• • •
But first there was a wrong number.
It was a girl looking for someone who wasn’t me.
“But who are you?” she asked.
“Andrew.”
“Tell me about yourself, darling.”
A wrong number—and she was calling me “darling.” This was interesting.
I told her about myself. She was interested.
“How old are you?” she asked in a sultry, sexy voice.
“Just turned eighteen. How about you?”
“Seventeen. You have something against young girls, darling?”
“No.”
“Then can I see you Saturday night?”
“Yes.”
• • •
Come Saturday, I liked what I saw. Her name was Dolores. She was short, stacked, a little thick in the middle, but sexy as hell. Her sexiness—and eagerness to fuck—blinded me to her true nature. She was the ultimate Jewish American princess, a girl from Georgetown—a Brooklyn neighborhood bordering Mill Basin and Canarsie—who’d been spoiled by a doting mother and father. She was a ballbreaker, but because my balls were soon slamming against her beefy thighs, I overlooked that fact. Our first fuck happened right there at 3202 Nostrand, apartment 4A, on my parents’ bed. Her parents took such a liking to me that her dad got me a job at Seidman’s, a clothing store on Canal Street in Manhattan, where I worked for a small commission.
Seidman’s was managed by two characters—Bill Trotsky and Marcel Goldfarb. They bought suits for $20 and sold them for $500, calling them three-piece vested Swedish knits. The suits we sold were made a little better than papier-mâché. One time a guy brought back a suit I sold him because the sleeves had fallen off.
“On purpose,” I said, repeating the line that had been given to me by Marcel, a wisecracking Brooklyn street tough. “The sleeves come off for summer to give you better ventilation.”
In winter we’d sell buckskin jackets with fake fur. I’d explain that the fur was actually carpeting. “These are Allen Carpet coats,” I’d say. “You don’t get any warmer than that.”
I took whatever little money I made at Seidman’s and went on dates with Dolores, who loved shopping as much as fucking. I was so crazy about her body, I put up with her crazy jealous mind. If we were walking around Kings Plaza mall and I just happened to glance at another girl, she’d go nuts. On the other hand, she never hesitated to tell me how much she loved looking over those Italian boys in their tight jeans. “They’re just my type,” she loved to say.
One snowy Brooklyn night Dolores accompanied me to an audition for Sy Kogan, another orchestra leader big in the wedding/bar mitzvah party circuit. He liked what he heard and said he’d use me in one of his bands. I couldn’t have been happier, but Dolores couldn’t have been more miserable.
With snowflakes coming down like feathers, we were walking by the park on Flatlands Avenue when I asked her what was wrong.
“The girls,” she said. “When you play those weddings, the girls will be all over you. They’ll see you up there on the bandstand—a handsome guy beating the drums—and they’ll come after you.”
“You don’t gotta worry about that,” I said. “You can come to the weddings with me. You can come to every gig and be my date.”
“I’ll be bored.”
“No, you won’t. You’ll be looking at me. And I’ll be playing just for you.”
I thought my words had calmed her down, but when we got into the car and were driving across Ralph Avenue, she started up all over again.
“Enough with this stupid goddamn jealousy!” I said.
Next thing I knew, Dolores opened the door to the car and tried to jump out. Because of the snow, I wasn’t going that fast, but I grabbed her and stopped her anyway. I knew it was all part of her princess high drama, but it got me upset. No one wants to see his girlfriend jump out of a fuckin’ car.
Our first breakup didn’t happen over jealousy, though; it happened over money. Dolores insisted that for New Year’s Eve I take her to some fancy Manhattan nightclub for dinner and dancing that would cost over three hundred dollars. I just wanted to go to the local disco in downtown Brooklyn, where admission was five bucks. But Dolores wanted what Dolores wanted, and when I refused she threw a fuckin’ fit. Far as I was concerned, we were through.
“She’s driving me crazy,” I told my man Marcel that Saturday at Seidman’s.
“She’s driving you crazy,” said Marcel, “because you’re crazy about her.”
Marcel was right. “It’s gonna be a lonely New Year’s Eve without her,” I had to admit.
“You see how we always got replacement inventory here at Seidman’s? When one line of suit doesn’t sell, we bring out another. It’s the same with broads. I can’t believe a good-looking guy like you doesn’t have replacement inventory.”
“Well, there’s Lorraine.”
“Who’s Lorraine?”
“I met her at a disco. She even gave me a number. Only one problem.”
“What’s that?”
“She’s eight years older than me—she’s twenty-six—plus she’s divorced and she has a baby.”
“She doesn’t sound like a problem, Andrew. She sounds like a party.”
I followed Marcel’s advice and asked her out that same New Year’s Eve. I turned it into a triple date.
By then the long-standing members of what I affectionately called the Nostrand Avenue Schmucks—Larry, Jan, and Neil, famous for hiding behind his long dark hair—had been my closest friends for years. Jan and Neil didn’t have New Year’s dates, and I asked Lorraine if she could fix them up. She did. Neil’s date was a looker. But we wound up calling Jan’s date the Man because she looked more like a he than a she. I’m not sure how the evening wound up for Neil and Jan, but I had a happy New Year’s fucking Lorraine on the floor next to the crib where her baby was fast asleep.
