by Clancy Sigal
We on the bottom of the pile could breathe again.
But the suspicion never quite left me that World War II, the “good war,” was anything but good, and that it was a continuation of the demolition job on our morale and militance that the Depression had begun. I did not know at the time that legions of grown-ups were grappling with the same dilemma as two Lawndale boys who had loved each other in the winter that changed all our lives.
While Barney and I were still brothers-in-dissent, we had an American history class together from a teacher named Miss Saunders, who was the sand in my oyster.
She was a small, disputatious woman with distressed hair and a kyphosis-shaped back, who spouted crabby “isolationist” opinions and was a troubling, provocative, superb classroom educator at Marshall High. I owe her. She and I spent the semester screaming at each other, boring everyone else in the room but ourselves. She called it “Mister Roosevelt’s war,” her code phrase for Jewish-instigated, and kept dropping heavy references to “Warburg” and “Rothschild.” If I leaped from my seat to protest, her typically manic flushed face would pull a violent rictus and she’d jump up from her desk to stamp her feet. “Pulling England’s chestnuts out of the fire!” she’d snarl in fury, and froth white foam at the corners of her mouth, which she did in moments of excitement. I was up and down in my seat like a jumpin’ jack, supposedly to debate with her but really to pull her chain, when one day she lost it and hurled herself from her desk and ran at me with a wooden ruler in her upraised fist.
“You little Communist bastard!” she shrieked, waking up the half of the class that was asleep. She was trembling from the top of her nearly bald head to her brown Oxford shoes as she launched herself straight at me. She’s going to hit me, I thought, and I’ll be the talk of Marshall High. Some miracle of self-control stopped her at the last second, and she stood over me glowering and frothing so heavily I thought she was going to have an apoplectic fit. At last she drew a deep breath to keep her voice steady. “GET OUT! Out! Out this instant! Go to the Communists where you and your kind belong!”
Your kind. Anti-Semitic bitch, I thought cheerfully.
The hall bell rang. As we students tumbled out of Miss Saunders’ room, one of the boys from the class was hanging around outside waiting for me. Max Weinstock, gauntly tall, awkward, and intense, put his hand on my arm. “Some performance you put on there,” he said. “If you’re interested, I can show you some real Communists.”
Thus began my next life.
But it was without Barney Herzog. No more beloved friends. Now I had comrades.
My Joe resists any hint from me that I want him to believe as I do. But sometimes blood will tell, and he’ll surprise me, like the other day as we’re coming back from Little League practice, he bursts into song:
Oh, Franklin Roosevelt/
Told the people how he felt/
And we damn near believed what he said …
I look over and ask, “Do you know what that song means?” He glances at me derisively and seems to channel Jennie through one of her favorite responses, “You think I’m stupid?”
10 Old Folks at Home
JENNIE, AN ASPIRING ENTREPRENEUR who hated the profit motive, started up yet another doomed business at about the time Hitler goose-stepped into Paris and in Mexico City a Stalinist hit man stabbed Leon Trotsky in the head with an ice pick. Nowadays, this new enterprise might be called an “assisted living residence” in our apartment in a cheap floor-through at 4104 West Grenshaw. The entire building smelled richly of tobacco because Mr. Ginsberg, who lived upstairs, was a cigar maker hand rolling leaves on his dining room table.
Ma and I had but one client, a senile, dribbling, apple-cheeked diabetic named Mr. Haroldson, who sat on his bed all day in a ratty bathrobe and made halfhearted passes at me. (“Here’s a nickel. Come be a nice boy.”) If he followed me out into the hallway with malice aforethought, I body slammed him but he liked it a little too much. Unperturbed, Jennie advised, “Be broad-minded, son. All he needs is a little human contact.” I sure gave him that. The bar for child or elder abuse was set rather high at the Grenshaw Home for the Aged, as Ma called us, because we needed the money the grown Haroldson children gave us for his upkeep.
A whole different mind-set operated in Lawndale when it came to child endangerment. There was no elaborate social service and police apparatus sensitive to, or set up to deal with, crimes like rape or incest, and this fairly low level of awareness may have licensed some family crimes. The neighborhood dealt rough justice to troublemakers or let it pass, but only in rare instances took it to the law, which was universally seen as hostile to poor people.
