“I’ll kill that fucking mutt,” he said, expectorating brown spittle from the Ivanhoe tobacco curled up in his lip. In his frenetic effort to attack the dog, he lost his balance. But the poor dog lost much more. Terrified, Flight sprinted toward the second-floor window and, true to his name, jumped out. (The dog survived his fall, but he ended up with a limp, just like Grandpa.)
Grandpa was caustic and unpredictable, but he was a dreamer, and his mind swirled with energy and fantastic ideas. He was an amateur mason and liked working with stone, and one of his many cockeyed ideas was to invent a doghouse made from concrete. If he could prefab the design (God knows how), he calculated a massive fortune would follow. Not surprisingly, the cement doghouse never made it to market, but his own personal adventure stories were so riveting, they would inspire my own wayward travels. I remember him describing the way he converted his Model A Ford into a camper, retrofitting the back into his own sleeping quarters in which he caravaned across the country. I can almost see him stopping at those Navajo reservations, regaling the Native American chiefs there with tales of his travels and teaching them herbal remedies found in nature, or, more likely, the Yiddish theater. During the Great Depression he’d arrived in Los Angeles and, with his knowledge about the body and his own natural strength, helped found Muscle Beach. Then he was off to Central America. I never learned how he found work as a cook on a pirate ship, but he did tell me they smuggled mahogany out of Costa Rica. His was a wild life, but as he explored the world, Mother and Eli were left at home to fend for each other.
There Are All Different Kinds of Heroes
Before he disappeared to trek around the world in search of adventure, Alexander left the custody of my mother and her brother, Eli, to a handful of relatives, who shuffled them between their homes like playing cards. The pride of the family was Eli, who first lived in Jackson Heights with Uncle Louis. Uncle Louis worked part-time as a masseuse in the Catskill resorts, never went anywhere without a cigar in his mouth, shot craps in his basement, and possessed the family gene that made him sharply critical of everyone except himself. A cast of cantankerous characters—Cousin Paul, Uncle Max, Cousin Herbie, and Monroe, each a bit eccentric in his own special way—also helped raise my mother and Eli for a while. Not having a family or place of their own left its mark. Eli and my mother rarely had their own clothes as children, always the recipients of hand-me-downs from the cousins and other family members. My mother dreamed of a better life—or at least clothes that were her own—for herself and Eli.
Soon, she would dream only for herself.
My uncle Eli graduated from the Naval Academy in Annapolis, and, since the war had begun, he was promptly shipped out to one of the farthest outposts: the South Pacific theater.
With her mother gone and her absentee father wandering the country in his camper, my mother’s closest family member was Eli. He raised her as best he could. Back in New York, along with her relatives, she eagerly read his letters from the front. Shortly after the letters stopped, the military car arrived with the navy’s regrets from Washington. There had been an attack. He had been on a destroyer, working as a lieutenant. It was a dangerous assignment, considering Japanese destroyers owned those waters. Inevitably, a kamikaze pilot had attacked them.
Inside their boat, the sailors were rocked, scrambling to put out fires and keep the oncoming water from sinking the ship. Eli was down in the hull, pushing through the chambers, trying to close the large doors to keep more water from coming onboard. The water kept rising, though. He came to a door and started to close it, but there was no way to close it and get to safety behind it. As the water filled up the chamber around him, he grabbed the wheel and started turning it to lock the door tight, ensuring that the others might have a chance to live and guaranteeing that he would not.
Many years later, long after the war, Mother traveled to the South Pacific to visit the grave marker with his name on it, which had been placed in New Caledonia. She must have wondered why the forces of nature had colluded so heavily against her, first making her father disabled, then taking her mother before her own eyes, and finally leaving her hero brother dead in foreign waters. Without Eli, my mother’s only protector was gone.
