult nose. On a big stage, it was still easier for him to have Artie alongside. No one was going to laugh at Artie’s seraphic curls and finely cut cheekbones—and that voice! When Paul wove his ordinary voice together with Artie’s dulcet instrument, he knew he sounded better than he ever could on his own. Artie had become so many things to Paul: his best friend, his partner, his musical inspiration, and increasingly his rival, too. On a darker day Paul would examine his friend from afar and feel a pulse of bile. Why had Artie gotten to be so blessed, with his height, his voice, his hair? And why did Paul have to be so dependent on him? Paul was the one who could play guitar. He didn’t need Artie to help him write a song or face down a real audience—unless he did, and that need put kerosene in Paul’s veins.

  Paul’s insecurities were every bit as clear to Artie as their shared impulse to outdo each other whenever the opportunity arose. And when Paul started bragging about his stickball heroics or the pretty girl who had all but asked him to ask her out, Artie knew exactly where Paul’s fault lines lay, and how much of a tremor it would take to knock him off balance. Still, their friendship ran deeper than their rivalry, and when they were in the public eye, Artie made a point of standing slightly behind Paul, or even hunching a little to make their height disparity less obvious. Artie didn’t say anything about it, but Paul was well aware of what his friend was doing—which made Paul that much more dependent on Artie, and then his cheeks reddened and he wondered again why a guy as smart, talented, and popular, goddammit, as he was should need anyone to do anything for him.

  Yet who else was he going to hang out with? Who else could see the hilarity of an imaginary Fattest Girl in the School contest, then roll on the floor laughing half an hour later when Paul leaped to his feet to greet a visiting rotund girl by shouting, to the confusion of everyone except Artie, “You’re the winner!” They both got sent to detention for that one, but it was worth it. Artie was still laughing about it fifteen years later, recalling that absurdist goofball humor they shared, a juvenile punch-and-kick comedy fueled by the adolescent reality of high expectations, harsh judgments, and the terror of being anything less than entirely perfect.

  Taking jobs at different camps for the summer of 1957, Paul and Artie traded letters describing remarkably similar weeks of shaving cream fights, busted curfews, midnight raids, and serial romances with the female staffers. To Artie, who had never been to a camp of any sort, the experience was a revelation. He was learning how to play tennis, he had met at least two great friends, and he’d fallen in love at least three times already. So many of the girls were really “pretty and built,” and out of the twenty-five at least five or six were really nice—“and that’s a damn good average.” That any of them was even interested in him was easy to figure: “I’ve been doing a lot of entertaining, and it has made me pretty popular.” Paul had been up to the same thing. “You can imagine what a crazy guitar-thumpin’ kid can do to these kids.” When he wasn’t wowing ’em with his guitar, he could do it with a racquet and a fuzzy white ball. (“I’m afraid you’ve had it, Garf, I’m slightly great in tennis.”) After hours, he’d jump into a car with the black kitchen staffers and ride for hours, driving from town to town and cranking the radio dial between rhythm and blues stations. On a couple of occasions, he and another guy sneaked back to New York to catch Alan Freed’s rock ’n’ roll revues at the Paramount Theatre in Brooklyn, finding their way back to camp just in time to serve breakfast to the unsuspecting campers. And that wasn’t the half of it. Paul had also gone steady with three different girls so far, and was “workin’ on” another so intently it was biting into his tennis time. It’s hard to imagine a better way for a highly pressured independence-starved city kid to spend his sixteenth summer, so how to account for the anger that erupts in his looping cursive script. The former pro who had been teaching Paul and another friend how to play tennis each day turned out to be “a fuck, though. I hate his guts.” Turning his attention to a girl he’d met just before leaving Queens for the summer, Paul reprinted a few choice phrases from a letter she’d sent, the better to ridicule her imprecise description of
a baseball game she’d seen. The girl, he concluded, was “so pitifully stupid its [sic] pathetic … Incidentally I really liked her.”

  Paul was becoming a seething young man, a slave to the invidious comparison, acutely attuned to the pleasure of dealing a truly nasty bolt of humiliation. Yet flash-forward a year, and he was back in camp, this time as a counselor to a cabin full of seven-year-olds. They were the youngest campers, not all of them entirely happy to be away from their parents, their dogs, the stabilizing comforts of home. Paul kept an eye on the quiet ones, reading the sorrow at the corners of their mouths, including them in all the cabin hijinks, keeping the jokers and bullies from making sport of the smaller and weaker. When one homesick camper peed in his bed in the middle of the night, Paul got the weeping boy cleaned up and tucked him into his own dry bed before tossing a blanket over the boy’s wet mattress and spending the rest of the night sleeping there. The boy had the same accident a few nights later, and Paul responded in exactly the same way, then made certain to change the subject quickly when another camper asked why the two kept switching bunks.

  Paul the counselor was warm and inclusive. He composed and sang funny songs about camp at meals and around the campfire, and reveled in the corny jokes and sing-alongs that left the kids giggling and humming at the same time. When Artie paid a visit late in the summer, Paul arranged for them to sing a set of songs for all the campers, wowing them with their tight harmonies and all-around professionalism. It was a highlight in the kids’ scrapbooks, many of which included at least one snapshot of Paul, that cool counselor with the guitar. A lot of them never forgot him, even the ones who weren’t music fans enough to realize, until many years later, that their former counselor had written his guitar into very different circumstances. A former camper, Helen Strassner, saw Paul and Artie perform ten or so years later and gathered with the fans and autograph seekers near the stage door after the show. When the door swung open Helen went straight to Paul and reintroduced herself. She had been at Camp Washington Lodge, he had been her brother’s counselor one year, they were so happy for his success, so proud to have known him back when …