The Amorous Busboy of Decatur Avenue

by Robert Klein

  Because I was a sophomore, my pledge period was brief, though there was some hazing, like forced drinking, paddling, and foolish errands. I was required to eat fried ants (which I found delicious), and some asshole forced me to make his bed a few times. Not surprisingly, it was Freddy Linzer, the moron from the pig-nose barfing incident. I had to be tolerant of him for another few weeks.

  Now that my social standing had improved, my academic life had taken a turn for the better as well. Compared to the previous year, it was a joy to study history, political science, and international relations, to actually be interested in and adept at my studies for a change. I did not wish to think too far ahead, but law school had been suggested as a possible future consideration. My father had never approved of paying heavy tuition to learn for learning’s sake, thinking that a college education should be a means to an end. Now that I wouldn’t be going into medicine, he wanted my new courses to be practical, subjects that I could actually use in a career. I got the impression that he would have preferred me to be taking Shoe Making 101 or Watch Fixing 104 rather than American Diplomatic History or Philosophy. He loved history, but he said, “You think you’re gonna make a living because you know about the War of 1812?”

  No matter, those days even my ROTC brass was shinier, sitting upon my newly issued modern army greens, and my marksmanship had improved considerably. Maybe I was imagining it, but people on campus seemed to look at me differently, as I did myself. Now I felt like—I don’t know—a real Joe College.

  * * *

  I had a new interest. Up to then, I’d had no curiosity about the plays presented by the Footlight Club, as either participant or spectator. My theatrical experience, apart from making people laugh, had so far been confined to grade school and summer camp shows.

  One frosty October day, I saw a posted notice announcing tryouts for The Brothers Karamazov, a stage adaptation of the Dostoyevsky novel. I read for the part of the youngest brother, Alexey, a monk. I not only got the part, but the two professors who made up the drama department, Duryea Smith and Ronald Brown, raved about my reading. I hadn’t received such adulation since Major Davis and the schmucky hat.

  The rehearsals were fun but demanding. The direction by Smith, and the set design and technical work by Brown, were at a much higher level than the general acting talent. Nonetheless, these guys forged on as if Olivier and Brando were members of the cast.

  My new involvement was making me new friendships, for the most part with people who weren’t conventional fraternity types: English majors and ceramic designers, campus Bohemians à la 1959. Sam Chororos was a literate twenty-five-year-old army vet with a hip sense of humor, who always wore his old military fatigue jacket and a four-day beard. Joanne Wendover was a talented actress, mysterious and delicately pretty. Sandra Sherman was a brilliant yet quiet intellectual, who loved—and more importantly, understood—William Faulkner. She was too shy to perform, but she loved the theater and lent her talents to all things offstage. She was a “techie,” with paint all over her jeans, exhaling the smoke from her Pall Malls thoughtfully. I was accepted right away into their community, which was a refreshingly different world from the Alfred I had known up till then.

  Smith, who was called “Prof,” deftly guided me during rehearsal from corn and phoniness into a genuine performance. I found I had a knack for it. He was as energized by my work as I was by his, like a football coach who has found a talented quarterback. I had never encountered such an association before. Brown, whom we called “Rod,” was less formal than his colleague, more accessible, and a wonderful source of theatrical know-how. He was a handsome tweed-clad redheaded former World War II bombardier with a charming British war bride, June, who was the college librarian. Rod was an aficionado of Scotch whiskey, and of course an honorary faculty member of Kappa Nu.

  I was damned nervous about the opening of the play, but not for the conventional reasons. I was still insecure about my status among my peers on campus, especially my fraternity brothers. Was being in a play cool? I was afraid of being an object of derision: another homecoming mascot, another drum major. But that didn’t happen. I received a fine ovation and a good notice in the college newspaper, The Alfred Saxon. People complimented me and offered congratulations. I had found a new passion and purpose. You got it: the theater.

  * * *

  We were rehearsing a staged reading of Antigone at an apartment just off campus. It was the residence of a cast member, a drama volunteer named Charlotte, who was playing Eurydice. I was playing Haemon, her son, who ultimately defies his father and, among other things, commits suicide. It was a good role and the only one appropriate for me, but I wished Haemon had more to say and died later in the play. It was the first of many times that I would count lines. I was becoming a real actor.

