Rusty: “Do you believe in the Immaculate Conception?”
Joe: “Ha!”
Rusty talked incessantly of when and where he’d take off. St. Louis seemed a possibility, even though it left him two hundred miles short of his goal. He was uncomfortable with our little family. He was the odd Protestant out. “I think you should drop me off here,” he said to Joe and pointed to a spot on the map. Zanesville, Ohio.
“There’s nothin’ there. Fuck it, we’ll find a better place.” And the better places sped by. Rusty, unable to insist, didn’t know how to talk his way out of Joe’s car.
The more I was enamored of Joe, the more impatient I became with Rusty. Joe and Jules on the road, that was the story. Rusty was an irritating footnote. It took little effort for me to turn him into a caricature of sterile Christian faith. I switched seamlessly into an anti-Christian bigot, a born-again Jew sharing character and dimension with my Catholic brother, two standard bearers of ethnic ballsiness versus white-bred blandness.
On our fourth day out, Joe claimed he’d run out of money. He’d have to stop in the next town, Fulton, Missouri, and see how much he could raise selling the Cadillac. Unless he could borrow just enough from Rusty and me, for gas, motels, and sundries.
I was down to fourteen dollars, but I was willing, with the smallest cautionary twinge, to turn it over to Joe. Rusty denied that he had any money. But several times a day I observed him sneaking a wallet out of his pants pocket and checking its contents to make sure that Joe and I hadn’t robbed him.
No matter. He had made up his mind to go, and later that day he finagled it.
We had stopped at a diner for lunch. Joe insisted on paying: “Maybe our last meal.” In the middle of our meal Rusty excused himself to talk to three young people at a table across the room. He explained that one of the girls in the group was wearing a sweatshirt with the logo of a school connected to Rusty’s church. Minutes later, when he returned to our table, it was to say good-bye. They had offered him a ride, and he had accepted. Were they going his way? Rusty ignored the question. They could have been going in the opposite direction and he would have gone with them.
“How much money you got?” Joe asked after I paid for the meal that he said was on him. I was down to seven dollars.
Joe thought about it: “We can make it to New York if we’re careful.” We were in Lansing, Michigan, when he said this.
Who cared? I had a ride that started in the Mojave Desert and it was going to take me home! A single ride of three thousand miles! We would make it on seven dollars—what was to stop us? My pal Joe was in my corner, my winning ticket to everything that I dreamed of.
Two days later, we didn’t have a quarter for the toll to get us through the Holland Tunnel. I panicked. There, across the river, the towers of Manhattan teased, so near, so far. I was stuck forever on the Jersey side unless I used my last nickel to call my mother and pleaded with her to come to New Jersey with a quarter to rescue us.
Can you believe the humiliation? I was seconds away from tears when I noticed that Joe had left the stalled car waiting on line to go through the Holland Tunnel. I spotted Joe working his way down traffic, from one idling car to another, his right hand out, palm upward. He was looking for handouts. And getting them. I watched with shame (my mother’s son) and glee (Joe’s son) as coins and even a few dollar bills spilled out of car windows into Joe’s open palm. It took only a minute or two. The line of cars began to inch toward the tunnel entrance. “Eleven bucks,” Joe showed me, as he stepped back into the convertible. “You could afford a cab to the Bronx.”
I didn’t want to take Joe’s money, but I thought I would hurt his feelings if I refused. “It’s yours, I’m loaded,” he said, thereby leading me to wonder once again what to believe of this man. If he was loaded, why the charade for handouts? I took the subway home wondering.
Before we parted, I wrote down my Bronx phone number, TIvoli 2-8128—after more than sixty years I still remember it—on a slip of paper for Joe. I asked him for his. He had trouble finding paper, a pen. I found paper. There was something wrong with the pen. When that problem was solved, he wrote down a nearly illegible number for me. “Is this a four or a five, Joe?”
“Lemme look. It’s a four.”
“And is this a two?”
“Waddaya want?”
