The Amorous Busboy of Decatur Avenue

by Robert Klein

  I borrowed a tuxedo from the band, which I hurriedly put on over my wet bathing suit. I had a few impressions of Johnny Mathis and Jimmy Durante up my sleeve, but with a twist. Instead of Durante singing one of his songs, like everyone who imitated him did, I planned to talk about things around the hotel that everyone knew about, using the Durante voice. I also prepared a joke that I had heard some time before and that fit the style of the Borscht Belt comedian: “Two medical interns standing in front of a hospital. Guy walks by with an unusual limp, his feet spread apart like this while he walks. [demonstrate walk] First intern says, ‘Looks like acute osteomyelitis.’ Second intern says, ‘I disagree. Looks to me like aseptic necrosis.’ First intern: ‘No, no, can’t you see the classic limp? It’s definitely an osteomyelitis.’ Second intern: ‘No, it’s an infarction of bone, clearly aseptic necrosis.’ First intern: ‘Why don’t we ask him? Sir, excuse me, my friend and I are interns, and we noticed your unusual limp. He thinks you have aseptic necrosis, and I think it’s osteomyelitis; could you tell us which it is?’ The guy with the limp says, ‘Sorry, fellas, I’d like to help you, but I just shit in my pants.’ ” “Shit” was too strong a word to use at the family hotel, though “crapped” could be substituted.

  I decided on a bold step. I got Yetta, one of the hotel housekeepers, to teach me the punch line of the joke in Yiddish, which would probably make it sound funnier and less risque. She came up with “I have made in my pants.” I will write it phonetically here: “Eh chub gemacht in der heusen.” It was a smash with the older folks, and it left the younger members of the audience searching for an elder to explain.

  The Durante–Hotel Alamac schpritz got some good laughs. It was the first time I ever made out a list of ideas as an outline, and fleshed them out onstage through improvisation. It was crude, but it worked, and I got quite a bit of encouragement from people who thought I was talented, for a lifeguard. I took some kidding about my age from the comedians I introduced, and all in all had a good time, after which I relinquished my MC duties to the new man: a fortyish guy with a ukulele and a toupee that looked like arugula on his head.

  After the shows, the Saturday-night festivities continued with dancing to the house band. Latin music was the rage. The cha-cha, the pachanga, and the mambo were played in long sets, featuring lots of timbales and bongos, with a roomful of dancers and no Fred Astaires, to be sure. The largest and most prestigious hotels, like the Concord, had the best Latin bands in residence, like Tito Puente and Machito. We, at the Alamac, had to be content with the four undergraduates who comprised “the Alamac Quartet, featuring the Accordion of Manny Salmanowitz.” The band had mediocre chops but showed great resourcefulness. For example, since they were shorthanded on those big-band arrangements, the saxophone player invented a way to shake the maracas with his feet and hit the wooden claves at the same time, all the while singing in poorly accented Spanish.

  The dance floor was filled with guests and staff of all ages, the oldsters stepping to their own slow pace no matter the tempo of the music, while the small children enjoyed placing their feet on Daddy’s shoes. The tiny bar in the corner of the casino did very little business among the guests, thus reinforcing the erroneous folklore that Jews don’t drink. With the legal drinking age at eighteen, the staff more than made up for the deficit and the faulty stereotype.

  That was the night life in a family-type hotel, which was not considered a meeting place for young singles, in contrast to the Concord and Grossinger’s, which were hot—1958-style. Many a husband and wife found each other in the sizzling atmosphere of the Catskill Mountains.

  * * *

  In the daytime, in any kind of favorable weather, the social center of our hotel was the swimming pool. For those who disdained swimming and the sun, there were plenty of umbrellas and card tables. The pool was large, almost Olympic-sized, and was lined with redwood chaise longues covered with pads. The hotel acreage featured lovely oak, maple, and various pine trees, along with some manicured lawns speckled with green Adirondack chairs. Against the aging white wooden buildings with their green trim, the scene could have been from the nineteen twenties.

