II
After my parents’ divorce, I was living with my mother. Louis Armstrong lived ten blocks away, but I didn’t know this, and near him there was an abandoned, gigantic street-long theater that, in my dreams at night, had reopened, neon lights shining. I was always dreaming of the resurrection of theaters. I was little Mr. Show Business, reading Variety, loving its raffish tone, that Jewish-Italian-Irish-immigrant mix, that color that Runyon aimed at in his writing but didn’t really convey very well. I interviewed Sophie Tucker at the Concord in the Catskills for the National Jewish Post and at 13 I published a letter in the New York Times about the ethereal beauty of Audrey Hepburn in her Broadway debut in Ondine. I drew neon lights around my name and around Jolson’s. “Jolson Sings Again” was my anthem. I wanted the New Amsterdam Theater to reopen its shuttered doors, I wanted its lights to blaze again on 42nd Street and the Ziegfield Follies to reopen there, John Steele singing “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody.” (I had seen him, an old man, sing it on the stage of the Palace). I wanted the Ziegfield roof gleaming again, stars shining overhead, and Flo Ziegfield seated resplendently in his office, high hat and tux, gold watch fob and flower in his lapel. And Oscar Hammerstein at Hammerstein’s Venetian Terrace and Jolson at the Winter Garden singing until 4 A.M.
I wanted the razzle dazzle of the old Broadway I had never seen, the great white way, back. Vaudeville was the personal touch I wanted and needed, and movies had replaced it before I was born. The little snatches of it I saw, pathetically sandwiched between two films at the RKO Jefferson on 14th Street with a three-piece orchestra or later at the Palace, the performers giving every ounce of themselves to move an audience, gave me a human connection I desperately needed. I was witnessing the tail end of everything. The old-timers were still around in their straw hats; Joe Laurie Jr., bowtie, striped suspenders, cigar, big stomach, was at Variety on 46th Street on the balcony atop the winding staircase chronicling Show Biz From Vaude to Video; Leo Lindy was still dishing up cheesecake to all the guys and dolls at Lindy’s, out-of-work actors, the stingy eccentric rich, and Utopian Socialists still hovered for warmth all night at the Automat on 47th street, Winchell cruised Broadway all night in a police car, sirens screaming to keep him happy, and the spiffy stage-door Johnnies stood with their flowers behind the Winter Garden beneath the fire escapes, waiting for the showgirls to appear. But it would all be gone soon.
I read James T. Farrell and Richard Wright and Budd Schulberg and Frank Norris and Dreiser, the urban naturalists, the writers of the stoops and elevateds and tenements that I knew, the pushcart vendors selling hot roasted chestnuts in winter, their breath billowing in the cold air. I got hot reading Zola’s Nana and Harold Robbins’ A Stone for Danny Fisher—even the covers of those 25-cent Signet paperbacks got me horny and I hid them under my pillow (oh man, the scene where the gangster tells the broad to show her tits and he feels her up like he owns them)—even my taste in fiction was of time almost past, racing past me as I hungered for it.
I had done my comedy act at Grossinger’s, but I was too small to reach the microphone and the audience stared in puzzlement, and it was at Grossinger’s that I had my first big erections playing ping-pong with a girl named Francine Yaswen.
I was fearless then, I’d played stickball and softball and potsy on the Elmhurst streets, I’d hung out on the stoops, I’d had overnights with the kids in the neighborhood. Just two floors beneath me lived Lazarus Goldenlake. I met him through his father, who was tremendously proud of Lazarus and talked to me in the elevator about his son’s great future. In adjoining beds Lazarus and I talked all night, secret delicious talks about spanking the very shapely bottoms, lusciously rounded and soft, raised high in the air, of girls at school, making them very red, until we fell asleep. Lazarus and I drifted apart as strangely as we had gotten together. His father still talked to me in the elevator about his son’s future, and seemed to assume I shared his high expectations for Lazarus. He never mentioned my future, so I think he felt we agreed it was Lazarus who was the chosen one. And then there was rich David Peel who lived on Central Park West, went to Miss Northrup’s dance class and introduced me to frozen foods in his frig. Lazarus and David had money in common and brittle, dry flaking skin and medicine cabinets full of lotions to treat it. David’s in prison now for stealing millions of dollars in paintings in Europe. But at the time we just wanted to meet girls. David and Lazarus were desiccated young men, cynical and worldly, not like me. I was amber, molten hot. I was a romantic mess. When I sang “Rosie, You Are My Posie,” I meant every word.
