Homeward Bound

by Peter Ames Carlin

  A year earlier Paul wouldn’t have risked going line for line with such a gifted singer. After Artie’s indelible fourth-grade performance, he hadn’t even dared talking to him. Since then, though, he’d started singing. Mostly to himself, usually when he was alone in his bedroom. Often he’d take a record player in, shut the door, put on a favorite record, and sing along. That was exactly what he was doing one day, listening to the soundtrack of Disney’s animated Alice in Wonderland movie and piping along with focus, when his father leaned his head inside to listen. Before Paul could say anything, Louis, freshly scrubbed and knotted into his stage tuxedo, smiled down at him.

  “You’ve got a nice voice.”

  It was the briefest of exchanges, but for Paul, his father’s words rang like an Arthurian investiture. The man wasn’t what you’d call unstinting in his praise, particularly when it came to music. Yet: You’ve got a nice voice. He could sing. From his father’s lips to the core of his consciousness.

  After dinner one summer evening when he was ten years old, Paul stepped outside with a ball and glove and went looking to have a game of catch. He walked around the corner and down the street a ways, maybe a block and a half, and soon he could hear the rhythmic thump of horsehide hitting leather, the easy chat of a boy and a father. When they noticed Paul watching, the father tossed the ball his way and invited him to join in. He was Charlie Merenstein; his son, Ronnie, was exactly Paul’s age. They’d just moved to the neighborhood and were crazy for baseball, too. Charlie was also a top-notch coach: he had charisma, knew perfect throwing and batting motion, and had the patience to help a kid get it right. From that point, they were a trio, Charlie hauling the boys to the batting cages every other night, hurling sky-high pop flies and then wicked-fast grounders. Paul was invited to drop in anytime, to come and go like any other member of the family. Charlie lit up when Paul was around and, with Louis away at work so many evenings, Paul came to treasure Charlie’s company, too.

  A natural athlete with quick reflexes and a strong arm, Paul started playing Little League baseball as soon as he was old enough to qualify for a team. He held his own against the other kids, but as they moved toward junior high school and the game became more competitive, Paul was no longer eligible to play with his regular teammates. Due to his height, he would be relegated to a special league for boys shorter than five feet tall. Devastated but still determined, he made himself into a team leader, fielding with a famished glove and spring-loaded arm that picked off runners with deadly efficiency. He swung a fearsome bat, too, snapping off line drives fast and low enough to be all but ungrabbable. Paul wasn’t the team’s only asset, and at season’s end the team had fought its way into the league’s all-city classic, a single-game duel against Staten Island for the championship. The league required each player to submit to a pregame height measurement, just to make sure that neither team had snuck in a ringer. And wouldn’t you know it, Paul learned he had grown just enough that summer to put himself a hair or two above the five-foot mark, which disqualified him from the championship game. Enraged by the double humiliation, he stomped to the bleachers and spent the rest of the afternoon rooting for his squad to lose—which they did, granting their exiled hero at least a shred of satisfaction.

  * * *

  One day in 1954 Paul tuned in to the Yankees versus Boston Red Sox game on WNEW-AM and caught the last few minutes of The Make Believe Ballroom, the station’s pop and jazz show that had been one of the most popular music broadcasts in the nation since its debut in 1935. The public enthusiasms of host Martin Block had built careers for the likes of Tony Bennett, Dinah Shore, and many more. That day, Block was sputtering, his clipped mustache a-twitch about a song he’d heard that was already hurtling up the pop charts, a guaranteed smash hit. Only it couldn’t be true, because this was the worst tune he’d ever heard in his life. It was so bad, in fact, that if it actually did become a hit, he’d eat his hat. Dropping needle on wax, the radio host died just a little bit more as the Crows, a four-man doo-wop group out of Harlem, let fly the “duh-dudu-duh-duh … love that girl!” opening to “Gee.”

  That was when Paul looked up from his scorecard. He’d been only half-listening to the music, but Block’s rant had caught the boy’s ear, and less than a minute into “Gee,” he knew that it was the first song he’d heard Block play that he actually liked. Just four voices set to a jump blues quartet banging away at the velocity of a Manhattan-bound IRT express. The music was simple and the words even more so. “Hold me baby, squeeze me, / Never let me go!” For the likes of Block and probably 96 percent of the aged and/or aging Make Believe listeners, that made “Gee” the iciest kind of portent: the sound of a future that doesn’t include you.

