by Lee Kalcheim
“What?”
“Hot dogs!!”
What a relief. To know that other people’s fathers made stupid jokes. And we pretended they were funny. I did point out to the boys that people in Los Angeles felt it was strange to celebrate Christmas where there was no snow, even though this was very much like the climate in Nazareth, where Christ lived.
“Yes, Dadoo, but not where Santa Claus lives!”
But, sitting around the big glass table, Navajo rugs hanging on the walls, the smell of ripe kumquats wafting in from the patio, I knew, as we sat amidst the comforting banter of old friends that this was temporary. The boys, in a way, had brought us out here, but I’d hope we would not stay long. We missed the changing of the leaves in fall. We missed snow. We missed walking to the corner for a slice of pizza. Hell, we just missed walking.
And we thought we should try to settle down somewhere where the boys could establish relationships with other kids. One afternoon, we invited the two boys who played Sam and Gabe over for a play date. To say it was odd to see the kids cast as Sam and Gabe on TV playing with the real Sam and Gabe at our house is an understatement. They played well together. Swimming, shooting water guns, etc. But that night in bed, as we asked them what stood out about the afternoon, Gabriel piped up.
“Peter doesn’t know where Paris is.”
Oh dear, my kids weren’t going to become snobs were they? One trip to Europe and they were snobs?
“Neither of them knows what’s the farthest planet from the sun.”
Uh, oh. I didn’t like the sound of this.
“Different things interest different people. Don’t make value judgments.”
“What’s a value judgment?
“When you … when you judge someone’s worth … when you decide if you like someone or not by how much they know, or how they dress or what they eat or how they look.”
“What’s wrong with doing that?”
“A person can, for instance, know less than you but be a good person. A kind person. That should be more important.”
“Can a person know a lot and also be a good person.?”
“Yes.”
“Is it okay to like that kind of person?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Great. We’ll do that. Okay Gabe?”
“ Okay.”
“ We’ll do that, Dadoo.”
“Okay.”
But as the end of May approached and our lease was up, we changed our minds and decided to stay. It had been twenty plus years since my heyday in TV, and now, at last, having gotten a series on, I had some cachet. Minor cachet. Very, very minor cachet. But it beat none at all.
Julia is an athlete—a runner. And she was enamored of the warm weather and the ease of living and opted to stay also. The boys, bless ’em said, “Sure.”
“Are we going to say in this big house?”
“No, no we can’t afford this. But we’ll find a very nice smaller place.”
“And Dadoo, we won’t have to worry about hurting the strange man’s furniture.”
“Right!”
“And Mommy says there’s a good school right down the hill.”
“Yes, Sammo, that’s true.”
“Gabe, we can walk to school.”
“Samuel, Dadoo’s going to take us in his beat up old convertible. Nobody walks out here.”
Julia and I had stayed up nights agonizing over the decision of whether to stay or not, but something as gleeful as the idea that they could walk to school in a city where everybody drives excited the boys enough to make it an adventure.
“And maybe we can skate to school. It’s all downhill.”
“Yes, but Sam, coming home would be all uphill.”
“So? Mommy’s a jock. She could pull us.”
Julia and I, “mature adults,” had agonized. The kids just found a way to make it work.
SCENE: A SMALL RENTED HOUSE IN STUDIO CITY, LOS ANGELES.
(The boys are playing ball with their parents in the small yard, as Pasquale, the 83-year-old Italian gardener whose services came with the rented house, calls Lee aside. He and the cherubic old gardener chat for a moment. Pasquale hands Lee a large manila envelope and Lee returns to the game.)
JULIA
Everything okay with the garden?
LEE
Fine.
SAMUEL
He’s not going to put that smelly stuff on the lawn is he?
GABE
It’s cow poop!
LEE
No, no, he’s not.
JULIA
What did he give you?
LEE
Uh … a screenplay.
GABE
Dadoo, he barely speaks English, how can he write a screenplay?
LEE
Honey, last week the pool guy, Vince, pitched me a TV series.
