And the whole feeling in the house, this house that was always filled with laughter and jazz, was now just so sad and dark. I stayed in my room. I didn't come out. I didn't want to see anybody. Friends would come over to try to talk to me, try to make me feel better, you know, but . . . I was one of the first of my friends to lose a parent. Nobody really knows what to say to you. Hell, we were fifteen. We didn't know what to say about a lot of stuff. I didn't come out. A living room filled with people, and I didn't care. I stayed in my room, and I realized I still hadn't cried.
And then one day, I heard laughter. Big laughs. Everybody having a great time. I had to come out to see who was working my room. And it was my crazy Uncle Berns. Performing for the family. He was making everybody laugh, even my mother was smiling. He was carrying on, making everybody else feel a little bit better, and taking some of the pain out of his heart as well. Berns was making people forget just for a few moments why they were there, and it was okay. He had just lost his brother, the person he was closest to in the world. And the message to me was profound because it meant that even in your worst pain it's still okay to laugh.
And then one day, Wild Bill Davidson came over. And he sat down, and he took out his trumpet and played the blues. Then Edmond Hall came over and took out his clarinet, and he played the most beautiful version of "My Buddy." And Arvel Shaw came over and Eddie Condon, Tyree Glenn, Willie "The Lion" Smith, Zutty Singleton, and there was a jam session in a Shiva house that people will never, ever forget. Even my mom was tapping her foot. Because once you hear the music, you can't stand still.
Then it comes time for everybody to go back to their lives, including an old friend . . . The gravelly voice, the moist eyes, the scent of bourbon . . .
"Hey, Face. It's going to be all right, Face. It's going to be all right . . . How do you know you never going to see him again, Face? We don't know what this is."
I wasn't sure what he meant.
"Face, consider the rose. The rose is the sweetest-smelling flower of all, and it's the most beautiful because it's the most simple, right . . . ? But sometimes, Face, you got to clip the rose. You got to cut the rose back, so something sweeter-smelling and stronger and even more beautiful will grow in its place. You see?
"Now you may not understand that now, Face, but someday you will. I guarantee it. Someday, Face, you're going to consider the rose. Can you dig that . . . ? I knew that you could."
CHAPTER 10
Joel left first. He had to go back to college, the University of Miami. Rip went back to the University of Bridgeport. Hard goodbyes. It was just me and Mom now.
Uncle Mac took me aside. "Billy, don't take this personal, but your brothers are gone now, you got to be the man of the house. That's your job."
Aunt Sheila, pinching my cheek . . . "Billy, darling, we're so proud of you. Be strong for Mommy, okay? You're the man of the house. That's your job."
I didn't want the job.
Then after everybody's gone, you're left with it. You're left with the shit of it, the size of it, this opponent in your life, this hole in your heart that you can't possibly repair fast enough. And the first thing that happens to you is you get angry. You get so mad that this has happened to you at this point in your life, you want answers. I was so furious I could storm right into God's office.
"Excuse me. I would like to see him . . . No, I don't have an appointment, but . . . What is your name . . . ? Peter what . . . ? Leviiine?"
I feel his presence. "There you are! How could you do this? How could you do this to her? Why would you do this to us . . . ?
"You move in mysterious ways? I can't believe you actually said that! You call yourself a fair God? Really? If you're fair, then why would you take him, but you leave Mengele out there? How is that fair? Why would you do this to me? WHY?
"It's the hand I'm dealt? The cards I get to play? Oh, that's just great. Are you God or some blackjack dealer? I mean, Jesus Christ! How could you say . . . Oh, hi. I didn't see you there. You look great. No. I didn't recognize you with your arms down. You look great. Went into business with the old man, huh . . . ? Well, maybe I wanted to do that too.
"You know what? I will never believe in you. How can I? Look what you've done to me. I will have other gods before you. There should be an Eleventh Commandment. Thou shalt not be a schmucky god . . . I'm sorry. I'm sorry." I turn to leave, but I can't . . . "Would you do me one favor, please? When you see him, would you tell him that I passed the chemistry test?"
