As a successful American screenwriter, I told that story to my friend Alan Pakula, the director, and he laughed until he had tears in his eyes.
“At the side of the road!” Alan said. “Hitchhiking. And God comes along! It’s unbelievable! Louis B. Mayer wouldn’t have believed it! Of course I believe it. It’s life.”
And many years after that conversation, Alan was driving along the Long Island Expressway in New York when a pipe fell out of the truck in front of him and went through his windshield and killed him instantly.
Just casually driving along. And God came along. It was unbelievable! Louis B. Mayer wouldn’t have believed it!
Of course I believed it. It was life.
The priests took us to a house in Fairfield, Connecticut, where they lived next to their church. We went to church every day. The house was big and magnificent and we had our own big and magnificent room.
I had never seen a room like this. It was snow-white, filled with fresh air. There were no rats, no sirens outside. There were yards all around the house, perfect to play bazball, although the priests told me they didn’t play it.
I took walks with my mother in the woods nearby. We saw birds with many colors. We fed ducks and squirrels. My father talked with the priests. There would be a delay until they could get rid of the old editor of their newspaper. They would find my father a job for six months and then we would go to a place called Klevland where my father would edit the paper.
The priests said, “The boy is too skinny. He must eat.”
An old Hungarian woman who was their cook made us heaping dishes of sausage and mashed potatoes and paprikaed beef and pork chops and spare ribs. I ate everything but never put any weight on.
The priests bought us new clothes—all we had were the clothes from the camps. They bought me pants and sweaters and a jacket with a fur lining. They bought me gloves and rubber boots.
And one day Father Benedek, an old man who had difficulty breathing, bought me a flute.
I took the flute into the backyard and blew it. Sometimes Father Benedek sat on a porch swing watching me and saying, “Good, Jozsi, blow it! Louder! Louder!’
I blew my new flute until I was as out of breath as he.
I heard my father talking to the priests about the Komchis as we had dinner in their house. I heard about Komchis named Stalin and Malenkov and Molotov and Beria. I heard about a Hungarian Komchi named Mátyás Rákosi, just as bad as Stalin.
“Zsido,” one of the priests said.
My father glanced at me and nodded. My mother said nothing during these discussions about the Komchis except once, when they were talking about a man named Hitler, who was a Nazi, not a Komchi.
“Bolond,” my father said—crazy.
My mother said, “Maybe.”
My father said, “Absolutely. A madman.”
When my father and I were walking in the woods in Fairfield, I asked him, “Papa, who were the Nazis?”
“They were bad people,” he said.
“Worse than the Komchis?”
“They hated the Komchis, but they were just as bad,” he said.
“Why were they bad if they hated the Komchis?”
“They killed Zsidos,” my father said.
“Why did they kill Zsidos?”
“Because they were crazy,” he said.
“Did they kill the Zsidos because they didn’t like the smell of garlic?”
“Yes,” he said, “something like that.”
I said, “I like the smell of garlic. I smell it on you sometimes. I don’t mind.”
“Good.” He smiled.
I said, “Why don’t the Zsidos stop eating garlic if people want to kill them for eating it?”
My father said, “Nobody has the right to make anybody eat or not eat something.”
I said, “You made me eat puliszka in the camps!”
“I was afraid you were going to die,” he said. “You had to eat something.”
“It would have been better with garlic,” I said.
“Yes,” he said, smiling, “for certain.”
When I walked in the woods with my father, we never watched the birds or looked at the leaves or fed the squirrels and the ducks. We marched along briskly together, holding hands. He didn’t say much, unless I asked him something, but then he answered me at length.
I never walked in the woods with both my mother and father. It was always one or the other. The two of them never walked in the woods, alone, without me.
Father Benedek got my father a job in Washington, D.C., with a friend of his, Joseph Tischler. We lived in the Tischlers’ house outside the city, in Takoma Park. The Tischlers were a kindly couple who treated us like we were part of their family. Mrs. Tischler found my mother a job in the kitchen of a restaurant in the city. And I was enrolled in the first grade of an American school.
My father took me to my first day of school. I had my flute. I walked into the school and the teachers led me from one place to another. The other children smiled and I smiled back. But I couldn’t understand what anybody was saying. I said, “Hov arr yu? Okay! Zank yu! Heykid! And Horun!” I blew my flute and a teacher took it away. But I didn’t cry. I said, “Okay.” I knew I was making too much noise.
At the end of the day, when my father came to pick me up, the teacher gave the flute back to me.
It was like that every day. Everybody smiled. Everybody called me Joee. Everybody said okay when I said okay.
As an American man, I considered the image of my father in Takoma Park. He left with Joseph Tischler every morning and he came home with Joseph Tischler every night.
He had spent the whole day looking at documentary film footage recovered from the Nazis in Hungary.
He who had survived the bombings was spending his days in America examining film of it, identifying for Tischler the bombed-out Hungarian cities. He even saw film one day, he said, which he was certain was the apartment house in Szombathely where we’d been bombed.
Some nights when he came home he looked dead tired, but he had reason to be, didn’t he?
The teachers in school asked to see my parents. The Tischlers came along to translate. I was there, too. I had my flute but I didn’t blow it.