It’s one thing to understand the magnitude of these losses, one after another, intellectually. It’s quite another to understand them emotionally. It took me some years to comprehend it all. About fifty, if we’re being honest. But, many, many years later, on a dock overlooking a lake in Arizona, my mother and I would talk, deeply, honestly, sincerely. She would apologize. And I would forgive her. I came to understand that her circumstances cornered her and drove her to selfishness. With everyone gone, she’d had to fend for herself, she must have thought. And maybe that’s why she occasionally left me. And why she left my father.
He was a jock and a bon vivant of his own making. Sure, he had dreams of fortune, but my dad, Milton, was always more than satisfied with what was in front of him. He had been a semipro basketball player for a brief time, standing at the towering height of five foot eight, and was so quick on his feet that he beat the New York City quarter-mile champ in a race once, wearing street shoes. He trained boxers and became a physical education teacher, an outdoorsman, and a fly-fishing fanatic. He had the bank account to show for it.
When I was a boy, my uncle Herbie, my dad’s brother, once told me, “Your father is the most successful man I know.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because he has no ambition at all.”
His love was always good enough for me. Mother always wanted more. A quick divorce was imminent, and after she married my wealthy stepfather and carted me off to the suburbs, I was always trying to find my way back to my father. I’d escape during the middle of the day and at night. I’d sneak onto trains, run from the Harlem stop to his apartment, and listen to him in the other room on the phone with my mother.
“I’ve got him,” he’d say, and in the days or hours we could spend together, I’d have him, following him everywhere. He was my protector, my hero.
“Someday you’ll understand,” he’d said about the fight and ensuing legal battle over my custody. He was right. Eventually, I understood. But eventually takes a long time to arrive.
You Are Who You Know
In the mornings, I’d stay on the couch under the sheets he kept for me in the closet and listen to him leave about half an hour before the sun came up. He’d kiss me on the forehead, then disappear out the front door to do roadwork. For a time, he was managing a prizefighter, an Irish prospect turned stumblebum named Jerry McCarthy, whose idea of roadwork was six miles followed by at least six Tom Collinses.
“He’s a coward,” he told me about McCarthy. “He can only fight when he’s drunk.”
After those runs, he’d dress up, slipping his coach’s whistle around his neck, and wait for the Colonel. The Colonel was an odd character who, like so many, adored my father; in his case, so much so that he volunteered to be his chauffeur. The Colonel was the owner of an old Lincoln that was so beat-up it would have drawn glares and jeers in Tijuana. My father didn’t care what the car looked like. He saluted him with ceremony every morning.
“Colonel, take me uptown,” he’d say, snapping his hand in a salute like a field commander.
“Yes, sir,” the Colonel would say, saluting with the wrong hand and steering his limousine of sorts in the direction of James Monroe, the high school where my father worked, in Fort Apache, then and now one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in the Bronx. There he maintained an eclectic group of friends—the maintenance staff, the crossing guards—and during breaks he would disappear into the boiler room to take a slug from his discreetly stashed bottle of Hiram Walker bourbon and play a few games of pinochle with the janitors and other coaches. He never spent the money he earned in those card games on himself; instead, he used his winnings on new uniforms, shoes, and equipment for students who couldn’t afford them.
He must have been up in winnings one year, because he financed his own basketball team and snuck them into the high school league.
So my uncle was wrong. My father had one ambition: basketball.
Fort Tyron Prep, he called his team, a joke considering how poor the students—a term I’m using liberally—were. Those kids couldn’t have afforded a free tour of prep school, let alone prep school. They came from Harlem and the Bronx, when they came to school at all. But he mentored them so closely they became a championship team. He snuck them into the city’s interschool league, where they defeated many of the New York City teams. Eventually, they were bused up to West Point to take on the junior varsity program there. Soon, the reporters who covered high school sports—even from The New York Times—picked up the story. My father worked so hard for those kids. He even helped more than a few of them earn scholarships, including three brothers, who, despite their impoverished upbringing, all attended and graduated from Yale.