On stormy days in Elmhurst, the gutters overflowed. Alone in my mother’s apartment and dreaming of meeting a girl, I would peer out of the windows. The street had turned into a river. The air was mint fresh. Children made rafts for the river. I imagined that while I was indoors they were sailing on them.
Everything stopped on those days. I felt a deep inward calm, knowing that things did not always stay the same. You could step outside the door and be borne away on dark green days.
I would walk away from the window, but afraid I was dreaming, I would go back, and there was the water moving by with leaves, bits of tree bark, rafts with flags, as far as I could see. I watched, and listened to the wind and the shouts and cries and laughter of the children of Whitney Avenue; then the unearthly stillness, the green smell, the lapping of water.
I found Rachel in the first place because of the telephone.
I lived on 90th Street in Elmhurst, Queens. The Bender sisters, Carol and Marcia, lived six blocks away on Junction Boulevard. Both had frizzy black hair, were dizzingly beautiful, and they were very kind girls. Carol was younger. I had never actually spoken to her, but had seen her at school and looked her up in the phonebook after finding out the first name of her father. She was so beautiful, and she had a melodic voice. I wooed her on the phone, playing Jackie Gleason records by the headpiece to get her in the mood and let her know I was a man of sophistication. Finally Carol said, “Why don’t you come over?” I never called her again. But I cursed myself for my fear and cowardice.
I called and I called and I called. The phonebook was my friend. I called teachers who were kind to me, I called blacklisted actors who were in the news (I found their names in the phone book too) and expressed my solidarity. How cute they thought I was, but I knew what I was doing. I wanted their gratitude; I wanted the connection. I was comfortable with the down-and-outers, the elderly, the castouts. When I was 10, I started calling a faded Ziegfield star I’d seen on stage named like Belle Baker. She had been a flower girl on the lower East Side, had worked in a dress factory when she was nine, and came out of the Yiddish theater. Irving Berlin had written “Blue Skies” for her and she’d introduced it in the Follies show, “Betsy,” in 1926. She had once shared the bill with Sarah Bernhardt at the Palace and Bernhardt sat in a wheelchair in the wings watching her sing “Put It On, Take It Off, Wrap It Up, Take It Home, Call Again.” I loved her deep, sorrowful, maternal voice, the way her singing had a sob in it. She held a big white handkerchief, that was her trademark, and she sang “My Yiddishe Momma” with beautiful feeling. Her voice had cantorial weeping in it and longing and kindness. Every week when I phoned her, her maid would call Belle Baker—the Belle Baker!—to the phone and she would take the time to just listen to me. The first time I spoke to her, she asked me, “Are you an orphan, child?” She knew! When she died, I turned up at the funeral at the Riverside Chapel and went up to her son, Herbert Baker, a comedy writer for Jerry Lewis. He peered down at me and I said to him, “Your mother was very proud of you.”
My father hated synagogues, he was antsy sitting there, he didn’t know the language, the history, the Bible, anything but Georgie Jessel’s mortuary orations and Jack Benny and Fannie Brice and Eddie Cantor and Cantor’s crusade for the March of Dimes, and of course he knew the food, hot brisket with potato latkes and applesauce, kasha varnishkes, hot pastrami on rye with a kosher sour pickle, knishes, white fish and lox and ba
gels—that was our catechism—but he sensed that the Jews were somehow special and he marveled at it, and so did I, the two of us half-assed, ignorant and bereft of culture, of history, going nuts in those fucking shuls, listening to the humming moaning wailing crying indecipherable sounds all around us, people bobbing their heads up and down in prayer, we were waiting to eat at last.
