Easy Street (the Hard Way): A Memoir (5 page)

Anyway, another abiding and burnished memory from back in the day were our summer vacations, which during the early, early years were all spent at this little Catskill dive called the Heiden Hotel. It didn’t of course compare to the crème de la crème places in the Catskills, like Grosingers or the Concord or one of those places you see in movies like
Dirty Dancing
. This was a resort for poor people, people who didn’t have a whole lotta discretionary income, but the place had all the bells and whistles to make you feel like you had escaped the ordinary, if only for a brief bit. It had a day camp for the kids and a swimming pool. It had a little restaurant where you went every night and ate dinner and where you had your breakfast in the morning, and that was our summer vacation. We did this for the first fourteen years of my life. Then when my brother, who was four years older than me, segued into being a professional musician, he started
doing gigs up in the Catskills at the ritzier places. My mom, dad, and I would then go to wherever he was playing. My dad eventually found a way to play at these places too. While my bro played in bands that might be doing anything from jazz to the Beatles, there was usually another house band that played for the Perry Como and Sinatra generation. Dad always fandangled his way onto the stage.

I remember feeling so good to see my brother’s fucking genius and marveled at his instinctual talent on the drums. It was also great to see my dad become a totally different man when he had the sticks in his hands. I mean, the focus was incredible. He had this crazy and furious zeal when he played. He had this heat coming off his back and a sizzle about him because he was so fuckin’ happy. Really, his connection to whatever true passion he had in life was playing those drums. When he wasn’t on the drums he was just this ordinary, schlepping lower-middle-class dude trying to make a living and be the best dad he could be. But when he was behind the drums . . . well, it was something else. Something mythical touched him.

Back in the neighborhood the other thing my dad and I did was go to the movies. There was a Lowe’s on 175th, which eventually turned into Reverend Ike’s tabernacle, with gilded ceilings and gorgeous murals, built when movie houses were Victorian classic beauties, decorated in full detail like stages that had once only been meant for kings and crowned heads. Dad and I would go at least once a week for the admission of a handful of coins; we could feel like royalty for two hours in the dark theater, just for two bits and a ten-cent bar of candy. If I was on Easter break or summer vacation or Christmas vacation, we went to the movies two or three times in a week. We also went to the RKO Coliseum on 181st and Broadway. So between those theaters, which had had different distribution deals with 20th Century Fox, Paramount, or Warner Bros., for example, Dad and I watched pretty much every movie that came out all through my childhood.

As I write this it makes me remember how important my father’s total absorption and near-fanaticism for watching movies was to me. It’s a big part of the “who” I became. It was also one of those magical
moments I still see vividly. It was so enthusiastically contagious to watch my dad’s reaction to a film. It was like I was the dad and he was the kid. That’s how much movies floated his boat. Whenever there was a cheaper ticket for a film revival going on at one of the movie houses we might go every day to see one classic masterpiece after another. I went with him to see the 1939 version of
Robin Hood
at least ten times. That one was made for the big screen and in color. It was one of the very first experimentations in Technicolor in Hollywood history. For my dad, it was his number-one movie of all time, and Errol Flynn was his number-one guy.

Flynn was an overnight sensation from the moment he hit Hollywood in 1935 with the release of
Captain Blood.
He was instantly typecast as a swashbuckling romantic. In the early days of film
typecast
was a big part of the contracted actor agreements the studio made with talent. You were a cop type, villain thug, happy brainless guy, sexy, or whatever box you could fill. It still happens to this day, and getting typecast can be a blessing or a curse. But Flynn rode that golden crest of fame with the full pedal to the metal. He also made some of the biggest box office–grossing movies for the next ten years. In life he was as suave and debonair during his heyday as he was on film, although he was a heavy drinker from the start. Unfortunately Flynn possessed a dark side. A dashing heroic golden boy in the eyes of the world, his genius ultimately was no match for his penchant for self-destruction. He would eventually squander all the majesty his magical side had accumulated. He became destitute in the fifties and spiraled down to an early death. Indeed, the curse of creativity versus self-destruction that so many in the arts struggle with had beaten Flynn in the end. He died at age fifty of heart disease, degeneration, and cirrhosis of the liver.

