Stay Interesting

by Jonathan Goldsmith

  “Fritzy is planning our execution.”

  “I never liked Fritzy.”

  “No shit,” I said. “We might not get another chance. Now, here’s the deal: Yom Kippur is next week.”

  Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, was the perfect cover for Herman and me to escape our captors. A few weeks before, I’d called my father, knowing as always that I could count on him, and asked him to encourage the headmaster, Phelps, to get us to a synagogue, it being so important to our family of nonpracticing atheists. I knew even Führer Phelps could not refuse this kind of religious request. My plan worked. On the morning of Yom Kippur, Phelps’s driver picked us up in the headmaster’s woody station wagon, and off we went to shul.

  The synagogue was half an hour away in the town of West Chester, Pennsylvania. We walked inside, put on our yarmulkes, and scanned the room for exits. I ducked inside the men’s bathroom. At the far corner, I noticed a window. I jumped to grab the windowsill, pulled myself up, and looked out. Freedom! Outside, I saw scaffolding. The synagogue was under renovation and getting a fresh coat of paint.

  The scaffolding and all the painting equipment were perfect cover, and our very own ladder to freedom. I went to fetch Herman.

  “I got a spot,” I told him. “This is our chance. Let’s go.”

  Herman followed me into the bathroom. I pointed toward the window and boosted him up until he could get his grip and wriggle his fat ass through. Splat. I heard him land on the sidewalk. I hoped he was still ambulatory. Then I jumped, pulling myself up and squeezing out. My dress shoes landed on the sidewalk. I steadied myself and pulled Herman to his feet, and we ran for it.

  Once the synagogue was safely out of sight behind us, we slowed down to catch our breath, wandering through the suburban cul-de-sacs until we found a main road. After an hour or so passed, we arrived at Christie’s, a diner on the edge of the expressway. It was attached to a truck stop, and the rigs we passed as we walked onto the property had license plates from all over the country. My father had sent me five dollars for my birthday, so we walked inside the diner and ordered the perfect celebratory meal for the Jewish day of fasting: bacon, breakfast sausage, and pancakes. It wasn’t until we had finished that we realized we had a problem: We’d spent most of our money and had only a measly dollar apiece left.

  Herman was quiet. I assuaged him with a piece of chocolate cake.

  “How do we get home?” he said.

  “Why do we want to go home?” I said.

  Looking at the trucks in the parking lot, I had another idea.

  “Let’s hop a truck,” I said. “We can sneak on, right in the back.”

  Herman began sweating.

  “We could fall off,” he said.

  “Yeah, and we could also get tied up by Fritzy and hanged,” I said, standing up. “You want to go back there?”

  Herman shook his head, traces of chocolate frosting on his lips.

  “You with me?” I asked, boldly enough to show I was ready to find our ride to freedom in the parking lot but not brave enough to go by myself.

  “How do we know where the truck is going?” Herman said.

  “Who gives a shit?”

  “We could end up in California,” he whined.

  “So?” I said. “The farther away from Phelps, the better. You want to sit on Mr. Arnold’s lap again for another bedtime story? They probably have the Dobermans out looking for us now. Someone is going to give us up any minute. Let’s get out of here.”

  We scrambled up from the booth, Herman stopping momentarily to shovel the last forkful of chocolate cake into his mouth, and scampered out into the parking lot. Most of the freighters were closed up, except for one decrepit vegetable truck. I jumped up in the back, turned around, and pulled Herman aboard. We crawled around the back, taking refuge amid the crates of produce.

  The engine soon rumbled and the back of the trailer started to shake. The vegetable truck pulled out, and we found ourselves on the highway. It was cold and windy in the back of the truck, and without any money or warm clothes, we prayed we were not on the long trip to California after all. Our prayers were answered an hour later—sort of—when we pulled into Wilmington, Delaware. We jumped out, found our way to the bus station, snuck on a bus to Philadelphia, and then boarded a train.