But although we sat there dutifully and without understanding, still we knew that we were in the presence of something. But what was it? My father turned the pages of the New York Times and said of the scholars, the actors, the writers, the gangsters, the producers, the artists, the scientists, the explorers, the psychiatrists, the pickle kings, the hot dog kings, the entrepreneurs, my father pointing, turning the pages furiously, laughing: “He’s Jewish! He’s Jewish! She’s Jewish!” Even when the names were goyishe, they were Jews who had reinvented themselves, Jews in disguise. “How is it possible?” my father said, shaking his head in wonder at the level of achievement. First the Holocaust, then Israel making the desert bloom. My father couldn’t figure it out. Hunger, tradition, crazed ambition, persecution, obsession had done it; but God knows it didn’t rub off on my father, lying back in his recliner eating a banana. And yet it had: in his fantastic, glistening, boisterous, failure, my father, the loser of all time, had outrun the competition.
My father with his big cock, sweating, drops rolling down his dark cheeks, when stripper Sherry Britton popped up unexpectedly in a vaudeville revival show on 14th street at the Academy of Music, my father peeping at me, not knowing what to do, my cock stretching to the seat in front of me, my father and I sat with our hard-ons, sweating and screaming inside.
I listened to the radio most of the night. Barry Gray broadcast his program on WMCA from Chandler’s Restaurant. Barry had been beaten up by hoodlums. The rumor was that he’d offended Walter Winchell and that Winchell was behind it. Somehow I was outraged and I wrote a petition protesting Barry’s beating. Then I crossed over the roof of my apartment house and rang the bell of an apartment on the second floor. I had no idea why I chose this doorbell to ring.
The door was opened by a girl with a round swarthy face, dark red lipstick, and wide eyes. Her name was Rachel Bernstein. She was wearing a yellow blouse, black skirt and red knee socks. She was curvaceous and extremely short, and gazed up at me with a cheerleader smile. She looked vaguely familiar.
“Hi!” she said.
“I protest—” I began.
“Sure! Come on in.” She signed my petition immediately without glancing at it, and said, “Don’t you recognize me?”
When there was a shortage of seats in home room, there was a girl who had recently plumped herself down beside me at my tiny desk and pressed against me. I was so shy that I couldn’t bring myself to look at her, although I must have peeked. Now for the first time I saw what she actually looked like.
Inside the apartment, we went into Rachel’s room. She sat down on a peeling chair facing me, adjusted her guitar, and played, very badly, and sang off-key, a torch song her Aunt Hannah had written about her husband, a degenerate gambler and a louse. But I didn’t mind how she sang: she was singing for me. I tried not to peek at her plum-like breasts. She tilted her head back, and I was fascinated by her small double chin. I had never noticed one before. And her lovely neck, which I wanted very much to kiss.
When I told her I played the piano, she perched atop it and sang, while I played, “Over the Rainbow,” with a wistful, little-girl look.
I mentioned my Jolson imitation, which was my specialty. Rachel jumped off the piano and placed the record on the turntable. I told her to get out of the way because I made a flying entrance. Mouthing the words to “Swanee,” I got down on one knee and belted it out. Waving my hat and grinning, I strutted out the door as the record ended.
Rachel applauded and then we had brownies and milk in the kitchen.
The phone rang. “Hank?” she said. That name stirred something in me, but I wasn’t sure what it was.
I said goodbye and raced ecstatically over the roof. Then I stopped in my tracks, remembering the party line.
In those days, if you didn’t have much money, your family chose the party line from the phone company. You didn’t have your own private line; you shared it with your neighbors. If they were using it, you had the choice of hanging up and waiting for them to finish their conversations, or just quietly listening in on their calls.
Alone in the afternoons after school when I got back to my apartment, I would pick up the phone every day around four and listen to a conversation between a girl and boy. The girl’s voice was high, tremulous and gentle; she was the needy one. The boy, whose name was Hank, was a tough guy who drove a truck.
When I entered my apartment, it was 4:15. I softly picked up the phone, and I heard Hank’s voice. “Rachel?” he said. I lowered the phone.
And she became my girl, all because of that party line, that told me in advance what she was like, that she too was afraid, and longing, and waiting for her first real boy friend. I would never had had the courage without it.
I had rung that doorbell. I had advanced toward her with my petition like a blind man in the dark, not knowing what she looked like or who she was or what I was doing.
