by Robert Klein
“I hate you, too,” I said with a mouthful of her lips and tongue.
She looked at me, and her face metamorphosed into a wicked smile. “Let’s have a hate fuck,” she said sotto voce as she rubbed herself against me.
“A hate fuck?” The thought appealed to me in a decadent way, and the sound of such profanity from the lips of the imperiously proper Mrs. Cater shot right through me like sensual lightning. I squeezed her breast hard, and she moaned passionately and bit my lip. Sex, after all, can be construed as an aggressive act, and I determined to fuck her for the cause of free speech and righteousness. She pulled me up and led me by the hand to her bedroom, then pushed me down on the giant bed. “Take off your clothes, you subversive Commie bastard,” she said as she removed hers with the studied technique of a topless dancer. Naughty Mrs. Cater standing there naked. Full, drooping breasts, with hips a good deal wider than her tiny waist. “Next year Richard Nixon will be president, and all you stupid, unpatriotic idiots will be squelched like a bug,” she declared as she removed a vibrator and a little yellow box from the top drawer beside the bed.
“Nixon is a reactionary douche bag who’ll never win,” I shot back, displaying an erection to please the gods. She lowered herself onto my body and began to run her hands across every part of me. “Haven’t you ever heard of the domino effect? If we let the Communists take South Vietnam, then it’s only a matter of time before they conquer the Philippines, South Korea, and all the other little countries,” she said while licking my ear and manipulating me in a most pleasant way.
“That’s just an excuse that the government uses to intervene everywhere they choose,” I retorted breathlessly, while manipulating her in a most pleasant way.
So it was to be sex—mindless, wild, and clearly political—exactly what I needed to take my mind off the catastrophe at NBC. She wanted it from every conceivable position, and she screamed with such passion and ferocity that I feared the occupants of the adjacent room would call the police or an ambulance. I pressed her arms above her head as I pumped in and out of her. “Nixon is a loser and a slimy politician,” I said right into her ear.
“He is not. He’s just what this country needs,” she groaned, and matched me stroke for stroke. Then, just before her climax, she grabbed an amyl nitrate capsule, normally used for heart attacks, from the little yellow box and broke it near our noses, which released fumes that caused a feeling of unreality, as if I were hovering above the bed, with a heart rate of about three hundred beats a minute. Maybe the paramedics were not such a bad idea after all. The sound she made at orgasm was a long, loud roar that evoked images of a Tyrannosaurus rex consuming a lesser animal, and I shushed her and attempted to cover her mouth to dull the noise. It is revealing that, though engrossed, I was cognizant enough to be terrified that the police might be on their way, with me having a lot of explaining to do: ever the vigilant boy. We had orgasms simultaneously.
When it was over, she allowed herself ten seconds to calm down, then covered herself immediately with a robe, lit a cigarette, and sprang up from the bed, reverting instantly to the society-dame mode. She told me that I was “a delight” and “very well informed,” and she threw me my pants. She retired to another bedroom and came out a minute later fully dressed and brushing her hair. “It was so nice to meet you, Richard,” she said as she guided me out. She gave me a maternal peck on the cheek. “Goodbye,” she said as she closed the door.
There I stood in the hallway, my heart still racing, the smell of her perfume all over me, not quite believing what had transpired in the last sixty minutes. At least she didn’t care if I did The Dean Martin Show.
Thus was concluded my first day in Los Angeles, which had begun and ended with me getting fucked.
Afterword
There are times in a life when a word or a gesture, a song or a scent, can instantaneously send you back to a moment in the past. It could be a brief, benign moment: the certain way you turned your head to see a birthday present, or the first time fresh rain dripped in your mouth. It can also be a profound moment, catastrophic or triumphant, that you will never forget, that pops up unexpectedly in memory from time to time. The past is a dream world of events that are remembered with varying degrees of perspective.