  Serendipitously for Herman, the train stopped in Camden, New Jersey, where his family was based. He’d had enough. I wasn’t as fortunate. I was homeless, as far as I was concerned. I couldn’t go back to Phelps and face Fritzy and the Führer. I also couldn’t go back to where the trouble had started for me: my mother and stepfather’s home in Westchester. I had only one refuge: my father. I wanted to live with him and have him be my sole guardian.

  The train continued on to New York and I snuck into the bathroom.

  I was discovered by the conductors, but they were very understanding. Positive Phelps had put out an all-points bulletin that I was gone, I concocted a story that my mother was on her last legs in a Midtown hospital and I was very upset that the school wouldn’t allow me to go until I was picked up by an adult the next day. They admired my spunk and compassion. One even bought me a sandwich and a Coke and gave me two dollars, just in case.

  After several hours in a train bathroom, I was very glad to reach New York. I walked around Times Square in awe of the sights, the peep shows, the hookers, and the smut shops. I bought three hamburgers at White Castle and two hot dogs at Nedick’s. I don’t think it all cost more than a buck. Feeling like a grown-up, enjoying my freedom, I stopped into the automat for a nickel cup of coffee. Lots of cream.

  I called my father, but he wasn’t in. I hoped he wasn’t away fishing. I wondered how my mother and stepfather were handling my being on the lam again. Maybe now they were sorry for sending me away to Phelps. That psychiatrist had really screwed up my life with those damn pigeons, I thought. Then it occurred to me that, just maybe, I was partly to blame for having said what I said.

  I guess they thought I was really disturbed. I know they thought I held certain proclivities and could end up as a pervert. After all, I frequently tried to watch One-Eyed Betty undress through the blinds. And my stepfather’s sister, on the occasions when I would spend the night at her house. Maybe they were onto something. I remembered, years earlier, proudly marching around Aunt Estelle’s house with my hairy and voluptuous cousin’s bloomers over my head. I was five. Some kids like yo-yos. Some like model planes. I liked scented panties. There was just something amazing about them.

  I kept calling Pop but got no answer, so I decided to take the subway up to Eighty-Sixth Street and wait him out at his place. It was then that I spotted a deck of cards with naked ladies on them in a smut shop window. I decided they were worth my remaining money and foregoing the subway for a hell of a long walk to Pop’s.

  He still wasn’t home. I fell asleep on the doorstep. When I woke up, I was hungry and I was chilly. In my desperate state, I started to consider Scarsdale. Maybe by this time they would have started to miss me. I might gain a few points by running to them instead of my father’s. (They didn’t have to know I had already tried and failed.) Maybe they’d see I was finally coming to my senses, ready to be the “good,” manageable boy they wanted, ready to join their happy home at last.

  Deluded into this fantasy, I hid out on the last commuter train. These were always easy because they were crowded: Even if the bathroom was busy, you could simply walk up and down the aisles. As long as you never sat down, they’d never have the opportunity to ask you for a ticket.

  I arrived and walked another two miles home from the railroad station. Phelps, the shul, Christie’s Diner, Delaware, all seemed like ages ago. I planned to be nice and sweet. I knew One-Eyed Betty would be glad to see me and feed me the stuff I liked. She was pissed at them anyway for sending away her drinking partner.

  I walked in just as a barbecue was wrapping u
p. My stepfather had a gaggle of business big shots assembled. He glared at me. My mother, much to my surprise, seemed concerned. Or at least she appeared to be. She gave me a hug. I liked that. It didn’t happen often. She told me Phelps had called in the morning and she was really worried but thought I was with my father.

  My stepfather finally tore himself away from his associates and cornered me in the kitchen. He was upset. Really upset. It was more than just the embarrassment of me arriving in the middle of dinner. Was it possible that he cared a little after all?

  I took the opening. I told him and my mother, in no uncertain terms, that if I was sent back to Phelps I would jump off the top of the silo on parents’ day. They looked at each other, comprehension of my precipitous state finally dawning on them.

  I was sent back to Phelps the very next day.