He seemed anxious to get going.
We said our good-byes. I was certain that it was for keeps. Forget the invitations to clubs, if there were clubs. Forget the B girls, if they existed at all. I was home, back on familiar territory in a familiar stance: celibate.
I walked in on my family at dinner. I had called before I went down in the subway, so they knew Jules was home. But they didn’t know how he got home. They didn’t know that I didn’t take the Greyhound bus. They didn’t know about hitching or my breakup with Doris or my breakthrough at Quality Apparel or my fight with Ed or that I had made up my mind to refuse induction into the army. I was going to be a conscientious objector. And I was going to move out of the house and find my own apartment in Manhattan. Oh, I had so much to tell them.
Seated at the kitchen table with my mother and father and Alice two hours after arriving home, I launched into my hitchhiking revelations and the countless stories that unfolded therefrom. I left out the Doris misadventure because they hadn’t been told the true purpose of my trip. I left out my fight with Ed because my mother didn’t like my having friends who weren’t Jewish, and I wanted to save myself from “You see, Sonny Boy, I was right about him.” I held back on my story of Quality Apparel because this had been my adventure, and I was not about to turn it into a story about my mother’s fashion business. But in florid detail, I recounted my single ride home out of the Mojave Desert with Joe Lane and Rusty Frey. Riotous laughter and shouts of “Slow down, you’re going too fast!” Coming my way for the very first time was the admiration and awe that Mimi regularly encountered when telling one of her stories. It was as if my rite of passage were not in the trip but in my story of the trip.
This was what I had come home for: to be seen as different in my parents’ eyes. As I concluded the story of Joe begging our way through the Holland Tunnel—more screams of laughter—the phone rang. The phone sat on a small table in the foyer between the kitchen and the living room. Alice answered and said, “It’s for you, Jules.”
I picked it up, wondering who could possibly know that I was home? “Hello,” I said, and heard Joe on the other end: “So long as you got home all right.”
I was near tears with happiness. He called! Joe was looking out for me. How could I have doubted him? “Go finish your supper, I’ll call yiz next week.”
When two weeks passed and I hadn’t heard from him, I tried the number he had given me. There was no Joe Lane there, no Joe Lane had ever been there. I tried Brooklyn information with the name Lane, Lanio, any other imaginative embroidery of Joe’s name that I could think of. I couldn’t believe he had done this to me. Was this Joe’s intention all along? Or was he in trouble? Was he in hiding? Was he rubbed out? I felt rubbed out.
Joe, in and out of my life in less than a week, vanished with his clubs, his B girls, his promises. I wasn’t getting laid! I was without a protector.
I lacked the guts to move out. I lacked the guts to be a conscientious objector. I was going to be drafted. On Monday morning, I went back to work at Eisner’s. It was as if nothing in the last month had happened.
THE SECRET OF MY SUCCESS;
OR, OVER THE CLIFF
The army made a satirist out of me. It didn’t make a man of me, as promised by my sergeants and lieutenants. Manhood would have to wait another twenty years, in the aftermath of marriage, divorce, and half raising a child who believed that she was the reason I walked out.
Over the years I have been asked how I came to make certain choices. How did I know? This choice as opposed to that, this direction or that? These questions have little to do with my life as I’ve been led into it. Much of my life a
s a young man was spent ignoring or delaying choices. The choices I made were due to running out of time—or someone else’s patience. Backed into a corner, a choice was made because I no longer had a choice not to. It’s easier when one’s choices get winnowed down from many to not so many, to a couple, to almost none.
It’s a matter of personal style. I seem to be at my best backed into a corner. Having nowhere to go, I spot the one open window and jump through. Choice to me is much like Butch Cassidy and Sundance escaping a posse by jumping off a cliff. They jumped. And survived. It was the right choice. But when it’s not, you’re dead.
