The stress and exhaustion in the apartment drove Joey from it as soon as he finished most of his homework each night. He sought a space of his own (the others had kept from him a secret existence; now, it was his turn to forge a separate life). He’d go downstairs to his friend Irving Kaiser’s apartment—just above Mr. Kaiser’s tailor shop—and listen to records. Also, Irving owned a typewriter. Joey would pound out some of his book reports on it; occasionally, one of them veered into a free-form fantasy or the beginning of a short story, most of which he kept to himself (it pleased him almost as much to hoard his brilliance—a surprise that would one day dazzle everyone—as it did to show it off). In school, he was forced to read Keats and Yeats, but he didn’t give a fig for them. Nor did he join the students who worked on the literary magazine or the school paper, The Lincoln Log. They liked to run about, à la Walt Whitman, shouting Shakespeare into the wind. Danny the Count (“I taught you how to hustle, so listen to me”) told Joey he should read Benchley and Wodehouse.
Instead, he preferred the contemporary fiction in the magazines Lee and Sylvia brought from the city, or the books they checked out of the circulating library in Magrill’s Drugstore, over on Mermaid: the Studs Lonigan trilogy and the stories of Damon Runyon and John O’Hara. A friend of Sylvia’s, on learning that Sylvia’s little brother showed an interest in writing, brought him a copy of Irwin Shaw’s story collection Sailor Off the Bremen. Afterward, Joey began looking for Shaw’s fiction in The New Yorker. “When I [finally] came in contact with good literature [in college], it was kind of a joke,” he recalled in a radio interview in 1984. “It took me many, many years to be able to read novels in which dialogue and melodramatic actions were not the key.” At one point, however, a copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses made it into the Heller apartment, on the strength of its alleged obscenity. It returned to Magrill’s unread by any member of the family, though years later Joe recalled the thrill of running across the word snot in its pages.
For a while, he was drawn to the Kaisers’ apartment for reasons other than records and the typewriter. A young woman boarded with them. Her boyfriend worked at a concession stand in the amusement area. The woman had a habit of walking around in a half slip and bra, with the door to her room partly open, or in the hosiery she’d bought at Baumel’s Specialty Shop nearby. Joey kept hoping to catch glimpses of her. More and more, girls had the power to astonish him. One day, he was standing outside Kaiser’s Tailor Shop when Dolly Partini, an Italian girl who lived across the street, walked past him carrying a pail full of mussels from the beach. Often, Joey and his friends killed time by plucking mussels from rocks or catching crabs by using cracked mussels as lures, but otherwise, he didn’t know what they were good for. Dolly dizzied him by telling him they were wonderful to eat. The smell of the sea rose, brackish, from her pail and unsettled his stomach.
At school, he developed “secret and serious, nonsexual crush[es] on one girl or another,” he wrote in Now and Then. Usually, his ardor settled on whichever female occupied the sight line between him and the teacher. The joy was less in interacting with a girl, or even watching her, than it was in storing a hidden pleasure.
Food was his other private, sweetly guilty indulgence. He had never forgotten the comfort of sitting around eating ice cream with Lena, Lee, and Sylvia in the days shortly after his father’s death. Now, whenever he felt unhappy or tense, he “prowl[ed] about the kitchen” at night, “agitate[d]” by a “rapacious appetite,” he wrote. He kept his kitchen raids secret, and yet, from time to time, he appeared to desire an end to the furtiveness. “[Once,] I found in the cupboard a bulb of garlic with several of the cloves already broken loose,” he recalled. “I thought surely that if I ate one or two, nobody would know. They soon knew. Everyone knew. For the next few days, people even half a block away knew.”
* * *
“[ONE EVENING] I learned that once you had a breast in your hand, there wasn’t much you could do with it,” he said.