The teachers said I did nothing in school. I didn’t do the numbers. I didn’t look into the books. I didn’t play with the other kids.
The teachers also said I was friendly and smiled a lot. I was smiling right then, too, as they were saying it, holding my flute. They were smiling at me right then, too, along with my parents.
My parents and the teachers asked me why I was behaving that way. I said it was because I didn’t understand what they were saying. Then I said, “Okay?”
They laughed and I laughed and the next day in school I didn’t do the numbers, didn’t look into the books, and didn’t play with the other kids.
But I smiled.
One night the Tischlers took my father and me to the restaurant where my mother was working in the kitchen. My mother seemed very happy we were there and introduced me to her restaurant friends.
They were people I’d never spoken to before, but had seen among the GIs in the camps and on the streets in New York. They were Americans with black faces.
Her black-faced friends gave me candy and Coca-Cola and some of them picked me up and held me. A big black-faced man said something my father and I didn’t understand. The Tischlers translated it: I looked just like a famous American named Havdi Doodi.
I said “Horun! Horun!” and the big black-faced man said “Havdi Doodi! Havdi Doodi!”
And I told that story when I was an American man to some people.
To Delia, a young American black woman I was in love with. “Howdy Doody?” Delia said. “Alfred E. Neuman would be more like it.”
To Carl Stokes, a friend and the first black mayor of a major American city. “Washington, D.C.,” Carl said, “in the fifties? That was deep backwater cracker country.”
To Ahmed Evan
s, a month or two before he and his black nationalist followers killed seven policemen in Cleveland. Ahmed said, “Ain’t no more black men workin’ in no more fuckin’ kitchens kissin’ the white boy’s ass!”
To the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., whom I was interviewing. Reverend King stopped the interview and asked me for ten minutes about what the refugee camps had been like.
To Jimi Hendrix, sitting in a little Hungarian restaurant, surrounded by older Hungarians looking at Jimi as though he were a purple-haired and beringed Martian. Jimi Hendrix said, “My dad worked in a kitchen like that much of his life.”
To Otis Redding, the day before he got on an airplane that killed him. Otis told me a story in return. “I worked in a kitchen in a hospital once,” he said, “and I was in an elevator singing a song that I was working on. And this white doctor said, ‘Shut up, nigger!’ and I slammed him so hard against that elevator wall that he went down. And, man, I walked out of that elevator singing that song real loud!”
And I wanted to tell that story to O. J. Simpson, who was at the pool of the Ritz-Carlton with his wife, Nicole, and my wife, Naomi. But I never got a chance to tell it because Nicole was angry at O.J. about something and because O.J. kept telling me how much he’d loved a mystery I’d written about a famous man who kills his wife and gets away with it.
While we were living with the Tischlers, we went to visit a friend my father had known in Hungary, Paja Balázs, and his wife and daughter in a town in Maryland. They lived next to a slaughterhouse where Paja, also a Hungarian writer, was employed. My father and mother were happy to see Paja and his wife and I was happy to see Erzsi, who was twelve years old and whom I’d never met.
At night the adults went out to see a movie and Erzsi stayed home with me. Erzsi asked me how old I was. I told her I was six. She wanted to see my pimpli. I showed it to her and she showed me her little breasts. Then she took me into a bedroom and we lay down on the bed and she showed me her behind and what was between her legs. She licked my pimpli and asked me to lick between her legs.
I was happy that she licked me and happy to lick her. She told me what we had done was a secret and I shouldn’t tell anyone. I didn’t.
Paja Balázs had seen me hysterical as a police car went by outside with its siren wailing.
“The boy has to be toughened up,” I heard him say to my father.
He and my father took me down the next day to the slaughterhouse where Paja worked. Paja changed into rubber clothes and grabbed the longest knife I had ever seen.
He went up to a pig and slit its throat. The pig shuddered and gushed blood. Then he went from one pig to another and did the same thing. There were five or six pigs shuddering and spraying blood. A sticky sweet smell filled the air.
My father held my hand but didn’t look at me. I watched the pigs bleed and shudder, but I didn’t cry.
Paja came over with his bloody rubber suit and said, “Huh, boy? Tomorrow we make sausage!”
The Tischlers gave me a black “kovboy” suit for Christmas. Leather pants. A black kovboy hat. A leather vest. A leather belt. A leather holster on each side. Two guns with rolls of red paper that made sparks.
I was no longer Havdi Doodi. I was Hopalon Kesedi.
After I got my guns, I forgot about my flute. I slept with my guns the way I’d slept with my flute.
From the time I was a young American man, I’ve always kept a gun near me when I sleep—on a nightstand, on top of a dresser, under the mattress.
I’ve never fired any of these real guns, but I’ve always been aware that they were there, ready to be fired.
· · ·
The Tischlers hugged me and cried when we got on the train to Klevland. I looked at them with a mean face and fired both guns they had given me. They laughed and hugged me again.
I was wearing my kovboy clothes and my black hat.
On the way to Klevland, I looked out the train window looking for the Komchi Indians Joseph Tischler had told me about. I had my guns drawn but my father told me I couldn’t shoot them. As I held my guns, my mother clutched her rosary, praying that this place called Klevland would be kind to us. My father slept.
