Just Kids From the Bronx

by Arlene Alda

  I had a passion for music early on. When I went to Junior High School 45—I think the new name is Thomas Giordano Middle School—there were two black women music teachers who encouraged me to sing these Hank Williams and Jimmy Reed songs. There was also a superintendent of a building that was on Crotona Ave around the corner. His name was Willie Green. He encouraged me too. He lived in tenement buildings and he played blues. And I loved this guy, Willie Green, and he would teach me these songs, and when I’d go back to J.H.S. 45 I’d get encouraged there as well. The Reverend Gary Davis, the great blind blues man, also lived in the Bronx. I used to go to his house. Teach me a chord. Teach me this. At that time, he would play in Harlem on the streets.

  Mount Carmel Catholic Church was the heart of Little Italy where I lived. Monsignor Pernicone used to talk to me about virtue. “Dion, what muscles are for the physical body, virtues are spiritual muscles for the soul. So you have to build yourself internally.” The guys in the neighborhood, I thought I knew where they were at, but they didn’t know where I was at. Monsignor Pernicone would also teach me in these conversations we had. I was walking around with questions like, What is truth? And who has the authority to define it?

  There was also this guy, Dan Murrow, who became one of the closest friends in my life. He was a Jewish guy from Boston. He was a social worker and my father didn’t like him. He said to him, “You’re getting paid for what you do?” So Dan Murrow gave up his job and he’d come into the neighborhood without getting paid and we’d sit and talk for hours. He was an extraordinary guy who loved people. There are not many on the face of the Earth like him. Because of his coming into the neighborhood, and infiltrating the gang and talking to me personally, asking questions about my purpose and direction, what he said and what he did meant a lot to me. I loved talking to this guy and we remained friends all of his life.

  When I look back, I say, Why did I gravitate to these good people when others used to smack ’em in the head? They were threatened by them. I was too. Then I saw the reason why. Because if they’re right, then I’m a failure. That’s frightening. These were extraordinary people.

  When I went to Italy and started connecting the dots, that’s when I started grabbing on to higher ground. I was very lucky because I had a hit record at an early age. I was twenty when Columbia Records sent me to Italy. I had a five-year contract with them for half a million dollars. Guaranteed. One hundred thousand dollars a year. They wanted to expand their distribution so they sent me to Italy. I went to Milan and that’s where I fell in love with Italians. And, you know, I’m Italian and I wasn’t crazy about Italians until I traveled. It was there I saw the beauty and the history and the architecture and the poetry and the music and the spirituality. You can’t look at Jews, for instance, hangin’ around Long Island, or Italians hangin’ around Jersey, and know those groups. You have to look farther than that. In Italy, I got to understand what the culture’s truly about. When I went to Milan, I saw my neighborhood. Milan looked like the Bronx, and the people walking down the street looked like they were from the Bronx. My God! I grew up with these guys in my front yard carving marble steps and stoops—and my grandmother would even come out and wash them with soap and water!

  If you’re raised in a borough, you’re very much on the surface of things. Then you grow up and you can see that all of these traditions have a lot of depth. They’re not old-fashioned. There’s more to it than that, you know.

  That first time I went to Italy, I was into all the artists. I looked at Michelangelo, at Raphael, their sculptures and their paintings, and the architecture there. From my perspective, each time I went, I went deeper and deeper. The second time I went, I was saying, These artists are glorifying God. Look at these artists. The Sistine Chapel, Saint Peter’s, and the architecture. The third time I went I realized why Rome was so important. It was the place where these two guys died. Peter and Paul, these two little Jewish guys, were martyred there. Paul’s head was taken off and Peter was hung on a cross. Upside down. That’s why Rome is so important. Not because the Vatican’s there. Not because of the architecture or the art or anything else. It’s because these two guys gave their lives for their beliefs.

