“You will never amount to anything!” he raged. “You do nothing with yourself! You stare out the stupid window! You play the stupid bazball! You throw away good food when we starved for all those years in the camps! Why? Why do you act this way? Why did I come to this country? Why did your mother and I sacrifice everything for you?” His arm hurt so bad after he hit me that he had to go to a doctor. The doctor put his arm in a sling. My father had dislocated his shoulder.
Walking back home through the alley from Greenwood Pool, I cut through the Alex J. Kozmon Funeral Home parking lot and saw Father John Mundweil in his black Ford coupé kissing the funeral director’s blond wife.
Father John saw me, too, watching him.
The next day in school, he asked me if I wanted to be the altar boy at funerals and weddings, where I’d get nice tips. I thanked him.
Funerals, I discovered, paid off better than weddings if you played it right. A few sympathetic tears in the altar boy’s eyes and the bereaved relatives always took good care of him, appreciating this goodhearted boy’s great sensitivity.
Walking home from a playground at dusk, I saw a group of older boys in an alcove on the ground floor of William Dean Howells Junior High.
They were hovered around a naked girl I’d seen with other older boys in the alleys. One of them was covering her mouth with his hands, the others were holding her legs apart.
I stopped and stared.
“Hey, Joey, you want some?” one of them yelled.
“Come on, Goofy,” another said, “you’re old enough.”
I started to run.
I heard them laughing behind me.
Sister Rose, furious that I hadn’t cleaned my desk the way I was told, grabbed me by the hair and dragged me to an empty classroom.
She knelt me down in front of her and screamed, “You don’t listen! You never listen! Listen to me!”
She picked up an empty Coca-Cola bottle near her and raised it above my head.
Before I knew what had happened, I had knocked the old nun against a wall and onto the floor. The Coca-Cola bottle was in my hand and I smashed it to the floor next to her.
When my father heard what had happened, he raged: “You hit a sister? You knocked a sister down? Do you want them to throw you out of school? Do you want to go to jail?”
My father wanted me to take violin lessons. I didn’t want to take them. I wanted to take saxophone lessons.
He arranged for my violin lessons to be given to me by a man named Wenger, who lived in a part of Cleveland far from us.
My father gave me the money to pay Mr. Wenger and then I took the bus to go to his house for my lessons … but I didn’t make it there.
I got off downtown and went to see the Cleveland Indians lose to the Boston Red Sox again.
“How was the violin lesson?” my father asked me.
I said, “Fine.”
He said, “Fine?”
I said, “Fine.”
Wasn’t that the advice he had given me? If they ask you anything in America, say “Fein.”
“Pig,” he said and started to slap me. But he winced as he raised his arm and then held it, grimacing in pain.
Mr. Wenger had called.
On a muggy, sticky night in the summer, my father took me for a long walk. We went halfway over the Lorain-Carnegie Bridge, which connected the west side of the city to the east, arching over the industrial flats.
My father stopped on the bridge and looked at the flame-topped towers of the steel mills and the iron ore hills on the Cuyahoga’s banks. The smell from the mills on this night was gagging.
“This is where you will work if you don’t make something of yourself,” my father said. “You will live your life in this stink and hell among oil monkeys who have to be drunk to forget the misery of their everyday life, their bodies covered in oil and filth no soap can take off. Smell it. Breathe it in. Get your first taste of the rest of your life.”
When Chuckie and José and I were in an alley at night in the stifling heat, slumped against a wall, smoking Lucky Strikes, it was Justine Corelli on American Bandstand we talked about. She was the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen.
“Jeez, those fuckin’ tits,” Chuckie said.
“That blond hair?” José said. “I want to shove it in that fuckin’ hair.”
“I wanna fuck that sweet ass,” Chuckie said.
“You can’t fuckin’ do that,” I said, “that’s not what it’s fuckin’ for.”
“What the fuck you fuckin’ talkin’ about?” Chuckie said.
“It wouldn’t fuckin’ fit in there,” I said, “it’s not what it’s fuckin’ for.”
They all laughed at me.
“Man, it makes fuckin’ room!” José said.
“Fuckin’ Goofy don’t even fuckin’ know you can fuck an ass,” Chuckie said. “Fuckin’ Goof’s fuckin’ goofy.”
I heard my mother and father arguing about me.
“We are Hungarian,” she said. “He is more American every day.”
“He is Hungarian,” my father said. “He knows his heritage. He is proud of it. We have taught him.”
“He should be in the Hungarian Boy Scouts.”
“He doesn’t want to be in the Boy Scouts.”
“He should be in the Hungarian choir.”
“He doesn’t want to be in the choir.”
“Do you want him to grow up to be an American and not a Hungarian?” she asked him.
“He lives in America,” my father said. “I don’t want him to be a foreigner—like us. Why should he have a life like ours? He is a boy. He can learn everything.”
“He is learning bad things,” my mother said.
“Mária, please,” he said. “All boys learn bad things. Then they forget those things and become good men. He would have learned these bad things in Hungary, too.”
“Did you forget the bad things that you learned in Hungary?” my mother asked my father.