The boys and girls of Abraham Lincoln formed social and athletic clubs in the basements of homes or in back rooms provided by local store owners. Adults encouraged these clubs, hoping to keep the kids out of trouble on the streets and (though this went largely unsaid) to prevent too much intermingling of ethnic groups, as well as fraternizing among lower and middle-class kids. With money from his newspaper route, Joey chipped in with several friends to rent a cellar in a two-family house and buy some bare-bones furniture and a phonograph. They called this Club Hilight. The Club Alteo (“All Loyal to Each Other”) was another popular gathering spot; it was located in the back of a store on a side street, two blocks from Joey’s apartment. The Alteo was a venerable institution, started several years earlier by kids who were now in their twenties. Joey and his pals constituted a second generation.
Kids of roughly the same age, and all known to one another, hung out at the Hilight, listening to records. The Alteo’s crowd was decidedly more diverse in age, geography (though limited to Brooklyn), and experience. There, Joey heard Duke Ellington’s music for the first time, and that of Count Basie. He realized with mild shock that he preferred these innovative black musicians to the blander, more commercial talents of Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller. At the Alteo, he heard older boys brag about sexual derring-do. He saw the “vipers”—the heavy marijuana smokers—sneak out the back door. He watched couples do the lindy hop, and tried to discern the physical signals sent by girls and boys, for it amazed him how the sexually precocious always found one another quickly. Clearly, he was not advanced that way, because most nights he was stuck against a wall, gawking, though his body hummed with curiosity.
Fortunately, there were plenty of curious girls, too, including some he’d known since elementary school: Ruth Gerstein (the first girl he ever kissed, in a game of Spin the Bottle at their eighth-grade graduation party), Gladys Simon, and Phyllis Ritterman, who had told him as early as fourth grade that she wanted to be a novelist. Before long, he had managed to explore a female breast, then sat there wondering what to do with it. (A few months prior to joining the clubs, he got his first quick “feel,” from a classmate he barely knew, at a well-known gathering spot for teens, Lindbergh Park, named after the famous pilot. The park was in Sea Gate, where Jews were not particularly welcome.)
One night, a girl from Joey’s French class, known to him as Gertrude, showed up at the Alteo accompanied by her older sister, who introduced her as Gail. What did this mean? Had she adopted an alias in preparation for indulging in unspeakable behavior? She wore a tight sweater and a high-lift bra, lipstick and mascara. Joey had never seen her like this. She caught his eye, recognized him, and looked away, embarrassed. The older boys, the seniors, circled her. Women’s secrets were many, their mysteries manifold and deep.
Sexual maneuverings aside, the clubs provided safe places for like-minded kids to mingle and find support. To his fellow club members, Danny the Count sang his Faulkner refrain. George Mandel rhapsodized about Beethoven and Basie. He and Joey had become quite close, though Mandel was three years older and Joey was a junior member of the club. Joey was “perceptive enough to be wary of [people], even scared,” Mandel noticed. But he was also “courageous enough to be … daring.” The two of them shared an interest in contemporary fiction; already, Mandel had earned the right to call himself a professional writer. He was making three hundred to four hundred dollars a week scripting and illustrating comic books. His drawings of the human figure had an angular clarity, and he possessed an uncanny ability to expose the foibles of vanity. His sly puncturing of social hypocrisy would undergird what the mainstream press later termed the “Beat ethos.” At first, some of his friends laughed at the amount of time he spent doodling, but the comic-book industry was beginning to burgeon. An outfit called National Allied Publishing, working out of a tiny office in Manhattan, solicited freelance artists, many of whom were high school kids happy to work at a rate of five dollars per page. In just a few years, ever since Dell Publishing and the Easter
n Color Printing Company in Waterbury, Connecticut, had teamed up to present newspaper funnies in a tabloid-style format, the comic book had flourished. When Mandel drove up to the Club Alteo one day in a blue convertible with hydraulic transmission and an automatic top, his friends stopped laughing at his doodles. Over the next couple of years, he earned more and more, working primarily for a company called Funnies Inc., as comics became increasingly popular, riding the caped shoulders of Superman. Two Jewish high school kids in Cleveland had created the Man of Steel. They sincerely believed in America’s promise. Superman was the ultimate assimilationist, emigrating from another planet to proclaim the American way. No shadowy evildoer—not even a Nazi—could escape him.
