One of the complications when growing into adulthood is that you learn about nuance. You realize that people and life in general are often far more complicated than they seemed when you were ten.
Several years before I left for school in London, my dad’s close friend—and mine—Peter Kortner, had moved there. I was thrilled to be reunited with him (we’d been exchanging letters the whole time from one side of the Atlantic to the other) but when I arrived, he was very distant and hard to pin down. I didn’t understand it and was deeply hurt. He was one of my favorite people in the whole world, an adult with whom I could communicate honestly about anything and everything. I finally wrote to my parents and told them that I’d been in London almost a month and my great pal Kortner was refusing to see me.
Four days after mailing the letter, the phone rang in my flat. Both of my parents were on the line. My dad said they had something they needed to explain to me. I said, “Okay.” And my dad said, “Kortner’s very worried about seeing you.”
“Why?” I was bewildered.
“He’s gay.”
It took me a few moments to absorb this news. And the only reason I needed the absorption time was because he seemed so not gay.
“But what about all the women he was always with?”
“Do you know what a beard is?” my dad asked.
I didn’t yet know all that many openly gay people when I was nineteen years old, but I knew what a beard was.
“But why?” I asked. “Why did he have to do that?”
“Because he thought it was better to pretend,” my mom said.
“You both knew? I mean, the whole time?”
They both said that they had.
“But,” I said, “what does this have to do with not seeing me?”
“I guess he’s not sure how you’ll respond,” my dad said.
“I don’t care what he is,” I told them. “He’s, like, my favorite person in the world.”
“Then you should tell him that,” my mom said.
So that’s what I did. I called Kortner and insisted that he take me out for a high tea; I wouldn’t let him off the hook. When we met at the Dorchester Hotel, he looked wildly uncomfortable, so before our cucumber sandwiches and clotted cream even arrived, I said, “Look, I spoke to my parents. They told me you’re living with some guy here and that for some reason you think I give a shit. I just want to say that you really hurt my feelings and all I really care about is that you’re the grown-up and I’m the college kid and you’re supposed to take me out to dinner every couple of weeks so I actually don’t starve to death. Plus, they show American football games every Sunday at a café near Hyde Park Corner and you’re the only person I know within five thousand miles who likes football. So can we get past this and just be friends again?”
We could and we did. For the rest of the year, I saw Kortner once every week or two, although he only let me meet his partner once. He’d take me out to neighborhood restaurants and we’d meet to drink bad American beer and watch football at Café Royal near Piccadilly Circus, and every so often he’d take me someplace reasonably fancy. It was at one of those fancier meals that I had my first vodka martini. He ordered one, it seemed like an extremely sophisticated concoction, so I ordered one, too. Kortner explained to me about the various options: onions or olives or a twist, vodka or gin, dry or less dry. I liked it immediately; there was no learning curve—and it instantly became my drink of choice, especially because we once saw Sean Connery at a restaurant and that meant I was having a martini in the same place as James Bond. I ordered mine “shaken not stirred” that night and the waiter, properly, looked at me as if I were a lunatic.
In the mid-’80s, Kortner moved back to the United States and settled in Northern California. I went to see him there once—he was in a very stable relationship with a new guy, whom I was allowed to meet with no to-do—and we spoke every Sunday morning because we bet football over the phone, the same way I did with my dad.
In 1990, I went to Tampa, to the Super Bowl—the Giants won their second one, over the Bills on the famed “wide right” kick by Scott Norwood—and called Kortner at halftime from a pay phone in the stadium. I did my best to torture him over the fact that I was seeing the game live and told him I’d bought him a Super Bowl XXV hat, which I would send to him when I got back to New York. He sounded weak, and I knew he’d been feeling ill for quite some time. I asked him if he was okay and he said he’d tell me all about it when we spoke in a few days, when there wasn’t all the Super Bowl hoopla in the background. I said, “Fair enough,” hung up, and went back to my seat to watch the thrilling game.
The day I got back to New York, my mom called me to say that Peter Kortner, whom she also loved dearly, had died the night before. He was the first person I ever knew who died of AIDS.
PRE-DINNER DRINK: VODKA MARTINI
When my mother finally acquired a taste for hard liquor—it didn’t really happen until she was in her seventies—Absolut Citron over ice became her drink of choice. In her eighties she started drinking non-flavored vodka and even the occasional martini. She knew how much I liked an ice-cold vodka martini, and I considered it a personal victory when we went to dinner at a restaurant near her apartment one night and she admitted that a martini is a superior cocktail.
It needs saying right up front that technically a vodka martini is not a real martini. A martini uses gin as its main ingredient. Now that I’ve dispensed with that formality, I can also say that my attitude is: Screw it. I don’t like gin and I like vodka. So to me, a vodka martini is a real martini.
The recipe to make a perfect vodka martini is not very complicated:
1 martini glass (any glass will actually do, since the glass does not affect the taste one iota, although it does make the drink more enjoyable and feel more sophisticated.)