“What exactly are we talking about, Mária?” my father said.
“I would have liked him to learn bad Hungarian things,” my mother said, “instead of bad American things.”
“Boys learn bad things in a universal language,” my father said. I could hear the smile in his voice.
“I’m not just talking about that,” my mother said.
“Then I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
My mother said, “Yes you do.”
“Read!” my father said to me. “What are you doing with your life? Read! It’s the key to knowledge, the key to success. Always this bazball! You will growup to be one of the stinking-feet people.” That’s what he called athletes: stinking-feet people.
“Sitzfleisch!” he said, using a German word for the ability to sit on your own posterior. “Sitzfleisch!”
I begged him to take me to an Indians game or to give me the money to go to one. He said I was too young. I kept asking him. Finally he said, “If you get all As on your next report card, I will take you to see the stinking feet.” I was getting Cs and Ds.
On the day I brought him the report card with all As, he let me pick the day we would go to the stadium. I picked a Saturday afternoon. The Indians against the Yankees.
My father wore his beret and his trench coat. It was summer. He watched the game for a while. I tried to explain it to him.
“This is stupid,” he said. “Nothing happens. They stand around and wait. Where is the action?”
He took a Hungarian-language book out of his trench coat pocket and for the rest of the game he read. Dostoyevsky. Crime and Punishment.
And when I was a successful American screenwriter and kids asked me how they could learn to write, I said, “Read! Read! It’s the key to knowledge, the key to success!”
I even said to them “Sitzfleisch! Sitzfleisch!”
But then I added this sentence: “There aren’t many German words I like, but …”
At that baseball game, my father saw people around us ea
ting frankfoorters and gave me a dollar to buy some. When I got to the hot dog stand, they had just run out.
There was a pizza stand next to it and I bought two pieces with slices of kolbász stacked on top. I had never tasted this wondrous-smelling thing before.
I took the slices to my father and he said, “What’s this?”
I told him it was an American food called pizza, that they were out of frankfoorters.
He looked at it suspiciously, tasted it, and said, “This is magnificent!”
I tasted it and agreed.
He told me to go back and buy two more slices and then he sent me back again to buy two more for my mother.
“How was the bazball?” my mother asked when we got home.
My father said, “Mária, they serve the most magnificent food at these American games!”
He handed her the slices we had bought for her.
“This is wonderful!” my mother said. “What’s it called?”
“Pizza,” I said.
“It sounds Italian,” she said.
“American!” my father said. “It’s American food!”
My father gave me advice about America. “Didn’t I tell you Americans are crazy? They are producing an electric can opener. I read it in the Plain Dealer. Who needs an electric can opener? Is it too much work to open a can with a regular opener? Don’t they know that no one will ever use something so stupid?”
I was lying to my parents all the time about what I was doing after school.
I told them I had to go to the public library downtown to study a special project.
I went instead to Jean’s Fun House and the Roxy Burlesque on East Ninth Street and watched a stripper take her clothes off.
One Sunday I told my parents I had to play in a special baseball game and went with José instead—Chuckie was sick—to the Cleveland Arena where we watched Jerry Lee Lewis play the piano and howl like the devil. He didn’t just play his piano, he put it on fire with matches and lighter fluid.
José and I went out on Euclid Avenue afterward and broke some store windows with other kids, then ate a cheeseburger at a Royal Castle and listened to the jukebox play “Come along-a-baby, whole lotta shakin goin on!” about ten times.
José paid for the whole thing. He’d stolen an old lady’s purse as she was coming out of the seven o’clock Mass at St. Patrick’s.
When I was an American journalist, I told Tempest Storm how I would sneak down to the Roxy and watch the strippers when I was a boy.
We were in Tempest Storm’s dressing room in Dayton, Ohio, and Tempest appreciated my story so much that she took her sweaty G-string off and put a fresh one on while I was doing the interview.
Tempest said she had played the Roxy but I was sure the show I got in her dressing room was better than anyone ever saw at the Roxy!
I got a zip gun like Chuckie’s and José’s. We didn’t really know what to do with these homemade, sling-shot-style guns, so we shot rats in the alleys with them.
We were walking down an alley at night when a drunk came staggering toward us. José went up to the drunk and smashed him in the face with the zip gun. The drunk’s nose broke and he fell to his knees and wailed like an old woman. Chuckie kicked him in the Adam’s apple and he started to gag on his own blood. I kicked him in the nose and blood burst from his ear. José took his wallet out of his pants and we ran.
Seven bullshit dollars but we got away clean.
I have never told anyone about that helpless, pathetic man and the blood that burst from his ear. I probably shouldn’t have told you.
One night we hit the jackpot.
We didn’t plan it … it was a stultifyingly hot day … We’d been down at Greenwood Pool and we’d prowled around the alleys … and we saw the old lady who owned the little grocery store on Bridge Avenue lock up her shop and get into her shiny new Buick and drive away. Word was that she lived in Rocky River, where the rich Irish lived.
We messed around for another couple hours … trying to get into the pool hall, drinking coffee and listening to the jukebox at Nick’s … until it got darker … and then we went back to the store and got in through the back where the window looked out onto the alley.