Joey spent hours at the Club Alteo, poring over Mandel’s drawings, sharing story ideas with him. Together, they recited absurd variations of well-known passages from the Bible, or conceived jingles that parodied radio ads. Joey’s take on a popular Pepsi-Cola commercial went like this: “Pepsi Cola hits the spot / When I drink it, how I fart / Twice as much for a nickel too / Pepsi Cola is the drink for you.” Playing off another ad, he’d sing, “If there’s a gleam in her eye / Each time she unzips your fly / You know the lady’s in love with you.” This silliness required little creative effort, but it got Joey listening carefully to the “Lucky Strike Hit Parade” and absorbing the pacing and structure of ads. A successful parody, he learned, gauging the depth of his friends’ laughter, depended on crack timing and perfect understanding of the form. He also discovered (consciously—he’d known it all along) that twisting English into the Yiddish syntax he’d heard all his life from his mother usually produced satisfying comic results.
Bleaker and bleaker, Coney seemed, after an evening of music, tall tales, and maybe an intimate grope with a girl. Walking home, or wandering past Feltman’s, Hahn’s Roosevelt Baths, or Paddy Shea’s saloon, the boys passed ash cans stuffed with chewed corncobs or half-eaten hot dogs. Occasionally, they’d go as far as Gravesend Bay, where a dye factory heaped sulfur on its grounds. The boys pulled matchbooks from their pockets and tossed fire into the little yellow hills. The flames flared blue, igniting the night, providing a moment’s distraction.
School was distracting, too, for which Joey was quietly grateful. Math gave him a little trouble now and then, but his English classes were a snap. He took a typing class, ostensibly to aid his writing, but mainly to meet new girls. His fondness for their sweaters explained his mediocre progress on the keys.
A few of the girls admired the Boy Scout uniform he sometimes wore to school. Joey had never been much of a joiner, and he probably became a Boy Scout under pressure from Lena or Lee, who extolled the wholesomeness of the group’s social activities. He didn’t participate much in the organization, but the uniform made him feel like a comic-book superhero. It hid his secret identity—the nail-biting worrier.
At the Alteo, Joey was torn between villain and hero. Sometimes, he’d see three or four older boys latch onto a girl with whom they seemed to have an unspoken arrangement. One by one, they would disappear into a back room with her. He felt titillated, sad, strangely angry—at who, or what, he wasn’t sure. He should do something, shouldn’t he? What should he do? Stop what was clearly bad for the girl (he had overheard some of the girls whispering about these fast Coney Island boys who’d dance you into a back room and force you to give them what they wanted)? Or join in? Was he just being a coward?
When he turned sixteen—the year was 1939—he got a part-time job as a messenger for Western Union, earning the minimum wage, twenty-five cents an hour. For four hours a day, after school, he delivered telegrams in the city. He spent most of his paychecks on secondhand phonograph records for the Club Hilight. But the clubs were beginning to lose their allure for him. More and more vipers filled the alleys behind the cellars, or congregated in the stores’ back doorways to smoke. The older boys stole away the most attractive girls.
* * *
IN 1939, Russia invaded Finland. the Iliad clashed in Joey’s head with Mandel’s comic books as well as details snatched from the newspapers. He drafted a short story about a Finnish soldier fighting off Red hordes. After many hours of scribbles, more scribbles, and erasures, he rushed downstairs to Irving Kaiser’s typewriter and got the story down on beautiful clean white sheets. Immediately, he mailed it away—first to Collier’s, then to Liberty, and finally to the New York Daily News, which published fiction in those days. They all rejected the piece. He didn’t tell Mandel. He hid the rejection slips. For a while, he avoided the clubs; he had nothing to talk about to distinguish him, to raise his esteem in the eyes of his friends and the girls. He took solitary walks on the beach. One evening, he saw a woman he knew, the older sister of a girl in his building whose little brother had drowned one summer, not long ago. The woman was kissing a man beneath the boardwalk, letting him run his hands across her breasts. The man’s face was hidden in shadow. Joey looked out at the ocean, at the invisibility—the absolute erasure—of the woman’s dead brother. Each time the man touched the woman’s breasts, the drowned boy’s spirit seemed to drift farther and farther out to sea.
