A deep baritone voice shouted, “Mr. Miller! Mr. Miller!”
I turned around, incredulous, as four tall black youths bore down on us calling my name. How wonderful to be famous! Breathless, they came to a halt before us.
“You are Mr. Miller, aren’t you?”
“I sure am!”
“I knew it!” one of them shouted triumphantly to the others and, turning to me, said, “I recognized you.”
“Well, frankly, you guys had me scared there for a minute.”
We all laughed, and the one who had recognized me shook my hand and said, “Man, I have always enjoyed your music!”
What to say? “You fellas in school?” I asked.
“We go to NYU.”
“Well, you’ve got the wrong Miller. I think you mean Glenn, the bandleader who died a long time ago. I’m a writer.”
Embarrassment, apologies, but they had studied my plays and sweetly pretended to be as enthusiastic as if I had played trombone. We shook hands all over again to validate my revised recognition and parted happily waving to one another.
The shock of release from tension lifted us in a momentary surge of self-satisfaction, as though not luck but my talent had drawn a charmed protective circle around us—a response I recognized to be ridiculous. But if it was not fear I had felt with those running feet bearing down on us, it should have been, I told myself. Was I incapable of real despair? Or was it possible that things in this city were not as bad as advertised?
I knew that my memories of Harlem were deceptively warm. Even in my dreams black people surfaced most often as sufferers and injured, though sometimes obscurely threatening. Like the figure in one dream I had in the sixties, a man at a café table bent over a glass of wine, the brim of his straw hat concealing his face from above—for I was hovering in midair looking down at him—and as I floated closer I saw that a hole had been cut in the side of his hat through which the eyes of a black man were staring at me with an expression neither menacing nor friendly, just frighteningly open to interpretation. He had eyes in the side of his head, saw in all directions, the silent symbol of the force of judgment or the measurer of my high-flying presumptions, or both.
An ambiguous place, Harlem was packed nevertheless with the living and much hope. As darkness fell in the warm evenings, Sid Franks and I would release captured fireflies from jars and watch them swoop down the six stories from our front windows and cross 110th Street to vanish in the park. We would sit impatiently waiting at those windows in the dead of winter, eyes on the flagpole above the boathouse until the red ball flag went up announcing the hardening of the ice, which sent us yelling our way down the elevator and across to the edge of the lake to sit struggling with clamp-on skates that never stayed on very long. It was the Harlem of Joe Aug’s bike store on East 111th, a sensual place in my mind after my fourteen-year-old cousin Richard began hanging around there with a condom drooping out of his breast pocket, the first such apparatus I had seen, the size of it intimidating and promising at the same time. Richard was the one who slept with his mother because he had an incipient case of tuberculosis—the mystery of the connection was never to be solved in my mind—and as if these pied signals of the forbidden were not enough, he had also appointed himself Joe’s helper and clerk, fascinated as he was by the bicycle, a machine that by the age of seven I also found deep pleasure in riding or just thinking about. It would be thirty years or so before a dream gave me the reason: I saw a bicycle turned upside down, and under the sprocket bearing-housing there were three holes, and under them a word lighting up one letter at a time like a theatre marquee—“M-U-R-D-E-R.” That was a hard period with women for me, and the triangular frame of the machine was the female.
But one of my missions to Joe’s store, the most vivid one, had a far more tragic connection with womankind. My mother’s adored mother had had a leg amputated as a result of her diabetes, and something was needed to keep the sheet raised off her wound. I thought the rear fender of my bike might work and, encouraged by my mother, went to Joe to have it removed. Joe was a friend of our family, and his sister Sylvia, still in high school, had been hired by my mother as our all-around helper, museum guide, and spirit of encouragement. She was our baby-sitter, pinner of my mother’s hems, exclaimer of praise for my singing, fetcher to my schoolroom of books I had forgotten, and awestruck audience for any elaborate tale I came home with.
