Still Foolin’ ’Em

by Billy Crystal

  “Count to ten, go into the audience, kiss your mother and grandparents, and come back onstage.”

  What? Five thousand years of anguish and suffering and having the tip of my penis cut off in my grandmother’s living room and all I get to guide me through life is “Count to ten and kiss your relatives”?

  I started to cry. “That’s it?” I whispered.

  “Yes, and I expect you to be in confirmation class Monday and don’t discuss this with anyone,” he replied, with a look in his eye that said, Tell anyone, and I’ll cut the rest of your penis off.

  Given how I felt about my penis, I haven’t said a word to anybody. Until now.

  * * *

  Junior high was a disaster. The four elementary schools in Long Beach all emptied into the junior high. My class had more than five hundred students in it. I was out of my comfort zone. Plus, Rip was such a star that a lot of his teachers put pressure on me to be as good as he was, and I didn’t think that was possible.

  I’m still not sure what happened. I was a smart kid, good grades, test scores, the whole bit, but I let things distract me. By “things,” I mean the two things on the front of girls. I went on a small rampage. This girl, that girl, on the phone, meeting them at the Laurel Theater, my first make-out sessions, copping my first feels—all of that stopped me from keeping my eye on the ball. Actually, my eyes were always on my balls, as that became a hobby as well. Once I knew God wasn’t stiffening me, I was home. So as my erections went up, my grades went down, my self-esteem went down, and I floundered. If they gave grades for masturbating you’d be reading a book by another Einstein. I settled into life as a C+, B− student. As I started high school I couldn’t stop thinking about two things: baseball and performing. Oh, right, and tits, so three things. Maybe that was puberty after all.

  Performing stand-up in the high school variety revue called The Swing Show that spring was a turning point. My first big crowd had almost a thousand people in the audience. I rewrote a routine from a Jonathan Winters album. He was my favorite at the time. It was a takeoff on the Frankenstein movie, with the scientist building this giant monster, and at the end of the routine he calls UCLA and tells the coach his basketball player is ready. In my version, I was the scientist and turned the monster into a basketball player for my high school. I was a fourteen-year-old sophomore, and I didn’t think it was stealing. I just did it word for word in front of an audience. I executed it perfectly, and it just killed. Well, of course it did—it was Jonathan’s material. Dad was there, and taking a bow and seeing him smile up at me from his seat is something I will never forget, because I only got to see that once. He died suddenly the next fall, and my childhood came to a screeching halt. I never felt young again.

  The night he died, we argued. My first girlfriend had dumped me, and I was moping around. He was frustrated with me, I got fresh, and that was the last time we spoke. I thought I had something to do with his death, which was a huge burden. I drifted through my junior year of high school. With Joel and Rip away at college, it was just my grieving mom and me alone in the house. I never felt I could have a weak moment in front of her, which, frankly, was exhausting, and I held in a lot more pain than I was able to bear. Making the high school basketball team gave me a place to go after school, and though I didn’t play much, I loved and needed the camaraderie of my teammates. I had a good varsity baseball season, hitting just over .300, and did another strong performance in The Swing Show, but I was missing my dad and dealing with my mom.

  I felt a little stronger during my senior year of high school, though the haze of sadness still blurred my vision. Mom had pulled herself together somewhat and had gotten a job, which, at the age of fifty, was a major accomplishment; she was determined to make sure we all graduated from college. I got the lead in the school show and won the intramural wrestling championship and, along with it, my nickname. I was all of 122 pounds. The title match in front of a raucous crowd in our packed gym was scoreless into the third and final period, when my opponent deliberately gouged me in the eye. Furious, I reversed him for a point, then got my shoulder into his stomach and drove him off the mat and threw him into the scoreboard—a portable blackboard, which fell over and shattered. My great friend David Sherman stood up and yelled, “You brute!” The crowd started chanting, “Brute! Brute! Brute!” From then on, Brute was my nickname. When I checked into a basketball game and got out on the floor, the fans chanted, “Brute! Brute! Brute!” At five foot seven with a buzz cut, I was hardly typecast for that moniker, and you have to wonder what my opponents were thinking.

