But when I was with my mother, it was “You’re wrong, Sonny Boy, you used to be sweet as sugar, who gave you this mean streak?”
So in the presence of my mother I went back to the Bronx, spiritually. Undercover again. I talked less, pretended to listen, and when I chose to speak, more likely than not, I didn’t mean a word I said.
It was all about positioning myself. My guess is that I felt ill at ease from birth. My mother used to tell me what a good baby I was. But I don’t believe it. I think I faked it. I believe it was my first lie. Yanked out of a comforting womb into a blindingly bright world of endless unease, where from the first moment of consciousness I was called upon to do, unwillingly, nothing less than what I’m called upon to do, still unwillingly, eighty years later: cope.
I don’t like it now; I’m very sure I didn’t like it then. The last thing in the world I was meant to do was cope. I was meant to have others cope for me. I was ordained to be cope-free. Waited on hand and foot. A child of privilege. Succored. Not sucked up and spit out, again and again and again.
I was meant to be adored, and I suspect I was. For about a day and a half, maybe a week. I don’t know. Anyhow, it spoiled me, it set me up for my later fall, an ongoing cycle of falls.
I don’t know who set me up. And I lack the funding to research this. And I shouldn’t have to bother. Somebody should do the job for me. Somebody should have done it a long time ago. Dug into the scandal of my earliest childhood: how I went from being adored and spoiled rotten to, in a matter of days, perhaps minutes, a nonentity. Not slated for center stage, where I rightfully belonged, but pushed to the sidelines, largely overlooked, not ever the one picked out of the crowd, not destined for stardom, not I, never stardom. No: they cast me for best friend.
What did my father know and when did he know it? How complicit was my mother? Was it she who set me up? “Is there anything I ever did to you that you resent me for?” Was her question an encoded confession of residual guilt rising to the surface to cry out, “Sonny Boy! I was wrong!”
J’accuse!
Rhoda and Jules, 1933
DANNY
I was not a generous-hearted kid, but I acted like one in public—as much as I could, with as little cost to myself as possible. A boy in the next building, 1225 Stratford Avenue, Danny, younger even than Alice, took on great interest for me.
Danny was a blue baby. He had what they called in those days a hole in his heart. He wasn’t bedridden, but he was housebound, home educated, and spoiled rotten, primarily by his mother, who was making up for the crime of bringing this deathly ill child into the world, this boy without a single friend. His parents, decent, generous working-class people, had heard of my interest in comics. Danny loved comics. He hardly ever left his bedroom, which had mountains of comics, more than I’d find in Pensky’s corner candy store. Comic books were his mother’s come-on to me to become Danny’s friend. I could borrow any book I wanted, the world was mine, all I had to do was spend two or three hours after school several days a week and pretend that I liked Danny. I was being offered a bribe to become Danny’s friend, and though I found such an offer mortifying and the comment it made on my character humiliating, I thought—what the hell—why not try it out for a while.
Danny was not predicted to live past twelve. That was a lot of comics for me to read in the four years he had left, comics I would rarely buy for myself. My dimes were not plentiful, coming mainly from delivering drugs for Kaminkowitz, our corner drugstore. So I had money to buy only the DC line: All-American, Action, Detective, as well as newspaper reprints from Popular Comics and King Comics. Danny’s collection opened up a vast storehouse of additional material: the Marvel line—The Human Torch, The Sub-Mariner—as well as Fiction House, with the brutal, brilliant art of Charles Biro’s Daredevil and Jack Cole’s The Claw. Opportunistic as I seemed to myself, how could I boot this golden opportunity?
Danny was eight at the time, small, a narrow gray face without expression, guarded blue eyes, a mop of long blond hair. He was so skinny, he made me look muscular. When Danny walked, it took his entire body pumping away to get him across the room. His arms and legs swung in and out in straight lines stiff as a gate. His breathing sounded amplified. Walking from one room to another took almost as much effort as climbing a hill.