As Joe, a kindly thin little man forever with a cigarette, squinted one eye and unbolted the fender, Cousin Richard held the bike firm, and despite the solemnity of the occasion I found it indecently hard to keep my eyes off the condom hanging from his pocket. Richard, who would become a solid businessman one day, was not yet respectable; through a most pleasant and relaxed cat’s grin he ceaselessly dropped obscenities that had Joe laughing and me embarrassed. He was cool decades before Cool. As I rode off, my fender under my arm, Richard called after me from the doorway of the store, “Ride careful! Watch out for your pipik !”—a particularly sacrilegious farewell when I was bound for the house of my dying grandmother with an object that might well prolong her life. When I arrived at her apartment and softly knocked and the brown mahogany door slowly opened to reveal my mother looking down at me, I knew she had forgotten our plan about the fender. I entered the living room, the eyes of half a dozen anxious faces looking uncomprehendingly down at me and my invention, which I managed to stash next to the doorway before backing out of the apartment like an irreverent disturbance. When Grandmother Barnett died, a few days later, it did cross my mind to ask for my fender back, but it was beyond me to raise the issue. I suspected that it had never even been used, a hard lesson but maybe a necessary preparation for the future’s rejection of so much of my creation.
My first movie was a haunting experience that deepened my misunderstanding of the real. One night, for some reason, the roof of our apartment house was turned into a makeshift theatre, with a few long benches and camp chairs facing a large suspended sheet. I was not yet in school, small enough to look straight ahead at my father’s pocket, from which he took coins to pay our admission. It was a balmy evening, the first time I had been on the roof at night. (Had they gotten Mikush’s permission to walk on his cherished black tar?) A light suddenly blasted the sheet, and large people moved about on it, laughed, chased one another, threw pails of water, and then, drenched, turned to face us and slipped on the sidewalk and fell, and a woman seemed to be weeping but then laughed when a friendly man walked into her room.
Now the light went out—the whole thing had lasted only ten minutes or so—and I asked my father where those people were. Of course he had no idea. So I gripped his fingers and made him follow me around the benches as the small audience was getting up, and we approached the sheet. Why was it so silent back there? I did not let my father’s hand go as I peered behind the sheet, still expecting some wonderful vision full of light and strange scenery and a room where the action I had just witnessed had taken place. But there were only the pipes sticking up from the roof, and overhead the usual stars in the night sky. “Where are the people?” I asked my father again. He shook his head in bewilderment and softly laughed. I felt anger, not at his inability to explain, but at his failure to take the problem I was trying to solve seriously. Had it been my mother, she would doubtless have cooked up an explanation that at least showed some respect for the dilemma.
Three years later in the Shubert Theatre on Lenox Avenue there was a different kind of shock when I saw a curtain go up for the first time. Here were living people talking to one another inside a large ship whose deck actually heaved up and down with the swells of the sea. By this time I had been going to the movies every Saturday afternoon—Chaplin’s little comedies, Fatty Arbuckle, Pearl White’s serials that always ended in frustration, with her head an inch from a buzz saw or the train roaring down the tracks toward her trussed body or her canoe poised on the edge of a waterfall. I had seen the great cowboys: William S. Hart, looking just like his horse with his long expressionless
face and flat cheeks, and later William Boyd and Tom Mix, always cheerful and ready to help everybody—except Indians, of course. Yet once you knew how they worked, movies, unlike the stage, left the mind’s grasp of reality intact since the happenings were not in the theatre where you sat. But to see the deck of the ship in the Shubert Theatre moving up and down, and people appearing at the top of a ladder or disappearing through a door—where did they come from and where did they go? Obviously into and out of the real world of 115th Street, of Harlem, and this was alarming.
And so I learned that there were two kinds of reality, but that of the stage was far more real. As the play’s melodramatic story developed, I began to feel anxious, for there was a cannibal on board who had a bomb and intended to blow everybody up. All over the stage people were searching for him, a little black man in a grass skirt, with two bones knotted into his hair, who would show up, furtive and silent, as soon as the white people went off. They looked for him behind posts and boxes and on top of beams, even after the audience had seen him jump into a barrel and pull the lid over him. People were yelling, “He’s in the barrel,” but the passengers were deaf. What anguish! The bomb would go off any minute, and I kept clawing at my mother’s arm, at the same time glancing at the theatre’s walls to make sure that the whole thing was not really real. The cannibal was finally caught, and we happily walked out onto sunny Lenox Avenue, saved again.