  During my last season of high school baseball, I was the captain of the team, hit .346, and even belted my first home run. Against a Calhoun High School pitcher who was later drafted by the Houston Astros, I took a high inside fastball and turned on it. It sailed over the fence at the 325-foot sign in left center field. As I approached first base and saw it clear the wall, I yelled, “Oh, baby!” When I rounded third, my coach, Gene Farry, was waiting for me. He shook my hand and whispered, “Don’t say that again.” He was right, but I was just so damned happy.

  As Little Orphan Annie—Long Beach High Swing Show.

  That May, my buddy Neil Chusid introduced me to a young man named Lew Alcindor. Neil and Lew were classmates at Power Memorial Academy, in Manhattan. At over seven feet tall, Lew was the number one high school basketball player in the country and was on his way to UCLA; changing his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, he became one of the NBA’s all-time greats. We got to be friends, and Lew came over quite a lot and loved our family’s connections to the world of jazz and its African American musicians.

  One beautiful spring day, Lew, Neil, and I decided to play some hoops at the local basketball courts in Long Beach. We walked on the boardwalk toward the center of town. Lew was wearing a UCLA T-shirt, a panama hat, and round red John Lennon sunglasses. He looked at me and said, “You’re not cool enough—wear these.” He gave me his red sunglasses and Neil the hat. We arrived at the famous courts at Central School. Larry Brown, now a Hall of Fame basketball coach, had made these courts his home when he’d attended Long Beach High. College and high school players from all over came to Central School on Saturdays to play against one another. The games were in full swing as the three of us sauntered onto the courts: five-foot-eight Neil in his wide-brimmed hat, trying to look “bad”; five-foot-seven me with my red glasses, trying to walk like I was six-five; and the most famous seven-foot-two high school athlete in America. The players just stared at us as I uttered, “We have next.” We didn’t lose a game until we got hungry and Lew said, “That’s enough—thanks, guys.” Neil put on his hat, I put on my red sunglasses, and we walked out the way we had come in.

  In June I was handed my diploma. After an anxious summer saying good-bye to my friends and family and all I had ever known, I got on a plane and headed to Marshall University, in Huntington, West Virginia.

  Sitting alone on the plane as it flew south was a strange feeling. Not unlike how I feel at sixty-five. How did this happen so soon? I had never been away to camp, had rarely even slept over at a friend’s house, and now I was on my way to my first year of college. After a harrowing landing at the Huntington airport (the runway was just over the lip of a mountain), I arrived at the Hotel Prichard, which would be my dormitory. The school had taken two floors of the hotel because of a lack of dorm space. My roommate wasn’t in yet and our bunk beds weren’t even assembled, so that first night I slept on a mattress on the floor. After my collect call home to say I had made it, words I barely got out because of the lump in my throat, I walked into town to look around and get a bite to eat at the White Pantry, a nearby burger joint. I was wearing a T-shirt, and my Star of David necklace peeked over it. I ordered a cheeseburger, and the counterman said they were closed, which they weren’t; the place was packed. He pointed to the sign on the wall that said, WE RESERVE THE RIGHT TO REFUSE SERVICE TO ANYONE. He then motioned to my Star of David, and I stood up and walked out.

/>   * * *

  I got a job as a DJ on WMUL, the campus radio station, and had two shows: one of my own, called Just Jazz, and another called Nightlife, which I did with a partner named Tom Tanner. We’d be on late at night in Huntington, and after a while people started listening. It was a way for me to perform and be funny, and it was just like I was home doing bits on our tape recorder with my brothers.

  High school graduation, June 1965. I think this was taken by Lew Alcindor.

  I was hoping to be the second baseman for the Thundering Herd, but the school had canceled the freshman baseball program, so that dream would have to wait until my sophomore year. I was very shy, didn’t really date anybody, and even taught a Sunday school theater class at the local synagogue. My roommate, Mike Hughes, was a great guy; we were a solid pair even though he was in his mid-twenties and I was only seventeen. We made up some phony proof of age so I could get a beer now and then. One day, I was talking to some of the guys in the dorm about Lew Alcindor, and they doubted that I knew him. I bet a bunch of them five bucks each. So I wrote a letter to Lew care of UCLA, and in a short time I got a letter back, which earned me a lot of dorm cred and seventy-five dollars.