Getting back to school was so hard because I had this boulder to take with me everyplace. But then I developed something else. The best way I can describe it is by what I called it. I called it the "otherness" because that's how I felt. I wasn't here. I wasn't there. I was in an other place. A place where you look, but you don't really see, a place where you hear but you don't really listen. It was "the otherness" of it all.
I pushed the boulder up the hallway in school. Friends flying by me having a great old time. Some of them staring at that stupid black mourning ribbon I was wearing. I looked like I had won a contest for making the very worst pie. People either avoided me, or they looked at me in a strange way.
I thought I knew what they were thinking: "There's the kid whose father died in a FUCKING BOWLING ALLEY!" I would feel angry at Dad, embarrassed, because he died there. This isn't how it should be. You should die in bed with all your family around you, smiling at each of your loved ones, telling them you love them, and that it's okay. You're ready, and not afraid, and don't be sad, didn't we have a great life? And with them almost rooting you on to the next place, you leave this earth--that's how it should be, not dying on the floor of a bowling alley surrounded by people wearing rented, multicolored shoes. I was seething . . . at my life, and that I felt that way.
And then I'd see The Girl with The New Boyfriend. Blond-haired, blue-eyed football player, Impala-driving, Nazi bastard. And I'd get confused. I'd get so confused sometimes. I didn't know what I felt worse about, the fact that my father was gone or that I didn't get The Girl. I'd feel so guilty. I'd feel so torn apart. I mean, who was I grieving for? Was I grieving for him, or was I grieving for me?
Basketball tryouts. The sign was posted in the hallway. I wanted to be on the varsity basketball team. That was the glamour team. The whole town would come out for the Friday night games. I played three years of varsity baseball in high school and the only people who came to the games were the players. I had made junior varsity basketball the year before, but I had to make the varsity team because my brother Rip had been on the varsity, and I wanted to do whatever he did because I thought he was the coolest (except for the kicking leg). I also had to do something just to get out of the house.
It was probably too soon for me because the first day of tryouts, somebody threw me the ball, and it bounced right past me. I just couldn't see it. I would dribble the ball off my foot because I was in some other place. The otherness was blinding me. The ball kept going places I didn't want it to go. I couldn't guard anybody. I couldn't keep up because I had this boulder to take with me everyplace I went. Three days of trying out for the team, total disaster, total. Embarrassing play.
After the third day of this, the coach, Gene Farry, called me into his office after practice, I thought to cut me. Instead, he asked me something that nobody had asked me since October 15.
"Bill, are you okay? How's everything at home?"
I stared at him, unable to speak. Suddenly, tears welled up in my eyes. I just exploded . . . the words, making their way out of my heart . . .
"I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Coach. I'm sorry.
"There's nobody home.
"I am so lonely.
"I don't know what I'm doing from one second to the next.
"I'm failing every subject.
"I just don't know anymore.
"There's nobody home. You know what I do after school every day, Coach? I run home and I cook. I make dinner for my mother because she's out looking for work. She's out trying
to get a job, and I want to have food on the table when she comes home, so she won't have to do it herself.
"And she looks so sad and so tired. And I try to make her laugh, but that's not working either.
"And I'm trying to keep up. I'm really trying to keep up with my studies but I can't. I go into my room in the back, and every time I open a book, I can hear her in the next room.
"I can hear her moaning and sobbing herself to sleep every night because the walls are too fucking thin."
The tears ran down my face like they were escaping from prison, the wetness of them oddly reassuring. I wasn't embarrassed. Coach Farry, only twenty-four at the time, smiled at me, and said, "Take all the time you need, I'll be out here."
He put me on the team. That's the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me.
We have our first game. It's an away game at a school on the Island called East Rockaway High School, and I'm sitting in the bleachers watching the JV game, which preceded the varsity game. I'm sitting there all alone, except for my boulder, looking but not seeing, hearing but not listening. Two friends are behind me, Harvey and Joe.
