Little did I know that event and reputation would follow me throughout my life.
Danny’s Bananas
On the corner of my block was Danny’s Bananas. On Saturday I would report to Danny, a young handsome guy who always wore a white wife beater—the ones with straps and a low cut neck line that shows off your chest hair. Danny sold only bunches of bananas from his wooden stands, right off the street at the corner of 42nd Street and 13th Avenue. Huge stalks, the whole plants, they must have weighed fifty pounds, were delivered by trucks full to the top with green bananas. My job was to bring the new green bananas down to the basement through the sidewalk folding double steel doors, where the bananas were stored, and then bring up the ripe ones. I had to cut off and throw out the rotten and squashed ones. (Yeah—squashed bananas. Now you know why the girl on the blanket at the Nemerson pool with the squashed banana made me sick and still sticks with me.) I never forgot the smell of that cold, dark, damp banana basement.
It was one of the badges of honor to work for Danny. Only the chosen few did. Everybody bought his bananas. They came from all over the neighborhood and beyond. He knew everything about everyone and he talked to them all. Sometimes when certain individuals would come by he would go down to the basement, lock the steel doors and say, “Junior, watch the bananas. I’ll be right back.” This meant I got to run the stand, pick, cut, weigh, and sell bananas. On 13th Avenue Danny and I were truly top banana.
The Meter Boy
In 1956 I spent 75 percent of my time on the street in my limited neighborhood within Borough Park, which included 12th to 14th Avenues and stretched from 43rd Street down to the 38th Street park. Those were my blocks, including the schoolyards at PS 164 and Montauk Junior High School. I took regular trips to the Sunset Park pool, Coney Island, and Ebbets Field. Back then if you saved ten Borden’s ice-cream pop Elsee the Cow wrappers and sent them in to Elsie with $1.25, two weeks later you got your Dodger ticket in the mail, then cut school that Tuesday afternoon, went to the ballgame, and sat way out in the bleachers. It was always full of kids. Living on 42nd Street I spent much of my time playing stickball, stoop ball, punch ball, off the wall on a bounce hit it yourself, Johnny on the pony, sculze, kick the can, hit the stick, salugi, mums eye mums eye 1–2-3, lucky strikes, and more. I never went anywhere without my thirty-five-cent shiny, midnight-blue with a diamond in the middle Duncan yo-yo in my pocket.
Today the iPhone has replaced the yo-yo.
One day while playing stickball on the street corner of 42nd, back when we used a mop or broom handle stolen from the neighbor’s yard for a stick, I kept swinging and missing the pink Spalding ball. I was pissed, so I hit the new addition to the block, the newly installed parking meter. This time I didn’t miss, and to my surprise the meter popped open. Dimes poured out; what was I to do besides take the money and run? That was the start of my first lucrative job: popping the meters with a screw driver and putting rubber bands around them so I could come back in two days and take out more dimes. You never opened them all and never took out all the dimes. That way the city wouldn’t have to repair the broken ones and I could get some dimes from the ones with rubber bands. It took them a while to figure it out. I would stash the dimes in my six-year-old little brother Jamie’s pockets, in his boots, everywhere. I had dimes all over, bought anything I wanted. So many dimes it looked like my pockets had the mumps.
One sunny summer Saturday morning looking out of my bedroom window, curious to see if any of my friends were out yet, I saw police cars and cops everywhere. I heard one say to my hysterical mother, “We are looking for Frank Yandolino.” Thinking they were looking for my father, she answered, “He’s not home.” The cop looked up and caught me peering out the corner of the window. The cop answered, “No, ma’am. We are looking for him. The meter boy.” They all looked up at me and I ran to lock my door. By this time the entire neighborhood was looking on. As I was taken away in a police car I asked them to put on the siren. They obliged and off we went down the block. That was the end of Brooklyn for us. We moved to Brentwood, Long Island, from 1957 to 1962, my high school years, which are a whole other story unto itself. Sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll was just beginning. Somehow I managed to play high school baseball, football, swim team, and dated a cheerleader without knowing how to spell, multiply, or divide. So growing up in Brooklyn must have taught me something.
It’s been forty-five years and I finally finished writing today at sixty-eight years old on October 28, 2012. My birthday.
Bullshit. I’ll never finish this book. It’s now October 28, 2013, and I’m still writing.