  They were right. This new music, that pounding, jiving rhythm with its three-chord verses, four-note melodies, and horny fifth-grader lyrics, was spreading fast. The year before, 1953, onetime country swing band Bill Haley and the Comets hit No. 12 on the Billboard charts (and No. 11 on Cash Box) with “Crazy, Man, Crazy.” Next came Big Mama Thornton, dominating the rhythm and blues charts for more than two months with “Hound Dog,” a jump blues shouter composed by a pair of Jewish wiseasses, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, already becoming the hottest pair of songwriters in the Brill Building, the eleven-story art deco building that was considered the center of New York’s pop music industry. “Gee” took a little longer to break through—released in 1953, it had simmered for almost a year, creeping onto regional sales charts. The tune broke big during the summer of 1954, racking up enough sales and plays to make it a crossover smash: No. 2 on the rhythm and blues charts and No. 14 on the pop list. By the end of that year, “Gee” had sold more than a million copies and helped launch a renaissance for doo-wop, the kind of harmony-rich group singing first made popular in the late 1930s and early 1940s by the Mills Brothers and the Ink Spots. Now, fifteen years later, those older groups’ perfectly enunciated ballads had come to sound as stiff as the tuxedos they performed in. They’d sung about love with a chaste formality that seemed almost completely desexualized, the kind of lovemaking you can do while sitting on her parents’ front porch. But their inheritors had moved closer to the bedroom. Spin “Earth Angel” or “In the Still of the Night” and you can hear the eroticism oozing through the swirling oohs and ahs. This love song was slinky and silky, passionate and, if you were a boy on the cusp of adolescence, thrilling.

  The not-quite-thirteen-year-old Paul Simon found just as much in the music as in the lyrics. He loved the way voices joined in harmony added up to so much more than the sum of the two or three or four parts; the way the intertwined melody and harmony connected to backing chords that moved in strict adherence to the rhythm, which, he noticed, also dictated the meter of the lyrics, but also the words’ balance of consonants and vowels. The sound was so electrifying he couldn’t resist presenting it to Louis. Surely his father would recognize the beauty, too, and maybe even admire Paul’s ability to discover new and beautiful things in pop music. But that’s not quite how it turned out.

  They were driving, just the two of them, when Paul started prattling on about Patti Page’s 1952 version of “I Went to Your Wedding,” how lovely a tune it was, with this melody he couldn’t get out of his head. To illustrate his point, Paul sang a few lines. He didn’t get very far before Louis cringed.

  “God, that’s awful!”

  Louis might as well have slapped him. Paul’s father had ridiculed his favorite song and worse, far worse, had called his singing awful, too. Or at least that’s how Paul heard it. “Boy,” he remembered in a 1991 interview, “I just sat back and I said, ‘Well, all right. I’m not singing any more here.’”

  Still, that didn’t keep Paul from trying to pry out exactly what was so wrong with the music he loved. He went back to his father on several occasions, with a record or when another one of his favorite songs came on the radio. He took it for granted that Louis would get that same disgusted look, but now he wanted an explanation. Why don’t you l
ike it? Louis made a face. “Because it’s really dumb.” Paul couldn’t believe it. Dumb? “Earth Angel,” that spine-rattling piece of vocal perfection, with that clever image of the girl being both an angel and still on earth? Louis shrugged. “I just think it’s dumb.”

  Of course that was typical middle-aged dad stuff. But the twelve-year-old Paul didn’t know that. What he’d heard was derision, a fresh bulletin about his shortcomings. He never forgot it.