  Never Let School Get in the Way of Your Education

  Fate intervened before I did my swan dive off the highest point at Phelps. One rainy, gray November morning, the headmaster called me into his office and told me news that burst through the gloom of the day like a ray of sunshine:

  My stepfather had had a nervous breakdown.

  I was told to pack my things, and the next day I not only left Phelps behind forever but also left the Northeast for a time. We—my mother, my recently adopted younger sister, and my stepfather—were on our way to Florida, where my stepfather could rest. The drive was scenic and quiet, which suited me fine. The only happening of note over the thousands of miles of road was at a rest stop in North Carolina.

  There, in the bathroom, was a condom machine. I couldn’t believe it. I stuffed my only coins into the machine and marveled at my newly acquired and now most prized possession. I put it in my pocket and we continued on our way.

  • • •

  Once we were in Florida, my path was clear. I was going to be a pearl diver. I was ten, maybe eleven. While I had a vague awareness that the best oyster beds were located in the Philippines and around the emirates on the Red Sea, and the pearl divers in these far-flung locales could descend to more than a hundred feet below sea level in one dive by holding their breath for more than seven minutes, I had to start my training in the body of water closest to me: the main pool of the Fontainebleau Hotel.

  I still remember the smell of suntan lotion, surf, and grease from the grill that hung in the humid air of southern Florida, a place where we didn’t live for very long. In the 1950s, the Fontainebleau had just opened, and the incredible panoramic face of the hotel and epic sweep of rooms quickly became a hangout for an eclectic mix of clientele: drug smugglers, wannabe gangsters, and an entrenched population of Jewish bubbes and zaydes betting their nickels and quarters playing games like mah-jongg and canasta all afternoon under the umbrellas by the pool. This pool was special. It had been designed to look like a tropical lagoon, lined with the rattling fronds of palm trees and complete with its own waterfall. The hotel had been designed by Morris Lapidus and was built like a time-travel machine. “If you create a stage and it is grand, everyone who enters will play their part,” he said.

  Jimmy Schwaab was another scrawny kid from New York who had come to the Fontainebleau with his family on vacation; he was like a child vacuum cleaner. Jimmy had developed a foolproof way to collect a percentage of the change the cabal of grandmothers were churning around the mah-jongg tables. His ruse was simple: He pretended to be a native pearl diver, but instead of grabbing pearls, he asked the yentas to throw their spare change into the pool and he would dive in after it. When I saw all the shining change that Jimmy had been making, I asked to join forces with him.

  Together, we worked the Fontainebleau pool in the mornings and afternoons—you know, the times when I should have been in school. On my first day, after going home, I counted all my newfound fortune on my bed. I couldn’t believe how much I’d made. More than ten dollars! Those earnings were far more than any other job had paid or any other allowance I’d received.

  Business was so good for Jimmy and me that we figured we could recruit a team of divers to work with us and take a percentage of their earnings. We could even expand operations to other resorts and pools. Heck, we were so good in the water, holding our breath and acting like natives, we could start our own salvage company and find buried treasure, diving for gold coins among the wrecks off Key Biscayne and Bimini. Sadly, we never got our operation together. After the third day, we closed up shop. Jimmy had to go back to New York.

  As for me, I came home to find my mother in tears. What had I done? Well, for starters, I hadn’t bothered to go to school once, and the principal had called. But that wasn’t all. I looked down at my sister. She was playing with a small balloon. But it wasn’t a balloon. It was a condom, inflated and tied off.

  My condom. The one I’d purchased in North Carolina.

  “How could you do this?” my mother wailed.

  Here’s the thing, which I didn’t realize until much later. My little sister was three. How could she have opened the condom package, let alone blown it up into a balloon and tied it off so deftly? She’d had help. And I believe the culprit was the one standing over her with tears in her eyes, asking me how I could do this. She should know.

  It didn’t matter. I listened through the door as my mother spoke to my father from the other room.

  “Milton, I can no longer handle the boy. I’m sending him to you immediately.”

