“I’m Mrs. Silverstein,” she said. A hush fell over the room. I could feel everybody staring at her. She smiled, but I wouldn’t call it a happy smile. This smile gripped your heart and made you shudder. “So, Andrew told me you gave him a little punch in the arm, is that right?”
“It was just a little chuck.” Mr. Barketta tried to look cool, but he mainly looked sick. He came over to me. “It was only a tap. I didn’t hurt you, did I, partner?”
“I know you would never hit my kid.” That smile again. Blazing cold. Turning Mr. Barketta to ice. “I see that now that we’ve met. I just had to check.” Then Mom flipped that smile over, changing it from giving you the shivers to warming you up. “Andrew told me you do a pretty good John Wayne.”
Mr. Barketta rotated his neck, hitched up his pants, narrowed his mouth and walked bowlegged across the room toward Mom. “No way I’d ever hurt your little boy, ma’am,” he said, channeling John Wayne himself.
Everybody laughed, Mom the loudest. “Very good, Mr. Barketta. It’s like I’m looking right at the Duke.”
“Aw, shucks, Mrs. Silverstein.”
Another huge laugh.
“Well, I’ll let you all get back to class.” My mother dipped her head daintily at Mr. Barketta, gave me a wave, and headed out of the classroom, her mink coat swishing as she walked.
“Very nice meeting you, Mrs. Silverstein,” Mr. Barketta said, losing the John Wayne, going back to his goofy normal voice.
My mom waved again, tinkling her fingers over her shoulder, and left the classroom. For half a second, the room went quiet as a tomb. Then all the girls clapped and cheered, and all the boys whistled.
DON’T FUCK WITH AN ORIGINAL
I NEVER BEGAN fights, but I never shied away from them. There was this kid who lived down the street. He was a little nuts to begin with. We were trading baseball cards when he decided that he didn’t like how the trades were going. So, without provocation, he knocked over a huge stack of cards and swiped at my face with his open hand. Before I could react, he ran off. When I got home, Mom took one look at me and started screaming.
“What happened to my Andrew?”
I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror and saw why Mom was yelling. I looked like something out of a horror movie. The kid had taken his fingernails and raked my face from my forehead to my chin. That’s when I flipped out. I ran out of the house and down the street to where the kid lived. I was gonna kill him. When I got there his big fat mother—she must have weighed three hundred fifty pounds—was blocking the door. The kid was hiding behind her. Trying to reach around her to grab her son, I was screaming, “You’re dead! You’re dead!” I was just about to get past the mother when my mother and sister showed up. They knew my temper and were scared I was going to kill the kid. But I wouldn’t listen to reason. I was still going after him when I felt a hand on my shoulders.
“Okay, big shot,” said my dad. “Time to stop.”
So I did.
Next day Mom said I could skip school ’cause of the scratch marks on my face, but I went anyway. I was gonna get this fuckin’ kid. I waited all day ’cause I knew we’d be on the same bus going home. I stared at him, letting him know he was gonna get it. He looked out the window, trying to ignore me. When we got to our stop, he got to the front of the bus in a hurry. I was in the back, but I blasted my way through the bus, knocking the other kids out of the way. He was already running down the street. I dropped my books to gain speed and quickly caught him right in front of our house. He tried to rake my face again. Not this time. He then tried to punch me in the balls. That’s when I really went off. I don’t mind a fight, but I do mind getting punched in the balls. I got him in a headlock and bashed his face with my knee. Aunt Carol heard the commotion and came running out.
“Beat the shit outta him, Andrew!”
I slammed him with his metal lunch box. By now he was a bloody mess. I didn’t stop until Dad and a few other men arrived and put an end to the massacre.
An hour later I was back home with Mom and Natalie when we heard Aunt Carol screaming. We all ran downstairs to see what was wrong.
“That little bastard,” she said, “the one Andrew beat up. He was just here. He pulled out his dick and pissed on my window.”
The way Aunt Carol said that broke us up. It also broke up the mood. We couldn’t stop laughing.
