Still Foolin' 'Em (6 page)

Yom Kippur is when we atone for all our sins of the past year. It’s like Catholic confession except we do it all in one day and the rabbi doesn’t try to cornhole us. These services are always packed. Often we move to a bigger venue to accommodate the crowds. Tickets are expensive. It’s like play-off seats for season ticket holders. Nothing is included in your basic package. Regular Friday and Saturday morning services are not well attended, but the chance to go to the big dance and spill your guts about the bags of Oreos you shouldn’t have eaten or your flirtation with the pool boy brings the masses.

On Yom Kippur most Jews try to fast, so it’s a very long service filled with sadness and guilt and the rumbles of growling stomachs. At one point there is a silent prayer, during which you basically get a few minutes of solitude to silently say to God how you fucked up all year, and that even though all he asks is that you fast for one day, somehow you gave in and ate a little nosh on the way over to keep your strength up. Even worse, it was a Sausage McMuffin. (If only there were a Yom Kippur app that could read the minds of all those hungry, tortured souls: “I bought retail,” “I masturbated to that weather girl who wears the tight skirts,” “I ate pork rinds,” “I voted Republican.”) When the service is ending, the shofar (a ram’s horn) is blown, signaling the beginning of the New Year, and the masses go to someone’s house for deviled eggs, bagels, and lox, and then to the nearest Chinese restaurant. This is called “breaking the fast,” and it would be an incredible bonding experience if we hadn’t all been sneaking food all day.

The next big Jewish holiday is Christmas. Everybody loves Christmas. Especially the Jews. Jews adopt Christmas and other people’s holidays because they’re more fun than ours. It’s not an equal playing field. On TV, for instance, you never see
Have a Nice Hanukkah, Charlie Brown
or
The Grinch Who Returned His Presents for the Cash
. And the music? “Bagels roasting on an open fire” just doesn’t cut it.

Christians have warm, festive gatherings where the family comes over, they open their gifts, and they share a huge meal. Gentiles’ lives are a Hallmark TV special where the final scene is the whole clan singing “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas” by a roaring fire. You can’t help but feel jealous. There’s a reason Rockwell never painted a Jewish family dinner. We never look happy! We need a makeover. For every Schlomo who loves his holidays, there are fifty other Jews who wish their name was Tim. That’s why so many of my friends have huge, beautifully decorated Christmas trees surrounded by piles of gifts. We drink warm cider and eat red smoked salmon blinis with green caviar on top, in Christmas colors. We even sing carols. We do this just to fit in. We bust our ass for Christmas, yet at Hanukkah we forget to light the candles by the third night. Hanukkah isn’t a sexy holiday. At that time of the year, I feel that I should be wearing a Jewish star on my sweater. The country is only 2 percent Jewish, marked down from 3 percent, and I just don’t feel a part of it for the holiday season.

The only Jewish holiday that’s any fun is Purim, where we eat cookies stuffed with prunes. And you know why: to clean out the matzoh that’s been wedged in my ass since Passover.

Passover: there’s another holiday that isn’t all it is cracked up to be.

It’s a holiday when we celebrate … suffering. There’s a surprise.

What makes it even worse is that Passover occurs at the same time as Easter. Again we can’t compete. Two thousand years ago Jesus is crucified, three days later he walks out of a cave and they celebrate with chocolate bunnies and marshmallow Peeps and beautifully decorated eggs. I guess these were things Jesus loved as a child.

Passover commemorates the Exodus from Egypt. A fantastic tale. Moses frees the slaves who were building the pyramids, we’re lost in the desert for forty years, cross the parted Red Sea, get to the Holy Land, and we celebrate by eating cardboard and a fish called gefilte that is so lacking in flavor you have to cover it with horseradish and bitter herbs. Not one fucking chocolate bunny. We do have eggs, except they’re hard-boiled and served in salted water. My mouth is watering as I type this.

Every year at the lengthy Seder service, we ask the four questions. Why is this night different from all other nights? And it’s not: it’s ten-thirty and we still haven’t eaten! Two hours in and we’re still suffering and still lost for forty years. How is that possible? Forty years? I never figured it out until I drove with my grandparents.

“Make a left.”

“No, it’s a right.”

“What did the guy say?”

“I don’t know, I thought you were listening.”

“I’m not the driver, the driver should listen.”

So, we wandered in the desert for forty years. And when we did get to the Promised Land, we claimed the only place in the Middle East that doesn’t have a drop of oil under it. So much for Jews being the chosen people. You can almost see God and his staff laughing at the water cooler.