  Charlotte’s husband was an assistant professor, and they had two small children. The rehearsal was over, the coffee and cake consumed, everyone was leaving, and I was just about to go out the door when Charlotte said, “Bob, wait a minute, I want to ask you something.” She gestured me to the couch, sat down, opened her script to Eurydice’s speech, and said, “I’m not sure of this section where I enter, could you help me? Here, you read the Greek-chorus part just before my entrance.”

  I was about to open my script to the proper page, a scene in which she learns of her son’s death, when she took it from my hand. “No, let’s just use my script. You begin right here.” So I did.

  HAEMON

  Eurydice is with us now, I see. Creon’s poor wife. She may have come by chance. She may have heard something about her son.

  EURYDICE

  I heard your talk as I was coming out to greet the goddess Pallas with my prayer. And as I moved the bolts that held the door, I heard of my own sorrow. I fell back fainting in my woman’s arms. But say again just what news you bring. I, whom you speak to, have known grief before.

  As she spoke the line about the bolts holding her door, I was aware that she was moving closer to me so I could feel her leg and thigh touching mine. On the word “sorrow,” she looked at me, but not in sorrow. I made a mental note to remind her of the sorrowful content of the speech, which she was playing all wrong, unlike her more logical approach during rehearsal. When she reached the part about “fainting in my woman’s arms,” she took a strange five-second pause, then leaped on top of me, grabbed my crotch, and pushed her tongue down my throat. She was breathing hard, like a miler at the end of the race.

  “Charlotte, what are you doing?”

  “I want you,” she said.

  “But you’re married, for God’s sake.”

  “My husband’s at a conference this week, and the children are with their grandmother.” She began to take off her sweater. She was rubbing herself against me with all her weight, and I was becoming impaled on the metal clasp from the script underneath my back, which hurt like hell. Being impaled on a script may have been an appropriate death for some actors, but I was not among them. I wrestled myself free and ran to the other end of the room. She was persistent, though, and pinned my hand against the wall, trying to kiss me again, while putting my other hand under her bra.

  Many things were going through my mind at once. I had never been seduced before, not to mention by a married woman. I pictured her husband, whom I did not know but had seen on campus. He was a tall, gaunt man with glasses, and I wondered what he was doing right then at the conference. I hoped he was actually there and wouldn’t suddenly come through the door.

  Even with my vivid imagination, which could see sexuality in almost any woman, I had never even remotely thought of Charlotte in that way. She was the epitome of plain, a thirty-six-year-old who wore no makeup, had a nifty wart near her upper lip, and favored dresses and a haircut that reminded me of the Amish. She must have had bad feet, because I had never seen her without orthopedic shoes, the kind that old ladies wore. Yet here she was, in full passion mode, with a kid half her age: Who knew? In any case, I was more intimidated than hot,
and I finally pushed myself free.

  “Relax Bob, nobody’s here. I want to make love to you. Come on, no one will ever know.”

  “I’ll know,” I said. Even though I was innocent and practically a child—well, sort of, anyway—I felt guilty. I didn’t know what to say. I, the sexual novice, had had many fantasies of seduction by older women, but this was not what I had in mind. “Uh . . . I have to go now, got a test tomorrow.”

  “You won’t tell anybody about this, will you?” she said.

  “No, I won’t tell anybody.”

  She tried to kiss me good night at the door, but I was out of there. However, the image of her face coming toward mine, that zoom shot of the wart getting closer and larger, would stay with me for quite a while.

  The walk home was an emotional mix. My heart was still racing. I couldn’t believe what had just happened. Intellectually, I was appalled at her behavior, but I found to my surprise that I was aroused after the fact. I was quite the man now; my new world of the theater was one adventure after another.

  Charlotte’s presence at subsequent rehearsals made me uncomfortable at first, but we carried on as if nothing had happened. I was most awkward meeting her husband on opening night, and I sincerely hoped he would never know that his wife had jumped on top of me and that I had accidentally touched her breast.