Now our fans are arriving at the away game. And as they drift into the gymnasium to watch the game, Harvey innocently says to Joe, "Hey, your father's here."
And I stood up and said, "Where?" I thought they were talking to me.
I couldn't believe it happened, but it did. I didn't know what to do. It was just . . . out there. What could I do? I mean, I couldn't turn around. What was I going to say? "Sorry guys, I thought my dead father just walked into the gym to watch me play"? So I just sat down as if nothing had happened, just staring straight ahead but not seeing, listening but not hearing. I couldn't imagine what was going on behind me . . .
I didn't talk to Harvey again for the rest of high school. If I saw him coming down the hallway, I went the other way.
The next week was November 22, 1963. Another Jack died.
Now the whole country had the otherness, except I had a double dip. And this misery continued for all of us for years and years, with a president from Texas who we really didn't like and a war that we really couldn't win . . .
And then one Sunday night in February of 1964, Mom and I were watching the Ed Sullivan show. Because that's how I spent every Sunday night now, just she and I watching Ed Sullivan. And something great happened for the country, something that made everybody forget what a hellhole the world was becoming. The Beatles were on Ed Sullivan. And for the first time in months, I smiled. And for the first time in my life, I liked another kind of music. And all through this magical broadcast, I heard this ticking noise. No. It wasn't 60 Minutes. It was Mom, making that disapproving sound. I was seeing the Beatles. She was seeing the death of jazz.
Oh, I wanted to be like one of the Beatles. If I could be like one of the Beatles, maybe I could get The Girl.
Once a month I got my hair cut from this wonderful barber in Long Beach. Remember barbers? His name was Cosmo. He cut everybody's hair. There was always a wait for Cosmo. I would sit in the chair. He'd put the smock around me. And I'd say to him, "Cosmo, leave it long in the back, okay? Long in the back."
"Sure, Bill. Like one of the Be-ah tuls, huh? Everybody wants to look like one of the Be-ah tuls. You will look like a Be-ah tul too."
He then started to clip my hair off . . .
"What are you doing!"
"Your mother called."
At the end of my junior year, something good finally happened for us. Joel graduated college and got a job teaching art in the very, very same junior high school that we all had gone to in Long Beach (he had become a really wonderful artist). He decided to live at home and give Mom most of his salary. So a little bit of the pressure was off Mom now. Until the draft board made Joel 1a, ready for induction. The buildup was starting in Viet Nam, and the army wanted him. Mom wouldn't let them take him. She made an impassioned speech in front of the military draft board pleading her case, that Joel was now the head of the household, with two younger brothers to support. She won, and Joel was spared.
Then came my senior year in high school. This time I made the basketball team the way I wanted to make it. I worked at it all summer. I was playing baseball wherever I could, but at night I worked on my shot, on my defense, my passing, and I played a lot that year. We were a very good team, the Long Beach Marines of 1965, and there's one game that they always talk about. This was the game we played against Erasmus Hall High from Brooklyn.
They were a fantastic high school basketball team. They were the number two high school team in the entire country. The number one team was from the City, a team named Power Memorial. And their center was Lew Alcindor. Eventually, he becomes Abdul-Jabbar. (In between he was Izzy Itzkowitz, for about three weeks. He said the food was too gassy, and he felt guilty, so he became a Muslim. We almost had him.)
One of our coaches had played at Erasmus, and knew their coach, and they arranged a special exhibition game, and mighty Erasmus, a predominantly black team, agrees to come out to Long Island to play us, a mostly white middle- to upper-middle-class school, in a predominantly Jewish town. This is unheard of--a City team to play a Long Island team? It was big news in the local papers, almost like the Knicks were coming. I mean, Custer had better odds in Vegas than we did.
Erasmus terrified us by the way they arrived at our school. They show up at our school in a Greyhound bus for the team, and another bus for the children of the team. We're in the locker room before the game having our legs waxed and--well, it's a home game, you want to look good. And Coach Farry comes in and says, "Listen, guys. Erasmus is a great team. But we're pretty good too, so let's show 'em who we are. Take the court. Come on, Marines, fight."