YOU CAN KEEP JOHN AND PAUL; I WANTED TO BE RINGO
ANOTHER BEAUTIFUL THING about my childhood is music. I fell in love with rhythm before I fell in love with girls. I was crazy for the beat of a tom drum, the snap of a snare, and the brassy crash of a cymbal. The first grooves I heard that drove me wild came from a song called “Caravan,” which Uncle Ernie loved and played on his phonograph over and over. Uncle Ernie loved the big-band beats, especially when the drummer was Gene Krupa, his favorite. Krupa’s drum intro and later his solo in Benny Goodman’s “Sing, Sing, Sing” did the trick: it turned me inside out and had me grabbing the spoons from Aunt Carol’s kitchen and beating on the phone book.
“Sure, Krupa was the greatest,” said Mom. “But they say he was a hophead. They say he took drugs. If I ever catch you taking drugs, Andrew, I’ll murder you. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Mom.”
“Promise me you won’t.”
“I won’t.”
And I never did.
Not long after my Krupa craze—a craze that has lasted until this day—I got even crazier one Sunday night when I was watching our Emerson console TV. Natalie and I were sitting on the floor, Mom and Dad were on the couch. Ed Sullivan came on. He looked like a corpse and talked like a tight-ass, but we loved Ed because Ed loved show business and always honored the old-timers. But tonight he didn’t have no old-timers. He had this group of four shaggy-haired kids from England.
The one who got to me was the guy playing the drums—the guy sitting high on a riser above the other three, up there with his big nose, his head bobbing up and down while he beat the shit out of those tubs. While the girls in the balcony were screeching so loud for George, Paul, and John that you couldn’t hear them sing or play their guitars, I could hear every sound Ringo made. Ringo was behind the whole operation. Ringo was the driver in the driver’s seat. I loved Ringo. I wanted to be Ringo.
“I’m gonna be that guy!” I announced to the other Originals.
In another family—a family more normal than the Originals—I might have been told that I was nuts. Who is this little kid saying that he’s gonna be a rock-and-roll star? But in my family the reaction was just the opposite.
“You’ll be whoever you wanna be,” said Mom.
“You’ll be terrific at whatever you do,” said Dad.
“Let’s go get that Beatles record,” said Natalie.
It wasn’t long before I had my own toy drum set and was banging away to my heart’s content. Turned out I was a natural. The rhythm flowed outta me. Also turned out that the drums were a great way for me to get out everything inside—frustrations at not doing good at school and anger at the bullies and gang members who thought they’d scare me off. They didn’t.
FUCKIN’ CUNT MOTHERFUCKIN’ BITCH ASSHOLE GODDAMN BASTARD COCKSUCKER PIECE OF SHIT SONOFABITCH BASTARD SHITHEAD
I’D HEARD CURSING my whole life. You couldn’t live in the Silverstein home and not hear a little cursing. My aunt Carol would call someone a “stupid bastard” or Mom would refer to some schmuck as a “dumb son of a bitch.” They used those words with a certain rhythm that rang right. There was a poetry to the way they cursed.
Back then cursing wasn’t what it is today. Certain words—like “fuck” or “cunt”—you’d never hear. They were off-limits. And of course as kids we were not allowed to curse at all. Even words like “goddamn” were not allowed. If I slipped up and said “Goddamn shit,” my parents would get upset.
Mom would say, “Listen to that mouth on him, Fred.”
Then Dad would say, “Where do you think he gets it from, Jackie?”
>
Either way, I was told, “Use language like that again and we’ll wash out your mouth with soap.”
All that brings me to one day when I was in the schoolyard during recess, a time when the other kids liked to gather around me because they never knew what I might do. I might get an old pail and start beating it like a drum, pretending I was Ringo Starr. I might climb on top of the tallest fence, announce that I was Superman, and fly off. I might do anything. But on this particular freezing-cold day I felt like being alone—an unusual condition for a kid like me ’cause I liked attention. I liked being noticed. But unnoticed, I went off by myself back to the school building, where I stood alone. No one was there. No one could see me. No one could hear me. I stood facing the closed doors of the school. While the kids were far away, running around the schoolyard and letting off steam, I opened my mouth, and a hurricane of curse words came storming outta me.