For a team photo, my father took them all to Columbia University, and they posed in front of the Ivy League walls themselves. The photo would be a treasure for them. And for him.
He never left me at home when I visited, never left me out of anything. I was in the locker room. I was out in the fields with him coaching the cross-country team in Van Cortlandt Park. I followed him to Yankee Stadium or to the Meadowlands—even to the local athletic clubs, the Y, and the armories—for weeknight boxing smokers.
“Colonel, take me to the Garden,” he’d say, and outside the arena, amid the mobs, he’d greet his friends on the way into the venue. We sat on the bench of the New York Knickerbockers as Red Holzman, one of his friends, coached the team and when Goose Tatum and Meadowlark Lemon of the Harlem Globetrotters came through. After games, I’d follow him to mill in front of the players’ locker rooms or near the entrance, where he greeted coaches and other friends.
“Hey, Bob,” he’d say, introducing me to Bob Mathias, the famous decathlon champion.
“Hey, Jerry,” he’d say, introducing me to Jerry McGarity, the renowned high school swimming coach and a strange, hard-drinking Irishman. (McGarity had a friend who worked at Sing Sing, and it always bothered my father that he took perverse pleasure in watching the executions there.) One summer night, my father crossed the street and stopped. “Hey, Jim,” he said, introducing me to Jim Thorpe, the famous Native American Olympian who earned his medals without a pair of shoes and was now a homeless drunk, sleeping in the gutter.
He even introduced me to the Great Zbyszko, the famous wrestler, who was close to my father. During the Depression, the contests between the world’s strongest men, wrestlers, and grapplers were popular, and my father marveled at their training regimens. The Great Zbyszko had come from Poland via Vienna, was a heady intellectual, and taught my father the secrets for accumulating massive strength. Zbyszko was so strong he could take a handful of bottle caps, place them between his fingers, and squeeze them all together. He could also tear a New York City phone book in half. Years later he told my father the secret to the trick. Didn’t matter. I was impressed.
Together, my father and the Great Zbyszko hatched a scheme during the Depression to make their own bathtub gin. Zbyszko showed my father how to do it, rolling out the vapors in a towel, which was the secret to their high-quality product.
My father’s closest friends, though, were not the famous athletes but the unknown masters of their craft, the hands behind the stars, the great cornermen and cut men and the network of self-appointed doctors, healers, seconds, and spit-bucket shamans.
• • •
Every day with my father was an adventure. We often stopped off at the Abercrombie & Fitch store on Fifth Avenue, where he purchased his feathers and other supplies to tie his flies for fishing. I loved these trips to Abercrombie, and veering inside the gun room and marveling at these incredible wild animals that had been shot and stuffed, I imagined myself a hunter too, venturing out into the bush with my gun bearers to face these marvelous beasts. The danger was riveting, putting oneself out in front of a charging rhino or water buffalo, a species considered the most dangerous game in the world. As a gift, my father gave me my first gun: a pump-action Winchester .22. I could shoot only when my father took me to the range or into the woods, but I loved shooting with him and was a good marksman. Years later, I was part of a team that won the national summer camp competition. It was small-bore, twenty-two-caliber class, fifty feet. I shot 97/100, not perfect, but still incredibly accurate.
When I wasn’t with my father, I’d substitute adventure books for adventure. I devoured stories that would place me high in the Andes of Peru or the Himalayas of Tibet or amid the tall grass on the plains of the Serengeti. I was in awe of the African interior.
At night, before going to bed, my father passed me his T-shirt to sleep in, the faded gray cotton reaching down over my knees. I’ve had trouble sleeping all my life, but never in that shirt. It was like a shield, and my father was my protector.