  * * *

  At the end of sixth grade, Paul and Artie were both accepted into the Special Progress program for advanced students at Parsons Junior High. Neither of them, to say nothing of their parents, would have dreamed of passing up the opportunity to study with Queens’ smartest kids, but the program came with another benefit: the students would complete three years of the junior high school curriculum in just two years. The only drawback, as they soon discovered, was that the only way for them to walk the mile from their houses to the school led directly through a neighborhood claimed by the Parsons Boys, a gang of leather-clad teenage thugs who made an enterprise extracting cash from the pockets of young or otherwise helpless passersby. Paul and Artie encountered the gang within a day or two of starting seventh grade and came to call them the Hitters, after the gang members’ traditional methods of intimidation. Thumpings, or promises of them, became a regular event. The two boys learned to weather the abuse as best they could.

  Music remained Paul and Artie’s central fixation, and the more they listened to Alan Freed’s show, to the nightly Top 20 broadcasts, and to the array of other stations crowding the New York City airwaves, the deeper their connection became. Paul was the more adventurous listener. He had become fond of the Latin dance band that shared the bill with the Lee Simms Orchestra’s Thursday afternoon shows at Roseland, and now he spun through the far edges of his radio dial, constantly on the prowl for unfamiliar sounds. Artie, meanwhile, kept track of the weekly Hit Parade broadcasts with mathematical precision, charting each song’s rises and tumbles in neatly penciled graphs, cross-indexed to reveal new textures in the weekly, monthly, and annual trends.

  Artie took to the family’s basement playroom to find his way through the lead and background parts of the new songs. His father, Jack Garfunkel, a wholesale representative for a clothing manufacturer, was an early technology fan and had been one of the very first owners of home recording equipment. First came a Webcor wire recording device, then a Wollensak reel-to-reel. The machines were easy to operate, so the Garfunkel boys—Jules was the eldest, Artie came next, and baby brother Jerry was last—had learned to operate the rudimentary devices without much effort. The recorders became Artie’s vocal laboratory. Drawn to sentimental tunes and juicy love ballads, he’d emote his way through “You’ll Never Walk Alone” or a Nat King Cole song, and then play back the recording and harmonize with his own melody part. At one point the family owned two recorders, which allowed Artie to record one part, then record himself singing along to the original tape, and finally come up with a third part while singing along with the second, two-voiced recording.

  Paul started to join the afternoon basement sessions. They’d listen to a record or two, singing along at first and then by themselves, each boy locking his eyes on the other’s mouth in order to sync not just the words but each syllable and intonation. “I would sit and examine exactly how Paul says his ‘T’s at the end of words,” Garfunkel said. “And where would the tongue hit the palate exactly. And we would be real masters of precision.” Kid brother Jerry Garfunkel became accustomed to getting booted out of the basement playroom so the older boys could work uninterrupted. Often he’d take refuge on the top stairs to listen to them work, chat, and goof around. It didn’t take long for Jerry to notice how easily they made each other laugh, and how much it reminded him of their dad’s usual patter. “I’m sure Paul’s father had the same humor, too. It’s Jewish sarcasm, and [some people] get insulted by it. But back then, there was no arrogance: just two kids trying to sound as good as they could.”

  Paul and Artie sang in public together for the first time midway through the school year, doing the Chords’ doo-wop hit “Sh-Boom” at a Parsons talent show. Neighborhood doo-wop groups were popping up everywhere, and the boys teamed with a fellow student, Johnny Brennan, and sisters named Ida and Angel Pelligrini to form the Sparks. A few weeks later the quintet redubbed themselves the Pep-Tones, as a tip to the Cleftones, a junior high doo-wop group from the Jamaica section of Queens who had just scored a national pop hit with their self-composed “You Baby You.” Although Paul had abandoned an early attempt at piano lessons, he asked for and received a guitar* for his thirteenth birthday.† Louis showed him some basic chords, and Paul soon realized how often the same two- or three-chord progressions would come up in different songs. He showed the archetypical changes to Artie, and they crafted an original doo-wop they called “The Girl for Me,” a paean to a flower-bedecked dream girl whom the singer will love forever, knowing that she’ll always be true. Convinced the song was just as strong a contender for the charts as any other teen-oriented pop tune, Paul got Louis to transcribe the music onto a lead sheet, which he and Artie sent to the U.S. Library of Congress in order to copyright the tune. Next they recorded a demo (probably on the acetate-cutting machine one of the Garfunkels’ neighbors owned), and brought it to a handful of the publishers and record companies in and around the Brill Building on the west side of Manhattan’s Midtown. No one was buying, but the company execs there might have been wise to take note of the audacity of the youngsters, confident enough at the moist age of thirteen to stride into office after office bearing their first-ever pop composition.