  I’m gonna tell you something I’m very proud of. I’m going to brag about myself. I got an honorary degree from Fordham University this past year. And you don’t know how that made me feel. I don’t even know how to explain it. I was sitting there up on this platform on graduation day listening to the commencement speeches and looking out on the lawn with these mothers and fathers and faculty surrounded by these beautiful buildings on this beautiful day.

  I’m sitting there being honored and, you know, it felt like it came around full circle. I was born in Fordham Hospital. It connected so much for me. The past, the present, and the future. I was so honored. I grew up a block away from there, not able to even think about going to Fordham. I used to climb over the fence and get chased out of there. My wife said, “They’re giving it to you because of your life experience. The way you affect people now.” Getting that honorary degree was one of the greatest experiences of my life.

  BARBARA NESSIM

  Artist, graphic designer

  (1939– )

  Our apartment faced south. It was the last house on the Grand Concourse so we could almost see downtown. I just somehow knew in my heart that where I lived was really special because I said, “Dear God, thank you so much for making me be born in the Bronx in New York and not in Kansas.” I had no idea why I chose Kansas. I hadn’t even seen The Wizard of Oz at that point, and I knew nothing about tornadoes.

  We’re Sephardic Jews so we come from a close-knit family of uncles, cousins, whatever. My father came from Turkey and my mother was born in Egypt but her family came from Greece. The cooking, Passover, everything was different from the Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe. My parents spoke the antique Spanish from 1492. Ladino. That wasn’t for us to learn, but for them to tell secrets.

  We lived in a two-bedroom apartment. My younger sister and brother and I shared one bedroom and my parents had the other. I would stay up late doing my art homework in my parents’ bedroom. I had a little corner there with my table and my chair. I’d put my pads and my T-square underneath the table and I would work all night. I don’t know how they managed. My father was a postman and got up early in the morning while I would be up all night with my light on, when they were going to bed. By the time I was about ten I knew that I was going to be an artist.

  My parents were traditional, but they trusted me. I mean, I knew how to get pregnant, and I knew that I wasn’t getting pregnant. I didn’t want to have kids. I wanted to have a career. I remember when I was fifteen, I was figuring out my future and I was sitting there thinking, Okay, I’m fifteen and I have to finish high school and that brings me up to sixteen, and then I want to go to college, which my father was against. He said if I was too smart, nobody would want to marry me and then, at twenty-five, my face would crack and I would be a toy in every man’s arms. “Dad, maybe one day I will get married, but not now.” I don’t think my mother had dreams for me. I was always pretty self-directed, so if she had a dream for me, it would be for me to be happy. And I was happy, so she got her dream.

  When I was fourteen, I had an epiphany. I was ice skating at the Wollman Rink in Central Park with my friend Vivian, whose mother had breast cancer and had one breast removed. She kept the falsies in a shoe box in the apartment. Vivian and I put on her mother’s falsies to look older. We were fourteen and we looked sixteen. I guess it was the end of the day, when the ice was very uneven, because my skate got caught in a rut and I fell. I heard my leg go boop, and it broke. I used to call it “my lucky break.”

  I was in the ninth grade and I had to get home instruction. I had Mr. Stonehill for three hours a week for academics, and then I had Julie Mahl as my art teacher. She was the one who encouraged me to go to a specialized art school, like the School of Industrial Art. She loved the work that I did. She used to tell
my mother I was a sponge. I just soaked up everything. She told me something, and then I did it, so I felt very empowered. I finally learned how to learn, academically.

  Before I broke my leg, I wasn’t really a great academic student at all. Somehow learning escaped me. I was always a dreamer. If I got a seventy-five in class I’d be happy, but it eroded my confidence. The one-on-one was very good for me. With Mr. Stonehill, I learned how to pay attention. I learned how to learn, and I liked it. Heaven forbid. I liked school! Because of the tutors, I knew I could be a better student.