  That afternoon, I landed with my bag at LaGuardia Airport and walked out onto the tarmac. My father was waiting in his gym shoes, standing up to his ankles in new-fallen snow. There were no pools around here. My career as a pearl diver was over. I never even snagged a pearl, but I discovered a jewel of wisdom under the waters of the Fontainebleau lagoon. A lot of nickels and dimes can add up quickly to dollars, but only if you’re willing to go out and get them.

  Some Rites of Passage Aren’t Right at All

  My journey to manhood continued to be transient. I would spend months intermittently with my father, then with my mother and stepfather, then with my father again. At least I convinced them never to return me to Phelps. My mother and stepfather left Florida again for tony Westchester County, outside of New York City. I toughed it out with them for stretches at my father’s behest.

  My new high school in Yorktown Heights wasn’t as abusive as the Phelps School, but I struggled to find anyone like me. The students had farmers as parents. My background, of course, was very different. But I wanted to fit in, like all kids do. I wanted to be popular, and to do so, as any kid knows, you have to befriend other popular students. I found my cool mentor in the only other Jewish kid in school. He was Anthony Hatzenberg, but he went by a different name. Everyone called him Tony Mambo Tony.

  For the 1950s, Tony Mambo Tony was the epitome of hip. The rage was pink, and he was decked out in pink socks, pink pop-collar shirts, pink ties. Everyone called him Tony Mambo Tony because even before his own bar mitzvah he was an extraordinary dancer. He played the congas and bongos and was so talented he sat in with the great Tito Puente at the Palladium in New York City. He was shorter than me, with a head of jet-black hair he greased back for performances. I remember watching him on the stage, sporting his sunglasses, hands a blur on the drums, just looking off to the side and lost in his own jazzy euphoria. Tony Mambo Tony was the coolest thing on two feet, I thought. So did he.

  Tony’s parents had come from the city—he spent weekends there—so we spoke the same language. Through his connections with Latin musicians, a group of bona fide adults who were not our parents, Tony Mambo Tony had the keys to the real world, a place that many of us randy teenagers at Yorktown knew little about.

  “You want to get laid?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” I said, eager to end my virginity and declare myself a man.

  “I got a great hooker.”

  “Okay! What’s her name?”

  “Edie. Edie Matthews.”

  �
�What’s the deal?”

  “I’ll set it all up,” he said.

  As I waited for the date, I practiced in my room, trying on condoms after my mother and Lippe had gone to sleep, familiarizing myself with how to get them on and off like a pro. I’d want to appear experienced. It was winter, and after making the first cut of the junior varsity basketball team, I recruited my teammates to accompany me down to see Edie. When the day came, we all hopped in my car, drinking beer and lying about everything we’d ever done or knew.

  “Oh man, I hear she’s a great fuck,” one of the guys said, as if he’d had dozens of conquests, but I suspected they were virgins like me.

  “She’s Puerto Rican,” someone else said as we continued down the West Side Highway.

  I was the driver in my stepfather’s Packard. I remembered One-Eyed Betty’s warning: Be careful with that little thing of yours. I thought of Ray, the old taxi driver from Tunisia who regaled me with the tales of his own venereal diseases, and thought about putting on a second condom for extra protection. The braggadocio and bravado diminished as we got closer to ground zero. Once we arrived, Tony Mambo Tony made the call and we all piled into the building. I looked up the stairs. On the third-floor landing, a man opened the door to size us up. His gold tooth glinted in the dull light, a large Doberman at his side. Must have been the pimp, I thought.

  “Come on up, boys,” he said in accented English, as the sound of a dozen trepidatious feet climbed.

  Waiting in the hallway, we found a half dozen students from Princeton, wearing their varsity jackets and smoking pipes. We got in line, waiting for our turn. We were so cool.

  I was standing next to Tony Mambo Tony.

  “Tone, what do I tell her?” I asked nervously, searching for a few tips, making sure the others didn’t hear.

  “Kid, it’s easy. You sit on the edge of the bed and say, ‘Edie, honey, I’m new at this game. You’ve got to show me the ropes.’”