SALAMI
BY THE SUMMER of 1976, I was back in the Catskills and back with Dolores. It wasn’t as much fun as the previous summer with Laurie. Lee Musiker was no longer at Delmar’s, and Dolores was always trouble. First she licked my balls, then she broke my balls.
One night after we’d fucked I was still breathing heavy when she said, “I got something to confess, Andrew.”
“What?”
“When we were broken up, I went out with someone else.”
“No big surprise,” I said.
“Except he really had a big surprise.”
“What are you talking about?”
“He was Italian. And he was big. Really big.”
I didn’t need to know how big, but Dolores took her hands and showed me just how big.
“I can’t help it,” she had to add. “I like it big.”
I was a confident young man. I knew how to please a woman—or at least I thought I knew. But when a woman starts talking about abnormally big cocks, a normal man can feel insecure. I was haunted by what Dolores had said—that for months she’d been getting plugged by some salami-sized Italian, and loving it.
After an afternoon of arguing, she and I took a ride down Loch Sheldrake Road to cool off. It was all sweet until she started up again. She was so upset that she was gonna throw herself out of the car. Only this time when she opened the door, I didn’t try to stop her.
“You don’t have to throw yourself out,” I said. “ ’Cause I’m gonna push you out.”
I took my feet and did just that. Like a basketball, she went rolling down the hill toward the lake. I drove a quarter mile up the road, parked the car, sat on the hood, and smoked a Marlboro 100 while I waited for her to climb the hill. It didn’t take long. There she came, trudging up the hill, cursing my name while waving her fist in the air.
Good times, my friends, good times.
• • •
Somehow we survived the summer. Hot sex can get couples through all kinds of shit. But hot sex can’t make the big issues go away.
That fall we were back in
Brooklyn driving around Flatbush when she saw this young Italian stud walking out of a corner candy store.
“Imagine the package he’s carrying around,” she said.
“I got no interest in imagining that. But if you do, I don’t wanna hear about it.”
“Oh, men can have fantasies but women can’t. Is that it?”
“I told you this before and I’m telling you again—keep your fuckin’ fantasies to yourself.”
“If that’s how you feel, why are you going out with me?”
“If it wasn’t for the sex, I probably wouldn’t.”
“What sex?” she said. “You’ve never even made me come. Not once.”
“You’re just saying that to be mean.”
“I’m saying it ’cause it’s true. You don’t know how to satisfy a woman. You don’t know what gets us excited; you don’t even know how to kiss. You don’t know the first thing about foreplay. You just grab for it. I bet anything you’ve never made any woman come. And you sure as hell didn’t make me.”
By then, I was parked in front of her apartment building. She got out of the car and slammed the door behind her, and I figured this was it. I’d said it before, but this time I meant it. I was through. Except I wasn’t.
I kept going back because . . . well, who the fuck knows? Was I in love? Maybe. Was I in lust? No doubt. Was I young and stupid? For sure.
One night I was feeling so many fuckin’ feelings for Dolores that, up in her apartment, I asked her to marry me. She said yes. But then she started describing the kind of engagement ring I had to get her. She wanted a big diamond. I couldn’t even afford a little diamond. The more she demanded, the angrier I got. Ten minutes after the engagement was on, the engagement was off. Then I was running outta there, and she wrapped her arms around me, trying to stop me from leaving.
“Get your daughter off me!” I yelled at her father, who couldn’t get her to budge.
Everyone calmed down. Her father went back to watching TV, and her mother returned to reading her book. Dolores changed into her robe and walked me out into the hallway. She opened her robe so I could see she was naked underneath.
From inside the house I hear heard her mother saying, “How long are you gonna tell him good-bye, Dolores?”
But Dolores wasn’t interested in answering her mom. She was interested in letting me finger her dripping vagina. She wanted it right there and then.
Who was I to argue? I fucked her pussy inside and out. When I finally left, she had a belly full of sticky paste.
Time went by. We dated, we fought, we fucked, we broke up, we made up, and it all started over again.
In the meantime, I switched from selling at Seidman’s on Canal Street to another clothing store on Church Avenue in a rough black neighborhood in Brooklyn. Since I got along good with the brothers, I had no problems.
“Andrew,” the manager said to me one Saturday afternoon. “You got a call.”
It was Dolores. She had two words for me: “I’m pregnant.”
I didn’t say anything. I just stayed in shock. That night I called her from my parents’ bedroom phone. She told me that her mother knew but her father didn’t. What did I wanna do?
What could I do? Nice Jewish boys are raised to marry the women they get pregnant. But this nice Jewish boy wasn’t even making $200 a week. The last thing he needed was a child and a wife who could put him in a mental institution.
“Lemme just think about this,” I told Dolores before hanging up.
When I walked into the living room, my mother was sitting there. She took a puff of her cigarette, exhaled slowly, and looked into my eyes. No one could read me like my mother.
“She’s pregnant, isn’t she?”
“How do you know?”
“Your face. I see it in your face.”
“What am I going to do?”