Alone with him in his room, I felt trapped as if in a hospital ward. Virtually every move he made, everything he did, was mildly repellent to me. Here I was taking cruel advantage of this kid, and I felt exploited. How could I be so crazy as to think that the borrowing of comic books was enough for the self-loathing I had to endure? I couldn’t and didn’t hide my motives from myself, establishing a friendship that embarrassed me, working hard to please, using my talent for mimicry, mockery, wacky humor to get him laughing. And he did laugh. Nobody made Danny laugh but me. I spent endless hours with Danny in his dark ground-floor apartment, entertaining him, making up stories and funny voices to fit his small army of tin soldiers, exerting myself to such extremes of forced hilarity that I would leave this sick eight-year-old dangerously hysterical with laughter.
To laugh at me as openly and trustingly as Danny did acted on me as a form of seduction. How could I resist him? His laughter, almost against my will, moved to make us friends, real, not fake. In some ways I could see that this kid was more like me than my real friends, with whom I was just as much of a fake as I was with Danny. After a year or two of our evolving friendship, my self-loathing lifted. As I got older and smarter, I could say things to Danny that would calm him down when he went into one of his rages. His mother, Ruth, in a frenzy of slavish devotion, trying to make up for the condition that the medical world said would kill him before he was twelve, gave in to his every request, demand, outrageous outburst. Anything he needed, or said he needed, whether or not they had the money to buy it—his father Sid drove an oil delivery truck—they managed, nonetheless, to get for him. At whatever price they had to pay, financially, emotionally, argumentatively. The parents fought a lot.
Sid was a short, muscular, essentially good-natured workingman. What he saw, and could do nothing to stop, was his wife’s dark and tragic need to placate and correct what was left of Danny’s life. Nothing was too good for Danny, especially what Ruth saw to be the growing bond between us. In our early days I played the clown, but in three or four years—for Danny did not die—I became his mentor and role model.
At about the time he was twelve, heart surgery was developed that gave Danny a chance at some other kind of life. He did not have to remain an invalid, he was not going to die in a week or a month or a year. It was not clear how long he would live, he was not cured, but he was mobile now. He could take walks. He no longer moved his arms and legs like a cross-country skier. He could leave the house, he could go to a public school, he could take classes.
By the time I was writing plays, Danny had ambitions to be an actor. He came over to my Riverside Drive apartment every once in a while and read a part he was auditioning for in a play. I’d advise him on his lines and he said I was helpful. We weren’t friends anymore. We had drifted apart in my twenties, soon after I was drafted. And now I was married, a father, settled and famous. Danny was adrift, a single young man working at junk jobs and hoping to get as lucky as his role model.
I did him small favors, the very littlest I could do, calling up a few contacts to arrange for off-Broadway auditions. But the truth was that though I thought Danny had talent and that he might develop into a good and interesting character actor, the real character that emerged in his adult years I didn’t care for that much. I had done Danny so much wrong for so many years that it made me uneasy to admit I didn’t like him.
At his funeral at twenty-seven, his mother in her grief accused me of filling his head with pipe dreams, as Eugene O’Neill’s Hickey might have said, making him think he could act, so that he worked so hard at it, too hard, didn’t take care of himself, died too soon not because he had to but because he was too ambitious, an ambition
he never would have had except for me. I gave him the ambition his mother said killed him.
I didn’t do it on purpose. It was the time we spent together—and the talk. I talked to Danny about what was important to me. I thought I should. It was in trade for his comic books.
RED ED
Mimi, four years older than I, preceded me to James Monroe High School. Her friends, mostly male, liked to visit our house after school and on weekends. They were talkative the way Mimi was but I found them to be wittier and more engaging. Mimi had a lot of charm but she didn’t waste much of it on me. But in conversation with Emil and Woody and Willie and Sam, her charm (and theirs) was all too apparent. Charming even in regard to the Civil War in Spain (they all sided with the Loyalists and against General Franco), the coming war in Europe (they favored the Soviet Union against everyone else), labor’s ongoing struggle to organize (they sided with the CIO, particularly its militant, pro-Communist wing, against the AF of L). They were vocal about civil rights and repeal of the poll tax and carried, with their school texts, copies of Richard Wright’s Native Son. A few were active in the YCL (Young Communist League) but, whether members or not, they were equally pro-Soviet. “Fellow traveler” was the catchphrase in those years, 1938 to 1942, when Mimi was in high school and made her mark.
