I said, “I’m sorry, Pop.”
“Please,” my father said, “you and I both know too well that to take your mother seriously is to break our hearts. We mustn’t do that, must we?”
Maybe because I got him into so much trouble, Stanley Osenar, the editor of the Latineer, and I became friends.
We hung out after school in the coffee shops and diners around East 105th Street and Euclid, smoking, drinking coffee, playing “Fingertips” and “Please Mr. Postman” on the jukebox, and talking, talking, talking. Stanley was as much of a reader as I and we talked about Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and Gregory Corso. We talked, too, about politics and Communism.
Communism was a noble experiment, Stanley Osenar believed, but Stalinism had caused it to fail. Marx and Lenin, he said, fought for the rights of the working man and the poor. Countries like Hungary and his native Yugoslavia had been repressed by a feudal, slaveholding system which had brutalized the poor and the working class until Communism came along.
“You’re full of shit,” I said, and reminded him of the twenty million people Stalin had killed, of the massacre of the revolutionaries in Hungary in 1956.
“I’m not defending Stalin,” Stanley said, “I’m defending the theory of Communism as opposed to Communism in practice, although I’ll argue that Communism in practice gives the poor basic services which they never have in a feudal society.”
Was it possible, I asked myself, that there were good Komchis?
On the way home from one of those arty, highfalutin after-school conversations with Stanley Osenar, on the way to the bus stop at East 105th and Euclid, I heard a woman singing.
The sound was coming from a bar with its door open. I went up to the door and stood there, transfixed by her voice. A sign on the door advertised a young unknown rhythm and blues singer.
Appearing that night: Aretha Franklin.
· · ·
I joined speech and debate again and, at a weekend tournament, saw a girl with bright red hair and green eyes. Her name was Peggy Carney. She was sixteen, tall, well built, a sophomore at Beaumont, a private girls school on the East Side. I forgot Kay Jeffries completely the first time I saw her.
I saw her again at another tournament the next weekend and asked if I could drive her home in the red-and-white convertible that I’d waxed and polished the day before with just this in mind. She agreed and we stopped off at Howard Johnson’s where I bought her a burger and a milkshake. We talked about rock and roll and our reading. She, too, loved Ginsberg and the Beats. I drove her home to an expensive suburban house and she asked me to meet her parents.
We went out to a record hop the following Friday. I wore my self-awarded letter sweater and she wore a tight blouse and skirt. We did the twist on the dance floor and I saw the other guys from Cathedral Latin watching me enviously. When I took her home, she kissed me with her tongue in my mouth and put my hands on her breasts. Her breasts were the size of oranges.
“Do you want to do something tomorrow?” she asked.
I said sure.
“Well,” she said, “my parents won’t be home. Why don’t you just come over and wake me up in the morning and we’ll figure out something to do.”
When I got there the next morning, the front door was open and I said, “Peggy?” There was no answer. The house was quiet. I went upstairs and saw an open door. I walked in and saw her. She was in bed, asleep. Naked.
I went to the bed and kissed her and she put her arms around me dreamily and pulled me onto the bed. Her eyes were closed as though she were sleeping. Her skin was snowy white, a tangle of bright red hair was between her legs. I had never seen anything so beautiful. She kept kissing me, her tongue in my mouth, her eyes closed.
I took my clothes off and moved on top of her, my fasz huge. When I entered her, she smiled and moaned but kept her eyes closed. She moved in rhythm with me and kept smiling and moaning but never opened her eyes. We came at almost the same time and, afterward, I lay at her side, devouring her body with my eyes. She was as asleep as she had been while making love to me.
When Peggy “awoke,” she said, “Hmm, that was a nice cuddle, wasn’t it? Don’t you just love cuddling?” She got up shyly and put her clothes on.
I felt like jumping up and shouting it to the whole world:
I did it! I did it! I did it!