I saw no Komchi Indians, but when I saw a rat on a train platform when we were stopped, I fired at it. My father woke up and took my guns away.
CHAPTER 3
I Kill Rocky Balboa
COLT
You stir up the shit, you get down to the sludge.
Hearts of Fire
HOLLYWOOD BECKONED IN 1974.
I was a writer at Rolling Stone who, after growing up in the gray and rusted Midwest, had fallen in love with California. But Jann Wenner, the publisher of Rolling Stone, was moving the magazine to New York from San Francisco and I desperately didn’t want to go. I wanted to stay in the sun.
I had serious responsibilities. Gerri and I had two babies and sometimes things were so tough that we’d go through clothes in the closet looking for change. Unless a miracle happened, it was clear that I was going to New York with Jann.
And then the miracle happened. Out of the blue, I got a phone call from an executive name Marcia Nasatir at United Artists. She had read my book, Charlie Simpson’s Apocalypse, which was a National Book Award nominee. She thought the book was cinematic and asked if I had any interest in doing screenplays.
Screenplays!
I had loved movies all of my life, had even taken some film courses in college, but the plot I’d always had in mind was to do some journalism, learn about life, and then write novels.
Never mind what I had in mind … the gun was at my head … the wolf was at the door … there were babies in the house crying for their Similac … Jann was going to New York … and I didn’t want to leave Marin County.
I flew down to L.A. to see Marcia Nasatir. She was an intelligent, caring woman who was looking for new screenwriting talent.
“Why don’t you go back home,” she said, “and think of some screenplay ideas and send them down to me.”
I went back home and did that. It wasn’t easy. The house we were renting was so small and Steve and Suzi were so loud that I had to put an earplug into each ear to try to think. After about a week of doing that, both ears got infected and now I had doctors’ bills on top of all the other bills.
I finally got a note together to Marcia with some ideas. One of them, in very brief outline form, was about a screenplay to be called F.I.S.T., about a truckers’ union.
Marcia liked the concept and asked me to come down to L.A. again to talk about it. She asked what I had in mind. I explained that from my reading and the stories I’d heard from old union people on the West Side of Cleveland, where I grew up, I understood that the early years were a war, that people had died in the struggle, that the reason some unions became intertwined with the mob was that union members were immigrants fighting a brutal WASP power structure and were forced to turn to other immigrants for help just to stay alive.
What I had in mind was a big, sweeping historical piece that would necessitate a lot of research and would explain the intertwining of labor and the mob on a human level.
Marcia said, “Fine.”
I said, “I beg your pardon?”
She said, “Let’s do it.”
“Just like that?”
She laughed. “Just like that.”
I laughed. “Well, what do we do?”
“Do you have an agent?”
“I have a book agent.”
“Fine,” she said, “we’ll work it out with your book agent.”
The deal they made with me was what they called “a step deal.” I would do the research, then write what they called a “treatment,” then write a screenplay, and then make revisions on the screenplay—and if the movie was made, I would earn a total of $80,000. I was told that at any time along the line they could decide to end the process and end my payments.
It was, I knew, a risky proposition. I didn’t know anything about writing a screenplay. What if they just
took my research and said “Thank you very much”? What if the research took me longer than I thought it would—what would my family live on?
But it offered the possibility of freedom if it worked out. I wouldn’t have to go to New York with Jann, I wouldn’t have to go through closets for change, I wouldn’t have to leave the sun. And it sounded like fun when it didn’t sound scary. I’d always enjoyed doing historical research and that’s how this would begin.
Before everything was finalized, Marcia asked that I meet with Mike Medavoy, the head of the studio. He was pleasant and friendly. His back wall was filled with photographs of himself with actors, politicians, and public figures.
“It sounds fine to me,” Mike said. “But how do I know you can write a screenplay?”
“His book is really cinematic,” Marcia said to him. “You’d see this is no problem if you read it.”
“Yeah, but it’s a book,” Mike said. “I’m talking about a screenplay. How do I know he can write a screenplay?”
I said nothing. My Adam’s apple was probably bobbing, butterflies were making their way through my esophagus toward my open mouth.
“Mike, I’m telling you,” Marcia said.
“We’re not making a book deal with him, we’re making a deal for a screenplay.”
“Oh,” I suddenly blurted. “That’s no problem. I took a couple of film courses in college. I wrote a couple scripts.”
He looked at me a long moment, a twinkle in his eye. “Fine,” he finally said, “no problem then. Let’s do it.”
Twenty years later, Mike Medavoy said to me. “I knew it was bullshit, but that wasn’t the question I was really asking you. The question I was asking you was if you really wanted to do this and the lie told me that you did.”
The research took longer than I expected. I drove across the country to places like Ypsilanti, Michigan; Sandusky, Ohio; Johnstown, Pennsylvania; Passaic, New Jersey; talking to veterans of the labor movement—to people who’d been gassed and beaten because they stood up for their rights as working men and women against a cruel conglomerate made up of bankers and company heads with goon squads and National Guardsmen at their beck and call.
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