  The ever welcome spring arrived, the snow melted, and the major Footlight Club production was Molière’s comedy The Imaginary Invalid, in which I played the male juvenile lover. A cute fireman’s daughter from Staten Island named Gwen Kegley played the ingenue opposite me. Our stilted seventeenth-century love scenes were lots of fun, though my long wig kept getting in my mouth when we kissed. Gwen and I enjoyed it so much that we carried the spirit of the lovers offstage and dated a few times twentieth-century-style, without wigs and knee breeches. It was my first stage romance. There was a good deal of making out, but it went no further. For a few weeks, we held hands, went to the movies, and attended the parties; however, as with so many romances between actors, the feeling faded shortly after the production was over, though we remained friends. Nonetheless, I’d had meaningful feelings toward her, shared real kisses with her; it had not been going through the pleasant motions, as had been the case with Virginia Duncan.

  Spring break brought an exciting prospect. I, who had never been farther from New York than Washington, D.C., had been given funds and permission to go to Fort Lauderdale, a spectacularly desirable destination for vacationing college students. I had just seen Where the Boys Are, a Connie Francis movie about the college-Florida phenomenon, which sure gave the impression that there was a lot of fun going on in Fort Lauderdale. And though it was 1960, and movies had to adhere to a code of decency, there was a certain amount of vaginal-penile contact implied in those torrid South Florida parts.

  I was still too young to have a New York driver’s license, so my two Alfred companions did the driving, and I shared gas expenses. William Wadsworth was a junior engineer and the owner of the ’58 Buick two-door coupe that would carry us to the eternal land of collegiate girls out of control. The other guy was John Wilkinson, a quiet chemistry major from Pittsburgh. Wadsworth was a transfer from Duke University who couldn’t stop praising his two years there. “It’s the Harvard of the South,” he would say.

  The trip was long, sitting in the back seat of the Buick, but I absorbed it all like the travel-deprived provincial I was. I even went radical in southern Virginia and put gravy on my grits instead of sugar.

  We stopped in Durham so Billy Wadsworth could say hello to his Duke buddies. The grounds were gorgeous and made Alfred look like a trailer camp. We entered the fortress-like building and knocked with the pure brass knocker on the proper door with the gentleman student’s name on a brass name plate below. “Heeeey, Billy! We thought you’d be here later. You son of a bitch. If we knew you were comin’ sooner, we’da had the nigger polish your name on the brass plate.” Yeah, the Harvard of the South.

  Billy had some matters to attend to, so John and I took the Liggett & Myers tobacco-factory tour. And there they were, those things I had seen in the newspapers as long as I could remember: the water fountains in the factories marked “colored” and “white.” I wanted to drink from the colored fountain, but I was afraid to, because this racist outrage was sanctioned by the sovereign state of North Carolina, and I was less than keen about winding up on a chain gang.

  The best was yet to come. Just south of the Georgia border was the town of Yulee, Florida. There was a crowd along the side of the road, watching a spectacle of hooded men with a fifteen-foot-tall cross. In an homage to modernity, the cross was lit with electric lightbulbs. My companions were so amused that they turned the car around and came back for a second pass. One of these hooded yokels noticed the New York license plates on our second pass and said, “Get on outta here!” As the only Hebrew in attendance, and quite convinced by the tone and ugly face of this idiot, whose skin reminded me of an expensive handbag from Bonwit Teller, I took this to be a sound idea. It seemed that on my journey south in 1960, I was destined to experience every stereotypic, negative aspect of the South. But that’s the way it was.

  Fort Lauderdale was sunny and hot, a novelty for boys who had just left two feet of snow thirty-six hours earlier. Its hotels and motels, including ours, all had prominent signs saying RESTRICTED CLIENTELE, which, it was explained to me, meant no Jews. It did not mean blacks, who made the beds and cleaned. That they could not stay in these places was a given. Socially, the trip was a bust. Where the Boys Are was an appropriate description. I would guess there were seven boys to one girl, an unfortunate ratio, especially as the boys all seemed to be morons from Mississippi State who roved around the streets yahooing Confederate battle yells and vomiting. I was delighted to get back to school.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, back at Kappa Nu, I was experiencing being on the inside of things for a change. I voted to accept every new freshman who wanted admission, vowing never to blackball anyone, though once again boys were rejected and scarred. I also refrained from hazing the pledges, though many others did not. On the whole, the guys in the house were a good bunch. There were about a dozen gentiles, among whom were a couple of blacks and a Chinese guy named William Louie. Louie was a wonderful guy, a talented artist and potter whose parents owned a Chinese laundry in my neighborhood in the Bronx.