We run out there. It's our home court. We're greeted by a thousand Erasmus fans, stuffed into their side of the gym, and they're all in dashikis, African tops. This was a terrible time for whites and blacks in America. The South was literally exploding: dogs biting, people rioting, churches with children in them blown to bits, buses burning, civil rights workers murdered, "Blood on the leaves, blood at the root." Black people were starting to turn back to their African roots. The heavyweight champion had changed his name from Cassius Clay to Cassius X and then finally to Muhammad Ali. It was an edgy, scary time.
The Erasmus crowd was on their feet now, as their team warmed up. Even the cheerleaders could dunk. They're swaying back and forth, their arms waving back and forth in these choreographed African-feeling chants: "Erasmus, Erasmus. KILL THEM."
And our cheerleaders were on the other side of the court singing (to the tune of Hava Negilah), "Please don't hurt our players. They're very nice boys, and they bruise easily. OY!"
So we're down 55 points as the second quarter begins, and I'm just sitting there. My mom's in the stands. She came to every game, and every game that we fell behind, she did the same thing. Yell at the coach.
"Put Crystal in. Let's go coach. Number 11. We can't be any further behind. Let's go. Let everybody play. I pay a lot of taxes in this school system, and I--"
Oh, God. Coach Farry turned to me and said something that terrifies me to this day.
"Go in."
"Are you nuts? There's a game going on here."
So I check into the game. All my friends in Long Beach stand up, and give me a standing ovation, and they wouldn't stop. My friend David Sherman had nicknamed me "The Brute" because I had won the intramural wrestling championship . . . 122 pounds of steel. In the middle of this ovation he starts chanting, "BRUTE, BRUTE, BRUTE," and everyone follows him.
I walked out onto the court, like a Christian in the Roman Colosseum. They wouldn't stop. "BRUTE, BRUTE, BRUTE!" I couldn't imagine what Erasmus was thinking: This is their secret weapon? So I tried to walk like I was six eight. I looked at that Erasmus team with an attitude. I tucked in my jersey with authority . . . and my number disappeared into my trunks. It's hard to be intimidating when your nipples are showing.
Play resumes, and I'm guarding a buildin
g in a pair of socks. This is the biggest man I've ever seen in my life, he has his own climate. He's running upcourt, and I'm guarding him and he's laughing at me.
"Hey, where you from, Oz?"
This guy was so big, his crucifix had a real man on it.
He'd dribble the ball up high, taunting me. "Hey, munchkin. Come on, munchkin. Take the ball from me, munchkin."
So I get pissed off. I see an opening, and I knock the ball loose. It rolls on the court. I dive on it. He dives on it. The ref goes, "Jump ball!"
We get to center court. Everyone's hysterical laughing. Both sides of the gym are united now about one thing: I look like a schmuck. He's up there. I'm down here. We look like a semicolon. He doesn't even have to jump to win the tip. I've got my head hanging down because I'm now a sight gag.
Everybody's laughing. Then I heard that voice in the stands. "Come on, Crystal! Come on, 11! Give it your best shot! Let's go!"
And she was right. What a great credo. Give it your best shot. Simple, but powerful. Give it your best shot. So with a renewed confidence, I looked up . . . into his crotch . . . and said, "This is ridiculous."
The ref stepped in, still laughing. "Let's go guys, jump ball." Give it your best shot. Give it your best shot. Give it your best shot. The ref threw up the ball, and then everything was in slow motion for me. I remember the ball spinning. I could read it in the gym lights, Spaaaalllldiiiiing.
Give it your best shot. Give it your best shot. Give it your best shot. I took off. I could feel the friction of the air on my body as I rose and rose like some sort of Nike missile. As I got to the top of my jump, I made a fist and I swung as hard as I could. Pow! I hit him in the nuts. He crumpled to the floor, his eyes bulging out of his head, like a cartoon character who just hit his own thumb with a hammer. He screamed in falsetto for all to hear . . .
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