The Amorous Busboy of Decatur Avenue

by Robert Klein

  Georgia and I had lunch together one day at a little Italian place on Second Avenue. I was in a good mood, excited about her first Broadway show.

  “I have something to tell you,” she said.

  “You got a movie?” I said.

  “No. I’m pregnant.”

  “What?”

  “I’m pregnant. It’s for sure, Bobby, I found out today.”

  In my stunned silence, I thought of the menstruation celebrations from college—no opening a keg here. In fact, our passion and enjoyment had turned to serious business. I thought of my parents and saw the absurd image of bouncing a baby on my knee. I thought of Georgia’s career and the Broadway show: So did she. “I can’t have a baby now. It wouldn’t be right for the baby’s sake, either. Maybe someday I’ll be a mother, but not now. I’m not ready to have a baby, nor are you. Don’t you agree?” she said.

  “Of course. But what do we do now?” We held each other and hugged, this time with the gentle, sexually neutral pats of assurance on the back.

  “Are you mad at me?” I said.

  “Why should I be mad at you? It’s not anybody’s fault. Maybe the diaphragm wasn’t in right. Maybe it was that time we fooled around a little too much without it. In any case, don’t worry. We’ll just have to find someone. Do you know anyone who knows where to get an abortion?”

  This was a question I’d had no practice for. “No.”

  “There’s a doctor in Pennsylvania I’ve heard about. I’ll find out what I can and call you tomorrow,” she said.

  I felt quite useless in my shock: no helpful information and no money. Going to my father for help was out of the question, so I confided in Rhoda, my wonderful, always protective sister. She generously offered money and kept my secret from our parents. She had no admonitions or “I told you sos,” only concern for Georgia and comfort for me.

  I asked my closest friends, with discouraging results. Abortions of course, were illegal. It was said that some Park Avenue doctors performed them for the rich for thousands of dollars, but other than that or going on an expensive trip abroad, the options seemed to be few. That doctor in Pennsylvania was out of commission, possibly in jail, but somebody suggested someone else who would answer to the name of Mike.

  I called the number in order to establish a masculine, threatening, don’t-fuck-with-this-helpless-female, intimidating character. Then I put Georgia on. After she had answered a few questions, she was given another number to call. In this call, she was able to ask some questions about what the whole thing would entail. She was assured that they had done the procedure safely many times, but they were vague as to whether it would be performed in a doctor’s office or whether a licensed doctor would perform it. Georgia made it clear that she would be bringing someone with her, to which they had no objection. She made the arrangement, making several notes on a pad.

  In three days we were to meet a guy called Tony at a gas station on Route 46 in New Jersey at three P.M. sharp. He knew the color and make of my car and would identify himself when he saw it. The abortion would cost five hundred dollars in cash, which Georgia was to bring with her, and she was not to eat anything for five hours before the appointment. The whole thing seemed laden with danger and not a little sleazy, but Georgia wanted to go through with it, in her typically positive, decisive way. Her courage gave me the resolve I needed, because I was afraid of what lay ahead. I had no control over matters, being an impotent string-along who had unfortunately not been impotent enough to avoid this situation.

  On the appointed day, we drove to Jersey, and I gave Georgia the two hundred and fifty dollars my sister had given me. We were both understandably nervous, but in the interest of morale, we kept up an optimistic front, especially Georgia. She spent a lot of time comforting me, which I needed; I had to take care that I didn’t become an additional burden to her. We found the correct gas station and pulled off to a side of it to await Tony. Twenty minutes passed, and doubts about whether we’d found the right place began creeping in. I was about to suggest that we leave when a man, appearing out of nowhere, tapped on my window, scaring the shit out of us. I rolled it down: “Tony?”

  “Yeah.”

  I unlocked the rear door, and he got in. He offered a handshake to each of us, and I held Georgia’s other hand in mine. We did not tell him our names. The look and sound of him intensified my greatest fear, since he was central casting for a mobster, with his suit, overcoat, and obligatory fedora. He had a “dis dem and dose” manner of speech, though he spoke softly and was polite, apparently sensitive to Georgia’s exigency. I noticed that his hands were not rough, and his fingernails were clean. “You ever been in a family way before, dear?” he said.