Vodka (as much as you’re comfortable pouring into your glass; I maintain it’s better to have 2 or 3 small to medium-size martinis rather than one giant bomb of a martini. If in doubt, just think WWJBD—What Would James Bond Do? Also, I like Ketel One but the truth is, that’s pure pretentiousness since I can’t really tell the difference between different types of vodka.)
Ice (or no ice—but the colder the drink is, the better, of that there is no doubt; so best to keep your vodka in the freezer if, like me, you prefer it straight up.)
Dry vermouth (just a drop or two—the tinier the drop, the drier the martini.)
Dab of olive juice (optional) (This is what makes it a “dirty martini.” I prefer mine slightly dirty.)
That’s all there is to it. Except … not really.
To those who drink them, a martini is not just a drink, it is a way of life. Much about drinking good alcohol becomes a way of life, celebrated and ritualized, and that’s as it should be.
In the 1980s, my dad was a member of a wine group called WOW—World of Wine. It was a bunch of Hollywood guys with white shoes and white belts—writers, directors, producers, and agents—who had two things in common: they loved sitting around telling stories and they particularly loved doing that if they were drinking sensational wine. The group used to meet once a week in a famous L.A. restaurant, Le Dome, on Sunset Boulevard. I was allowed to go a WOW lunch once when I was visiting L.A. The lunch itself was fun but the highlight was seeing something these middle-aged, mostly Hebraic scions of the TV and movie business had managed to pull off. Le Dome had a wine cellar beneath the main dining room. And the WOW guys had their own private wine cellar within the restaurant’s cellar. It was behind a small iron gate and each member had a key. If they went to Le Dome for lunch or dinner on their own, away from the WOW group, they were allowed to take any bottle out of the private stash as long as they quickly replaced it with an equivalent bottle. I have to say, I thought then and think now that that is about as cool as it gets.
I drink plenty of the stuff, although I never joined a wine group. I am, however, a member of a group of fellows who call ourselves the Martini Brothers.
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The Martini Brothers’ hallowed history began in the suburbs of New York in the mid-1990s. Three friends, Lee, Zig, and Paul (yes, the same best friend from childhood Paul) wound up living within twenty miles of each other outside the city. Periodically, since all there is to do in the suburbs (at least in my biased view) is exercise, wash your car, grill outdoors, coach Little League, wife swap, and drink, they would get together, eschewing the first five choices, and drink martinis in someone’s living room or den. At some point, I was invited to drive out and join them.
Twenty years later, there are now thirteen Martini Brothers and our three- or four-times-a-year meetings are glorious celebrations of life, friendship, and male idiocy. We go out to excellent restaurants, we see movies that few women (or responsible male adults) would ever agree to see with us, and we have as many refills as we can of our favorite cocktail. We have, in the process of glorifying the martini, ritualized every element of our get-togethers, down to our individual club names. We have strict initiation rituals, printed business cards with the official Martini Brothers logo and slogan (You buy us martinis, we buy you martinis). We have a Martini Brothers Summer Extravaganza every year, as well as a Martini Brothers Winter Holiday Extravaganza, at which we award the extraordinarily prestigious award, the Golden Olive, which goes to the Martini Brother of the Year. We even have a secret handshake (I’d describe it but then I’d have to kill you).
What we also have is a lot of warmth and a caring connection among all the members. We insult everyone, always good-naturedly (although, seriously, Brother Pinky Martini is an idiot), and I’m going to get a lot of shit for writing this, but we do actually love each other because we all understand each other; we share something that we can’t fully share with anyone else (and, let’s face it, hardly anyone else wants to share it with us).
The Martini Brothers logo. Our motto: “You buy us martinis, we buy you martinis.”
To open every sacred Martini Brothers event, after Brother Father Paddy Martini’s benediction, we begin by raising our glasses while one of us asks the question “Who lives better than we do?” The answer is a heartfelt chorus: “Nobody!”
That answer is not to be taken lightly. Nobody does live better than a bunch of friends eating well and drinking martinis and enjoying each other’s company.
At some point during every Martini Brothers evening, I think of Peter Kortner, sipping a martini in a cozy London restaurant, and I think of my dad, my mom, and my aunt Belle at cocktail hour in my parents’ L.A. home. And I conjure up the toast that Belle wrote down for my fortieth birthday in New Orleans: “Happy to be here. Happy to be anywhere.”
Another worthwhile slogan to eat, drink, and live by.
CHAPTER SIX
During the last week of December 1975, at the age of fifty-three, my mom took her very first job.
Like almost everything in life, it started as one thing and turned into something else, completely changing her life as well as the lives of her immediate family, her siblings, and her friends.
Happily, even though I was now living three thousand miles away, I managed to be there at the very beginning.
You know how in sitcoms, the screen goes wavy and suddenly your favorite character is wearing a bad wig and unfashionable clothes and is twenty years younger? Picture this page getting wavy. I’m taking you for a bit of a ride via a family flashback.
* * *
AFTER MY YEAR in London, I returned to Los Angeles to spend my senior year of college at UCLA. My passion for learning was still great but my passion for the piece of paper saying that I was learned was fading rapidly. So with one day and my last set of finals to go, I dropped out.