We did our best for Mr. Haroldson, feeding him regularly and giving him his daily insulin injections (I got good at this) and being gracious to his mistress, who arrived by taxi twice a week. She wore enough lipstick and rouge to start a cosmetics factory, weighed about two hundred pounds and swept in like the Queen of England, reeking of White Lies perfume. She locked Mr. Haroldson’s bedroom door behind her. “What do they do in there?” I asked Ma. She shrugged. “It keeps him occupied.” Then her peculiar sense of humor kicked in. “Finally a man in the house.”
Two men, actually.
Out of the night mist, again without explanation or excuse, Dad turned up for his final appearance in our lives. He’d been gone a year, four months and nine days. (I kept a calendar.) Our apartment seemed to come alive when he was in it. To keep him happy and at home I went for boxing lessons at the local club—the American Boys Commonwealth (ABC). The redbrick building had been a gift to the underprivileged from the parents of Bobby Frank, the rich Chicago lad murdered by the “thrill killers,” Loeb and Leopold, in the 1920s. I also practiced deepening my voice and throwing short right hooks in the mirror the way Dad had taught me. He had left me a boy, but now I was a man qualified for him to stay.
With Chinese laundries spreading like fungi all over Chicago, there was even less likelihood of his making a living as a shirt ironer. So Dad, like Jennie, invented yet another hopeless business, delivering starched and finished collars on a waxed string all over town, which gave him an excuse to stay out of the house most days. Mercifully, he let me tag along. I helped him run the enterprise from the lay-down rear door of a $25 much-used Plymouth business sedan. It was like the old days when he took me to Bensinger’s Pool Emporium to see the two Willies, Hoppe, and Mosconi cue it out for the world title. Dad’s few collar customers were the same old guys, the “comrades,” who’d invited him out to Chicago in the first place and who played cards all day in the back of their bankrupt stores. And who adjusted their trousers as if to compensate for the guns they no longer carried in a waistband. They seemed to hold no grudges against him for taking a powder on organizing the anti-Teamster drive.
Please God make him stay, I prayed to the God I didn’t believe in.
One afternoon I cut class and came home early and walked into a side bedroom of the Grenshaw flat where Jennie was on her knees in a housedress blowing Dad. The shades were down, putting them in semidarkness. His naked back arched like a cobra’s, glazed eyes unseeing at the ceiling. Dad was out of it. His glistening penis, wet with Mom’s saliva and his sperm, struck me with an ecstasy of malice, envy, and joy. In my mind, as I fumbled to escape, I magnified his cock to the length of what I fantasized belonged to Doc Savage, Man of Bronze. I was experiencing something like the same morbid thrill as when the rusty old Colt automatic dropped out of his pocket at Slavic Hall. What a man. Ma glanced up and without dropping a stitch, so to speak, spat, and said, “Your father has a rash I’m helping him with.”
Oh, right. A rash. Sure, absolutely.
I backpedalled from the dark room, thinking: How clever of Ma. I saw through her scheme. She didn’t really like what she was doing. But it gave Dad such pleasure that she was forcing herself as a trick to get him to stick around with us. She was doing it all for me. Ah, brilliant Jennie!
Out in the hallway, Mr. Haroldson shuff
led by with his usual feeble touchie-touchie stuff, and absentmindedly I slapped his hand away. Animals, this apartment was full of them. I felt cold and hot at the same time and went outside to sit on the stone steps. Why had this unwanted knowledge come my way, at this particular moment, just after Pearl Harbor, as if that wasn’t enough to think about? Ma looked so undignified on her knees, her standard I’ll-kill-myself posture in front of the gas stove back at the Family Hand Laundry; and Dad getting his rocks off from Ma doing something I associated with suicide-by-gas and strangulation. There had been an expression of pure agony on his gaunt face. This would take time to figure out for sure.
I looked up and down the street, but for once there was little comfort there. Cold now with curiosity and an odd fury, I flew out of myself, soaring high up into the sky to look down on me from a great height like a circling falcon, on a kid on a stoop feeling pretty much as he had when Ma was arrested by the state’s attorney’s cops and he was sure he’d never see her again, a sort of death. Nobody was taking her away this time except Dad, and that’s what I wanted, wasn’t it?
On or off her knees, Jennie was smart but not quite smart enough to keep her man.