I find I remember minute details of some things, yet am hazy on the larger episode of which they are a part. I remember faces better than names, always have, so some of the names in these pages are not the names of the people they represent. I remember lawyers better than faces, so some of the names in these pages are not the names of the people they represent. For the most part, these reminiscences are presented affectionately, but as with anyone’s youth, mine contained heroes and villains, and I have no desire to get a phone call from a disgruntled eighty-year-old villain who denies his villainy. I have spent a fair amount of time speaking to people who lived those days with me, who reminded me of events I had forgotten and the fine points of ones I remembered. I am surprised at how much remains in my memory. Yet there are reasons why I chose to write about these particular pieces of my life, even if I was not conscious of them. Each of them underlines the basic influences in my youth, among them: humor, love, sex, music, ethicalness, and fear. It is surprising to me in reading these stories how unsure of myself I was, how afraid I was of risk and rejection, and how intensely everything was felt, large and small. This intensity is one of the mixed blessings of being young. Mellowing, it seems, is one of the meager compensatory blessings of being old.
The book concerns events that happened to me from the ages of nine to twenty-five. It is by no means a comprehensive autobiography, but rather an account of events that stand out in my memory, that have a chronology all their own. During the concentrated personal investigation of my past that the writing required, I relived the events in my mind, sometimes painfully but mostly joyfully, in amusement. I fell in love again, got angry again, laughed again, felt the pride of achievement and the sting of failure as if it were yesterday. From a distance, through the gauze of time, I can see how trivial some of my problems appear now. But to a young person, his place in his social universe is crucial to happiness and function, and patience is a notion that must be gradually learned. These difficulties were certainly not trivial when they occurred; in fact, they were the overriding realities of my young life.
I received a fine education at Alfred University and had a wonderful time, though my account of that four years contains some agony as well. There was the broadening exhilaration of living in a community of smart, ambitious young people, with their vivacity and laughter, in a rural setting so different from my home. Unfortunately, there was also the cruel actuality of institutional bigotry. Alfred today is an excellent school where those onerous elements of college life are long past and forgotten, but they took their damn time about it, and that’s the way it was when I was there. I remember with particular fondness my introduction to acting, especially the contribution of C. D. Smith and Ronald Brown, who had an abiding love for the theater and started a spark in me that has never been extinguished.
There are several accounts in these pages of relationships with girls and women with whom I was in love and in lust. It is my intention not to titillate but to communicate the excitement that sex held for me and its importance in my life, which has evidently been considerable. Though I by no means set out to write a treatise on how sexual mores have evolved, it struck me how clearly this plays out in the book, and how radical the change was by the end of the sixties. I wonder at our naïveté and desperation, those of us who lived on the hazy line of mutable moral attitudes: one foot in the nineteenth century and the other in the twentieth.
My narratives of romantic love, for me that rarest of conditions, were the most emotional for me to remember. Looking from the present, despite some heartbreak, I am grateful for having undergone its rigors, as subsequently I have met many a person who has, unfortunately for them, never been in love. I am certain today that despite my youth, I was truly in lov
e in those instances, so there is no need for revisionism here. I am also convinced that loving and being loved in return is as high an achievement as any that one can attain in life, and worth preserving, though making it last is the tricky part.
There are a number of comparisons in the book between situations in my life and scenes from movies: “I felt like I was in a Gene Kelly musical.” Perhaps I use them as a reference because, to me as a child, movies were glamorous products of imagination and talent in which problems got solved and people were happy. There have been moments in my life when I thought, This is just like a movie, a case of life imitating art, which imitates life to begin with. Maybe such thinking makes a happy episode seem more momentous, or a tough spot more manageable. At times the judgment is made retrospectively. When I hurt my thumb in the mechanism of an M1 rifle and howled with pain, I didn’t think of a funny scene from a Laurel and Hardy army movie then, but I do now.