  “No.”

  Then he proceeded to ask several questions, like a doctor would—that is, if your gynecologist was Carlo Gambino. “How old are you? How long since your last period? Any health problems? Allergies? Have you got the money with you?”

  I had a flash that he would steal the money and take off. I could have sworn there was a strange bulge in his coat that I took to be a gun. He explained that they didn’t use a scalpel; the procedure was done by inserting a drug, he called it, into the uterus, which would precipitate the bleeding in a few hours. It was the method used by the unfortunate physician in Pennsylvania who was currently indisposed.

  “Are you ready to go?” he asked.

  “I guess so. Should I follow your car?” I said.

  “No, you stay here and wait for her. The young lady will have to come with me alone.”

  “Oh no, we can’t do that. Why can’t I come?”

  “That’s the way it has to be. I’m takin’ a chance here. Don’t worry, I’ll bring her back here, and she’ll be fine.”

  “How long will she be gone?”

  “Maybe an hour, hour and a half.”

  “Is that all right with you?” I said to Georgia.

  “Yes, it’s okay,” she said, squeezing my hand.

  They left my car, and he took her to a late-model Cadillac coupe thirty feet away. He courteously opened the door for her, and they headed off for parts unknown.

  I sat there numb and forlorn, with the terrible thought that I would never see her again. I had a tremendous urge to follow them, because her going off alone was a new wrinkle and very disturbing to me. They could rob her, beat her; and even if they intended to fulfill their part of the agreement, they could botch the procedure, which I had heard was a common enough occurrence in clandestine abortions. I envisioned Georgia in critical condition with uneducated louts who wouldn’t know what to do, who would run for it while she died of blood poisoning and hemorrhage.

  I looked at my watch, and only thirty minutes had gone by. Holy shit, I was sorry we had done this. My mind drifted to other scenarios, including the horrible thought of sweet Georgia turning up dead, dumped somewhere. I hadn’t even gotten this guy’s license plate, and there was no chance that his name was really Tony.

  I tried to be optimistic, a characteristic uncommon to me, having come from a worrying home. Maybe Tony was actually a medical doctor risen from the streets by his own bootstraps, a visionary who performed abortions as a public service, because he was appalled that women couldn’t get them legally. Right, and he probably ran the numbers racket in his medical school. He was a doctor like Hitler was a rabbinical student.

  An hour went by. I began looking anxiously for the Caddie. What if she didn’t come back in an hour and a half? He had given that as an outside figure. He said an hour or an hour and a half. How long would I wait before I called the police? I never in my life wanted to see someone’s face the way I wanted to see Georgia’s. Then it had been an hour and forty-five minutes, with no sign of them. I fought with all my might not to panic; she would be here any minute now, I knew it.

  After two and a half hours, with what felt like permanent damage to my coronary arteries, the Caddie pulled up, and Georgia got out and walked toward me. Thank God she could walk. I helped her in
to my Ford, feeling more relief than I could hold in. I had been alone with my fears so long that I felt the need to tell her how worried I’d been—until I realized that I didn’t have my priorities straight. “Georgia, are you all right?”

  “Yes, I’m fine. Everything went okay.”

  “But you look a little pale. Are you in pain?”

  “Not really. I want some tea. He suggested warm tea right away.”

  We stopped at a diner. Georgia was still a little shaken but looked remarkably well, with her welcome smiling face. “What happened? Where did you go?”

  “I was thinking about you, Bobby, how worried you must have been.”

  “Me? No, I wasn’t worried, not at all. I was about to take a cyanide pill, but I wasn’t worried.”

  She took a couple of sips of tea and looked out the window at the passing traffic.

  “What happened? Where did he take you?”

  “We went to a house about fifteen minutes’ ride from the gas station. There was a woman there who was very nice, very comforting.”

  “Who actually did it?”

  “Tony did it. They had the equipment, the stirrups, just like my gynecologist has. He scrubbed, he put on sterile gloves, everything. He seemed to know exactly what he was doing.”

  “It must have felt awkward.”