It was not only blacks but also Orientals who were depicted on the stage as sinister. The Hearst press went periodicilly frantic about an oncoming “Yellow Peril,” with the Tong Wars in Chinatown as proof that Chinese were bloodthirsty, sneaky, and—as I would learn in one special vaudeville show put on to combat drug addiction—lustful for white women. Many were the front pages with the immense black headlines “TONG WAR!!”—accompanied by drawings of Chinese cutting each other’s heads off and holding them up victoriously by their pigtails. It made me wonder why anybody went to Chinatown at all. I would ask my parents what tongs were, and they preferred not to talk about them, doubtless having no real notion that they were in fact fraternal organizations. Actually, as in the larger American society, there were feuding racketeers in Chinatown, which would have been reassuring had I known of their existence.
At the vaudeville show on Saturdays, always the most anticipated day of the week, the opening acts—the mildly amazing Chinese acrobat families with their spinning plates and flying children, fairly boring after you had seen them twenty times—were always followed by the equivalent of a visit to the dentist: the classical soprano and the grand piano accompanying her. At the first sight of that piano being pushed onto the stage every kid in the house groaned and began beating his friends and crawling around under the seats. “The Last Rose of Summer” would be followed by one endless “rendition” after another from sopranos who all seemed to share the same high bust and the habit of folding their hands in genteel poise over their ample stomachs. Later I would see them as a punishment demanded by our Puritan conscience and approved by the audience as penance for its otherwise enjoyable two hours.
These included jokers and singers like Eddie Cantor and George Burns and Al Jolson and George Jessel, the black tap dancers Buck and Bubbles and Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and the headline acts like Clayton, Jackson and Durante, whom my father all but revered. He was a connoisseur, having seen these performers so often during his days on the road that he could tell me how their routines had changed. He loved to whistle, and good numbers could keep him happy for weeks whistling the tunes around the house. His highest accolade for a performer was “He puts it over, I tell ya,” and his worst condemnation was “dry.” His judgment was accurate within its limits, and those limits were not narrow. He would hardly have been expected to sit through an hour of Shakespeare, but one day, after my plays had begun to be produced, he recalled a Yiddish theatre production he had come upon years before in the Midwest. He could not recall the play’s title, but the great Jacob Adler was its star.
“He played some kind of king. You know, it was the olden days. And he had these three or four daughters, I think it was three, maybe four. And he’s going to give each one some of his money, and the one that really loves him the most he thinks don’t love him. So he ends up half out of his mind looking for his buttons, and he’s got nothin’ and he’s left standing there in the rain, it was some story. But that Adler, there was an actor, he put it over, I tell ya. I seen that show, must’ve been over forty times, because he was touring for years in it. What I would do I would go past the theatre and ask them when the last scene goes on, because that was the best scene, when he’s out there in the rain. He would belt out a roar that you couldn’t bear to look at him.”
He took performances personally sometimes, and if he adored Jacob Adler, he could almost literally not bear to watch Monty Woolley, a sophisticated bearded comedian who had a big hit in The Man Who Came to Dinner. The movies were low-cost balm and surcease for large audiences during the Depression and into the forties, and he and my mother would always find the quarter or fifty cents for tickets to the local movie house. When Woolley appeared, my father could not sit still and to my mother’s amused annoyance would keep changing seats, moving back and forth across the theatre hoping to get a less irritating view of the actor from a different spot. Not only had he failed to understand how movies worked on the rooftop, but ever after too. Long before our marriage, I first met Marilyn Monroe on the set of a film in which she had a bit part—a movie starring Monty Woolley, my father’s nemesis.