  The other touchstones of teenage life came and went for Paul at the standard pace. Compelled by Belle and her fealty to tradition, he celebrated his bar mitzvah on his thirteenth birthday, with Artie following just six weeks later. In typical fashion, Artie not only mastered the Hebrew in his assigned section of the Torah, but also worked with the synagogue’s cantor so he could sing parts of the service. When they worked on a harmonized section, the not-quite-teenage Garfunkel gave as much direction as he received, going so far as to shake off the cantor’s instructions to stand away from their shared microphone, issuing the older man such confident directions that he acquiesced immediately.

  ARTIE: (firmly) You keep it the same and I’ll know just when to change, because it was fine before, except for one or two parts.

  CANTOR: (changing position) This is okay?

  ARTIE: No. You’re gonna have to keep it closer.

  CANTOR: Okay.

  When they started singing, Artie took the higher part, his harmony closely tracking the cantor’s melody for a time, sometimes in unison before closing to a standard third interval, then abruptly leaping to a fifth before tumbling back down again—his harmonies sounding very much like those he would write and perform a little later in his life.

  Around this time, Paul traded in his baseball bat for a broom handle bat and took to the stickball circuit around central Queens. He and longtime ball mate Ronnie Merenstein would venture into other neighborhoods in search of the high-bouncing Spaldeen-brand ball-carrying kids they could challenge to a game. Their strategy came right out of Hustling 101. After letting their rivals run up a big lead during the first few innings, Paul and Ronnie would call things to a halt. How about starting a new game, only this time putting some money on the line to make it a little more interesting? Wagers made and secured, they’d start up again. Only, now everything was different. Toss a pitch at the short kid and, instead of whiffing it like he’d done through the first game, he’d uncoil and kablammo!, the pink ball would go airborne, sailing over two, three, sometimes four manhole covers before touching down again. The taller guy was suddenly just as dangerous at the plate, and when it was their turn on defense, the short one hurled left-handed curves that were all but unhittable. By the time he got home at the end of the afternoon, Paul could have as much as fifteen or even twenty dollars stuffed in his pock
et.

  He would have done it all for free. “He was a very good ballplayer because he worked harder at it than most other people. And he always wanted to be on the winning team,” Ronnie Merenstein said. And it didn’t matter what sport he was playing or how low the stakes were. When the boys played sock basketball in Paul’s bedroom, he’d lunge at the hoop as if they were playing in Madison Square Garden, sometimes with enough force to put Merenstein on the floor. But soon Paul wouldn’t have time for bedroom athletics. If he wasn’t working on music with Artie, he’d be shut in his room with his schoolbooks. When he finished with that, he’d pick up his guitar and work on new chords and progressions, repeating them over and over, sometimes for two or three hours, even as his fingertips cracked and blood crusted the strings and frets.

  * * *

  Adopting a patina of the delinquent fuck-off of teenage life, Paul and Artie took up cigarettes, trailing smoke and as much toughness as they could muster during their daily walks to and from school. They moved easily through Parsons Junior High School’s accelerated program, leap-frogged ninth grade, and got to high school in the fall of 1955. After Parsons, which was cozy even for a junior high, Forest Hills High School seemed mammoth. Completed in 1941, the Georgian Revival structure was faced by red brick with limestone edging and white columns reaching toward a bell tower (a bonus feature chosen over a swimming pool). It had been designed to hold thirteen hundred students, but population projections for the area hadn’t anticipated so much new construction in Kew Gardens Hills, or the surge of childbirths in the 1940s. By the mid-1950s the building had more than four thousand registered students. To serve them all, the administration was forced to divide the school into three independent programs that operated at different times of the day. As entering sophomores, Paul and Artie started their classes at noon and finished at 5:30 p.m., a schedule that meant they saw juniors for only half the day and never encountered seniors, who had to clear the classrooms before the younger kids could squeeze into the building.