  To a city boy accustomed to living in an apartment house and playing on concrete, the greenery and fresh air were wonderful. The starry nights, without car horns and tumult, coupled with the long vacation from school, were a happy change. The staff of waiters, busboys, and bellhops was composed entirely of college students trying to earn a few bucks during the summer. The other major goal of every libido-laden kid working in the mountains was sex, and not necessarily in that order. This was my summer before college, and I was the hotel lifeguard, which I considered a plum job and a grand opportunity to impress young women. I had earned a senior lifesaving certificate and wore the familiar red cross sewed to my bathing trunks with great pride. I had admired lifeguards since I was a small child spending the summers in Long Beach, Long Island. The image of these muscular, heroic men diving into the rough surf and manning lifeboats and buoys was a lasting memory. They had a hell of a lot more difficult job fighting the mighty, unpredictable Atlantic Ocean than I would have if I had to rescue someone from the Alamac pool. Still, I was a genuine lifeguard with an important purpose, trained in the various techniques of water rescue and resuscitation.

  One of the strangest of these was instruction in how to subdue a panicky drowning person, who, we were taught, had the strength of five men in their mindless flailing. The theory was that two drownings were worse than one. Therefore, we were taught how to assault the victim we were trying to save if he or she could not be calmed by any other reasonable means: a true contradiction in terms for a lifesaver.

  There was training in resuscitation, in which the victim was placed facedown in a prone position and pressure was applied rhythmically to the back, to eject the water. Unlike today’s technique—“out goes the bad air, in goes the good air, out goes the bad air, in goes the good air”—we were taught “out goes the bad air, out goes the bad air, out goes the bad air.” Apparently, the beneficial effect of inhaling had not yet been discovered, and one wonders how many lives may have been lost from the efforts of misguided lifeguards. This was years before the introduction of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

  That summer, however, at sixteen, I was not interested in mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. I was more interested in mouth-to-genital resuscitation, whose existence I knew of from naughty pictures and an occasional lucky friend. I would survey my aquatic domain wearing an army-fatigue cap, a whistle around my neck, and a tight pair of bathing trunks around a slim waist. There were sobering aspects to the job: I had been lectured by the hotel’s owners about attention to duty, and the fact that in forty years there had never been an incident at the pool. They even threw in a stern warning about insurance and my personal liability, and the specter of the unthinkable: someone drowning on my watch. This put a scare into me and stiffened my resolve to keep a close eye on my charges, especially the children, who would stay in the water hours at a time, until their skin turned the texture of a fresh prune.

  Nevertheless, in the performance of my job, there was no harm if my eyes lingered awhile on the bodies of the scantily clad mothers and their teenage daughters, who provided fantasy material for my off-hours. Wasn’t this also one of the perquisites of being a lifeguard? My motto for both work and play was, appropriately, “It doesn’t hurt to look—and think.”

  On my pool watch, I met a pretty sixteen-year-old girl named Marcia, with whom I engaged in long conversations about school and family. She cut a most voluptuous figure in her two-piece bathing suit. She was also unnervingly intelligent, engaging, and seemingly quite virtuous, as she continually refocused my one-track mind. Still, it was fun to dance with her in the casino, hold hands on country walks along the property, and delight in increasingly passionate good-night kisses. Her family were six-week season guests, and her mother kept a close watch on her like a Sicilian chaperone, which required the kissing to be furtive. I guess you could
say we were kind of going together, which might have put a crimp in my habit of looking at the women at the pool. But Marcia understood that I had to constantly survey the swimmers, and did not think me rude if my eyes wandered while we talked, even to the half-naked females baking in the sun on the chaise longues across the way.

  Early in August, a couple checked into the hotel with a ten-year-old son in tow. Word had gotten around the staff that this kid was trouble. The child had insisted on sitting on the luggage while the bellhops were carrying it, and he had painted another boy’s face blue during arts and crafts at the day camp. After he caused a ruckus by throwing oatmeal in the children’s dining room, and throwing a screaming fit in the lobby, after which a guest threatened to call the police, the hotel management had a tactful talk with his parents. The next day the family came down to the pool, replete with an array of floating toys and a tire tube. The mother and father, who looked rather old to have a child of ten, took me aside, and he explained that the boy was all they had and would I please keep a special eye on him. “You look like a nice young man. I want my little Oscar to grow up just like you, so please keep a good eye on him in the pool, and I’ll take care of you.”