  “You are listening to Just Jazz here on WMUL—the voice of Marshall University. I’m Billy Crystal.”

  Then I told Mike that I could sneeze at will. I have a chemical reaction to dark chocolate that can cause me to sneeze uncontrollably. Up until then, my record was fifty sneezes before my nose bled. Mike thought this could be great fun. So he got a group of guys together in the rec room and they all threw five bucks into a hat, and I ate a large bar of dark chocolate. I sat in the middle of the jammed room with everybody starring at me. Within five minutes, someone in the crowd said, “Hey, his ears are getting red,” which to me meant “Gentleman, start your engines.” The bet was fifty sneezes or better. Achoo! came the first. “One,” said Mike, who was holding the pot. Achoo! “Two,” said Mike. As the count grew, so did the amount of people in the room, all calling out the number as I sneezed away. I passed thirty-five easily, and guys threw more money into the hat. Forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty sneezes! Still not done but exhausted, somehow I worked my way up to sixty-four before a trickle of blood hit my upper lip. I made $225 and a few new friends.

  I came home that summer and went to work as a counselor for my old teacher Chuck Polin at a day camp he ran at the Malibu Beach Club. One day while I was playing catch on the beach with a friend, this girl walked by. I followed her, and we started talking and then dating. I was in love, and I knew that if I went back to Marshall we’d never make it. Long-distance relationships rarely work out. I didn’t want to let that happen. I transferred to Nassau Community College, only twenty minutes from Long Beach.

  It’s the best decision I ever made.

  Count to Ten

  As we face the challenges of getting older, some people want the comfort of knowing that there is a God watching out for them. People say it is a given that as you get older, you turn to religion. Personally, the aging friends I know have turned to the Holy Trinity: Advil, bourbon, and Prozac. Finding a relationship with God (if you believe in one) is littered with speed bumps. Now, I’d love to believe that there is a God watching out for us, but I can’t. How would he explain things? “God, why did you take my father when I was fifteen?” “Did I? Oh, yeah, I was getting a root canal that day … my bad.”

  “What about Vietnam? World War II, Hiroshima, the tsunami in the Philippines?”

  “Uh, migraine, I had a migraine. Plus, Vietnam’s not my fault—even I can’t control the CIA.”

  “Hurricane Sandy?”

  “It was supposed to miss the East Coast by two hundred miles. I left the word ‘miss’ out of my e-mail to Mother Nature.”

  Can we have all these awful moments in our lives and believe that God had a hand in them? Think about it: when some ballplayers hit a home run and step on home plate, they immediately point to the sky, yet when they make an error or strike out, they don’t point anywhere. Didn’t the same God watch over them? Most people who are religious can be divided into four groups: the fanatics (the ones who want to kill everyone who is not them); the true believers (those who accept on faith that what science and common sense tell them is a bit far-fetched; I can’t specify who fits this category, but let’s just say that I’m not quite ready to go with the idea that seventy-five million years ago Xenu brought billions of his people to Earth, stacked them around volcanoes, and killed them using nuclear weapons); the spiritual (those who use their Good Book and teachings as a way to connect with something deeper than themselves); and the cultural (those who identify less with God and more with which deli has the best corned beef).

  But as we age and feel that our time is dwindling, we need something because we’re terrified. Terrified that this is it. Hoping that this God who has screwed up over and over will come to us and make it all better. We’re Charlie Brown and we want to believe, we need to believe, that this one time Lucy won’t yank the football away. The problem is that just as we want to become closer to God and have something to put our faith in, our life experiences have taught us to be disillusioned with organized religion. Especially if you are a former altar boy.

  All religions have disillusioned followers. My personal disillusionment began at my “Count to ten” moment at my Bar Mitzvah. To add insult to injury, they kept telling me this was the day I would become a man, and that didn’t happen until I was seventeen.