For five or six seconds, Mom didn’t answer. Then she asked only one question.
“What’s her phone number?”
“Why—you gonna call?”
“Just give me the number. When I call, don’t say a word. Leave this to me.”
I gave the number, and Mom dialed. When Dolores’s mother answered, Jackie Silverstein took charge.
“I’m calling because of the situation with your daughter and my son,” she said. I couldn’t hear what Dolores’s mom was saying, but I could guess from my mother’s response. “Oh, please. You have to know what your daughter was doing up there in the Catskills with my son. It takes two to tango. You’re not gonna blame all this on my son. If you think your daughter’s gonna wreck my Andrew’s life, you got another think coming, lady.”
By the time the conversation concluded, Jackie Silverstein had prevailed. She hung up and told me, “Tomorrow morning you’re going to pick up Dolores and her mother and go to the hospital. You’ll wait there until it’s over.”
I always listened to my mother.
Next day I took Dolores and her mom to the hospital. Hardly anyone said a word. While Dolores went off to the operating room to have the abortion, I was sitting next to her mother. I was feeling like shit.
After fifteen minutes of silence, she turned to me and said, “Don’t ever hurt my daughter again.”
“I won’t,” I said.
Ninety minutes later, Dolores appeared. I couldn’t believe the way she looked. She’d changed into a sexy dress and put on major makeup. She was ready to go out dancing.
Outside it was freezing cold. Snow had started to fall. I slowly drove mother and daughter back to their apartment building. When we arrived, the mother got out first, leaving me and Dolores alone.
“Wanna come up for a hot chocolate?” asked Dolores, as if nothing had happened.
“Get out of my car,” I said.
“Why are you so touchy?” she asked.
“Just get out.”
When I got home, I told my mother everything that happened and everything that Dolores had said.
“It’s over,” I said.
“No it’s not,” said Mom.
“What are you talking about?”
“She’ll come back after you. I know the type. She’ll keep coming after you until you do one thing.”
“What’s that, Mom?”
“Wait a few days. Then call her and tell her you’ve been seeing a psychiatrist. Tell her the psychiatrist is worried that you might get violent with her. Tell her that, and you’ll never hear from her again.”
I listened to my mother. I told Dolores, and never heard from her again.
I’M JOEY TRAVOLTA
REMEMBER HOW TRAVOLTA as Tony Manero prunes and grooms himself before heading for the disco in Saturday Night Fever? That was me the night I went with my sister and one of her friends to Studio 54. I stood before the mirror, blowing out my hair, then working on the waves until every strand was in perfect fuckin’ place. I put on my tight blue polyester shirt, tight blue polyester pants, and black pointy Italian boots and headed out into the night. I was Tony Manero.
Studio 54 was the place where everyone from Diana Ross to Liza Minnelli to Andy Warhol to Michael Jackson to Mick Jagger to Donna Summer to Sly Stallone and Susan Anton was boogying and bumpin’ their butt off. I wanted to be inside the ropes of the midtown Manhattan disco where the all the beautiful people came to be seen and get high on coke. Though the booze and coke didn’t interest me. Now and then I might smoke a little joint up in my bedroom and go off on a jerk-a-thon, but that was it.
When we arrived at Studio 54 I went up to the muscleman doorman and, in my best Vinnie Barbarino voice, said, “I’m here.”
“So what?”
“It’s me. Let me the fuck in.”
“Who’s you?”
“Are you fuckin’ kidding me? It’s me. Travolta.”
The muscleman snickered. “Nice try, kid. The real Travolta walked in an hour ago. Now get lost.”
In her usual sweet manner, my sister said, “One day soon my brother’s gonna be a big star. Can’t you ju
st let him in for a while?”
“Not a chance in hell.”
Did that take me down a notch? Sure it did. But did it ruin my evening? Hell no. Me, my sister, and her friend headed back to Brooklyn. What would Vinnie do at a time like this? He’d go to the neighborhood pizza joint for a hot slice.
Sitting in a booth, I was still in my Travolta head, doing a Vinnie Barbarino monologue about how much I was loving the cheese pizza, when two chicks sitting at the next booth overheard me.
“You sound just like John Travolta,” said one.
“You look just like him,” said the other.
“I’m not John, I’m Joey, his brother.”
“You’re kidding,” they said.
“No, I ain’t. I’m his kid brother. Matter of fact, I was just over there at Studio 54. We was over there with all the stars until I got a little bored.”
So I carried on the conversation, and before long the two girls were over at our booth. Natalie, who is extra-cool, saw that I might be getting some action, so she and her friend left me to the women.
As I carried on with my routine, the girls were hanging on my every word. I was telling them how I’d just come from Hollywood, where I was racing cars with Paul Newman and hanging out with Olivia Newton-John. I was so deep into character I was believing this shit myself.
Turned out that one of the girls—a redheaded Irish beauty—lived only a couple of blocks away from 3202 Nostrand. She invited me over to her finished basement for a couple of beers. When we got to her place, she handed me a black Magic Marker and asked me to sign the wall. In giant letters I wrote, JOEY TRAVOLTA WAS HERE.
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