Cultivate Eccentric Influences
Sunday at Uncle Mike’s was an education in itself. Unlike my mother’s side of the family, which perhaps never got over the tragedies of losing my grandmother to her illness and my uncle Eli, who never came home from the war, my father’s people were exuberant, eccentric, and dedicated to scouring the world in search of adventure. I remember my father introducing me to his cousins, who mesmerized me with their tales. Uncle Mike, for instance, was the proprietor of Agnes Strong Imports, a downtown curiosity shop that rivaled city museums. I peered through the bows and arrows, rugs, chandeliers, and other oddities from his world travels, and he gave me a chess set made from real ivory, no doubt a souvenir he’d picked up on his travels across the Serengeti. He later developed a friendship with Pancho Villa and traveled extensively throughout Mexico. As a teenager, he had found his way into a senior job building the railroad in Brazil and ultimately lived for a time with the Yaqui Indians. They taught him the finer points of marksmanship.
“Jono,” Uncle Mike would say, using my nickname, “the Yaqui can shoot from horseback and hit their target on a moving train, always in the same place: right between the eyes!”
Uncle John, Uncle Mike’s brother, was not a spy, but he worked in the Office of Strategic Services, or the OSS, the precursor to the CIA. He was a scrapper, tough and strong, and relished a good fight. My father used to say, “Whenever we heard sirens, we always worried about Johnny.”
After the war, Uncle John became a druggist and worked in a pharmacy. He was so tough that, once, when an armed gunman pointed a pistol at his head, demanding the cash in the drawer, Uncle John disarmed him single-handedly and called the police to pick up the poor bastard. At the time, Uncle John was eighty-three.
Uncle Abe, another brother, had a small bootlegging operation in Milwaukee. Always the practical man, Abe delivered his bootleg hooch from a street trolley car, where he served as the conductor, hiding the bottles behind the driver’s seat on his routes.
“Hold!” he’d call out to the passengers, then scamper off to make his deliveries. Uncle Abe fancied himself an astute businessman, buying, for instance, a tomato farm on a street called Worth Avenue, in then the sleepy Florida farm town of West Palm Beach. In a few years, he sold the tomato farm for a few thousand in profit, thinking he’d become a mogul after closing the biggest deal of his lifetime. Now that land is among the most expensive stretches of real estate in the world.
His sister, Henrietta Strong, another accomplished immigrant, helped found a home for poor children in Greenwich Village. She also started a greeting card company called Brownie Block Prints, which she eventually sold to Hallmark for millions. For her efforts, she was awarded Woman of the Year by Eleanor Roosevelt.
And let’s not forget Uncle Ezra, touched by madness, a poet given to melancholy, a raconteur and lothario of note, who made the bohemian coffee shops of Greenwich Village his home and suffered an untimely dem
ise at his own hand. Or Uncle Julius, the romantic hobo and wanderer who would arrive unannounced at the farm of Aunt Jenny, the mother of Mike, Ezra, John, and Abe, make a few repairs to the tractors and threshers, then disappear at sunset to scratch the wanderlust itch that consumed him all his life.
When I was a young man, these eccentrics were my teachers, my living encyclopedia of adventure, and I learned about the world through their exploits. My father learned from them too. He and his cousins were the new generation, desperate to explore America and the world once Isadore and Minnie, his parents, settled in New York after emigrating from Riga, Latvia. His father arrived with a fifty-dollar gold piece and dreams of a new life, leaving behind a bleak existence and little hope for prosperity. But like many others, they found a way.
Know Your Roots
Isadore Goldsmith, my grandfather, was a model of kindness. After passing through Ellis Island and settling in the Bronx, he opened a candy and cigar store near Yankee Stadium, then a focal point in the nation, considering the batting records Babe Ruth was setting.
Ruth was one of my grandfather’s most loyal customers. My grandfather could always tell when the Babe was coming because he could hear the gales of laughter from a crush of children that always surrounded the slugger, following him from every direction.
Ruth was an avid cigar smoker, and he’d lift a glass jar in my grandfather’s store, reach in with his giant paw, and retrieve a handful of stogies each day.
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