But the bottom line is, I want to reconnect with God, I want something to hold on to because I want to believe there is something better, something after this. And I hope there is. After all my disillusionment, I want to believe. I’m just afraid that after I die, I’ll get to the pearly gates and God will say to me, “Billy Crystal.”

“Yes, God.”

“Come here,” he’ll say.

I’ll make my way over.

All the people of my life who have gone before me will be assembled, watching.

God will lean in close, put his almighty hands on my shoulders, and with an angelic look he’ll whisper, “Count to ten, turn around, kiss your parents and grandparents, and come back onstage … and never discuss what I just told you.”

My Twenties

Three years after I met her, Janice Goldfinger (she heard all the jokes) and I were parked in the driveway of her family’s house. As we finished listening to “Cherish” by the Association in her secondhand Chevy Impala, Janice said, “So we should get married.” It wasn’t the big, down-on-one-knee romantic event I’d been starting to contemplate, but as I’ve come to know over all these years, when Janice wants to do something, she does it. So basically, she asked me. As soon as she said it, I said, “Of course we should, I love you.” I was twenty-one; she was twenty.

As I was about to go into her house and ask her father for her hand and the rest of her, here’s what my scorecard looked like: It was 1969 and Vietnam was raging, I still had a semester to go at NYU, and I really didn’t know what I was going to do when I graduated. Otherwise, things were perfect. The one thing I did know was that I wanted to spend my life with Janice. I didn’t have any money for a ring, so my mom graciously gave us her own cherished engagement ring, and we put the small diamond into a new setting and I gave it to Janice under the statue of George M. Cohan in Times Square. Corny? You bet. It still wasn’t that “Oh my God” moment, but to this day every time we pass the statue we smile and hold hands, and we feel a lot better about ourselves than the people who got engaged under the statue of Joe Paterno at Penn State.

I was a film and television directing major at NYU’s School of the Arts (it had not yet been “Tisched”). Not sure why I didn’t audition for the acting program. Maybe I thought if the acting thing didn’t work out, at least I’d have something solid to fall back on. I’d come to NYU after two great years at Nassau Community College, where the theater program had been my home. I acted in plays and musicals, and I directed as well. I did stock in the summers, and this put an end to my baseball career.

In the film program at NYU, my fellow students were kids like Oliver Stone and Christopher Guest, and one of my film professors was a bearded, long-haired young genius named Marty Scorsese. An intense guy, he taught a production class and a history of film class. His passion for making movies was strong, and even though I felt nervous around him, his love of the history of cinema inspired me. I made a few student films that weren’t very good (Marty confirmed that). Though I loved learning the principles of directing, I needed to be onstage. I had done summer stock and was also the house manager for
You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,
a musical that ran in the East Village. I tore tickets, directed people to their seats in the tiny theater, sold drinks and souvenirs at intermission, and knew everyone’s parts. I could have gone on for any actor in the musical, including Lucy.

I was barely earning enough to share a tiny eighty-dollar-a-month apartment in the East Village with David Sherman, one of my oldest and dearest friends, dating back to junior high. He’s now a doctor and we live near each other in Los Angeles. Back then, he was in medical school and I was in film school, and we would switch and do each other’s homework. This meant he would go see a movie, and I would illegally dispense drugs to his patients.

We lived at 325 East Fifth Street, next door to the police station that would later be the home of
Kojak.
There was a red-haired detective at the precinct—I’ll call him Sergeant Dinkus—and he was always busting music great Miles Davis. Oftentimes, Davis’s red Ferrari would be towed and sitting in front of the precinct, and Sergeant Dinkus would be lecturing the pissed-off jazz man. “Don’t come down here looking for trouble!” he’d say. Miles would say, “I wasn’t looking for trouble—I’m just looking to buy some heroin.”

“Down here” meant the East Village, the center of the sixties’ cultural revolution. Plenty of today’s balding boomers were then long-haired, peace-loving hippies who believed that we shouldn’t be the world’s police dog—including me, with my bushy “Jew ’fro.” It was the perfect time to be young and angry. We hated LBJ, and then we really hated Richard Nixon. We despised the war, because it meant we could be drafted right away to fight for something we didn’t believe in. The disaster of Vietnam fell on the heels of the violence of the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King Jr.’s and Bobby Kennedy’s assassinations. National Guard units patrolled college campuses, students were killed at Kent State, and the Democratic convention in Chicago was chaotic. The country was divided between a mass of angry, idealistic people who felt that the government was blowing it and those who didn’t. Other than that, it was a fun time.