Joey returned to his apartment house. He heard someone typing behind the Kaisers’ door. He paused on the stairs. His Finnish soldier was a joke. The Red hordes had swept him away. They were sweeping everything away. The world was changing—newspaper headlines had gotten bolder, darker, scarier. The social clubs were changing. Girls were changing. So was he.
Within a few years, he would stand again on these stairs, outside the Kaisers’ door, thinking of his friend. Irving Kaiser would experience his last thought in Italy, where he would be blown apart by a German artillery shell.
* * *
“THIS IS THE VOICE of … miserable men who are buried but not covered over by earth, tied down but not in chains, silent but not mute, whose hearts beat like humans, yet are not like other human beings.… [W]hy are we [treated like this]? For the horrible crime of being poor.”
These sentiments appeared in the Jewish Daily Forward’s “Bintel Brief” in 1910, but nearly thirty years later, they could have served as testimony for many of the men on subways and in train stations whom Joey witnessed on his way to work each day for Western Union. In Coney Island, “[w]e were prudent with money,” he wrote, but “I was … kept ignorant [of] the threat of true poverty.” It was not until he took a job in the city and began to keep track of wages that he registered real desperation. The contrast with certain other commuters, men wearing Rogers Peet suits—some of these fellows could even afford suits from Brooks Brothers—was stark. He noticed that passengers from Coney Island, Bensonhurst, and Borough Park tended to read the New York Post and PM. At the Bay Ridge stop, where riders from tonier areas caught the train, copies of the Journal-American or the New York World-Telegram appeared in well-pressed laps. For the first time in his life, as far as he knew, Joey found himself among Republican voters. These people wouldn’t be caught dead in Coney Island—not outside the Pavilion of Fun.
He was amazed to be working in the city. The job connection had come through Sylvia or Lee (later, he couldn’t remember which); one of them had a friend who managed a Western Union district office in Bensonhurst. This man arranged an interview for Joey with someone named Shorter, in the main headquarters at 60 Hudson Street. Joey assumed he’d be assigned to Brooklyn, but his optimal hours—after school and on Saturdays—best matched the schedules of on-the-go city businesses. He was told to requisition a uniform (brown leather puttees) from the supply office and prepare to learn his way around the West Side.
After school each day, he’d catch a trolley to the train (this took a ten-cent bite out of his pay, and there’d be another ten coming home—until he learned to take the subway directly from school), ride to Union Square, and then walk to the Flatiron Building, where a central locker room offered space enough for forty or fifty messengers to change into their uniforms. In an office on Seventeenth Street, Teletype machines spit out half-inch paper strand
s dark with words (the comedies and tragedies of daily commerce, and of ordinary lives); the machine operators pasted these strips onto yellow forms, folded the forms into envelopes, and handed them to the waiting messengers to be delivered to nearby addresses. Businesses in the area included Ohrbach’s, Mays, and S. Klein’s. Joey amused himself by timing the traffic signals as he hopped from one office complex to another, adjusting his pace so he always caught the WALK command. He dreaded the day (it never came) when he’d have to hand someone a yellow envelope with two red stars stamped on it, meaning sad news.
Many of the offices he saw were nondescript, temporary-looking. Lots of closed doors. What went on in these places? How did these outfits justify the amounts of money (whatever amounts they were) spent on lighting, carpeting, rent? He was astounded to see trucks lurching into the city, apparently from all over the country, bringing vegetables and fruits, dumping them at various distribution points, from which they’d be disseminated to the kitchens of the rich and the poor, into the bodies of penthouse dwellers and cellar rats, and finally into sewers and trash mounds. He was appalled to hear the squealing of animals and to smell blood from within what looked to be warehouses near the Hudson. To quell his stomach at the end of a day, he’d bum a Spud or a Kool from one of his older coworkers. Once in a while, he’d saunter into a tavern and bluff his way to an ice-cold beer.
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