After all those years of dreaming and fantasizing and just about ripping my pimpli and my fasz out of myself. I did it! The real thing! With a real, flesh-and-blood beautiful girl who couldn’t wait to stick her tongue in my mouth! With a girl built like a brick shithouse! With a girl who had big tits! With a girl who had an ass to die for! And it was everything I had dreamed and fantasized it to be! Magical! Fantastic! Divine!
Howdy Doody triumphant!
I couldn’t get enough of Peggy and, it seemed, Peggy couldn’t get enough of me. In the car. In her bedroom. On the couch in her basement. But each time she was “asleep” as we made love. And she never addressed the fact that we had made love; she talked about how she loved to “cuddle” with me.
“I hope you don’t get pregnant,” I said to her.
She snapped at me, her eyes huge. “Pregnant? How could I get pregnant? We haven’t done anything. Silly!”
“Who is she?” my father said to me one day.
“Who?”
“I don’t know who,” he said, “that’s what I’m asking you. But you do. So please tell me her name.”
I laughed. “How do you know there is anyone?”
“Because you’re acting like a moonstruck cow,” he said. “You’re either in love or you’re losing your mind like your mother and maybe I should start worrying about the radio cords again.”
I told him about Peggy Carney then—about her red hair and green eyes and her sense of humor and how much fun it was being with her.
“You’re making love to her, aren’t you?” He smiled.
I felt myself blushing and nodded.
“Life can be quite wonderful at times, can’t it?” my father said.
The great Puskás Öcsi was in town, the greatest soccer player in Hungarian history, a man some said had been the greatest soccer player in the world.
“He’s an old friend,” my father said. “He called and said he’ll be in town and wants to see me. Do you want to come?”
We met the great Puskás at a football field on the East Side where he was doing a coaching exhibition for young players. He was a bear of a man, his face red-veined, spare tires around his middle, his hair graying. He was a coach in Madrid now.
He and my father hugged each other when they met, laughing about how they’d aged.
“I’ll tell you a story about your father,” the great Puskás said. “We grew up in the same neighborhood in Kispest. We belonged to the same gang. We would have battles each day with the other gangs from other neighborhoods. We threw beer bottles at each other. Your father couldn’t run because of his limp. So he constructed a wooden shield for himself that he put on his back like armor. All the beer bottles bounced off his back.
“But one day a kid nailed him in the jaw with a bottle, dislocating it. We rolled him through the neighborhood on a wagon, yelling “Meghalt a Pisti”—Steve has died! When we got him home and his mother heard us yelling that he had died, she ran to the wagon sobbing, hysterical. Your father said, ‘I’m not dead, Mama,’ and smiled. ‘See, I’m alive, Mama!’ And his mother hit him so hard that his jaw snapped right back into place.”
I watched the two of them laugh at the memory.
“Limp or no limp,” the great Puskás said, “your father was one of the toughest kids I’ve ever met.”
There was one other Hungarian kid at Cathedral Latin. He stopped by my table and ate his lunch with me. His name was George Árpád. He told me that his father read my father’s articles in the Catholic Hungarians’ Sunday and hated my father.
“He says your father is a Jew-lover,” George told me. “My father keeps a book cal
led The Protocols of the Elders of Zion on his nightstand. It explains how Jews run the world.”
“What is it with these idiot Hungarians always hating Jews?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” George said. “My father’s right. The Jews do run the world. You must be a Jew-lover like your father.”
I said, “You must be as dumb as your father.”
He never stopped by for lunch again.
Peggy had to do a book report on John D. Rockefeller, Cleveland’s famous billionaire. She wanted to see the cemetery he was buried in.
On a hot summer day, we drove out to Lakeview Cemetery. There was no one else there. John D. Rockefeller had a big vault and tomb which was closed. We were sweated out and lay down in the cool grass.
I started to kiss her and she fell “asleep.”
And I felt as rich as Rockefeller!
My father watched me warily as I read books from the library about the Russian Revolution and Marx and Engels and Lenin and Trotsky and Stalin. One night I said to him, “Why didn’t you tell me there were some good Communists, Pop?”
“Like who?” he said.