As soon as we touched the window, the burglar alarm went off, but that didn’t stop us.
José went right to the cash register—he knew what he was doing—and opened it. Chuckie and I went to the front window, waiting for the cops. We both had our zip guns.
Chuckie suddenly started to laugh nervously and took his dick out and started to piss all over the floor and the window.
José said, “What the fuck is wrong with you, man?” But he was laughing, too. He was still going through the register, trying to get some drawer in there open.
We heard a siren approaching from far away.
Chuckie yelled, “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go!” and was zipping up his pants.
José yelled “Wait!” then whooped and hollered and held up a white envelope.
We ran toward the back and Chuckie, for no reason, took his zip gun out and blasted the cash register a couple of times.
We dove out through the window and ran down the alley as we heard the siren much louder now, coming closer on Bridge Avenue.
The white envelope had $800 in ten-dollar bills. We divided the money up.
I was afraid to keep that kind of money on me or hidden in our apartment.
In the Num Num Potato Chip factory parking lot, I found a loose red brick in the wall.
It became my first bank.
I was rich now. I sat for long hours at the Royal Castle on Lorain near Fulton, eating cheeseburgers, sipping black coffee, smoking Lucky Strikes, my T-shirt rolled up, my hair in a greasy ducktail, a silver comb in my back pocket, a zip gun in my jacket pocket, listening to the jukebox, my face full of angry red-pus-dripping zits that I clawed and scratched at.
I was a cool … rock and roll … DP … geek.
I didn’t have a room of my own in our apartment, no place where I could read or study or listen to the radio or jack off or smoke in peace.
At night I slept on that couch in the living room that folded open.
I had a Cleveland Indians pennant and a Rocky Colavito photo I wanted to put on a wall.
“The boy needs a room of his own,” I heard my father tell my mother.
“Why?” my mother said. “What’s he going to do in there?”
He started building my room the next day. We had a small extra bathroom in the apartment with a toilet and a washbasin.
He screwed a wooden board into the wall above the washbasin and got a small chair that fit in front of it at the Salvation Army.
Now I had my own table.
He built a wooden box that fit over the toilet.
Now I had my own cabinet.
I read and studied there and listened to my portable radio. I put my Indians pennant and my Rocky Colavito photos up on the wall.
Now I had my own room!
There was a penny arcade on West 25th Street run by a white-haired American named Timmy. In the back room he sold dirty pictures. I bought one for ten cents and put it in my wallet. It showed a naked woman kneeling.
My father said one afternoon that he wanted me to come to the public library on Bridge Avenue at Fulton Road with him. He sat down on a bench in front of the library. He reached into his pocket, pulled out my wallet, and opened it to the picture of the naked woman.
“Well?” he said.
I said nothing.
“Your mother found it,” he said. “She’s very upset.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. My face was burning. It was all I could say.
“I know you’re masturbating,” he said.
I felt myself flush even more. He was looking right at me. I looked away from him. I felt tears welling in my eyes. He looked away and sighed and contemplated the library’s lawn.
“I’m sorry,” I stammered. “I know it’s a sin.”
He didn’
t look at me for a long time, then nodded and looked at me with a sudden smile.
“Who said it’s a sin?” he said.
“Sister Rose.”
“Ha!” my father said. Just that one word. “Ha!”
“Isn’t it a sin?” I said. “She says I’ll go blind.”
“Are you having any difficulty with your vision?” he asked, still smiling.
“No.”
“You won’t go blind,” he said. “Nothing will happen to you. Everybody does it. It’s normal.”
I was astounded. “You too?” I said.
“At your age,” he said, shrugging.
“Sister Rose? The other sisters?”
“For certain,” he said, grinning widely now. “Especially the sisters. Much of the time.”
“Much of the time?”
I was laughing. So was my father.
“I have one question I want to ask you,” my father said. “Why did you pick a woman with such a big fenék?” (It meant posterior in Hungarian.) “Some men like big fenéks and some men like little fenéks, but the fenék on this woman is really a big one.”
And with that, my father handed me my wallet. “You don’t have to throw the picture away,” he said, “but hide it someplace where your mother can’t find it.”
I said, “Yes, Papa.”
“And do a better job of hiding it than you did with your mother’s sandwiches.”
“Yes, Papa.”
He looked at me a moment. He seemed to be studying me. I saw tears welling in his eyes suddenly.
And in English—it was the first time he had ever spoken to me in English—he said, “You American now—yes, Joe?”
I felt tears in my eyes and in Hungarian I said, “Nem, Papa.”
And in English he said, “Ohhhhkay, Joe,” and walked away.
[Freeze Frame]
The Phone Man
I MET THE wealthiest telephone repairman in Los Angeles. He’s got a house with a pool in Calabasas, a Ferrari and a Porsche, and hot bimbette girlfriends all over town.
It started accidentally. He was up on a pole, repairing a circuit, and he heard a voice in his ear he recognized immediately. Jack Nicholson. He couldn’t stop listening—Jack was talking to a girlfriend—and after an hour he knew a lot, a whole lot, about Jack’s intimate life.
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