  I also never felt very popular in middle school. Because of my upbringing, I wasn’t allowed out that much so I wasn’t integrated into a social group. Everyone was out after school, making friends, but my family was more strict. I said to myself, when I go to high school, I’m gonna completely change myself and I’m gonna go with the crowd I want to be with. That’s what I did. That was my epiphany. I was going to like myself better.

  You know, I was an artist even then. I was really the same person as I am now. When you’re young, you think you’re gonna change when you grow up. Somehow you think you’re gonna be different. When I was ten, I thought, What am I gonna be fifteen years from now? And at twenty-five, I used to think, I wonder what I’m gonna be like when I’m forty? I was exactly the same. Now [in 2012] I’m seventy-three. I’m exactly the same. I’m not any different than when I was younger.

  PART TWO

  I SAY IT’S THE TEACHERS … DESTINY

  It was a separation toward self-creation.… It’s the process of coming from a place—your family, your neighborhood—and then creating something new. I knew that change was not about money, but an interior process about understanding who you are. What you see the world as being. There’s a kind of self-confidence that comes with that.

  —ROBERT F. LEVINE

  AL PACINO

  Award-winning actor, director, producer

  (1940– )

  Remember the Dover movie house? My mother would take me to the movies there when I was about three or four. Movies were our entertainment. It was sort of like having a big television, only no one had TVs in those days. We had radios but no TVs. I remember going past a storefront and there was this little box on display, and in it was Milton Berle in black-and-white and it was fun to look at. You couldn’t hear anything, because the set was in the store. I have a very vivid memory of that—the first time I ever saw TV—in a store window.

  The Dover theater is where I learned how to understand some of the more sophisticated movies. I’d have some vague memory of the movie, which I’d sort of repeat at home the next day. You know how kids have this memory? It gets imprinted when you see those pictures. So I’d act out all the characters that I saw and remembered. I was addicted to those stories. It was a lot of fun for me because most of the time I was home alone with my grandmother. My mother and grandfather were out working during the week.

  I adored my grandfather. He originally came from Sicily but came to New York and lived in Harlem before he moved to the Bronx. He was a great storyteller. We’d both go up to the roof with chairs and newspapers. We’d put the newspapers under the chairs because otherwise they would sink into the soft tar that was the floor of the roof. Then he’d tell me stories about what life was like then, growing up. I relished those stories. He was a simple guy but very intelligent. You know how it is—intelligent but uneducated. Smart. I listened.

  And you know—it was beautiful. I mean the world up on the roof. It was like our terrace. I wish I could describe it to you artfully. It was as close to poetry as I could get. It was spectacular. The sun would be going down. You could actually stand there and see the Empire State Building and the skyline from the South Bronx. And imagine—all these people who had come from different parts of the world would be up there. And at night—at night, there was this cacophony of voices, especially in the late spring to late summer. You would hear the different accents. We had them all. There were Italians, Jews, Irish, Polish, German. It was like a Eugene O’Neill play.

  Summers were hot. We used to sleep on the fire escape of our apartment. Get the breeze out on the fire escape! My mother and I put blankets and pillows out there in the summer. That was a big thing. We had one bedroom, a living room, a bathroom, and a kitchen. It was hot inside.

  Sometimes there were seven or eight of us in that three-room place. My uncle came back from World War Two, and then sometimes there were cousins too. There were a lot of beds that would come out at night. At one point, I even slept between my grandmother and my grandfather.

  In first grade at school, I was extremely obedient. In about the second grade, the teacher started putting me in school plays. And then she had me read for the assembly. The Bible! I was the guy who got up and read the Bible to start assembly.

  There was this teacher, Blanche Rothstein, the drama teacher, who went to my apartment to talk to my grandmother and to tell her things about me. To this day I don’t know what they were, but I think they had to do with encouraging me to be an actor. She actually climbed those five flights of stairs to say that to my grandmother.

  This is why to this day I say “It’s the teachers.” That’s why when anybody says “teacher” I light up. There it was, in this South Bronx public school, recognizing something I was doing that made her say that there was real hope there. I don’t know, because otherwise I think I was pretty hopeless.

