The Amorous Busboy of Decatur Avenue

by Robert Klein

  It came out of my mouth before I even realized it: “I love you, Judy.”

  “I love you, too,” she said. I took off her glove and kissed her hand, but this was not the vicarious experience of a movie; it was the real thing, to which I was unaccustomed, and it was so much better.

  I gathered our books, and we returned down the dark path through flakes and mounds of white, walking so close together that we could have been participants in a three-legged race, while above us the carillon played “Joy to the World.”

  * * *

  Christmas vacation was upon us. Judy and I would be going home together via the eight-hour Erie Lackawanna train ride, a raucous trip with dozens of reveling college students, lots of beer, singing and laughter, merry train conductors, and smiling black car porters. Minus the raccoon coats and ukuleles, it was the epitome of, dare I say it again, a Hollywood college movie. Sitting next to Judy, with rustic winter scenes of upstate New York whizzing by the window, I hoped the journey would last forever. We held, we clutched, we kissed every two minutes and kept each other warm in the chilly car.

  It had been ten days since my rebirth as a man in requited love, and I had been making up for lost time. The only moments of trepidation had come during especially heavy necking sessions outside the Steinheim when it became a question of how far we would go. At these moments she gently calmed us down. The last thing I wanted to do was push it; I was content to kiss, hug, and hold; to do the virtuous thing—this despite my aching gonads, eager for release and an end to their agony after each session. My gonads notwithstanding, it was I who may not have been ready to go further.

  Somewhere passing Binghamton, Judy and I were holding hands, watching the silos and telephone poles whiz by. She turned her head and leaned in to my ear. “There’s something I need to tell you,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Kiss me first.”

  And I did. “I know it’s all so new. But I want you to know that I love you very much, and I want to know that you love me, no matter what,” she said. For the first time, I realized that we were surrounded by forty noisy people, though a quick check revealed that they were not paying the slightest attention to us.

  “I love you so much I can’t even tell you how much,” I said.

  “I want to tell you . . . I need to tell you . . . that when I was going with Andy, we made love. We had sex.”

  Hearing it directly from her own lips, the lips that had kissed Andy’s, was an emotional jolt, but I didn’t show it. “I sort of expected you would. You loved him, didn’t you?”

  “I thought I did. But I know now that I didn’t, and I’m sorry that we went that far.”

  “It doesn’t matter, that’s over now,” I said, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Quickly, the wound that was disappearing was opened again, and those images flooded in.

  “I don’t want us to make the same mistake,” she said.

  “Are you saying it’s a mistake to ever have sex until you’re married?”

  “No, no. It’s just that it should happen at the right time. Not yet, when it’s too early. It should happen when we feel sure about it.”

  “How will we know?”

  She brushed my hair off my forehead and looked at me. “I’ll know.”

  “You will?”

  “Oh yes, I’ll know. So I want you to promise me that you’ll wait and be patient. Because I want to make love to you very much already, and if we do it too soon, it could—well, ruin things or . . . hurt our relationship.”

  Everything she said made consummate sense and was expressed in a heartfelt way. Yet this was bittersweet, in that I now felt guilty for my desire, and goddammit, Andrew Ruby had slept with her and I hadn’t. Despite how close I felt to Judy, he had been intimate with her tenfold. Why couldn’t I shake this crap from my mind? Because I was nineteen years old and living in December 1960, that’s why.

  “Does it bother you a lot? About Andy?” she said.

  I cast my eyes down, then out the window, taking a long time to answer. “I know I have no right to object. It was your business—and, I guess, his. Anyway, it’s over and done with.”

  “You’re not answering my question. Does it bother you?”

  “It’s just that I care so much, that the thought of you and—”

  She took my head to her breast and stroked my hair and said, “Don’t worry. We’ll be fine. I love you.”

  “I love you, too, Judy. Maybe it’s a little painful, but I’m glad we talked about it.”

  “Me, too.”