Bye-bye Daddy. So much for cocksureness. This time, he took off for good and all. Phffft, gone. Jennie was strangely unmoved, as if she knew all along the rash cure wasn’t going to work. She didn’t even seem surprised when a letter from Dad arrived from off the road. We sat down at the dining room table to read it together. Postmarked Pittsburgh, but headed New York, it was all about his trouble making job contacts, the poor employment market for laundrymen, etc. As a scribbled p.s. he added a note disowning me, bingobongo just like that, declaring he wanted nothing further to do with a son who associated with “red scum.” Ma looked a question at me, and I threw it right back at her. But I knew why he wrote the p.s. Just before he left us, and in a childish burst of euphoria when I believed he might hang around, I bragged that when I grew up I was going to fill his shoes as a labor organizer, my preferred union being the CIO, the young breakaway from his own (more conservative) American Federation of Labor (AFofL), to which he’d given his life. At the time, he’d let it pass as mere chatter, but in this last letter he said he hated a “‘splitter’—rimes with quitter.”
My chin trembled without my meaning it to.
I asked Ma why Dad didn’t want to speak to me again.
Nothing betrayed in her voice. “It’s just an excuse. Probably been carrying that letter around with him for years.”
I went crazy. Crazier.
In the film Dead End there’s a scene where Humphrey Bogart as fugitive criminal startles his old mother by suddenly reappearing in the old slum neighborhood. “Don’t you recognize me, Ma?” he pleads. She stuns him with a hard slap across the face, snarling. “YOU AIN’T NO SON OF MINE!” His morale broken, Bogart commits suicide by shooting it out with the cops. From the moment the Rockets saw Dead End, we slapped each other around mercilessly while screaming “You ain’t no son of mine!” enacting and re-enacting a ritual drama of parental rejection that, in one form or another, we had all encountered.
I wasn’t any son of Leo Sigal’s. But his saying it didn’t make it so. I wrote him letter after letter to a P.O. box without result. After a few months, I figured it all out. To hell with him, his union, his cigar. He was going to have a tough time getting rid of me.
When a father abandons a son, the son takes on the role of guilty party. If you have admired your father, then you must see his wisdom in ditching you. You deserve punishing because he knows you for the piece of shit you know yourself to be. He’s a man, and men know things. You don’t cut it for him. If only you were more compliant, less of a flincher, or more loving in some unspecific way, he would still be here. Better yet, if you had not been born. That’s it. He left because you exist.
So you do your best to self-destruct.
A Kiss to Build a Dream On
A cultural feature of Lawndale life was the prevalence of pre-teenage kissing games when few, if any, of us even knew what a vagina was, let alone where it was. From about twelve on, spin the bottle, post office, truth and dare and freeze tag were established parts of my Friday-to-Sunday nights. We’d use any excuse for a weekend party, in some empty building or an apartment where the parents were away and then … kiss away like sixteen inch guns. We called it smooching, and the girls seemed as eager to play—is the word indulge?—as the Rockets.
Technically, there was a lot of body rubbing and face rolling, except that we absolutely did not do “Frenchie.” The first time a girl tried to slip her tongue between my lips I leaped back in disgust. Eww! The point was to play at dread or anticipation … peck here and there … dodge from unattractive girls … but also steer clear of the most beautiful girls because we wanted them so … and try not to lose status when, in post office, we were chosen by a girl we liked too little or too much.
Kissing games could be risky. If you were seen deriving too much pleasure from kissing a girl, you lost macho points in the playground on the following Monday. And if you kissed the “wrong” girl—for example, sent her a “special delivery” (long kiss in dark closet)—and she had a larger boyfriend or, God forbid, someone like Angie Lombardo from ethnic-enemy turf, you could call upon your head all the devils of passionate revenge. And then, of course, there was always Father Lenihan’s warning that your fingers and toes could drop off if you caught VD from an unclean girl’s touch. But how could one tell who washed?
Kissing was like playing baseball. You had to concentrate if you wanted to succeed … though “succeed” at what I had no idea. So far, girls were simply odd collections of hips, breasts and eyes, and I hadn’t yet learned to puzzle the jigsaw pieces together into a human something connected in any way with the serious sexual activity I suspected Ma got up to either with Dad, or whomsoever when he wasn’t around. In other words, I wanted the kissing—like the neighborhood—to go on forever without much change.