  The conduct thing started when I hung out with kids that sort of pulled you with them. You were influenced by them. They were influenced by you. It worked both ways.

  After third grade, my mother had to come to school pretty much once a year to talk to the teachers. Their conclusion? That I needed a dad. My mother was adamant. She said it was because we were poor and, because of that, she had to work. And besides which, she said, I had a great relationship with my grandfather.

  As I got older, I noticed that I would become close friends with males who became my father figures, like my grandfather had been to me—like Lee Strasberg of the Actors Studio, for instance.

  When I was a young teenager, three or four of us hung out together. We were extremely close. We played tag on the roofs, believe it or not. We’d hop from one roof to the next. One time I was running full out to leap over to the next roof when I saw this alley between the roofs. I pulled myself back just in time. I swiveled around and went back because I knew I was going to go down. We also scaled the roofs when we were about ten or eleven. Remember those TV aerials? We’d kind of hold on to them as a balancer—and we’d walk on the edge of the rooftops. Now I couldn’t even look down if I had to. Nobody ever fell, thank God.

  Some of my closest friends, like my friend Cliffie, became drug addicts. They started taking drugs at ages fourteen, fifteen, but they had IQs that went through the roof. At the same time they were into drugs they had little pocket books of Dostoyevsky in the back of their pants. I was very fortunate. I wasn’t into drugs.

  My mother kept me off the streets on school nights. My friends weren’t controlled that way. They had the kind of freedom and abandon that led to drugs and difficulty. I was so angry with my mother for keeping me home when I wanted to go out. It wasn’t until later in life that I fully realized what she had done for me. What can I say? I hope my kids don’t take that long.

  ROBERT F. LEVINE

  Entertainment lawyer, literary agent

  (1940– )

  As a kid I was fat and I was smart, and my mother supported me unconditionally. When she took me to the family doctor who told her, “You know your son is too fat and you should do something about that,” her response was, “My son is too fat? Look at your wife.”

  I was always at the top of my class in public school. I was smart enough to manipulate my world to avoid activities in which I couldn’t be the best. Even now, I find myself gravitating toward things that I’m good at rather than changing myself. For instance, I don’t want to ski. I’m not interested. It comes from a combination of built-in fear a
nd wanting to excel. I figured out how to manipulate my world so it worked for me. I avoided sports because I wasn’t good at them. I hated phys ed because I wasn’t good at it. I found climbing ropes really hard. I wasn’t good at it. Instead of building my body and learning how to climb the damn ropes, I figured out how to avoid the class.

  In retrospect, it limited my life. And not being good at sports was a source of some humiliation for me. I was good enough at other things so it wasn’t held against me, but it bothered me. When you’re used to being the smartest in the class and then you’re the last one picked for the team, it feels like shit.

  When I went to Bronx High School of Science, my views expanded because it was a window onto the world. When you grow up as a working-class, lower-middle-class Jewish person in a Jewish neighborhood, the world is very small. The world is your neighborhood. The world is your building. You know everybody in the building. The kids in the building play together. You know all the people in the neighborhood because they all play together. When I went to Bronx High School of Science, all of a sudden the world got bigger. Really much bigger. One weekend you’d go to a party in a Bronx tenement. The next weekend you’d be at a party on Park Avenue. The high school had kids from all over, which is why it worked. There was this mix. Upper-middle-class kids from Manhattan professional families went to school with kids like me who were from these very limited Jewish neighborhood places. Seeing how other people lived made me want to get away. To get out of my small world, my parents’ world.

  My mother grew up during the Depression and that defined everything. The people who grew up that way had a level of fear about the world that was scary. My mother was one of the most frightened of people. She was terrified. Terrified of risk. Everything needed to be secure. The intention of life was to be safe, so I grew up with a fear of taking risks, of being out on a limb. You have to have a safe job. You have to be a professional. I bought into it, I guess.