  “ ‘Awkward’ hardly describes it. I was terrified. But he did his best to put me at ease, and somehow I had confidence in him. Actually, I had no choice.” She put her hand on mine. “Bobby, honey, we had no choice.”

  I dropped her off at her apartment with a long, grateful, tearful hug. She had been so determined and so courageous. I had been in quasi-panic when in fact it was she who had taken such a risk. It was obvious that if a boy were to get in trouble with a girl in this way, he could count his blessings that the woman in question was as kind and clear-thinking and purposeful as Georgia Parks.

  I checked all afternoon by phone to see how she was. She said she felt fine. She had begun to bleed, and though the flow was light, it was a welcome sign and painless. It lasted about four days, with all the characteristics of a menstrual period, and then it was over. She felt better almost immediately and didn’t miss a performance of her Broadway show. Despite the worrisome sojourn to Route 46, everything had apparently worked out fine.

  Ten days later, onstage, she began bleeding profusely and almost fainted. Determined, and wanting to keep private a profoundly personal secret, she managed to finish the performance and went immediately to Roosevelt Hospital, where she was kept overnight after undergoing the D and C procedure that was required to complete and correct the job Tony had botched. She was all right, thank God, my sweet but resolute friend, but it was never the same between us again.

  That day I received a wedding announcement in the mail. “Mr. and Mrs. Charles Silverman are pleased to announce the marriage of their daughter Judith to Mr. William Carney, Jr.” I felt an emotionless finality. Given what had transpired since my breakup with the future Mrs. William Carney, Jr., this was small potatoes. You could fold up your scorecards right there and then. My childhood was officially over.

  Chapter Twelve

  Foreign Affair

  She was a knockout, a beautiful brainy blond multilingual piece of work. She was four years older than I, twenty-six to my twenty-two when we met, which put her in the fascinating category of older woman. Also, she was European and bright and opinionated, and spoke with an accent that was exotic to my Bronx ear.

  It was June 1964, the first of the two years of the New York World’s Fair. The Motown Supremes’ “Baby Love” emanated from every radio, along with those sensational British imports who were named, in a clever double entendre, after an insect group, singing “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” My relationship with Georgia had become distant and platonic. Americans were beginning to heal, coming out of the shock and depression from the murder of John F. Kennedy the previous November. The Mets, those darling New York losers, had a spanking-new modern stadium adjacent to the World’s Fair grounds and the brand-new gleaming screaming jets at La Guardia. The Grand Central Parkway had even been widened, and had acquired snazzy space-age lamps and signs to accommodate the multitudes flocking to the area. Things were definitely looking up for New York and me that warming season.

  I had a small studio apartment on 153rd Street, near Riverside Drive, shared only with members of the old, even prehistoric, family Blattidae, who thrived marvelously inside the walls and my garbage. But it was mine, my first New York apartment. After the liberties of five years away at college, graduate school, and summer stock, habits and sensibilities had changed; and for me, jobless and no longer a student for the first time since I was five, that previous fall of 1963, at home in the Bronx, had been a particularly excruciating time to feel like a failure. I had grown unused to my parents and being in such close quarters with them: independent, one might say. Independent though I may have been, I had hardly been hopping freight trains during my years away, having been a student and not financially self-sufficient. However, I had lived free of parental supervision for so long that the difficulty of the adjustment added fuel to my already dismal circumstances. Though I had just spent a year at the Yale School of Drama, I was down on myself, feeling lost, having no connections nor a clue as to how to break into the theater and show business. The look of disappointment in my father’s eyes told it all. Worse than that, pity, as my theatrical résumé after graduate school was pitifully brief.

  After Six Characters, Nikos Psacharopoulos gave me a two-week spear-carrying role as one of Herod’s soldiers in a lavish, expensive New York Pro Musica production of The Play of Herod, an eleventh-century liturgical church musical underwritten by the Ford Foundation. I got two hundred dollars a week as one of Herod’s soldiers whose job it was to slaughter innocents at The Cloisters museum in New York and the Rockefeller Chapel at the University of Chicago. I had a great incentive in the acting job, such as it was. The nasty little prank-pulling choirboys who portrayed the innocents deserved to be slaughtered, or at the very least remain in the castrati section of the choir for the rest of their lives. Beware of child performers, and do not be fooled by words like “choirboy.” My chain mail costume made of heavy wool was like a sauna.