I was ten years old when Kennedy got elected. With Kennedy, it was toes all the way up: this guy appealed to you and broke through all this American hard-held tradition. You think the Presbyterians wanted
to give up power to some Catholic upstart? No way, man. All they had going for them was power. Well, that’s not all they had going for them, but the ruling class had always been WASPishly dominant in positions of higher power. I remember all of these discussions in our house between my father and his friends: “Oh, a Catholic guy will never get to be president.” That’s when I began to realize that there are forces at work in America that are bigger than anything I ever could discriminate.

One time I asked my dad and his buddies a question: “You mean a Catholic or a Jew has never been president?”

“All been Presbyterian,” one guy answered, which, of course, is not totally accurate. But I began to wonder what the fuck
is
a Presbyterian anyway? If you were a kid growing up like me in the neighborhood and someone says Presbyterian, he could’ve been saying Hindu. I knew a lot of Catholics and I knew a lot of Jews, but I didn’t know any Presbyterians—those were people who lived in a different neighborhood from mine. In fact, it didn’t seem like they were even on the same planet as I was.

Yeah, we all grew up with the air-raid shelters and the Red menace. On the radio the House of Un-American Activities was playing out in the news and was the background noise I heard while doing my homework. But when I was a kid the first time I could recall a connection to anything other than sports figures and movie stars was JFK. From 1959, when he started running for office, you could sense this was going to be a game-changer. It was so palpable that you couldn’t avoid it, even if you were a kid like me who didn’t give a shit about any of that. It happened because Kennedy was this guy who looked like he stepped off a wedding cake and had this twinkle in his eye. He seduced men and women alike as good as any movie star on the planet.

Before Kennedy there was the fifties, with Eisenhower, who was just plain vanilla. I mean, there was nothing distinctive about him. He was more like a banker—completely unsexy, completely unspectacular, and completely unremarkable. In the 1960 election it was either Kennedy or Nixon. Nixon was politics as usual, and you knew what you’d get. He was another boring empty suit, with no personality, but
he was supposed to be the next president of the United States because he’d been the vice president. Then this upstart kid comes along, this young guy with this stunning wife and brothers galore, and this father who pushed around kings, and there was just all this legend surrounding him. He starts giving press conferences, and every fourth question he has the floor laughing because his wit is so unbelievably sophisticated. He was always on point and was a truly witty guy who dared to take the ordinary events of the day and make them into something extraordinary.

It was a thrilling time, even as a kid, during those three years when he was president. We got a place in the world; we were the envy of the world because we had JFK and Jackie Kennedy in the White House. It was not like Camelot; it
was
Camelot. I actually was deeply invested in being alive during the Kennedy years and very deeply invested when the assassination took place, because that was a kind of end of innocence. I cried, just as I had done at my own father’s funeral.

But in the early sixties Kennedy, in only three years, gave us a symbol that was worth living and dying for. He was as much of a prince as anything you’ve seen in this country in the last 150 years. He was charismatic, gorgeous, brilliant, and strong. He stared down the Russians and created the Peace Corps. Imagine giving seventeen-year-olds, who had all of this energy and idealism but didn’t know what to do with it, an opportunity to put their energy and ideals to incredibly good use helping those less resourceful, all while seeing the world. He created the space program, thus opening the door to a new age of technology. He was a man who did not like to lose and took on any competition. He was going to make America the first to put a man on the moon. This sudden frenzied attention to science and technology was the initial catalyst that transformed our world into the techno age in which we currently exist, in full digitization, right now. He also ushered in an agenda to fix the broken promise of the American Constitution that said all men are created equal—it said nothing about color. He had the balls to finally say enough is enough, bringing the civil rights conversation to national attention.