GABE
Is everybody in Hollywood a writer?
LEE
Just about.
SAM
I don’t care what he is, as long as he doesn’t put that smelly poop on the grass!
CHAPTER SEVEN
HITLER’S BATHROOM
We stayed out in L.A. another year, so I could try to sell a series. Of course, I was competing with my gardener and my pool guy.
We found a house on Sunshine Terrace.
It was much less expensive. Smaller. And cozier. In many ways we preferred this to the big house from year one. Also, when our friends asked us where we were living in L.A., we said blithely, “Sunshine Terrace—of course.”
This house was unfurnished. Thank God, we didn’t have to worry about breaking the crazy landlord’s antiques. We rented furniture, and little by little we replaced the rental stuff with furniture Julia found on the street.
“Quick, get the car. There’s a couch on Ventura Boulevard!”
The boys were happy. They started school. Kindergarten. They got real violins. One quarter sized. They were so small they looked like they came out of a cereal box. They began taking lessons. And they loved practicing. Real sounds came out. Not ones you particularly wanted to hear, but … It wasn’t long before they learned to play “Twinkle, Twinkle.” They could actually play a tune. And play it. And play it. And play it. To this day, when I hear “Twinkle” my teeth gnash.
An interesting pattern had developed with the boys. Twins are little bugs in petrie dishes. Because they grow up in the identical environment, you get your very own, pseudoscientific, in-house, child-study program. They each wanted alone time with us. And they’d figured out a one-up-early/one-to-bed late schedule to make it work. I don’t think they sat down and planned it. It just … kind of … happened. And once they realized what it gave them, they set it in stone. Sam early. Gabe late. They got to not be twins.
It may not be true science, but it’s fascinating. Sam would wake up early, when Julia got up to run. They’d hang out for awhile—cuddle and read. Then I’d get up and join them for breakfast. Gabe got up last and joined us. At night, Sam hit the sack first. I stayed up late to write and Gabe stayed up with me. While I sat at my desk, tapping away at the computer, Gabe sat beside me with a big yellow pad in hand scribbling away pretending to write. He couldn’t write yet, but he wrote … something. A word here or there. He filled the page. He was, as was his Dad at this moment, a writer. Every once in a while, I’d take the pad and read over his scribblings.
“What’s this one about, Gabey?”
“It’s about how I have to take care of Sam.”
“You have to take care of Sam?”
“Oh yes. A lot. In the schoolyard, he runs around with his pacifier in his mouth. And I have to tell him, you can’t have that in your mouth when we play kick ball. It’s not safe. You could swallow it. And so I have to put it in my pocket until the game is over.”
“Uh huh. What do the other kids think of Sam still using a pacifier at school?”
“Well, they think he’s weird. But Sam rolls it around like a cigar and yells at them, ‘Hey I li
ke it. Bug off!’
“Bug off? Where did he learn to say that?”
“From you, Dadoo.”
It was as sweet as sweet could be, those nights writing alone with Gabe. And Julia treasured her early mornings with Sam. On the other hand, Julia and I spent very little time alone with each other. We would have to put that on hold until they left for college.
One evening, after their bath, I was drying off Sam, Gabe having run naked and wet right into the den to plop himself in front of a National Geographic Special about elephants on TV. How do I remember that? Because he called me in later explain what was going on when there was shot of two elephants humping.
“Gabe, come back here you’re still wet!”
“No I’m not, the couch dried me off!”