As far as my parents are concerned, they did their best to provide security, and there was no doubt that they loved my sister, Rhoda, and me very much. Good people, idiosyncratic people. My father takes it on the chin here a bit. He was a powerful personality and a gifted comedian who meant well, but he had a tremendous amount of anger in him. He underestimated the effect on his wife and children of his temper, made all the more frustrating by his consistent myopia about others’ approaches to life. Whatever our faults, the Kleins engaged one another, made one another laugh, were never boring. Reticent we were not: We went for the laughs; we fought for time at the dinner table. It is far from coincidence that such a family would produce an individual who makes a living by his imagination. I want to thank them and a host of others who played a part in my life. If you played a part in my life and went unmentioned, please forgive me, as the Academy has asked me to limit the number of people I may thank.
Photo Captions
Chapter 1, “Careful Parents”
My father’s favorite photo—the suit was high quality.
Chapter 2, “Challenging Mrs. Graux”
Careful parents and children at the beach—I had to wait an hour after eating before going swimming.
Chapter 3, “The TeenTones”
The TeenTones—we were on Ted Mack’s Original Amateur Hour—we lost.
Chapter 4, “Push Like You Mean It”
Rhoda and the author.
Chapter 5, “Joe College”
The author as ROTC cadet, 1959.
Chapter 6, “Boy Hero”
The lifeguard at the Alamac Hotel, searching for drowning victims and girls.
Chapter 7, “New Passions”
The author as a Japanese warrior slashing at a terrified graduate student.
Chapter 8, “Tales of a Busboy”
The author and a colleague posing between breakfast and lunch.
Chapter 9, “Ducks in a Row”
A serious senior, 1962.
Chapter 10, “Yale and Beyond”
Graduation, with Rhoda and my mother and father.
Chapter 11, “Summer Stock and Hard Knocks”
Scene from A Thurber Carnival at Casino in the Park Playhouse.
Chapter 12, “Foreign Affair”
Elizabeth Schmidt in uniform in front of the Berlin pavilion, 1964.
Chapter 13, “The Second City”
Joan Bassie, the author, Fred Willard, Sandra Caron, and an unseen David Steinberg in The Original Amateur Hour, our funniest sketch.
Chapter 14, “Learning How”
Onstage at the Improvisation.
Chapter 15, “L.A. and Me”
The author with Jack Roy (aka Rodney Dangerfield) and his son, Brian.
About the Author
For more than forty years ROBERT KLEIN has entertained audiences. He has had an acclaimed career in comedy, on Broadway, on television, and in film. Born in the Bronx, he was a member of the famed Second City theatrical troupe in Chicago in the 1960s. Twice he was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album of the Year: Child of the Fifties (1973) and Mind Over Matter (1974). He received a Tony Award nomination for Best Actor and won a Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award for his performance in the hit Neil Simon musical They’re Playing Our Song in 1979. In 1993, Klein won an Obie and the Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Performance by an Actor in Wendy Wasserstein’s The Sisters Rosensweig. In 1975, Klein was the first comedian to appear in a live concert on Home Box Office. He has done seven one-man shows for HBO. He was a star of the hit NBC series Sisters and has made more than 100 appearances on The Tonight Show and The Late Show with David Letterman. Notable films include Hooper, The Owl and the Pussycat, Two Weeks Notice, and How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days.
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The names and other identifying characteristics of some people have been changed.
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Copyright © 2005 by Robert Klein Company, Inc.
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Designed by Jan Pisciotta
Lyrics from Let the Ball Roll by Irving Caesar and Gerald Marks reprinted by permission of Marlong Music Corp.
The Library of Congress has catalogued the hardcover edition as follows: Klein, Robert.
The amorous busboy of Decatur Avenue: a child of the fifties looks back /Robert Klein.
p. cm.
1. Klein, Robert, 1942–. 2. Comedians––United States––Biography. 3. Actors––United States––Biography. I. Title.
PN2287.K673A3 2005
792.702’8’092––dc22 2004063691
[B
ISBN-13: 978-0-684-85488-5
ISBN-10: 0-684-85488-0
ISBN-13: 978-0-684-85489-2 (Pbk)
ISBN-10: 0-684-85489-9 (Pbk)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4391-4436-7 (eBook)