Now we were together constantly. In the evenings I sat with Rachel and her parents watching Make Room for Daddy with Danny Thomas on television. Her father was working for his doctorate in psychology. He had melancholy eyes, and spoke in a whiny, cracking, high-pitched voice. But he had a dry wit, and he was a loving father.
They were the noisiest family I had ever seen. My parents were screamers, but their screams were a way of relieving their terror and fear. They never forgave. I would walk by the Bernsteins’ window at night, hoping to glimpse Rachel, and I’d hear shouting voices and laughter and music and dishes falling. They would have angry fights and a few moments later be laughing and joking together.
They’d marched for the Rosenbergs; the FBI hounded them; Mr. Bernstein had been fired from a job. His favorite music was Bach, Stravinsky and Paul Robeson singing “Ballad for Americans” and “Peat Bog Soldiers,” a dirge for the concentration camps. But they were more far more alive than their politics.
The Bernsteins ate frankfurters, chili, spaghetti and tamales to keep the budget. Everything about them was spicy to me. Mr. Bernstein sat in his undershirt at the table reading Punch; Rachel’s brothers, Joey and Sammy, hummed through each meal. The children had their own bedrooms; their parents slept on the sofa bed in the living room.
At first Rachel and I were just friends. She and Hank still talked on the phone once in a while, but she never saw him again. I thought of her all day and all night. Once she shook her hair in my face and I gasped.
On New Year’s Eve, on my 14th birthday, in Rachel’s bedroom, at midnight, after three glances of punch, she fell into my arms. Tentatively, I kissed her on her warm, tender neck as if I was doing a scientific experiment; so that if she moved away I could pretend I was probing her for science. She did not move away. I kissed her on the lips: a taste of chili and tabasco sauce. She put her arms around my neck and kissed back.
At night I returned to my mother’s apartment, where my mother screamed or cried alone in bed. On weekends I stayed at my father’s boarding-house room across from the Greyhound bus station and ate with him among the sad old Irish men at Bickford’s.
I spent most of the afternoons and evenings now at Rachel’s house. I peeked into pots ahead of time to see what was for dinner. I sat beside Rachel in the spicy warmth of the kitchen and Joey and Sammy would begin their non-stop humming. Mrs. Bernstein washed the dishes and sang to herself, “He’s just my Abe, an ordinary man … but I love him …”
I wanted to please Mr. Bernstein, so I acted “progressive.” I carried around a red-leather-bound volume of Stalin’s writings entitled Towards a Soviet America which I had found in the garbage. But Stalin was dead and the sight of the book drove Mr. Bernstein crazy. The FBI was still h
ounding him. He pleaded with me to keep the book at home.
When the family wasn’t around, I would sneak more food from the pot on the stove, hungry, insatiable for the warmth the Bernsteins shared with me so naturally. Yet once I heard Mr. Bernstein in his whining voice say softly, “Doesn’t Michael have a family of his own?”
I was constantly afraid of losing her. I felt the darkness inside me; I didn’t dance; I was afraid of everything. I wanted to tell her about my parents, but I thought I would drive her away. She wouldn’t believe me. No one had parents like that; I’d never seen anything like them among my friends. They were freaks of nature. I was jealous of Brendan Neill, a classmate. A tall and gentle boy with a guitar, a singer of Irish folksongs. A much sunnier boy.
The dark was encroaching. My teachers befriended me. A curly-haired, gentle man named Morton Ballinzweig, my junior-high teacher, had been my friend. He had suddenly died when I was 13, and even though I wrote a poem about him in The Nation and said that Mister Ballinzweig had “made me love the days the way I had loved the nights,” it was the night that I was moving toward.
Rachel didn’t understand how I felt about Brendan. “Michael,” she said. “I want to have friends. We’re always alone. If we get married I want to have all sorts of friends coming to our house. More friends than babies even.”
When my mother wanted me to be nice to her, she wooed me. She cooed, she stroked my hair and we rubbed noses, like pussycats. When she felt lonely, she wanted me to come into bed with her. Lying in bed, I felt damp, I had hot and cold flashes.
She had a habit of turning; she could turn in the middle of a sentence, a thought. She would be giggling and praised me, and suddenly slap me across the face, her eyes blazing.
Great Kisser Page 15