  The train groaned to a brief stop in Hancock, New York, and we poked our noses out the door amid the loud roar of the big Lackawanna diesel. The arctic air was a shock and practically burned the lungs, but it was fresh and cleansing, like the conversation we had just had. About two hours from home, I felt comfortable enough to bring up the matter again, with a kind of mischievous smile, to tell her that I was not uptight about it. “Did you like it?”

  “What?”

  “Sex with Andy.”

  She was a little embarrassed but not offended. “I guess so, initially.”

  “Whaddaya mean, you guess so?”

  “Should I have not liked it?”

  She laughed and I laughed and the rest of the ride was carefree and we could talk about it easily, and it was back to the clouds. By the time we pulled into the terminal in New Jersey, I had matured by ten years: a new man, confident and in love.

  * * *

  Judy and I made plans to see each other as much as possible during vacation, though she lived on Long Island and I was in the Bronx. I had a driver’s license, and I was sure I could get my father to lend me his huge ’59 Pontiac Bonneville a few times. Then the next day, as if we hadn’t seen enough snow at Alfred, there was a major blizzard in the metropolitan area, and driving was out of the question. I had to content myself with the telephone. One, two, three calls a day were not enough, until conversation was exhausted and I found myself calling just to hear the sound of her voice.

  After three days I could stand it no longer and planned a trip to her home by subway and Long Island Rail Road. I had a nagging cough that had been going on for two weeks, which I had neglected through the chimera of love. My father had told me to go to the doctor several times, but I felt fine, so I dismissed the idea. The cough persisted, and my father insisted, so I promised to stop by Dr. Rosenstein’s office, which was next to the subway entrance, on my way to see Judy.

  Our family doctor, my old inspiration for pursuing a career in medicine, was a caring practitioner worshiped by the neighborhood. Catholics and Jews both prayed for him. He was also a little absentminded, as when he was doing a gynecological examination on my mother and took a phone call in the next room and forgot about her, leaving her in the stirrups for a half hour—with her hat on, yet.

  As someone who had known and treated me since the age of five, he wanted to know everything about what was happening with me in college while he looked into my throat and ears and poked around in my nose. All I could talk about was the anticipation of seeing Judy in a couple of hours, but as he listened to my chest, he shushed me and his expression changed. “You got that walking pneumonia again, kid. I want you to go right home to bed. Your mother can get this prescription filled.”

  “Go right home? You gotta be kidding, Doctor. I gotta see this girl, I’ve been waiting for three days, snowed in.”

  “No, go home, we don’t want this to get serious.”

  “But I feel okay.”

  “You’re not well now, but you’ll be all right in a few days, and guess what, your girlfriend will still be there. Go home.”

  I went out on to Bainbridge Avenue and right into the subway, determined that nothing would prevent my visit. I would tell my parents that I went to the doctor and had a cold and would take care of the pneumonia later, though I very much hoped that my father would not find out about my deception.

  The trip seemed to last a year, but I wo
uld have hitchhiked to Nebraska to see her, and see her I did. It was an added novelty to be out of the college setting and with her in the simple, tidy house where she was brought up. Her mother and kid sister were home, which confined our initial greeting to a small peck of a kiss, until we found a corner in the finished basement to do the job properly. It went with the territory, having to look over our shoulders every time we wanted to embrace.

  Her sister was shy but her mother was not, and she got right to the point: “So, I hear you two are cuckoo about each other.”

  “Mother, please,” Judy said, blushing.

  “Uh . . . I guess ‘cuckoo’ could describe it,” I said.

  Judy’s mother was a pretty, self-confident woman with a competitive twinkle in her eye, who enjoyed giving us the needle, and she continued with playful gems like “Judy is gaga over you” and “Are you gaga over her?” It was a difficult gauntlet for a first visit, but I was game for her game and as charming as I could be, which calmed Judy, who was not amused by her mother’s audacity. If it was some sort of test, I think I passed, but I understood why Judy had said they didn’t get along.

  Her father came home, a quiet, gentle man who greeted me warmly and with dignity. He was prematurely gray, tall and thin, and looked like Judy. Like love itself, meeting the parents was a new experience for me, and slightly unnerving, because there was the incongruity of their being strangers and my passion for their daughter.