Mimi’s crowd was fast-talking, fast-quipping, mischievous, naughty, left, meaning far left in their politics, their taste in books, art, movies, and just about everything else. When Mimi had her moment, the New York City high schools were a beehive of left-wing activity. Kids, if they were not Red, were a hottish pink. Teachers were Reds, and if not Reds, fellow travelers. Being a Communist meant a sense of commitment and mission that filled in the blanks for those who saw themselves as lost in the shuffle. In a time of Depression, anti-Semitism, racism, and a coming war, it gave them a doctrine, a dogma, the answer.
Thanks to the revealed truths of Marx and Lenin, Mimi and her friends were in the “vanguard.” They spoke of the injustices around us and the evils that threatened us with boisterous verve, irony, and humor. History, they had learned from Marx, was on their side. Their talk was rapid-fire and wise-guy intellectual, full of self-confidence. This was her gang as she rose through the ranks from A student to girl reporter on the Monroe Mirror, the award-winning high school weekly, to its first-ever female editor in chief.
She was on a fast track, and I was very much in her shadow, in awe of her and her friends, who, when she brought them over to the house after school and on weekends—astonishingly!—liked to spend time with me. They liked to look at my homemade comic books—and discuss them—ask questions about my one and only area of expertise, newspaper strips and comic books.
I was enamored of them. No one that close to adulthood had ever taken me seriously or discussed my interests as if they weren’t childish. And during our conversations, my level of self-deprecating smart-assery rose to meet theirs. These trenchant put-down artists, stimulating, provocative, who, because of their politics, might well lose the game but never the argument—I studied their style. Even when they were losing, they acted like winners, as if someday we would all be living in the world they advocated.
It was this style that drew me to their politics. No one of a conservative or religious bent had their nervy, cocky, turn-your-own-argument-against-you (you made my point!) swashbuckling demeanor. I wanted to be like them long before I understood what they were saying. Their style of radicalism seduced me as much as or more than its substance. Could this wry, smart-ass, wiseguy style work as my own approach? I, who didn’t know how to talk back, who hadn’t fashioned a language for talking back? A method, perhaps, by which I could even rebut my sister, who, when she wasn’t my press agent, was my persecutor. Her temper was terrifying, her eloquence unstoppable. Was a single well-placed smart-ass comment from me likely to stop the unstoppable? I could talk myself into believing many fantasies, but not that one.
My friendships did not stand out well in comparison with Mimi’s. Mimi’s friends were more interesting than mine: Morty, Georgie, Dick, Irwin, Larry, Saul, Lou were all bright and engaging. And though I liked them, I was not quite myself with them. By my early teens I had adopted a “socialized Jules” persona that conformed to the norms of expected behavior, shooting for shallowness—joking, teasing, bullshit, and bravado. Conversations were about baseball and movies and lust. Nobody said “fuck.” This was the forties—and we were Jewish. But we did say, “Would you look at the pair on her?”
“What a piece of ass!”
“She’s a dog.”
“Arf, arf.”
“I bet she fools around.”
“She puts out.”
“You want to do it your first time with a dog like that?”
“Your first time, not my first time.”