  Don’t get me wrong—I think all the basic tenets of my religion are great: fairness, education, respect, kindness. But let’s face it: our holidays can’t help but add to the disillusionment, because they lag far behind. Take New Year’s celebrations.

  My favorite photo: March 25, 1961, my Bar Mitzvah reception. Jazz great Henry “Red” Allen performed. He was a guest who got up and jammed. Not many Bar Mitzvahs turn into jam sessions.

  With the Chinese New Year, there are dragons, parades, firecrackers. With New Year’s in America, there are big parties, the ball drops in Times Square, you get drunk, tell someone you love them, and throw up on their shoes. With the Jewish New Year, we fast, we can’t turn on the lights, we confess our sins. Happy New Year! What a party! A bunch of guilty, hungry people sitting in the dark.

  Yom Kippur is when we atone for all our sins of the past year. It’s like Catholic confession except we do it all in one day and the rabbi doesn’t try to cornhole us. These services are always packed. Often we move to a bigger venue to accommodate the crowds. Tickets are expensive. It’s like play-off seats for season ticket holders. Nothing is included in your basic package. Regular Friday and Saturday morning services are not well attended, but the chance to go to the big dance and spill your guts about the bags of Oreos you shouldn’t have eaten or your flirtation with the pool boy brings the masses.

  On Yom Kippur most Jews try to fast, so it’s a very long service filled with sadness and guilt and the rumbles of growling stomachs. At one point there is a silent prayer, during which you basically get a few minutes of solitude to silently say to God how you fucked up all year, and that even though all he asks is that you fast for one day, somehow you gave in and ate a little nosh on the way over to keep your strength up. Even worse, it was a Sausage McMuffin. (If only there were a Yom Kippur app that could read the minds of all those hungry, tortured souls: “I bought retail,” “I masturbated to that weather girl who wears the tight skirts,” “I ate pork rinds,” “I voted Republican.”) When the service is ending, the shofar (a ram’s horn) is blown, signaling the beginning of the New Year, and the masses go to someone’s house for deviled eggs, bagels, and lox, and then to the nearest Chinese restaurant. This is called “breaking the fast,” and it would be an incredible bonding experience if we hadn’t all been sneaking food all day.

  The next big Jewish holiday is Christmas. Everybody loves Christmas. Especially the Jews. Jews adopt Christmas and other people’s holidays because they’re more fun than ours. It’s not an equal
playing field. On TV, for instance, you never see Have a Nice Hanukkah, Charlie Brown or The Grinch Who Returned His Presents for the Cash. And the music? “Bagels roasting on an open fire” just doesn’t cut it.

  Christians have warm, festive gatherings where the family comes over, they open their gifts, and they share a huge meal. Gentiles’ lives are a Hallmark TV special where the final scene is the whole clan singing “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” by a roaring fire. You can’t help but feel jealous. There’s a reason Rockwell never painted a Jewish family dinner. We never look happy! We need a makeover. For every Schlomo who loves his holidays, there are fifty other Jews who wish their name was Tim. That’s why so many of my friends have huge, beautifully decorated Christmas trees surrounded by piles of gifts. We drink warm cider and eat red smoked salmon blinis with green caviar on top, in Christmas colors. We even sing carols. We do this just to fit in. We bust our ass for Christmas, yet at Hanukkah we forget to light the candles by the third night. Hanukkah isn’t a sexy holiday. At that time of the year, I feel that I should be wearing a Jewish star on my sweater. The country is only 2 percent Jewish, marked down from 3 percent, and I just don’t feel a part of it for the holiday season.

  The only Jewish holiday that’s any fun is Purim, where we eat cookies stuffed with prunes. And you know why: to clean out the matzoh that’s been wedged in my ass since Passover.

  Passover: there’s another holiday that isn’t all it is cracked up to be.

  It’s a holiday when we celebrate … suffering. There’s a surprise.

  What makes it even worse is that Passover occurs at the same time as Easter. Again we can’t compete. Two thousand years ago Jesus is crucified, three days later he walks out of a cave and they celebrate with chocolate bunnies and marshmallow Peeps and beautifully decorated eggs. I guess these were things Jesus loved as a child.