The Lower East Side of New York had an electric energy. Head shops and restaurants were everywhere, and the Fillmore East was around the corner. It was the best music venue in the city, home to Hendrix, Zappa, Janis Joplin, and Dylan. It had also originally been a theater, and I’d seen my first movie there,
Shane
, when I was five. Next to the theater was the Central Plaza, a catering hall for weddings and big events and, for fifteen years, the place where my dad had produced jazz concerts. We grew up going there, and it was now an NYU building housing dance and theater studios. One of the studios was in the very ballroom Dad had used for his weekly jazz events. Alongside the Plaza was Ratner’s restaurant, which had been a well-known spot in New York for years, but the young people that now packed the streets had given it a new life. When you’re as stoned as everyone was in that neighborhood, a dairy restaurant with great whipped cream desserts is an oasis. David and I went there a lot. David had a heavy beard that he could grow as fast as Nixon. One day after a few hits on a joint, he shaved one side of his face, dividing it right down the middle. A little high, we sat down in Ratner’s, and the waiter came over and asked David what he would like. The clean-shaven side, which was facing the waiter, ordered something, and then David turned his head and the bearded side ordered something else. David then got into an argument with himself, constantly turning his head. It was truly funny, but after a few hits, it was hilarious. Ever try to keep a straight face in front of someone who hasn’t laughed since the Great Depression? The waiter simply stared at David. Ratner’s waiters were mostly older Jewish men, weary messengers of matzoh-ball soup who had seen everything—everything but the straggly group of tripping, incense-smelling, “peace now” folks, many of them bearing a disturbing resemblance to Jesus Christ. Their table-side encounters sounded like this:

“VATZ IT GONNA BE?” asked the waiter; I’ll call him Murray.

“Man, I’ll have the LIZARDS THAT ARE COMING OUT OF YOUR EARS!” screeched the lost soul whose LSD-glazed eyes looked like slices of blood oranges.

Never losing his cool, Murray answered, “Oh, the special.”

I had two great friends, Al Finelli and David Hawthorne, from Nassau Community College. They were funny and talented actors, and we had a great chemistry together and were always improvising sketches. We talked about forming a three-man comedy group someday, but it didn’t seem possible because of the uncertain future we were all facing.

As my graduation from NYU approached, I was terrified. On December 1, 1969, the first draft lottery was televised. It was the ultimate reality game show: 366 Ping-Pong balls with the days of the year printed on them rolling around in a device usually used for Bingo night at the senior center.

One by one the balls were pulled (as mine were as I watched) and the fate of thousands of young men was decided. We’d been told that guys with the first 195 birth dates chosen were definitely going to be drafted and more than likely would soon be on their way to Nam. I was in a night class at NYU, and we all watched the dates numbered 100 to 199 on television. I wasn’t in that group, but I didn’t know about the first ninety-nine. I ran home and called my mother. “Mom, are you watching the lottery?”

“No, dear, there’s a two-hour
Bonanza
on. Hoss got bit by a snake…”

Great. Finally, on TV, I saw that I wasn’t in the first ninety-nine, so I lit a joint. Then I wasn’t in the 200-to-249 group, so I lit another; then 250 to 299, another; 300 to 349, and I was giggling. Finally March 14 came up, number 354! I went to Ratner’s and had a big piece of cake, and a side order of the lizards that were coming out of the waiter’s ears.

*   *   *

I called Janice first, of course. It seemed we were free and clear of the army and that scary war. Before the draft, I had been interviewing at some Long Island high schools for possible teaching jobs, which would mean a deferment, but in my heart I knew teaching wasn’t what I really wanted to do. Now, with the draft out of the way, I called Dave and Al and we formed a comedy group first known as We the People and then 3’s Company and started to work on the Coffee House Circuit. These were nightclubs on college campuses, mostly on the East Coast. We traveled all over New England and New York and Pennsylvania, spending three nights or sometimes a week performing at a school, meanwhile living in a dorm. We made $350 tops, which was split three ways for a week’s engagement. So I’m talking big money: $117 a man divided by three days is $39 a day, but in 2013 money, that’s at least $40. At the same time, I was substitute teaching at Long Beach Junior High, which I had attended. It was strange to have lunch in the faculty dining room with teachers who had taught me. I could never call them by their first names.