The boys didn’t watch all that much TV. They’d seen plenty of Sesame Street when they were toddlers and loved Thomas the Tank Engine, and of course the annual Charlie Brown’s Christmas and The Grinch and any Bugs Bunny episode. (Bugs was our hero—still is—because he was super confident and did not suffer fools gladly). But we liked to watch documentaries: The Life of Thomas Jefferson, or Thomas Edison, or the Wright Brothers. One of the documentaries we watched was about World War Two. One about Hitler. (There were so many shows about Hitler on the History Channel that it soon became known as the Hitler Channel). The boys knew very little if anything about Hitler. Oh they’d heard his name. His name comes up even without the help of documentaries. Because he’s the epitome of evil, especially in a family that contains at least one Jew, his name comes up. Believe me. So they’d heard his name. And in this particular show, there was, in fact, some graphic footage of that evil. And we had to do some quick thinking about whether to snap off the TV when that footage appeared. We did. Which of course left us open to a barrage of questions about what they had missed. Why we had turned it off? And it left us having to explain the nature of the atrocities that we hadn’t allowed them to see. That was really tough. But they saw enough of Mr. H’s evils to know that he was bad. Very bad. He earned his evil epitome honestly.
In the bathroom, as I dried off Sam, he began goofing around. Jumping up and down and making airplane noises and pretending to ice skate in a puddle of water. I’m drying him and he’s goofing around. He’s getting out of hand. I finally hold him firmly and say, “Sam, you cannot goof around in the bathroom. You could get hurt. They say that the bathroom is the most dangerous room in the house.” Sam looks at me, thinks a moment, and then asks soberly, “What’s the most dangerous room in the world?” I looked at him. Thought. Shrugged. “I don’t know Sam, what is the most dangerous room in the world?” He smiled, “Hitler’s bathroom!!”
Well, I laughed. He laughed. And inside I thought, Wow! How did he put that together?
I didn’t think of myself only as a comedy writer. I had an agent, years ago named Audrey Wood. She had been Tennessee Williams’s agent. She was a legend. And I once confessed to her that I was reluctant to write comedy. She was a gruff woman. With a wonderful, large, gentle face. No nonsense. When you were talking to her on the phone, and the subject matter of the call was finished, she just hung up. No requisite small talk to end the conversation. Subject discussed—click! I thought, maybe someday I’ll have the confidence to do that. Hasn’t happened yet. But I was sitting in her office one day. It was twilight, just before Christmas, and she was particularly conversant on non-business subjects. Little things, like how she had to buy a particular kind of car because she was short and most cars wouldn’t allow her to see over the steering wheel. So she ended up buying the new turtle shaped Rambler that everyone looked at as she drove by. Its futuristic design seemed so unlike her, she said, “I’ve been around a long time and I think people expect me to drive a little blue Buick. But this is the only car that lets me see out the windshield. I felt that was important!” We somehow got on to an idea for a play that I was working on. And I expressed my doubts about writing it, because it was a comedy. She leaned forward and patted my hand. “Yes, yes, Kalcheim, I know. You want to be a significant writer!”
From that moment on, I knew writing comedy would not make me a second class citizen.
And here I was in the midst of it—living in a house in Los Angeles, with a cozy home and a tiny pool and a view of the San Gabriel mountains—which naturally we called, “The Sam-Gabriel Mountains.” I briefly also had a significant income. And all of this because of comedy. I had taught classes in writing television comedy, but I knew damn well comedy couldn’t be taught. Oh, I could teach anyone how to write a sit-com. There was a formula. There were rules. If you followed the rules you could write something that we would call a sit-com. It might not be a good sit-com. But it could be called a sit-com. But I could not teach anyone to be funny. Am I saying, you have to be born funny? I don’t know, but when the boys were two years old, maybe younger, just learning to talk, they were playing “train” in our laundry room up in our farmhouse in Massachusetts. (No farm, just house.) Both the boys were sitting on the floor with those striped overalls and caps and all sorts of paraphernalia that we thought looked like something that would be worn inside a train engine. Now sometime between birth and this moment, my wife and I had yelled out the expression “Alllll Aboard!” It was therefore general knowledge that this was what was yelled when a train was about to leave the station. Or we were about to leave the house. All Aboard! I peeked into the laundry room where train noises were rampant and asked how things were going. Gabe looked up at me and said that they were playing train. Then he pulled at a rope we’d tied between shelves of canned goods—the train whistle rope—and yelled, “All awood!” “What?” I said. “Allll awood.” It took me all of ten seconds to get it. A board was a piece of wood. He was making a joke. “All awood” was a joke on “All aboard.” Jesus, where did that come from? We didn’t sit around the breakfast table deconstructing jokes. I certainly told my share of groaners. And my wife is very funny. But we didn’t explain how you make a joke. And we rarely invented jokes. I did later on, when they became more sophisticated. Than what? All awood is pretty damned sophisticated.