Munro was my very first satire, a cartoon narrative about a four-year-old boy who is drafted into the army by mistake and cannot get the powers that be to admit it. It was finally published in 1959 as part of the book Passionella and Other Stories, about seven years after I wrote it. The book became a best seller, and in 1961 Munro opened as an animated cartoon at the Radio City Music Hall with Breakfast at Tiffany’s. It won an Academy Award. But prior to that heady triumph, Munro was rejected by every publisher in New York: Simon and Schuster, Random House, Knopf, Harper and Row, Duell, Sloan, and Pearce … All of the rejecting publishers admired the book. Editor after editor told me how good it was, but their problem, you see, was that they didn’t know how to market it. It had the look of a children’s book, but it was for adults. How could they present it to their salesmen or to bookstores if it didn’t fit into a slot? It defied the established categories. If I was a name author, that would be another story. But nobody had ever heard of me, and so my satire was unpublishable.
Being good wasn’t good enough. Being fresh and original was beside the point. From 1953 to 1959, Munro faced one rejection after another. My cartoon about a boy who didn’t fit into the army didn’t fit into conventional publishing. If I had been rejected by the army as successfully as Munro had been rejected by publishers, I might have ended up without a career.
The day I was scheduled to go down to the draft board for my physical, I went up to the roof of our apartment building and chinned myself on one of the several thin horizontal steel rods used to hang equipment. My arms were weak. Chinning three times was my limit. I had hoped that I would pull a muscle in my back. I had been suffering since fourteen with a chronic back problem—bedridden for four or five days for opening a window the wrong way with one hand while leaning over at a bad angle or for lifting a fifteen-or twenty-pound weight without properly bending and bracing. Any thoughtless move might collapse my lower back, dropping me to the floor screaming and moaning. It was exactly what I was hoping for now.
So there I was, up on the roof, chinning, contorting my six-foot, 130-pound body in order to induce that which came so easily when I didn’t want it. This roof that I was trying to cripple myself on was familiar territory. In summers it was known as Tar Beach because it was where tenants of 1235 Stratford went with blankets and beach chairs and suntan lotion and baby oil and prostrated themselves in the heavy Bronx sun, which felt ten or fifteen degrees hotter than Midtown Manhattan.
Up on the roof with a 360-degree view of a landscape I couldn’t wait to escape (but please, not yet!), I chinned myself, trying to force my not-nimble physique into awkward and strained positions in the hope that my weak and skinny body that couldn’t throw or catch a ball, that didn’t attract girls, that couldn’t beat up anyone—that this loathsome, unloved body would do right by me for once and collapse into back spasm, so that I could flunk my physical and get on with my life.
Once again my body failed me. On January 19, 1951, I was drafted.
MADNESS
I went insane in the army. I was insane for two years, during which time I faked a breakdown. The breakdown was an act, the insanity was real. I didn’t know I was insane. I knew I was unhappy. Distraught. Demoralized. I saw myself as a victim of a Cold War fundamentalism, mindless authority that used language as a propaganda tool, ratcheted up to Orwellian levels where up was down, in was out, and good and God were terms of war, existing under military surveillance.
Seeing all this and understanding very little, I opted for insanity. It was my way of coping in a world where, up till now, I had been expected to cope only to get along, be a good boy. and obey, more or less.
In the Bronx, the good-boy act was tolerable. I was, by nature, a good boy, so it wasn’t that much of a reach even as I thought bad-boy thoughts. Besides, the bad Bronx grown-ups were, as I discovered on my first day in the service, small-bore bad guys, not setting out deliberately to do me in. The damage committed was not for lack of caring. It was for lack of insight and intelligence, which undercut their caring.
I didn’t have enemies in the Bronx, no one was out to kill me. However dense and wrongheaded my parents, teachers, and other authority figures I came up against, they lived under the illusion that they meant well. You can forgive a lot of mistakes if, in the process of being beaten to a pulp, you’re able to think, “At least they mean well.”