“Happy Birthday, Junior.” Thanks, Charli.
Love Always, Frank
CHAPTER 28
Affirmations
In order to promote positive thinking and confront my fears and self-doubts, I post the philosophical quotations and metaphors that I try to live by all over—on my boat, my apartment, my office, and several made it into this book. Here are some of my favorites:
If you see Chicken Little around me, shoot him!
Knowledge is wasted on the old.
I live the life I am.
I don’t want other people’s dreams to become my nightmare.
Absence makes the heart grow fonder; it all depends on how happy you want to be.
The grass may look greener on the other side, but you have to make sure it’s not Astroturf.
If you find the shoe on the other foot, make sure it’s yours.
I’m a vampire looking for a giraffe. I’m a flight waiting to take off.
I’m a balloon running from the pin. I’m a stranger in a familiar place.
Winning the battle can cause you to lose the war.
If I piss in the wind I don’t want it to hit me in the face.
Every day is extra.
Paid for it, didn’t I?
If nobody sees it, it’s not interesting.
Sometimes you’re on a roll, when you should be on a bagel.
I would rather be wrong than right.
Enough is too much.
I’m a hammer looking for a nail.
Just play me the hit.
If you, look, smell, and act like an ass, look in the mirror; you’re an ass.
I’m from Brooklyn; if you show me your tits I’m supposed to fuck you.
Make sure the light at the end of the tunnel is not a train.
Don’t give me anything I am not supposed to have.
Go with the flow, then turn left.
You gotta rape me.
In this life there is one of everything.
Let’s talk turkey, not beef jerky.
It takes just as much time to do it wrong.
The iPhone replaced the yo-yo.
You don’t always win what you want when you win.
I will sleep when I die.
If I had tits I’d be a billionaire.
I’m the cause and effect.
Lie, then learn.
I can hear a hit on a paper bag. What is a hit? It sounds like one.
If you didn’t grow up in Brooklyn you didn’t go through Basic Training.
I still look both ways when I cross a one-way street.
You can trace … if you make it better.
LA is the elephants’ burial ground of creativity.
Food for thought may be too much to eat for some, so offer them a bite.
Art should never disappoint.
Since you are talking behind my back … why don’t you bend down and kiss my ass. I’m the line between love and hate.
When I walk into a room it parts like the red sea. Those that love me and those that hate me.
My problem is I’m underfunded, always looking for a pope.
Only narcissists write memoirs.
Stick your finger in the hole and say yes.
You can lead a horse from water but they still drink.
I don’t give a damn. I want what I want when I want it.
Innovation is the
key to creativity.
I am what I am, what I am.
I’ll try anything. If I don’t die, I’ll do it again.
What is your yellow brick road, that constant thing that makes you unique, that weaves in and out of your life?
What is the moral of your story?
I leave you now with this last question: What is the moral of your story? But before you decide, consider that “morals” are often interpreted differently from one person to another.
As an example, in the classic story of Cinderella, the enduring moral is to have faith, to be a good person, and trust that you will be rewarded in the end. One day your prince will come.
Still, I can’t help but wonder, what if that glass slipper wasn’t really Cinderella’s shoe? What if the real moral of the story is: If the shoe fits, wear it?
Or, even better:
Grab the shoe and run.
Frank Yandolino at Camp Drum, Watertown, New York, “Special Forces War Games” during the war in Vietnam.
Producers Artie Kornfeld (L) and Michael Lang (R) at Woodstock ’69.
Inside Bert Sommer, album cover designed by Frank Yandolino.
Erotic Sheets designed by Frank Yandolino with Neville Gerson.
Abbie Hoffman: modern-day revolutionary and social crusader who began the Yippie movement.
Atlantis sixty-foot pyramid at the entrance of a theater, hotel, apartment complex in Atlanta, Georgia. Total design by Frank Yandolino.
Bert Padell: Frank Yandolino’s business manager and friend.
Big Daddy Kane’s Veteranz Day was released by Frank Yandolino’s The Label Records.
Album cover for The Legendary Paul Butterfield Rides Again, designed by Frank Yandolino.
Beach Boys concert on the beach at Atlantic City.
Poster for Woodstock ’69.
Frank and Charli in Paris.
Frank & Charli Page 33