Did each of my son’s learn the construct of a joke from being around funny parents, or was there a comedy gene they inherited? My mother was funny. When I was a kid we lived next door to a Catholic family. We didn’t interact much. I wasn’t even sure how many members there were in their family. We heard voices come out of their open windows in the summer, but the only one I was sure who lived there was Danny. He was my age. And I don’t think I said two words to him in the entire fifteen years I lived next door. But one day he and a few friends were playing in front of their house when I walked home from school, and they started shouting derisive remarks at me. Danny called me a matzo ball. When I told my mother she was incensed. She marched right over to our neighbors house and confronted Danny’s mother and proclaimed, “Nobody calls my little matzo ball a matzo ball except me!”
My mother was a delightfully funny, witty women. She had a take that was as lethal as Jack Benny’s when you said something off-putting. She could take an incident that had no comic value on the face of it and in the retelling make it hilarious. She recalled endlessly the time that a temp maid we had (middle class people had maids back in the fifties) had sipped a few too many drinks while making dinner. While my parents and their dinner guests were in the living room, the maid, trying strenuously to appear sober, swayed into the room, stood as still as she could and said to everyone, “Goodnight, I will see the remains of you in the morning.”
At the time, I’m sure no one but my mother thought it funny, but when mom retold it, it landed. She even mimicked the woman’s struggle to appear sober as she said, “the remains of you.” So, I grew up listening to her filter jokes out of seemingly innocuous conversation. Why couldn’t I have learned to be funny by listening to my mother? I learned how to put up storm windows from my father. A life lesson I thought I’d never ever have to use until I bought an eighteenth-century house that came with
ancient storm windows (not eighteenth-century, but old) (Thanks, Dad!). I learned to look things up when I didn’t know the answers to stuff. I can see my father at the dinner table, in the middle of a conversation about … oh … sheep herding in Ireland … nodding to me and saying, “Get the Encyclopedia! Get the World Book!” But these were more conscious lessons. My mother never said, “This is what makes what I say funny.” She had no idea. She just did it. Most people who talk or write funny claim they have no idea. How does a two year old kid, or a five year old kid, know how to construct a joke? Instantly. I didn’t say to Sam, “Come up with a Hitler joke tomorrow by 6:00!” He did it on the spot. It had to be learned. Or at least absorbed.
That February, the boys dressed up for Presidents Day—one Lincoln, one Washington. That evening Sam decided to recite much of what he had learned of the Gettysburg Address. Still wearing his Lincoln outfit he began,
“Four score and seven years ago …”
And went on as far as he could. We applauded. Then I got up.
“I’d like to recite the Gettysburg address.”
“Do you know it, Dadoo?”
“Of course!”
Julia look at me doubtfully, “Really?”
“Of course. Know it cold.”
I put Sam’s Lincoln hat on my head and began.
“I would now like to recite Lincoln’s Gettysburg address.”
I took out a slip of paper and read, “135 Main Street, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania”
They laughed at the old joke. Booed. And threw pillows. But there it was. It was part of the fabric of the family.
But even great funnymen didn’t necessarily have funny kids. Former comedy writer, now Senator, Al Franken said that his father was a working stiff, but loved comedy. Watched it all the time. Shared the love with his son. And I believe it was the sharing of it, the fun of laughing together that motivated the son to want to be funny.
Comedy can’t be taught, but it can be learned. The same way we learn diligence, responsibility, even generosity, we learn to be funny. So what I learned from my kids’ precocious comedic flare has nothing to do with comedy. It has to do with realizing how your kids learn from you.