by Norman Lear
“What would you do if your balls itched?” his father sputtered in return.
When we got home my father took over. He shooed the women out of the kitchen and ordered Ben to drop his pants so he could attend to him. How the man managed to be so rough on himself through so many layers of cloth only God knew, but we boys gaped in awe. We’d seen only glimpses of fully mature private parts, never having had the opportunity to soak in the assortment, which would have been a big deal in itself. But even if we had, we wouldn’t have been prepared for this human equivalent of a display at a Red Lobster, and we were thunderstruck.
Thinking quickly, H.K. figured that aspirin would take too long, bicarbonate of soda would be too weak—ah, but mixed with iodine!! Murray and I left the room as my father took down a soup bowl and Ben prepared to dunk. My cousin David stayed for Ben’s scream, and he was the one who raced him to the emergency room of the nearest hospital.
• • •
JEANETTE SEICOL WOULD likely have led a less harried existence had she turned down the romantic overture that presented itself one summer evening in 1921. My mother-to-be was toying with a mound of whipped cream on top of her banana split on a date with a guy named “Pete”—or so my father said each time the tale was told, though my mother insisted each time that she “never knew any Pete”—when one Herman K. Lear stopped by the table to say hello to his buddy and, dazzled by this dark-haired beauty, accidentally on purpose thrust his hand into her dessert. She laughed as the whipped cream gushed between his fingers.
After a whirlwind eight-week courtship, my folks were married in September, and Jeanette Seicol Lear gave birth to me—“Sometime during the day, maybe the night, how am I supposed to remember, it was so long ago!”—at New Haven Hospital on July 27, 1922.
Mother was a world-class narcissist. But my sister and I, as we were growing up, didn’t realize that. “Your mother is a saint,” our father often said, and we believed him. She certainly played that role to the hilt in their kitchen quarrels. We knew that she had had a serious operation as a child that involved a goiter, whatever that was—we never did find out—followed by other illnesses and procedures. Mom was a poster child for “Fragile,” with a need to talk long and often about her doctors and their prescriptions. That’s what we knew. It didn’t occur to us that a mother might take an interest in her children. She was more concerned with the neighbors—they mattered far more than we did. My father couldn’t have cared less, but anytime he raised his voice, it was, “Herman, the neighbors . . .” She lived to the age of ninety-one, and to the end she was always her favorite subject, to a fair degree her only subject.
No one could suck the juice out of joy like Jeanette. She was the original farbissiner, yet another Yiddish word, which is most easily translated as “sourpuss.” But a sourpuss is a farbissiner in the face only. A true farbissiner is a sour soul. Sour souls stain the company they keep. They wake up to piss on the day, and not just their day. A farbissiner doesn’t earn the title until she is pissing on your day, too.
Flashing forward to an incident that took place in 1987, I was a sixty-five-year-old man whose mother was coming to California for a visit. I sent a car to pick her up at her apartment in Bridgeport and bring her to the American Airlines terminal at JFK, where I met her with a wheelchair and an attendant. She said she was happy to see me, but before I could reach her cheek to kiss her she began to talk about Dr. Golden, her wonderful new eye doctor, and how could I not remember him, she’d told me about him on the phone a week or so ago.
Before her luggage was out of the car and checked at curbside, she had fished out of her purse the new miracle eyedrops that Dr. Golden, “God bless him,” had prescribed for her. All the way up to the gate and onto the plane she talked about how “that scratchy feeling” in her eye was gone; how Dr. Leventhal, Golden’s predecessor, had never helped her; how now she was eating better and enjoying life more with her mind off her eye problem; and did she tell me how when she called my sister to rave about her new eye doctor, “It was like she didn’t hear a word I said.”
We were in the air about an hour, I at the window deep into some reading and she on the aisle, when I noticed her going into her purse again. At the same time a young man was walking up the aisle and my mother pulled at his sleeve.
“Sir, I wonder if you could help me.”
“Certainly,” he replied.
As I, her quite grown-up, proven stable son looked on, Mother continued, “My new eye doctor gave me this prescription. I have to put three drops, not two, not four, he said, just three drops in each eye every four hours. Would you be good enough . . . ?”