  “Of course I’ll watch him, don’t you worry.” They had begun to walk away when the father turned and said, “Oh by the way, he can’t swim. Maybe you can teach him. He’s a smart boy.”

  I told them he had to stay in the shallow water and out of the deep end, and to obey my instructions at all times. They gave him these provisos in my presence, followed by a few of my own stipulations with regard to proper behavior at the pool. Oscar seemed to accept these rules and promised to abide by them. He was a skinny nervous kid, with extremely thick glasses that gave him an owlish look. Though he was apparently a healthy child, he was forever fidgeting and seemed to have the attention span of a two-year-old. This brought to my mind the need for a yet-to-be-invented product: Saint Joseph Valium for Children.

  His reputation having preceded him, I watched carefully as he sat in the tube and proceeded to kick his way around the pool, all the while keeping a close eye on me. In under two minutes, he was in the deep end, which was eight feet down, and I whistled him to come back, but he continued on his merry way. Ten whistles later, I grabbed his tube with a pool net, lifted him out of the water, and delivered a warning in a courteous tone (arguments with guests were frowned upon) about the danger of drowning and the inconvenience his death would cause. “Do you realize how your parents would feel if you drowned?” I asked him.

  “Who cares?” he said. “They’d probably laugh.” Nice kid. He behaved for a while, if one doesn’t count smacking a girl in the face, but soon had to be rebuked again after taunting and vexing me from the deep end of the pool. “Let’s go, Oscar! I told you to stay in the shallow end.”

  “You can’t tell me what to do. We’re guests here. We pay a lot of money to stay here,” he told me. “You just work here.”

  I silently prayed that the child I might have someday would not be like him. In a fit of anger and frustration, I forgot myself and blurted out, “I’m going to ban you from the pool, would you like that, you little bastard?”

  “You called me a dirty word,” he said. “I’m going to tell my father on you.” He exited the pool and ran up to the main building, shouting, “Mommy, Daddy, the lifeguard called me a dirty name!” This attracted enough attention so that people looked up from their magazines and began buzzing among themselves. The Mephistophelian Oscar was a known pest, but nonetheless I got odd, questioning looks from some of the guests.

  I became a little nervous. The thought occurred to me that I was expendable, with a host of young men waiting to take my coveted job. Five minutes later, Oscar returned with both parents. The father was furious and the mother seemed passive and embarrassed, as if she had seen this all before and knew that she had unleashed from her womb an adolescent plague on the earth. The kid seemed to be crying, but I could swear he was faking it. “Hey, lifeguard, my son says you used dirty language to him. That’s not right. You don’t talk to him that way.” The kid’s sobbing turned to a celebratory smirk, as if he had something on me—which he did.

  “Sir, Oscar will not listen to me when I tell him to keep in the shallow end.”

  “He’s only a child. Oscar, you listen to the man or you can’t go in swimming. Do you hear me?”

  “Yes, I hear you, Daddy.”

  The parents went back up to the lobby to play cards, and Oscar threw his tube into the deep end and jumped in on top of it. This went on for several days. One afternoon he arrived with his favorite tube and entered the pool at the shallow end. The day was somewhat cloudy, and pool attendance was down, as many of the adults, including his parents, were engaged in a gin-rummy tournament. I was brushing off the chaise-longue pads and sweeping the pool area as I kept an eye on Oscar. A couple of people were reading the paper and chatting while the loudspeaker blared the original cast album of Guys and Dolls. I could see the boy watching me as he trolled the shallow end, looking for a chance to make his move into forbidden territory. When he did, I whistled him back, and he complied, but slowly; just slowly enough to piss me off. This was repeated several times, and it became apparent that he was enjoying this game and the sound of the whistle. Tormenting me was his aim, and I cursed him under my breath, making a mental note to think long and hard before having children at all.