My parents were remarkably understanding about my decision not to graduate and they weren’t at all surprised when I announced I was moving back to New York. But they were more than a little bewildered when I chose to move to a rat-infested (well, one rat, but that was more than enough) basement apartment in Manhattan’s West Village. I loved that apartment. It was on Perry Street just off Seventh Avenue, around the corner from the Village Vanguard jazz club, my fantasy hangout, and it had a brick wall and an incredibly cool tin ceiling. There were a few things it didn’t happen to have, like a complete floor (I solved that problem by putting a sheet of plywood over the dirt hole that led to the subway below), a shower, a bathtub, a stove, or a refrigerator. I never managed to get the bathtub but I did figure out how to add the other three luxury items at a reasonable price. It was a railroad flat—fitting, considering it often felt as if I were living in a moving subway car—with a fairly large front room that functioned as a bedroom and living room, a small square room in which I fit a low dining table (low because I couldn’t also fit chairs, so it was Japanese sit-on-the-floor style minus the elegance or, in fact, any semblance of style), and another square room that ultimately housed the stove, fridge, and shower. There was a closet-size room after that with a toilet. That room didn’t have a door but I solved the problem by putting up what I was certain was a very attractive burlap curtain. Separating the other two rooms were strands of multicolored beads that I thought were totally cool. The view from my bedroom/living room looked up onto the building’s garbage cans, which were stacked in front of the only two windows in the whole apartment, and the first time it snowed after I’d moved in, I came home at night, flopped down on my bed (my waterbed!) to find some very cold, very wet sheets. It had snowed through the rickety window into my apartment.
My parents came east soon after I was ensconced. Before seeing my new living situation for the first time, my mom lectured my father, telling him that no matter what they thought, they had to be supportive and enthusiastic (they’d been prepared for the situation by their friend Edward, who occasionally took me out to dinner so I wouldn’t have to subsist solely on my Saturday visits to Ratner’s, and told my folks that he was afraid to sit down in my living room). My mom repeated her lecture to my dad several times, the last time during their entire cab ride downtown from the Upper East Side, where they were staying. When they finally arrived, descending beneath the garbage and through the dingy underground hallway, I opened the front door and before she could even get a peek at my digs, my mother, desperate to be positive, yelped in delight, “Oh, it’s fabulous!” I had to say, “Um … don’t you want to actually come in and see it first?” They then stepped inside. My mother stayed silent. So did my father—for about half a second. Then he said, in as supportive and enthusiastic a voice as he could manage, “Oh my god. What a shithole!”
* * *
ONE YEAR LATER, I’d finished writing my first novel, which I was certain would turn me into the next F. Scott Fitzgerald. That didn’t quite materialize, although it was published by a real publisher and earned me enough money to order a steak once or twice when I went out to dinner—okay, just once, but it was a very satisfying cut of meat. I had also managed to fall in love. Cindy lived in L.A. but had come to New York on October 1, 1975. The reason I remember the exact date is that it was the start of the Red Sox/Reds World Series, the one with the Carlton Fisk home run, which caused me to become a baseball fanatic again after five or six hippie-ish years ignoring the game. She arrived with a girlfriend and they wound up staying with me after a long-distance introduction from a mutual friend. I don’t remember the girlfriend’s name and paid little attention to her but I fell hard for Cindy.
By the time she left to return home to L.A., I was a goner. There were stars in my eyes, and the combination of infatuation, lust, and distance was causing a somewhat painful and continual ache in the pit of my stomach. So I did what any red-blooded twenty-two-year-old boy would do: I immediately called my parents and lied to them.
The Rat Apartment, 2016, now a men’s spa. But still a shithole, with the same lovely view from the windows …
I told them I was missing them and would love to visit them for Christmas and wouldn’t they like to pay for me to come home for a week or so. It turned out, they would. My dad said he’d s
end me a check and I could buy my long-before-e-ticket plane fare.
I then waited a week or two before deciding it was appropriate to raise a new topic. I phoned the folks and chatted for a bit. Then I let it drop that I kind of had this new girlfriend and she was kind of in L.A. and I was really kind of looking forward to their meeting her and, uh, oh yeah, she was kind of going to be staying at their house with me for the week I was there.
Whatever the opposite of a shrinking violet is, that was my dad, particularly by this point in his life. My cousin Jon once compared him to Hugh Griffith in the movie Tom Jones. The gist of his instant retort was: “Over my dead body…” “Keep dreaming…” “Nice try…” and … “Not a chance.”
… and the same revolting stairway my parents descended many years ago.
Although his acting career had ended when I was three or four years old, he still had an actor’s theatricality. His favorite role was that of “father”—he liked being a dad and playing a dad and he took the role very seriously. He was a valuable sounding board for me, personally, professionally, and morally. However, I didn’t take too kindly to his instant door-slamming reaction to my staying-at-their-house-with-girlfriend bombshell. I didn’t laugh at it, the way I did with a lot of his moral bombast, and I couldn’t ignore it. At twenty-two, it’s almost impossible to laugh at or ignore anything that stands in the way of sex and romance.
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