  To pass the time between my brief appearances as a slaughterer, I had marvelous chats with Patty Robbins, who played the Virgin Mary, interrupted only occasionally by her obligatory appearances in which curtains would part revealing her in an ark holding the infant Jesus. She was also an avid reader during her rather lengthy waits in a rather lengthy presentation. Upon hearing her cue, four struck chimes, she would put down Freud’s The Psychotherapy of Everyday Life and pick up the wrapped doll who portrayed Jesus while the Pro Musica singers broke into her theme song, a lovely Gregorian chant. She would assume a silent, adoring pose until the curtains of the ark closed again, and then put down the doll or throw it, depending on her mood. Not a word was spoken in the play. Well, it was sort of show business, as it might have been in the eleventh century, and I got to see Chicago for the first time.

  Since I had left graduate school, my father was concerned about me being able to fall back on teaching, the catchall safety-net phrase that had reassured him and had been the palliative, the very lubricant for his acquiescence in my pursuit of this career as an actor. I of course had no intention of teaching. I cannot help but notice that the patronizing phrase “you can always fall back on teaching,” something heard frequently in those days, was and is an accurate barometer of American priorities, despite rhetoric to the contrary. Too little homage and money paid to the teaching profession and too many unqualified people falling back on it. Lenny Bruce’s nineteen-sixties observation that Vegas blackjack dealers are paid more than teachers is unfortunately still largely valid.

  So there I was in the Bronx, sitting on my ass in the middle of a November day, no school, no work, feeling like a piece of shit, and my father called to tell me that the president had been shot. This event
characterized that whole period for me, with the general American pall seeming to feed my personal melancholy and deepen my rut. There had also been the humiliating and scary events with Georgia.

  As the theater world wasn’t happening, I had to find some steadier and more lucrative employment, with the aim of moving out of the family apartment and getting a few bucks in my pocket. My myopic father reasoned that “you have a perfect place to sleep and eat right here at no charge.” I realized in subsequent years that his argument was a screen, that he wanted me to stay at home because he would miss me and had difficulty with those rites of passage. When I was thirteen, I was developing a good deal of hair on my upper lip that I desperately wanted to shave. My father had warned me sternly not to shave yet, because “It’ll grow back twice as fast. Leave it alone.” One day I shaved it off, and when he noticed it at the dinner table, he went into one of his tantrums, screaming, unforgiving. In retrospect, I can see that his reasoning was the angst of a father who couldn’t bear to see his baby zooming through puberty. Unfortunately, Benny was unable to communicate any of that. My mother, though not eager to see me go, understood my need to fly the coop and, as ever, gave me her blessing.

  There was an available job that required a college degree and nothing more, so I fell back on teaching, though I saw the job as a “great leap forward” (I rather admired Mao then) in terms of self-esteem and respect. As a substitute teacher, I worked on average three days a week for twenty-six dollars a day through the winter and spring, which afforded me just enough money for rent and food and a modicum of everything else. I had a wonderful circle of friends, mostly City College graduates whom I’d known since junior high school. They were a smart, eclectic group of five, with some ancillary guys thrown in, who read good books and loved good music from blues to baroque. The politics were decidedly left-wing, with a couple taking such matters seriously and contributing time and effort to the cause of socialism. There were thoughtful, mind-opening discussions of politics, books, and music, with the political exchanges sometimes reaching screaming crescendos. There was much laughter, intellectual vigor, and sarcasm, with a minimum of sentimentality. Through them I acquired a lifelong devotion to W. C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, Charlie Chaplin, Laurel and Hardy, and the great Lenny Bruce. We read everything by Herman Hesse, John Steinbeck, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and on and on. Comedy and music were the most important connective tissue in our gatherings, which included guitar and harmonica folksy-blues musicales, in which those who could not play an instrument simply banged on furniture or blew across the mouth of a jug. We detested alcohol, preferring cannabis sativa, which we were certain would be legal any day. We thought of our parents as completely out of the loop, beings from another planet.