  The brothers were justly proud of this diversity, and miles ahead of the college administration, which still allowed a rotten, bigoted, hypocritical system that hurt boys. In fact, this humanism paid its own dividends to all concerned, few of us having spent so much intimate time with people so different from ourselves. However, the boys wanted so much to make the minority members feel at home that they sometimes overdid it and unwittingly became patronizing. Ricky Sampson, a black member from Long Island who was a running back on the football team, was everybody’s favorite. Everyone was so anxious to show him they weren’t prejudiced that the subject came up too often, accentuating rather than obliterating the difference. The guys meant well, but they were far from subtle while raving about Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier.

  Chapter Eight

  Tales of a Busboy

  As it turned out, it was the worst job I’d ever had. A summer-hotel busboy, three meals a day seven days a week, unending nightmare of a job; with an incredibly hot one-hundred-and-ten-Fahrenheit kitchen, appropriately staffed with dubious vindictive characters from hell. People can get very cranky in a commercial kitchen in July at a hundred and ten degrees.

  My fellow inmates and I—for that’s what it felt like—were college boys working for tips, hoping to buy a used car or contribute to tuition from the summer’s labor. Other jobs around the small old hotel were easier, and some were even fun, like day-camp counselor or lifeguard; but, to paraphrase the bank robber Willie Sutton, the dining room is where the money is. Though we had looked forward to a lucrative summer (an ambitious and lucky busboy could earn eight hundred dollars)
, none of us had anticipated being prisoners in the gulag. The problem was that we were bourgeoisie: sheltered children, every mother’s son of us, who didn’t even make our own beds, much less cope with such rigorous and stressful labor, especially with no days off.

  The bitching and groaning of the dining room staff became an accepted way of life, and the sight of all these exhausted and misused future internists and periodontists was both funny and sad at the same time. These were the apples of their families’ eye, princes every one, yet living a life more akin to Oliver Twist and Cinderella before the slipper. The fact that one could not look forward to even an occasional day off was particularly depressing. We served big breakfasts, which ran into huge lunches, which slammed into gargantuan dinners with no respite, only to be repeated again and again and again. Set up, serve, and clean up in the dining room, amid the never-ending noise of the kitchen, which I could not wait to get out of: I could never stand the heat. We all wore standard uniforms of black pants, white shirt, bow tie, and cummerbund, which were perpetually wet with perspiration and reeked of every soup and sauce we served. We were constantly screamed at by the demented kitchen personnel, with their heavy accents and short tempers and stench of alcohol.

  In the dining room, many of the guests, who could have been our parents, demanded impeccable service worthy of Michelin, and immediately. People who would otherwise be considerate and patient in their everyday lives became imperious tyrants once they signed the hotel register and were assigned a table, as if checking into a joint like this conferred on them the perquisites of aristocracy. A new woman at my station beckoned me over to her, and grabbed me by the bow tie—yes—grabbed me by the bow tie. She jerked my head down to face her like an errant dog on a leash. She was about fifty and taking no shit. “Listen, dolling. I like my cawfee burning hot—so hot that it burns my lips. You undahstand? This cawfee is ice cold. Now, go get me a cup of hot cawfee, and make sure the cup is hot when you paw the hot cawfee into it.” She pulled my bow tie and me even closer, as if she had some great secret to share. “You take care of me, and I’ll take care of you. Okay?” She then released me from the stranglehold. As I removed the “ice-cold” cup of coffee, it burned several layers of skin off the tips of my fingers. She was going to be a tough one, but not atypical of some of the guests, who were doggedly determined to get their vacation money’s worth, civility and common courtesy be damned. For those of us on the receiving end of this determination, it was an object lesson in humility.