It was social lust, different from true lust. True lust was directed at girls. Social lust was targeted at your friends in an attempt to impress them. In any case, lust was primarily a diversion. Our true passion was the New York Yankees: DiMaggio, King Kong Charlie Keller, Old Reliable Tommy Henrich, Allie Reynolds, Vic Raschi, and Fireman Joe Page. All our insider baseball knowledge was gleaned from Yankee radio announcer Mel Allen, whose comments were repeated with the urgency of breaking news. No one talked about books. Culture was generally sidelined, limited to opera talk with Irwin Jacobs. He and I played arias recorded from La Bohème and Rigoletto. My taste in opera was first formed by my mother, who, from my early childhood, tuned in to Texaco’s Metropolitan Opera broadcasts on Saturday afternoons. Now my mother’s influence was ceded to Irwin: a preference for Puccini (also one of my mother’s favorites) and Verdi. Mozart came in a lagging third. Jussi Bjöerling was Irwin’s favorite tenor, and therefore mine. Movies were not part of culture in those days. They were not discussed other than in terms of the simplest judgments: “Wasn’t that great?” “That stank!”
High school, which had been such a triumph for Mimi, was a crucible for me. In those days, kids went from elementary school to junior high, then on to high school. But Herman Ridder, the junior high to which Mimi had gone, was a trolley car ride away. I was willing to do anything to avoid a terrifying trolley ride to a far-distant place a half hour away where I had to pass through unknown, non-Jewish neighborhoods and walk two or three blocks. Who knew in which direction? I was certain to get it wrong.
But the only way to avoid that trolley car ride was to elect a language course that was not taught at Herman Ridder Junior High, a language exclusive to James Monroe, which was only a three-block walk from my house. That language was Hebrew.
Unable to learn the short Hebrew text of my bar mitzvah ceremony, I signed on for Hebrew as my language major because I was afraid of the trolley. Added to science, which I couldn’t learn, and math, which I couldn’t learn, and gym, which I couldn’t learn, was Hebrew.
Art, English, and history were the three courses I understood. I enjoyed and looked forward to them. Every other course was an exercise in confusion, endurance, fakery, and cheating. I couldn’t learn in school, couldn’t listen or absorb what I was taught. Words did not come together the way they were supposed to. I struggled with elusive meanings and baffling texts and unintelligible diagrams and equations. I was stunned and blindsided, made to feel like an immigrant days off the boat. Much of what I was taught sounded like gibberish, double-talk, and the parts that weren’t, that I could fathom, didn’t take me far. Just as I thought I was getting somewhere, inexplicably I’d tune out. The more I tried to absorb, the more my teachers’ words wafted off into a narcoleptic drone.
What I was unable to learn in class I partially made up for by studying and reading and reviewing at home. I was able to take what my teachers seemed to be saying as rudimentary lesson plans. What I was able to figure out from my notes I put to use as guidelines for my own home study. If I ignored their way, I might learn by my own method, which was to translate from school-speak to Jules-speak, decoding lectures into language that I thought I understood. Tr
eating myself as just as much a stranger to these shores as my parents and grandparents. Sweating hard at decoding lessons well enough to fool my teachers and get by.
It didn’t occur to me that I might have a learning disability. What I had, in my judgment, was a school disability. By gritting my teeth and slogging through to graduation (and then, by some miracle, eking out a college degree), I would turn my back on institutions of learning and become a free man. I would never be asked to pick up a textbook again. I would never again have to listen to a lecture. My high school diploma was to be my green card, my official entry into the real world, to get on with my real life, for which I knew I was better suited than for this strange and puzzling high school universe in which I pretended to be present as I tap-danced, smiling and joking, to places unknown.
I took it for granted that I would be the Monroe Mirror’s cartoonist. Hadn’t my sister been its editor in chief? Couldn’t I assume a process of natural selection? So how could I be expected to pay attention in class when the classroom wasn’t my focal point? It was the Mirror, two floors down, that’s where my thoughts were. To see my cartoons in print, reproduced in ink in a real newspaper. Not pencil drawings in a fake comic book. To pencil in a cartoon panel, then ink it in with pen, a crow-quill nib like the ones the big boys used, which, if you learned how to handle it right, gave you a thick and thin line, the kind of line a boy cartoonist had to develop if he wanted to look like the real thing. To see this cartoon in the actual newspaper instead of on my drawing board or spread out as my comic books were, all over the bedroom floor, to open to page 3 of the Monroe Mirror, a prizewinning, much-admired high school newspaper, and there I would be. In print.
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