“Like Lenin, for example.”
“Lenin?” he said, his voice rising. “Lenin was a cold, heartless revolutionary who believed that the ends justified the means.”
“He cared about the Russian people,” I said, “about the poor, about the oppression of the czars.
“What about Imre Nagy?” I asked. “Wasn’t he a good man?” Imre Nagy, a lifelong Communist, had led Hungary against the Soviet Union in the 1956 freedom fight.
“At the end he was. But only at the end. His hands were just as bloody as the others until then. And look what happened to him. The Soviets captured him and executed him.”
“But he became a Communist in Hungary,” I said, “because he saw how his parents, poor parents, were oppressed in a feudal system that used peasants as slaves. He had to become a Communist if he wanted to change that system.”
“My parents were poor people,” my father said. He was getting angry, his face flushed. “I didn’t become a Communist!”
“Why didn’t you?” I said. “You were poor. Your father worked in a canning factory. I bet he was paid and treated like a slave.”
“I don’t want to hear this in my house!” he said. My father was yelling at me now. “What is this … this szar—shit—you are telling me?”
I had hardly ever heard him use the word—it sounded odd coming from his mouth.
“You are swallowing all this propaganda you are reading. The Komchis are very good at propaganda!”
“Why are you yelling at me?” I said calmly. “I’m just trying to have a discussion with you.”
“Because it’s shit!” he yelled. “It’s the same shit I’ve been fighting my entire life! I never thought I’d hear you, my son, saying this Komchi shit to me!”
“I don’t have to agree with you politically,” I said. “I can have my own political opinions, can’t I? Can’t we disagree politically?”
“Disagree … about the Komchis?” he said in disbelief. “You’re going to take the Komchis’ side? You call that a disagreement? How can you love me if you take the Komchis’ side?”
“What are you saying?” I said.
My own voice was raised now.
“That if I love you I can’t disagree with you? I can’t have my own opinions?”
“About the Komchis?” he yelled. “Yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying. You can’t disagree with me about the Komchis!”
“That’s not fair,” I yelled.
“Fair?” he yelled back. “Is it fair to piss on what I’ve done with my whole life? Why do you think I left Hungary and started all over again and chose to be dirt poor? So you wouldn’t live and be raised under Communism! So you would be free! And now you are taking the side of those that I freed you from? I did it for you and now you’re making a mockery of what I did? Is that fair?”
“I was just trying to have a discussion with you about Communism,” I said, “and you turn it into an argument about love. How can we discuss anything intelligently if you turn it into something so emotional?”
“Emotional?” he yelled. “Don’t you understand? My whole life has been ruined by Communism! Ruined! I am not back in Budapest living in a big house writing my novels! I am here in this dump of an apartment working two jobs to have enough money to send you to school! You are the one thing that I have to live for! And if I keep hearing Komchi propaganda coming from your lips, I will have nothing to live for!”
I got home from seeing Peggy one Friday night and saw my father sitting at his desk with the English-Hungarian dictionary in front of him and another thin volume.
“What are you doing up so late, Pop?” I asked.
He showed me the book. It was my copy of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. My eyes almost popped out. Here was my father, the Catholic anti-Communist editor of the Catholic Hungarians’ Sunday reading Ginsberg, the radical Communist homosexual poet!
“Who is this man?” my father asked.
“He is an American poet,” I said.
“A bitnik,” he said. “I read about the bitniks in the Plan Diler.” He laughed. “Avant garde. When I was a young man in Hungary, it was the Dadaists. Tristan Tzara, a crazier Romanian than other Romanians, put a bunch of words into a hat, pulled them out individually, and wrote them down one after the other. He called it a poem. Now it’s the bitniks.”
“So,” I said, “Pop—tell me. How do you like Allen Ginsberg?” I was trying to hide my smile.