  After a nice chicken dinner, we found a few moments of privacy to talk. Her parents had noticed my cough, as had she, and I let slip the doctor’s admonition. Much to my chagrin, she immediately told her parents, saying that my health was more important than pride. Her father then insisted on driving the fifty-minute trip to the Bronx and would not take no for an answer. I was terribly embarrassed, but Judy came along with us, so the extra time with her was compensation, though she sat up front with her father while I sat in the back.

  In front of my building, I gave her a measly buss good night, with her father looking on. After my twentieth apology, I went up to our apartment, my head in the clouds once again. I opened the door and could see my father from the back, watching live television news of the aircraft carrier Forrestal on fire. He did not turn around to greet me. My mother came out of the kitchen wiping her hands on a dish cloth with a concerned look that I knew well. I crashed back to earth with a bang. They had called the doctor and knew everything, and my mother’s worried countenance told me that my father was livid. He turned around with that curling of his upper lip that had terrified me all my life. I was too old to smack across the face (I thought), but he was as angry as I’d seen him in a long time, and he began a tirade at the top of his lungs. “YOU HAVE PNEUMONIA, AND YOU GO TO LONG ISLAND? TO LONG ISLAND! YOU STUPID IDIOT!”

  “Dad, I feel fine. I just had to see this girl. I love her, and I couldn’t wait any longer.”

  “A GIRL! YOU WENT BECAUSE OF A GIRL! YOU LOVE HER! DON’T TALK TO ME, I DON’T WANT TO TALK TO YOU! GET OUT OF MY SIGHT!”

  The television was blaring casualty reports from the carrier fire as my mother gingerly tried to intercede on my behalf. “Benny, stop yelling, the neighbors can hear. He likes this girl, he couldn’t help it, he’ll go right to bed now.”

  “YOU BUTT OUT AND MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS!”

  “Don’t talk to Mother that way, it—”

  “SHUT UP AND LEAVE ME ALONE!”

  This was humiliating, sending me right back to my guilt-ridden, futile childhood quest to please him. I was a helpless boy again, descended rapidly from the firmament of love, which for the moment seemed very far away indeed. My father gave me the silent treatment, his ultimate punishment, for six days, and it took its toll every second that we were together in the small apartment. I could understand parental concern, but his anger was vicious. Couldn’t he let up, knowing that my action was a foible of youth and for the sweetest of reasons? I found myself as angry at him as he was with me, since he had put a sizable dent in my manly romantic euphoria. Worse, Judy and I would have to wait until we went back to school before we saw each other again, So, housebound, I counted the hours until I could flee the close quarters of this, at the moment, unhappy place.

  * * *

  As my junior year rolled by, I was having a grand time, what with my academic studies, the theater, and my social life all ducks in a row. I truly enjoyed my classes, especially International Relations, taught by an intellectual World War II marine combat veteran named David Leach. I loved his lack of pretense, the absence of elitism in his style, though he was eminent in his field and sought after by Yale and Harvard. I also had the privilege of studying under Frederick Engelmann, the brilliant Austrian-born political scientist. He displayed all the eccentricities of the genius professor as he lectured, complete with an assortment of fidgets, tugging at his trousers, and weird facial expressions, all of which I had down pat. He replaced Professor Russell as the premier faculty imitation in my living room shtick.

  My participation in the Footlight Club was marching on. We put on a production of a recent Broadway hit called A Majority of One, which was about an old couple, a Japanese and a Jew, who fall in love against the wishes of their families. For a change, I did not play the old Jew. The honor fell to Sara Calvalli, a vivacious English major who was the first woman I ever knew to wear black tights every day as outerwear: These Bohemians were ahead of their time. I played the old Japanese gentleman, once again using makeup and acting tricks to depict age, and an accent borrowed from a World War II movie.

  A Majority of One is a fluffy piece, a little too cute for its own good, and neither Smith nor Brown was in favor of doing it. It’s the sweet culture-clash idea in which the audience is charmed and amused to hear a Japanese pronounce Yiddish words and vice versa; but the professors acceded to the kids’ wishes and put on the play, which was a success.