It could also be confusing. The prettiest girls were not always the “best” kissers. Irene Wukowski, a quite overweight young lady of my age, took a shine to me, much to the Rockets’ merriment, and sent me special deliveries every time we collided at a party. She’d wrap me in her big fleshy arms and press me to her woman’s bosom and plant one on me that … was terrific. I fought clear the first time, but when she really went after me I gave in and let her swallow me up practically on top of her Matisse-like body. Something wrong here. Kissing pretty girls was fine, in its way, but Irene gave me a boner every time. I was beginning to suspect that there was something very complicated about this kissing thing.
And that was my mind set when Cenza Dominici entered my life at fifteen.
With Dad gone. It was ridiculously easy to mess up. Leo Sigal was tough? I’d be tougher. There was no risk I imagined he took that I could not do double.
To get right to the heart of the matter, I hooked up with Innocenza Dominici, the most dangerous girl on the west side. “Cenza” was sixteen, black-eyed, and the girlfriend of “Crazy Angie” Lombardo, a slim dark Sicilian-American teenager with a ferocious rep as a knife fighter and implacable avenger of slights nobody but he noticed. One moonless night, I took Cenza out to Douglas Park for my, but not her, first sex experience. Actually, the night was so cold and we did it so fast on a bench I’m not sure it happened. She did something, I did something, the moon came out of the clouds, and I clearly saw Cenza’s face looking up at me more in curiosity than passion. “I love mockies,” she said.
Mocky, sheeny, nickel nose, Ikey-mo, Hebe, clip tip (for circumcised), Hymie, Abie, Crikey (Christ Killer), Morta Cristo (same thing, in Italian), bagel dog—all anti-Jewish slurs commonly used by the Eye-talians or Irish against us on the street or at school. Often passed casually in conversation, like “Who’s the Abie broad?” Cenza made “mocky” sound like a word of endearment.
I’d done it (if I had) with Cenza because I knew she was sure to snitch to Angie and he would kill me. A g
lorious death in Rocket terms: my legend would live on. Except that it didn’t quite happen that way. In due stomach-churning time, Angie and several of his brothers, cousins, and friends led a squadron of cars down the middle of Roosevelt Road shouting anti-Semitic insults and flinging empty beer bottles and bricks at our make-out joint, Flukey’s Hot Dogs, and fled the scene laughing. Within the hour, older Jewish guys from Davy Miller’s bookie joint, swinging tire chains and sticks, had put together a retaliatory caravan that struck deep into Italian territory, and I jumped on the running board of one of the Jewish cars. The newspapers later reported it as a “race riot,” but really it was just a few punches thrown, no knives or guns, before we got back into our cars and retreated to our side of the racial frontier. As usual, the reporters got there before the police. Maybe a year later Angie passed me on the street and I thought, Sicilians will wait forever for revenge, and I got set for my execution by throat slitting. He just breezed by without a glance. I felt bitterly disappointed, because I’d spent so long gearing up for this confrontation and he was letting me off his hook with total indifference. What a put-down!
Nobody got killed in the so-called riot, though it wasn’t for want of trying. I think the mayor appointed a “racial harmony” committee, the boys’ clubs got an extra donation, and even the senior gangsters stepped in to enforce a truce, because too many cops were coming around. All from the simple act of slipping my hand inside Cenza Dominici’s blouse on a black, frigid night and praying for my extinction one way or the other.
A pity Dad hadn’t been there to see it. Next time I’d have to go one better.
In the War
1942—110,000 Japanese-Americans “relocated” to concentration camps. Sugar and gas rationing.
That first summer of the war, life for us was much better. Jennie got a real full-time job sewing olive drab sweaters for the multiplying U.S. army, and then—all hail to the “national preparedness drive”—her paycheck allowed us to rent a virtual mansion all to ourselves, no sharing of the bathroom down the hall, no landlords sneaking in to check if a light was on. A second-floor back at 3451 Douglas Boulevard, our most respectable address ever—and, blissfully, once again in Rockets territory—was a one-and-a-half room apartment with a Murphy pull-down bed that came out of the wall on its spring hinge. Jennie now could afford new clothes and I had a little pocket change from working in a grocery store when the owner’s son got drafted. It looked like the end of the endless summer of the Depression.