“Fuck!
“Shit!
“Cunt!
“Motherfucker!
“Bitch!”
I shouted out each word individually, and then I strung them together—“Fuckin’ cunt motherfuckin’ bitch asshole goddamn bastard cocksucker piece of shit sonofabitch bastard shithead . . .”
It was like I had Tourette’s. I couldn’t stop myself. It felt like diarrhea of the mouth. It went on for several minutes. But when it was over, it felt good. I felt free. Maybe those words had been bottled up in my mind and needed to explode. Those words had power. They came out of some deep part of me, and even as a kid, they felt good coming outta my mouth. To this day I can’t believe that moment happened. I was only in the third grade.
THE KING
IT WAS 1968 and I was eleven. I was told to go to sleep but couldn’t, because music was coming from the TV set in the living room that had me climbing out of my bed and crawling on the floor to crack open the door. I had to see who was making the music.
There he was. He was so explosive and dynamic that I couldn’t stay put. I had to take a chance on pissing off my parents by walking into the living room and just standing there. Knowing me as they did, Mom and Dad let me stay. They let me sit right in front of the TV, understanding that the singing was so great that I’d never get back to sleep anyway.
“Stay, Andrew,” said Mom. “You can hear a couple of songs, then straight back to bed.”
I heard more than a couple. I stayed for all of them—“That’s All Right,” “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Lawdy Miss Clawdy,” “Blue Suede Shoes,” “One Night with You”—one better than the other. The way he sounded fuckin’ fractured me—that cocksure smoothness of his voice. The way he looked fuckin’ fractured me—the tight leather pants and the leather jacket with the collar stuck up in the back. His sneer fractured me. His easy give-and-take with the audience fractured me. His absolute total not-insecure-for-a-second confidence fractured me.
I watched Elvis Presley that night—only later did I learn it was his comeback special—feeling that he was everything I wanted to be. Whatever he had, I wanted. But it was more than that. I felt that I already had what he had. I knew that Elvis was Elvis because he took over the stage and the room and the television audience around the world. He loved how everyone was looking at him. And everyone was looking at him because his every move was right. And his every move was right because he was in charge.
That was it!
His in-charge attitude was the attitude that lived inside me!
I didn’t know how or when or even why, but goddamn it . . . I was gonna have that kind of in-charge look and feel and act. I was gonna take over. I was gonna command the fuckin’ stage.
I was gonna be Elvis!
My parents saw that I was transfixed and did nothing to break my spell. Even though my parents related more to Frank Sinatra than Elvis Presley, they saw that Elvis had what Frank had: crazy charisma. By that age I’d heard enough Sinatra to love him myself. I loved when he sang “My Kind of Town” and “Come Fly with Me.” I could fly with Sinatra. But Elvis had something that Frank didn’t. Elvis had the leather. Elvis had the rebel look. While Elvis was singing, he was also saying, “Fuck you if you don’t like me, ’cause I like me. I like me so much I’m gonna make you like me.”
MIAMI FOR A MINUTE
I DON’T KNOW exactly why we left Staten Island and moved to Miami when I was twelve, because my parents didn’t include my sister and me in discussions about their finances. But that’s how it should be. With Silvertown Estates, I figured that Dad hadn’t made the fortune he had expected, but that was okay because Dad had lots of skills. Dad always found a way to make a living. The man could do anything. And Mom, like millions of other Brooklyn Jews, had always wanted to live in Miami Beach.
So we moved.
Miami in those days was about the Fontainebleau Hotel, where Sammy Davis and Sinatra played; the Eden Roc, where Liz Taylor stayed; and the Miami Beach Auditorium, where they shot The Jackie Gleason Show. I remember the palm trees, the beach, the sunshine, and the Parkview Point, the high-rise where we lived.