  As I performed my other tasks, I made sure to look up frequently, to see Oscar kicking in his tube before I returned to the broom or folding the towels. Then I looked up, and my heart dropped to my stomach and began to beat like a timpani. He was not there. There was only an empty tube. I screamed, “OSCAR!” at the top of my lungs as I took off running full speed toward the deep end, trying to see where he had gone under.

  I saw the telltale disturbance beneath the surface of the pool. I dove, arms outstretched like Superman, into the water, grabbed him across the chest, as I had been trained to, and sidestroked him to safety. Unfortunately, there was no need to assault him. He had taken water and was coughing and vomiting voluminously as I carried him to a chaise lounge and proceeded to expel his bad air and a good portion of the pool.

  By this time, a small crowd had gathered, and there was some tumult and screaming, but the boy began bawling heartily; to my immense relief, I knew he was all right. At this point, the whole Alamac Hotel and Country Club was on the scene, and I heard several people ask what had happened. “This boy was drowning, and Robert the lifeguard saved his life.” How I loved that moment when everyone was looking toward me, a hero, just like in the movies. Marcia was there and ran her cool hand over my bare back in a gesture of affirmation, then clasped me to her in a hug and asked, “Are you all right?” What would a heroic rescue be without a girl to show her appreciation? Even her wary mother gave me a hug.

  The boy’s parents came running through the crowd, his mother sobbing hysterically: “Oscar! Oscar! Gott in himmel! Where’s my Oscar!” I had to admit that it was a touching sight to behold when the little shit clutched his mother. I was congratulated all around, and Oscar’s mother gave me a huge hug as the father carried his child away in his arms, the child whose life I had saved.

  That is the official story, but there is a postscript. The next day Oscar’s parents approached me and tipped me five dollars. It wasn’t that I was ungrateful, but there is a philosophical question here: Namely, how did they come up with the figure? You know how much to tip the waiter or the bellhop, but how much when someone saves your kid’s life? How did the conversation go about the amount? The mother: “I don’t know, how much should we give him? Twenty-five?” The father: “Twenty-five? What am I, Rockefeller? We’re on a budget here. Let’s see. [counts on his fingers] How long have we had the boy? Okay, here you are, young man, five dollars. You can use that for college.”

  He stuffed the five into my pocket as if it were a Mafia payoff. I don’t want to seem callous, but I was trying to earn tuition here. Five dollars to s
ave his life? I could have gotten fifteen from the bellhops to let him drown.

  Chapter Seven

  New Passions

  I returned in the fall to a new dorm and a new roommate. He was an easygoing premed from New Jersey named Stan Friedman; we had developed a strong friendship and chosen each other to live with. He studied hard, bucking for medical school, and had not gotten into Kappa Nu, either, which, among other things, gave us something in common. Stan was not quite as aggressive as I with respect to the fraternity, but that was his nature.

  On my second day back at school, Al Uger and Bob Chaikin told me they were going to bring up my name for a vote. I received this news with mixed emotions. The summer had, to some extent, tempered my anger and shame, and I wasn’t thrilled about the prospect of more hope followed by more disappointment.

  A week later, one unforgettable night, five of my best Kappa Nu friends busted through my door cursing, with big smiles on their faces. They covered me with a blanket and pounded on me all the way to the car and the fraternity house. Under the blanket, I was free to shed a tear as one of the guys squeezed my hand. At the house, the hazing began immediately as someone shoved a huge pitcher of beer at me. “Chug it down, pledge! All of it!” I did and was given another, halfway through which I barfed all over the front lawn and passed out.

  When I came to, I could hardly believe this new state of affairs. Suddenly, I remembered Stan Friedman standing in our room, witness to the whole thing: Now I was in and he wasn’t. Al Uger, Steve Murray, Bob Chaikin, and others were ecstatic. I learned later with what emotion they had taken up my cause. All this good news notwithstanding, the hurt would not easily fade, and it would take quite a while before I felt like I really belonged. When I called my parents, my mother was happy because I was. My father was grudging and resentful in his approval: “What took them so long?”