“Of course,” he responded, taking the eyedropper firmly between thumb and forefinger, and as I sat there in a state between mind-bending wonder and apoplexy, he squeezed off three drops exactly—not two, not four—into each eye. A moment later he was gone and Mother was putting her drops away, unaware, or so it seemed, that I was staring at her.
In the field of comedy, what she did next would be called a “take.” A long, slow take. Very subtly my mother started reacting to something on her left—her son, still staring.
“What?” she said finally. “What??”
“Mother,” I said. “You asked a complete stranger for help when I’m sitting right here?!”
“I didn’t want to bother you,” she answered.
“I’m here, Mother,” I said through clenched teeth. “The son who takes care of you all year. You think I couldn’t have—?”
“Dr. Golden said you have to be very careful.”
I was ready to explode. “And did he tell you to ask a total stranger, when your son is sitting right next to—?”
“And patient.”
“Patient?” I erupted. “Since when can’t I be patient?”
She had only to look at me. “Some patience!” she said.
• • •
BUT, YOU MIGHT WONDER, was there no lightness, no laughter, on St. Marks Avenue? Yes, there was. My father, in a celebratory mood, liked to take us “out for Chinks” (Chinese food) on a Sunday night. Coaxing Mother to go out with him somewhere, he’d say, “Let’s get out of here, Jeanette. Let’s blow the stink off us.” More often we were home, of course, where we relied on Madison Avenue to quench our thirst for entertainment—music and comedy—via the radio. The sponsors ran much of production in those years, and so there were The Fleischmann’s Yeast Hour, Maxwell House Coffee Time, Lucky Strike Hour, The Voice of Firestone, The Chase and Sanborn Hour, Kraft Music Hall, The Johnson Wax Program, The Bell Telephone Hour, and dozens more. They fielded most of the comedy talent, some of whom went on to become great stars in their own shows, and others who flamed high and flickered out quickly.
We roared at Joe Penner, a flame-out whose “Wanna buy a duck” was a yuk in households everywhere, as was Baron Munchausen’s “Vas you there, Charlie?” (another flame-out). While they lasted, these were retorts audiences knew were sure to come in every sketch. There would be a split-second pause before delivery, and the audience, hushed with anticipation, would explode on the line.
The all-time kingpin of such moments came years later when Jack Benny, whose character was known to be an incredible miser, was being held up at gunpoint, and the robber said, “Your money or your life!” The long pause that followed entered the history books and taught every comic actor and writer alive—and yet unborn—one of the great lessons of comic timing.
Benny led the parade of comics that had their own shows in those years, among them Fred Allen, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Edgar Bergen (and his dummy, Charlie McCarthy), Eddie Cantor, Fibber McGee and Molly, Amos ’n’ Andy, and Bob and Ray. If anyone had told my mother that one day her son would know them all, she would probably have laughed harder at that than at anything she heard on the radio, certain they had the wrong Norman.
• • •
> THE HOMEGROWN MOMENTS of levity in our family, at least those that emanated from my parents, were few but memorable. My folks liked to kid each other about what their lives would be like were they to get divorced. In that event, my dad would always take my sister with him and my mother would take me. Claire and I would hear again and again that she was a Lear, “with Dad’s blood in her veins,” and I was a Seicol. How gallingly insensitive our parents had to be as they delightedly costarred in these scenes, performed for an audience of two—their devastated children.
The threat of abandonment by a parent, though, is nothing compared to being thoroughly crushed by both, which happened to me when I was twelve. I had only recently discovered—I mean really discovered—my penis. Utterly intoxicated with the ecstasy I derived from causing it to stand erect and bringing it to the point of climax, backing off as the feeling ebbed, and then climbing the magic hill again, I could pleasure myself endlessly this way—until I failed to catch myself and rose to meet heaven as it descended around me. It would be another year before I could ejaculate, but the multiple climbs to climax were as thrilling as they would ever be, as was the climax itself.