  I was now the biggest star of stage in Allegheny County, New York. Judy and I were a solid couple, as steady as any on campus, and were almost always seen together. One spring afternoon in 1961, we were photographed strolling along a scenic walk and were told it might be used for the college brochure: Joe and Judy College, documented at last.

  There was an important development regarding the issues of privacy and mobility: I had been given a new car. My father surprised me during spring break with a four-door Ford Galaxie sedan, a leftover 1960 model (yes, Pop had his good points, too). He presented it to me dramatically, enjoying the occasion as much as I did. It was not a flashy rich boy’s car, like a number of the sports cars and convertibles parked outside the fraternity house, but who was complaining? It was brand-new and smelled like it, and it was mine. Never mind the two-hundred-horsepower engine that could push your head back when you stepped on the gas, or the stylish whitewalls; the roomy six-passenger interior was the feature I most coveted, since it would serve as a romantic refuge for my girl and me. Soon enough, we joined the motorized fogged-window throng for all we were worth.

  It was all so grown up: I had my woman, my job of college, and my car. At the end of the term, it appeared that I might have an enticing future as well. The two-man drama department, the talented, tasteful, wonderful Smith and Brown, had cornered my father on Parents’ Weekend and suggested that I go for graduate work in drama upon graduation. The stereotypic contrast between my New York Jewish father and these two professorial gentlemen was quite amusing. Professor C. Duryea Smith, replete with suede patches on his tweed jacket, fiddled with his pipe and very politely said, “Mr. Klein, Robert has a good deal of talent, and he should study at the Yale School of Drama.” Professor Brown concurred: “Yes, indeed. Yale would be best.”

  My incredulous father replied, “Yale? You mean the Ivy League Yale—boolah-boolah and all that? To be an actor? A person goes to graduate school to be an actor? Did Eddie Cantor go to Yale to be an actor?”

  Dad had an excellent point. But as I would be graduating college at only twenty, it seemed a good idea to stay in school, to
pursue and immerse myself in what would now become, legitimately, my chosen field—one my father viewed with a worried eye. To his way of thinking, it would have been safer to take his suggestion and somnambulate into law school. That pretense, faint as it was, would now be cast aside, thank goodness.

  There was a symmetry, in that most of my buddies would be going on to graduate school, mostly for medicine, dentistry, and law. For them there was no equivocation: It had been their goal for years, their pursuit of which had never wavered; they belonged there. What, then, could be more appropriate for me than to go where I belonged, to pursue my true ambition, sheltered by the comforting structure of academia? Yale, yet.

  * * *

  The summer was full of beaches, picnics, movies, bowling, and the deepening maturation of a loving couple. Judy came on a picnic with my extended family of cousins and aunts, and I was invited to her cousin’s wedding. We had developed a good relationship with each other’s parents, who approved of the courtship. We had also become adept at stealing intimate moments at her house and in the beloved Ford, yet not going all the way.

  I was working in a Pepsi-Cola plant in Long Island City for the summer: eight hours a day of clanging machines and intense heat. They hired temporary additional help for the season, a few of whom were college boys, at eighty-five dollars a week. I was an American assembly-line worker, pride of the proletariat and a bona fide member of the Teamsters. The veteran workers, most of them grizzled tattoo types, really laid it on the novices: “Hey, college boy this” and “Hey, college boy that.” When the midmorning ten-minute-break whistle blew, I was chastised by one of the Teamsters for not leaving my workstation promptly enough: a union transgression I would not commit again.

  I ate my lunch on the East River pier every day and was fascinated to watch the unloading of sugar from Filipino and German freighters. I also enjoyed watching one of the forklift operators (the plant bookie) scoot about the huge building and around the dock, taking numbers and racing bets. My sandwich was always accompanied by a Pepsi, as there happened to be about a million bottles handy, and the company rules permitted you to drink all you wanted as long as you did not remove any from the plant—a transgression which could get you fired. You could just grab a cold bottle from the assembly line before it was capped and take a swig and put the bottle in the unwashed-bottle box.