They didn’t mean well in the army. They meant to gut me and mount me, divest me of my Jules identity and reinvent me as an army private indistinguishable from all other army privates, no longer Jules and Gene and Rudy and Harry but a unified mass commanded to carry out orders that made no sense but army sense, without logic or reason or respect. And this platoon going by the names of Jules and Gene and Rudy and Harry was systematically robbed of its individualism, indoctrinated by lectures, taunts, insults, veiled and unveiled threats, our wills mugged into understanding that the “I” word was out of step in this man’s army.
Questions asked by lowly privates, comments by lowly privates, wisecracks and differences of opinion, the weird notion of free speech, the application of—God help us!—logic were tantamount to crimes against the state, punishable by extra drill time or KP or forced marches to our final destination: unconditional surrender.
One did not question, one took orders. One accepted the army’s truth, which truth stated that one’s individualism must be subjugated, downsized to an insignificant cog in a war machine training to fight the Communist hordes of North Korea, but training in the long run to do battle overall with godless Communism, sworn enemies of all we believed in as our birthright. And to more effectively do so, the army abrogated our birthright in order to better fight the enemies who didn’t believe in it.
By the second week of basic training at Fort Dix, I lost my power of New York speech. Wisecracks and smart-ass comments formed themselves in my head as always, but they came out garbled, syntax upended, words in the wrong order or not the words I thought I was going to say. I began to distrust what came out of my mouth. It didn’t represent what I meant.
I was under ambush, self-sabotaged to a prehitchhike caricature: inarticulate, stammering, rabbit-in-the-middle-of-the-road-with-headlights-bearing-down-on-him Jules.
If I couldn’t talk, I could draw.
The draft put an end to my remarkable four-year apprenticeship with Eisner. As I have joked over the years, I left Will’s employ to go into the army at a slight increase in pay. I resigned as Eisner’s assistant to become, unexpectedly, Private Harry Hamburg’s assistant. Harry was assigned to the barracks next door. We met in company formation, where we immediately pounced on each other as kindred spirits: Jewish wise guys. Harry, as tall as I, had dark curly hair showing early signs of receding, opening on a sweet boyish face belied by a twinkle in the eye and a grin that promised mischief. Harry came from New Jersey, and his background was commercial art. He could do a lot of what I did, but he could do one thing more: hand lettering. He lettered beautifully and meticulously in expressive, showy styles that nicely launched the two of us into a partnership that got us out of basic training.
I had, from my arrival at Fort Dix, done my self-promotional best to advertise my work on The Spirit and Clifford. The Spirit supplement appeared on Sundays in the Newark Star-Ledger, available in Fort Dix PXs and day rooms. I visited as many as I could, extracting the Spirit section from the welter of other St
ar-Ledger supplements and displaying it with a prominence that I hoped would draw attention to the fact that there was a brilliant young cartoonist on the post. I harbored a mad hope that I could talent my way out of basic.
Basic training was what all new inductees were made to go through, but I saw mine as a special case, in that I was me and they were them. They probably didn’t mind as much as I did the marching, the drilling, the stripping down and putting back together again our M–1 weapons, or the firing range and target shooting, or the bivouacking. Or the infiltration course, where men crawled on their bellies across frozen New Jersey landfill as noncommissioned officers shot live rounds over our heads. Bullets! Live! Over my head! No sir!
I was not about to tempt some bitter career noncom with a resentment of middle-class college-boy draftees born into privileges not open to him, whose leveler was his machine gun with live ammo, which, as I crawled on my belly across the infiltration course, might “accidentally” slip an inch, a foot, two feet. Four perfectly placed slugs between the eyes, these eyes that were meant to lift me out of the same poverty as my assassin noncom’s, these eyes that, with my good right hand, were going to make me a famous cartoonist, though I came from no more privilege and had no more education than he. But does my noncom know that as he lowers his gunsight to spit out his vengeful proletarian bullets and blow me away in a case of mistaken identity? I did not appreciate the bitter irony of my situation. I had to put to use what remained of my dwindling wits to avoid the infiltration course.
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