I was in the bathtub one evening practicing this craft, climbing slowly up and down my nervous system, when my father, alerted by the sound of water rhythmically splashing for a considerable period of time, did what any father would do—at least any father named Herman Lear. He put his shoulder to the door and ripped the eye hook off the wood as he burst in. A moment later, I was hauled by the ear—naked and dripping wet, trying but failing to wrap a towel around me, my wiener shriveled in shame—to my mother and ordered to apologize to her.
Why would a father do that? What could he have had in mind, demanding that a young adolescent boy apologize to his mother for masturbating? If he had sought help to come up with a way to mortify me, to make me feel damaged, he couldn’t have done better. When I ask myself what motivated the weird way H.K. fathered his only son, I come up empty. Was it that we were the two males in the house, and that it was the male’s function exclusively in those years to support the family, and that, despite his bravado, his failure rate was eating him up inside? And inchoately, senselessly, he flailed? And I got caught in his flail-ure?
I don’t know if boys today are still told that they could go blind if they masturbate, but the notion was alive and well in 1935. Given how into the activity I was and that H.K. had been a witness to it, my heart was in my mouth when I asked him if it could cost me my eyesight. While he didn’t suggest I go out and get an eye patch and a tin cup, he didn’t exactly disabuse me of the thought, either. I don’t remember him ever talking to me about sex after that incident. The only unsolicited bit of advice from H.K. that leaned toward fatherly was when I started dating. He took me aside one day and, recalling a phrase from his Navy days, gravely advised me, “Norman, if you ever find yourself in a group of guys about to bang the same girl”—could there ever have been a father who knew his son less well?—“never take a wet deck.”
• • •
THE ONE MEMORY I have of my father that was fun, pure fun, was the Notre Dame/Ohio State football game in November 1935, which came to be known as the Game of the Century. I was thirteen and it was one of those occasions where my dad and I bonded so riotously that it blotted out every negative in my life for miles around and years behind. I couldn’t have been higher if I were a balloon and H.K. were helium.
My father always said his birthday was on St. Patrick’s Day, and on that day he wore a green tie. (It wasn’t until he died that we found out through the official records that he was actually born two days later.) He had a great Irish accent—when he worked with Irish guys he’d use it all day—and he could sing Irish lullabies in a sweet untuned voice, so of course we were Fighting Irish fans. Ohio State, the Buckeyes, were rated number one that year, so we turned on the radio in heart-thumping anticipation. Imagining the twenty-two players coursing up and down the field, as we did then while listening to radio, was no less exciting than watching it play-by-play on TV today. But by the end of the third quarter, most of the air was out of our balloons. Notre Dame was losing, 13–0.
William Shakespeare (that was really his name) was in the Notre Dame backfield at the top of the fourth quarter when coach Elmer Layden sent an almost unheard-of member of the team, Andy Pilney, into the game to join Shakespeare. Even as a “What the hell’s going on here?” grumble swept the stands, excitement began to build again. With less than twelve minutes left in the game, Notre Dame started to move the ball and the Shakespeare-Pilney combo started to cook. On the couch, and then on the floor, so did the Lear combo. In ten-plus minutes Shakespeare tossed two touchdown passes caught by Pilney, as the Lears, father and son, kicked, screamed, rolled, and hugged on the floor. And then—and then—don’t ask me what plays led to yet another opportunity to score, but with only forty seconds remaining in the game, Shakespeare threw one last pass deep into the Ohio State end zone. It was intended for Pilney, who couldn’t get to it, and was caught instead on a dead run—YES!—by Notre Dame’s Wayne Millner! The Fighting Irish had won, 18–13, and I’d had the most treasured afternoon of my life with the father of my heart’s desire.
When, some fifty years later, a friend who’d heard that story gifted me at Christmas with a 16mm black-and-white film of the game, I felt like I’d been knighted.
3
IN THOSE BROOKLYN years preceding and following my Bar Mitzvah, I felt less alone when I was by myself in my bedroom than when I was with my family. My buddies accounted for most of the fun and companionship I knew. For a time Eddie Pearl, Bernie Fleischer, and I played harmonicas and called ourselves the Harmonica Rascals, a group that became quite well known throughout an entire building on St. Marks Avenue. On Halloween I recall our gang forsaking all treats for the kick of playing tricks. We’d stick pins into doorbells that buzzed apartments on the upper floors, causing them to ring until the occupants came down to remove them. We’d let the air out of inner tubes on cars parked in the streets, leaving as much as half a block of flat tires. And we were thought to be “good” boys.