One afternoon at the Regent Theatre on 116th and Seventh—the acrobats having come and gone, and the soprano mercifully finished torturing us—a man in a business suit, the house manager, appeared before the lowered curtain in an unprecedented interruption of the flow of acts. We were now to “witness” a powerful play, he announced, brief but daring, as a warning to all our young people and even some adults about the evils of narcotics. Promising a thrilling and educational drama, he walked off, and the curtain rose on a Chinatown “crib” where foolish uptown white people surreptitiously came to indulge in opium smoking in order to enter “the land of dreams.” Along the back wall were double-decker bunks that, except for their untidy bedding, resembled those in a summer camp dormitory. A couple of Chinese wearing long pigtails and wide sleeves and black pumps packed pipes with opium and fed them to customers who entered, lay down, and smoked with hardly a word to these evil clerks.
A beautiful young woman in a pure white evening gown entered with two fair young fellows wearing white tuxedos and straw boaters. They were all having a night on the town. First one fellow, the cocky one, took a pipe and lit up, then sat on the edge of a bunk and gaily fell back into it, giggling as though he had entered dreamland with one puff. The Chinese quickly wore down the mild resistance of the second, more judicious fellow, and even I understood that with both of her friends out for the count she would be totally unprotected against these slimy Chinks, which was exactly what happened. She in turn was handed a pipe, but she seemed a bit worried. I had all I could do not to rush up to the stage and knock the filthy thing out of her hand. How horrible it was to harm a girl so beautiful! But nothing could stop her from also taking a puff, and her eyelids instantly started drooping. Another puff and she was staggering to the bed. Two Chinese instantly pushed her onto it and conferred excitedly in their strange language. The house manager reappeared at the edge of the stage and announced, “They are discussing her introduction into white slavery and are planning to ship her to a house of ill repute in Singapore !” I was so desperate I wondered why the manager didn’t stop it, but it was not to be. He turned and walked off the stage.
Now one of the Chinese started to climb into the bunk with her. The audience whispered in horror. Gangrenous green light covered the whole scene. Why oh why had she gone to Chinatown? She could have stayed on Park Avenue in her warm, safe home! The Chinese had one leg over the edge of her bunk. Ah, she was still apparently awake, if doped up, and resi
sted him, but so weakly, poor thing. His confederate reached in to hold her arms. A struggle. Gasps from the poor girl. And not a sign of life from her two idiot companions. Oh, how I hated them. Then, suddenly, offstage excitement, shouts and bustle, and on came an elderly but energetic gentleman and two policemen. Her father! A rich, clean, white, and hearteningly indignant man who, aided by the men in blue, pummeled the Chinks and collared them both, driving them off the stage. Shaking the two companions awake, the father upbraided both and warned them never, never, ever to touch opium again. With his ashamed and deeply grateful daughter supported by his strong arm, he exited, causing the green light to turn to reassuring rose. Thank God. I, certainly, had learned my lesson. It would be many a year before I discovered that it was the English who had forced the Chinese government to lift its ban on shipments of opium from India, causing the Opium Wars, the failed Chinese resistance to the white man’s poison. But no such perplexing news disturbed our feelings of white uplift as we, my mother and I, walked confidently down Lenox toward 110th Street and home.
Then as now the miracle of New York City was the separation of one group from the experiences of others. The city is like a jungle cut through by a tangle of separate paths used by different species, each toward its own nests and breeding grounds. Except for our teachers and Mikush our family knew almost no gentiles, and our prosperity helped seal us inside our magical apartness. It was my mother in her imagination and reading, and my father in his travels, who brought news of that other world where Jews were not the center of interest. His refusal to attribute naturally superior virtues to all Jews and anti-Semitism to all gentiles may have set up in me, if not a faith in, then an expectation of universal emotions and ideas. When it came to ethnic traits he was believer and skeptic at the same instant; the conflicting claims of family and vagrant sexuality, idealism and advantage, were as prevalent among Jews as among the gentile men he met on the road, whom his fair, blue-eyed appearance allowed him to get close enough to observe.
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