“He is crazy,” my father said, “but that is good. All poets and pharmacists are crazy. This ‘angel-head’ business he writes about, is insane. He thinks it’s metaphysics. I think it must be delirium tremens from drunkenness. An ‘angel-head’ pink elephant maybe, but exciting, I grant you! The kind of stuff that races your pulse, but the kind of stuff that I am not sure, in the end, says very much, at least to me. Who is this Ginsberg? What kind of person is he? He writes like he expects to die tomorrow morning. Or is that just the poet’s usual professional hysterics? Novelists, you see, can’t afford to be hysterical. Novels take too long to write.”
“Who is he?” I said. “A Jew, a Communist, a homosexual. A brilliant poet.”
“Really?” he said, looking a little stunned. “All three?”
“Really,” I said casually. “All four. A brilliant poet, too.”
“It figures,” he said, almost applaudingly. “Jews, Communists, homosexuals, they are usually educated people. They read. You see? You must read, as I always say to you.”
· · ·
The speech and debate city-wide finals were coming up and I wrote an essay for the original oratory finals called “Jesus Was a Bum.” Obviously influenced by Allen Ginsberg, it was the story of a hobo reviled by society until society realizes he is Christ come back. I was proud of my essay and thought I had a chance of winning.
The finals were in three rounds. There were twenty contestants and the score was tallied at the end of each round. I got two first places my first two rounds.
Peggy was with me, as excited as I was. The whole tournament was buzzing about the piece of original oratory called “Jesus Was a Bum.”
My third-round judge was a Jesuit priest from St. Ignatius, the high school which was just down the street from the apartment where I’d grown up on Lorain Avenue. The priest heard my recitation without any expression on his face and then posted his score: Number twenty, last place.
That would make sure that I didn’t have a chance to win any awards, let alone first place.
When I saw the score he’d given me, I confronted him.
“How can you give me a last place when the two other judges gave me first places?” I said.
“What you write is blasphemy,” the priest said. “It shouldn’t have been allowed into the tournament. I’m sorry the other kids here were exposed to it. I’m notifying your principal at Cathedral Latin Monday morning.”
<
br /> I felt tears coming to my eyes.
“Well fuck you,” I told the priest, “and the dumb fucking ass you rode in on.”
The priest blanched. “You’re going to regret this, Mr.”—he glanced at my entry card—“Esterhaze.”
My father and I were sitting in the principal’s office at Cathedral Latin. The principal was a priest in his sixties. He was reading my essay “Jesus Was a Bum.”
“This is garbage,” the priest said. “You represent Cathedral Latin at a speech tournament with this garbage?”
“You critic?” my father asked in his thick Hungarian accent.
The priest seemed taken aback by his question.
“You priest,” my father said. “You pray. Critic write.”
“He swore at a priest!” the principal said to my father. “That’s a sin and a sacrilege!”
“Yes!” my father said, his voice rising now, too. “He swore at priest because priest stupid … not fair priest! Joe lose temper! Now Joe calma, no more temper … but priest he still stupid priest!”
“You are suspended from Cathedral Latin!” the principal yelled, pointing his finger at me.
“You stupid priest like other!” my father said calmly to him. “You suspend from school—I sue! This free country! America no cenzura! Stupid priest no censor! Boy write true! Jézus come back like bum, everybody piss him. Stupid priest like you piss him! What boy write strong, original. This my opinion. I writer, not you, stupid priest! My opinion educate. You opinion stupid priest opinion! Ohkay, fein, you want sue, I sue! City Klevland know what stupid priest you! What boy write … Plan Diler write, too … cos I sue. Ohkay, fein. Whole City Klevland read what boy write. That you want? Ohkay, fein.”
I wasn’t suspended after all from Cathedral Latin.
I was allowed to graduate.
My father and mother came to graduation night, where I got my diploma.
Afterward, my father said, “I was embarrassed. All those other students went up to that stage for this and that honor. You went up only for your diploma. No honors for speech and debate. No honors for the newspaper.”
I said, “Well, none of those other kids were picked for the WHK High School Hall of Fame. What’s better, Pop? To get another piece of paper on graduation night or do something that the whole city can hear about on the radio?”
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