Marty Ellen would eat a dead fly for a nickel. We’d chip in to see him do it. A penny was real money then. It bought a cigarette. Two cents bought a newspaper. Five cents, one each from five of us, bought Marty Ellen popping a fly. He wanted a dime to do a roach, but with a Uneeda biscuit. A dime was a big deal, so we wanted him to eat the roach live without a biscuit. Somehow taking it with a biscuit made it seem doable, although the rest of us wouldn’t go near it for a quarter with two biscuits. I wasn’t present the day the deal was finally negotiated and Marty ate a live roach—barely alive, according to Bernie Fleischer—with a single biscuit for fifteen cents.
Herbie Lerner and the Schwarz twins, Edwin and Elliott, were centerpieces in my life away from home. They’ve all passed on now but I see them as they were then just as clearly as I picture any current friend today. We all belonged to the Young Israel of Eastern Parkway, where I wrote and we performed Sir, You Cur, or the Villain Gets It in the End—Herbie played the villain banker, I the heroine whose house he was foreclosing on—pretty much for our own benefit. If we had a dozen people in the audience, that was more than I recall.
We cooked up a ragtag sandlot football team, too. ACHVA, Hebrew for “brotherhood,” was our club at Young Israel, and our colors were maroon and gray. We bought great-looking maroon sweaters with a gray A on the chest and two gray stripes on the right sleeve. I was as accomplished at football as I would have been, had I tried, at sumo wrestling. Herbie Lerner was the star runner, passer, and kicker, and my recollections of him doing all that could not be clearer. H.K. would often come to the games, and I ached to be Herbie on those days. I managed to burrow my way to the bottom of a lot of scrimmages, however, so that if he blinked now and then, H.K. might think I was responsible for an occasional tackle. It never worked, but that didn’t stop me from trying again two yea
rs later when we moved back to Hartford and I entered my sophomore year at Weaver High School.
To please my dad, I tried out for the junior varsity team and made it. It didn’t hurt that I appeared to be a two-letter man in my maroon sweater with the gray stripes on the sleeve. When some students asked what school I’d gone to I would say Erasmus High, a well-known school in Brooklyn, but to accommodate the A on my sweater, and in Hartford now, I fudged the pronunciation to sound more like Arasmus. A few days into practice, however, I could have been a ten-letter man from anywhere and it wouldn’t have mattered. Coach Fred Stone caught on to my pathetic attempts to look like a hard-charging lineman and called me aside. “And what the hell do you think you’re doing?” he asked. Minutes later I was pulling my stuff out of my locker and handing back the key.
• • •
THE LAST WEEKS of my fourteenth summer, I got myself a job in Coney Island shilling for Paramount Pool and Ocean Bathing, a seedy piece of real estate famous among a group of young male frequenters for the several knotholes through which they could see into the girls’ showers. On the sidewalk in front of its crummy turnstile entrance, the management had me calling out to passersby anything that came to mind regarding the wonders of the establishment. And so I barked: “Hey, hey, it’s Paramount Pool and Ocean Bathing with your own locker! Only twenty-five cents. Twenty-five cents with your own locker. And shower! Why go home with sand jammed where you just don’t want a sand jam? The pool, the locker, the shower—twenty-five cents. You go home just the way you were born, one hundred percent sand-free.”
I loved Coney Island. The shotgun marriage of homegrown tackiness to pretensions of glamour and beguilement fascinated me. Everything was the “best.” Or the “speediest.” Or the most “breathtaking,” “heart-pounding,” “terrifying,” “enchanting,” and “thrilling,” and all of it “never seen before.” Pounding a sledgehammer on a slab hard enough to ring a bell at the top of a wired pole was a “Prove You’re a Man!” extravaganza! And so I came back the following year and spent all of my fifteenth summer barking again for Paramount P&O Bathing and shilling for two other attractions, equally eccentric.