Then all of the promise and all of the innocence and all of the purity, whatever it is that inspires somebody deep down into the bowels of their emotion, was removed in a couple of bullets. His death gave way to the entire cultural shift in the sixties. Once you took our innocence away, you created an environment for rebellion. How did they rebel? Rock ’n’ roll, baby. Bob Dylan, man. The Beatles, the Stones. Bell-bottoms, long hair. Fuck you. Fuck me? Fuck you. That’s when I was coming of age, right when JFK jumpstarted the modern era and lit the fuse that became the sixties.

I was thirteen and in middle school when the civil rights movement came to its head. I don’t remember a lot of discussion about race in my family or among my friends. New York was already a melting pot, and I knew and liked all kinds of kids. It did play out on the TV news, though, with images of students being barred from entering college because they were black. Then you started seeing the news flooded with Cronkite reporting on the images of people having fire hoses turned on them because they were marching for something and Rosa Parks making a stink by not giving up her seat on the bus, such that you began to see this pattern of discontent, so you couldn’t help but feel the sand shifting under your feet. There was no avoiding it, whether you had discussed it with your parents or not. If the news was on at your house always between six and seven at night, which it was, as it was in every house that owned a TV in America, this was what you were seeing.

When I think about how core values are formed, this one was forced upon me because of the era in which I lived. I guess I felt I needed to make kind of a call, thinking,
Holy shit, there’s a big world out there
. It’s so big that you need to know about it because you need to figure out where you stand in all of it. I agreed with everything the civil rights movement tried to achieve—it was common sense. I empathized with the spirit that was at the heart of this ostracized segment of the population: “We’ve eaten the crumbs for long enough, and we’ve gotten kicked in the face for long enough, and we’ve been hung from trees for long enough, and we’ve been led to believe that we’re second-class citizens for long enough.”

It was those feelings I got as a kid watching police-held German Shepherds biting people who were protesting when I began to see the blacks’ real struggle. I had an automatic default of sympathy for this cause that was not superficial, was not passing—it was deep. I remember talking with one of my black friends from school: “Of course you guys should be fucking mad, of course you guys should be fighting for your rights. This is insane, and it’s insane that anybody could be judged by the color of their skin.”

My friend said he just hoped it’d play out without warfare.

If not for Kennedy and then LBJ taking up the mantle, there might’ve been just that, or at least a lot more bloodshed. So yeah, I was not just witnessing; I was also forming my own opinions about what it all meant to me and my own values. It altered me in such a way that runs deep and is deeply personal to me: the family I have created is with a woman of color from Jamaica, and my two kids have the blood of many cultures streaming through them. We have a family who was at one time against the law—can you imagine that? We don’t think about color but rather about love and devotion and loyalty and admiration. I learned this watching the civil rights movement. If you think that what your kids are seeing and hearing from the age of five to thirteen is unimportant, you are seriously mistaken. A kid who plays hours of violent video games every day for all those years, for example, is going to have issues to deal with as an adult, of that you can be certain, and I bet it won’t be pretty. What core values are being formed?

Two months before Kennedy was assassinated and Martin Luther King gave his epic “I Have a Dream” speech, I was going to temple to get trained for bar mitzvah. My gang of neighborhood buddies who I had been hanging with since kindergarten went too. I got through it, and we had the ceremony. My entire family came from all over, even an aunt who flew in from California. It’s a big deal when a kid gets bar mitzvahed in the Jewish religion. Everybody shows up, everybody wears their spruced-up best at the temple. There’s a ritual in which the kid gets up and sings a portion of the Torah. That’s what your bar
mitzvah is, and then you’re part of the whole congregation. You participate in it, and when you get through the ordeal you are, so to speak, a man, and there’s coffee and cake by the temple. Then you throw a party afterward at some reception hall. Depending on how much money you have, some people go on fuckin’ safaris. My family had hotdogs. But we had a party, and people came with presents: fountain pens, US war bonds, and all the other shit people gave back then. I still have bonds from my bar mitzvah that I haven’t cashed.