I was still an innocent kid. For instance, my friend Mark, a year older than me, would talk about fucking girls, but I wasn’t ready. I didn’t know the territory. I hadn’t studied the anatomy. I didn’t really know what to do. I was shy. Yes, loudmouth class-clown jackass joker do-anything-for-attention Andrew Silverstein had a shy side. He wasn’t ready to get down and dirty. It would take many more years for me to gain the courage to explore the sexual territory that I was dreaming about. At that point, the dreams would have to do.
• • •
My dad was my hero because he not only loved and protected his family, he always found a way to deal with the cold, cruel world, no matter what setbacks he faced. When he got to Miami Beach, he was a builder, supervising construction crews putting up high-rises. He’d go out and walk on those steel girders fifteen stories above the ground and not think twice about it. The man could do anything. I saw that when things didn’t work out he never complained. When business at his Brooklyn toy store went flat, he just put a lock on the door and walked away. When the Silvertown Estates project didn’t work out, he didn’t moan or groan. He moved on. After eight or nine months in Florida, when Mom missed Brooklyn so badly we decided to move back, Dad walked out of his Miami Beach building business and started up a new business. This was the Royal Process Agency at 16 Court Street in downtown Brooklyn.
All the Originals were glad to be back in the borough we loved best. Staten Island was okay, Miami Beach was nice, but Brooklyn was home, Brooklyn was my heart. We moved in for a while with Grandma Shirley at Avenue M and East Twelfth—it was great living with a grandmother who treated me like a little prince—before we got a place of our own at 3202 Nostrand Avenue, apartment 4A.
FALLING IN LOVE WITH A PAIR OF FURRY GLOVES
I STILL REMEMBER my first time. You always remember your first. I was in my bedroom at my little desk making believe I was doing homework while my parents were sitting at the kitchen table on the other side of my door. My bedroom was right off the kitchen. I had an itch down there. And the more I scratched the itch, the itchier it got. Looking for something soft to rub the itch, I was rummaging through a box in my closet when I noticed a pair of furry gloves that Mom had bought me in the Brooklyn Kings Plaza shopping center.
I took one of the gloves and folded back the opening so the leather on the outside of the glove wouldn’t hurt me. Hoping to stop the itch, I stuck my cock inside the little furry glove. The more I rubbed the glove up and down, the better it felt. More rubbing, better and better feeling, until all of a sudden an overwhelming feeling washed over me. I pulled the glove off to see that my cock was shooting out stuff like I’d struck oil. It wouldn’t stop. I panicked. Making sure Mom and Dad weren’t around, I made a beeline for the bathroom, my cock still shooting cum. I threw a towel over the dick head to catch the last of my load. Remember—I didn’t even know what a load was. And I knew that it wasn’t piss, ’cause taking a leak never felt that good. I fi
gured I had broken my dick. Matter of fact, I didn’t touch my cock again for months after. It wasn’t until I heard the other boys talking about jerking off that I realized it was normal. That’s when I went home and started seriously dating both those furry gloves. I was the only kid in the ninth grade dating twins.
With the help of Vaseline and Neosporin, I wound up fucking everything in the house—scarves, socks, blankets, earmuffs. I fucked my mom’s fur coat so many times it didn’t even need a hanger. I’m sure some scientist has figured out how many loads your average horny boy shoots in a day. Well, if the norm is two or three, I could double that. Whacking off became a religious ritual. It was my way of worshipping the Priestess of Pussy. It was where I put my energy and imagination. No one told me it was wrong. No one warned me that it would ruin me. My parents had to know what I was doing in the bathroom for thirty minutes at a time. If they objected, they didn’t bug me. They figured it was normal, even healthy. In that respect, I was one of the healthiest kids on the block.
SLY AND THE STONES AT MY BAR MITZVAH
ONCE WE MOVED back to Brooklyn, Dad transitioned fast from picking up work serving summonses for different lawyers around the borough to starting his own company, the Royal Process Agency. He was done moving from business to business. He’d own and operate Royal Process for the next twenty years.
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