Hollywood Animal (53 page)

CHAPTER 13

[Flashback]

Me and Anastas Mikoyan

KARCHY

I can’t say “the.” My tongue. I can’t get it right.

MAGIC

Put a rubber band on it.

KARCHY

I never thought of that.

Telling Lies in America

THE FIRST BOOK
I read was Jules Verne’s
Michael Strogoff
, set in the world of czarist Cossack horsemen. It had been a Christmas gift from my father’s friend, the novelist and poet Gyula Bedy, and had been on a shelf unopened for two years. Suddenly I found myself out in the Russian steppes, far from back alleys, juvenile caseworkers, and my mother’s loony laughter. I moved on to
The Three Musketeers, The Man in the Iron Mask
, and
The Count of Monte Cristo
, books my father had read when he was a boy.

I read either on my living room couch, if my mother was okay, or, if she wasn’t, in my nonbathroom sitting on my non–toilet seat with wadded-up Kleenex in my ears.

Sometimes I told my father I was going down to the public library after school … and this time I really did, sitting in the Reading Room with the bums who came there to either warm up or cool off.

I started to haunt a used paperback store on West 30th and Lorain, a front, I discovered, for a horse racing wire. They sold paperbacks here with many of their covers torn off for either two cents or five and I moved on to Faulkner and
Fitzgerald
and Hemingway and Steinbeck and Salinger and C. S. Forester and A. J. Cronin and Mickey Spillane and Eric Ambler and Mary Roberts Rinehart.

The horse bettors, moving through to the back room of the store with big cigars in their hands, would sometimes give me literary advice.

“Hey, kid, didja read Henry Miller yet?”

“No.”

“Read him. He’ll make your dick grow.”

“I can’t sell him Henry Miller,” the owner said, “he’s a minor. They’ll put me in jail.”

But I begged the man and he sold me
Tropic of Cancer
and
Tropic of Capricorn
for ten cents. So I read Henry Miller and he didn’t make my dick grow but I widened my eyes sometimes when I read his descriptions. And I read Wolfe and Tennessee Williams.

I was a catholic (small c), ecumenical, and promiscuous reader. I read anything and everything that appealed to me. I hung around so much the owner asked if I wanted to help him in the back with the wire for $5 a day. I was tempted—$5 was a lot of money—but I remembered my promise to Father John and turned him down.

I told him I had made a promise to a priest to make something of my life. Touched somehow by that, he let me have the paperbacks for nothing as long as I brought them back when I’d read them.

I felt myself
transported
when I read a book. Nothing else existed when I was reading.
I
didn’t exist, either.
I
was Michael Strogoff and Tom Joad and Gatsby and Nick Adams and Mike Hammer. Their problems were my problems; their loves were my loves. I was in love with Daisy Buchanan because I
was
Gatsby.

My father gave me one of his beaten-to-death Hungarian-language typewriters—he typed with two fingers and smashed the keys—and I started making lists for myself of the books I had read.

Each listing had the author’s name, the major characters’ names, and a summary of the plot.

I also made lists of words that I hadn’t understood, their definitions in English, and their Hungarian translations.

I read only in English, to my father’s consternation. I refused, even, to read his own novels, copies of which were slowly gathering from subscribers who’d seen his ad asking for copies of his books.

“Why won’t you read Hungarian?” he asked. “You know how. Your mother taught you.”

“It’s easier for me to read in English,” I said.

“Are you ashamed of being Hungarian?”

“No.”

“Then what?”

“You told me to read,” I said to him. “I’m reading. You didn’t tell me to read in Hungarian.”

“Yes.” My father smiled. “Unfortunately that is absolutely true.”

Besides getting copies of his books from Katherine Webster or subscribers to his newspaper, my father would also steal them. Well, he wouldn’t really steal them because he’d pay for them—but he’d take them from the public library, and then say that he’d lost them.

I was with him one day when he told a librarian that he had lost four books and wanted to pay for them. The librarian wrote down the book’s titles and she wrote down the author and my father paid her $20 and she wrote my father a receipt.

When she wrote the receipt she stopped suddenly and said, “But this name—your name—is the same as the author’s!”

“This name,” my father said, deadpan, “Eszterhás—this name is as common in Hungarian as Smith or Jones.”

“Really,” the librarian said.

My father said, “True!”

“Well, you learn something every day,” the librarian said.

We were laughing as we left the library that day … Eszterhás was most definitely not a common Hungarian name. It was such a rare Hungarian name that we knew of no other Eszterháses in the whole world.

“Did you get a copy of
Nemzet Politika
yet?” I asked my father.

“Why do you ask me about
Nemzet Politika
?” My father smiled. “You don’t read my books anyway.”

“You said it will be the most difficult to find.”

“No, I don’t have a copy yet,” my father said.

“When I grow up,” I said, “I will find it for you.”

“Thank you.” He smiled. “Will you read it, too?”

“All right,” I said, “I promise you that if I find
Nemzet Politika
I will read it.”

“Thank you,” he said, his arm around me. “That means very much to me. I will hold you to your promise.”

Glancing through the
National Catholic Register
one day, I saw an announcement for a contest. If I answered 250 questions relating to American history, art, literature, and religion correctly, I’d win $1,000.

I told my father I was going to go down to the library after school every day and dig into all the books there and win $1,000.

“What will you do with the money?” he asked.

“I’ll buy a record player and I will buy every Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard record ever made.”

He shook his head and said
Ohkay!
And
Fein!
And when I got back from the
library
the next night I found a stack of musty and rain-damaged
World Book Encyclopedias
on the kitchen table.

“For
Elvész
” (the word means “lost” in Hungarian), my father said. “
Elvész Prezli
” (the lost pretzel).

I worked for a month answering the 250 questions and when I was finished my father drove me in our blue Nash to the downtown post office and we mailed my thick envelope Special Delivery to the
National Catholic Register
offices in Denver.

A week later I got a postcard back informing me that I’d lost but that I could subscribe to the
Register
at a special rate.

My father saw how disappointed I was and tousled my hair.

“There is an old Hungarian saying,” he said.

“I know all the old Hungarian sayings,” I said. “I don’t want to hear another one now.”

“You don’t know this one,” he said. “
Nem minden papsajt, van papszar is
.”

It really made me laugh. “Not everything is priest’s cheese; there is priest’s shit, too.”

I even thought I detected, shockingly, a glimmer of a smile on my mother’s set and stern face.

“You worked very hard,” my father said. “You lost. But you learned many things. Correct?”

I shrugged. All I knew was that I’d lost.

“So,” he said, “as far as I’m concerned, you won and to reward you for winning, I will give you two dollars every week from now on.”

I laughed and hugged him and I saw that my mother was smiling, too, and in my joy I moved to hug her, too. She backed away from me and left the room.

I stood there. My father was looking at me evenly.

“She doesn’t mean it,” he said.

I won my spelling bee at St. Emeric’s School and my father and I studied the dictionary together for the West Side finals.

I was eliminated in the first round of the finals for misspelling a word.

I ran home and my father and I looked it up in the dictionary and there it was: I had spelled it correctly.

Dictionary in hand, he came back to the school with me to confront the teacher with the evidence.

The teacher looked at the dictionary, then at the flyleaf, shook his head, and said, “This is an English dictionary you have here, published in Great Britain. They spell it differently over there.”

My father said, “It correct. Boy study in dic-cherry.”

“Sorry,” the teacher said, “wrong dictionary. Where did you get it?”

“Voloontair America,” my father said.

The teacher smirked.

On the way home, my father said to me in Hungarian, “I read an article in the
Plain Dealer
about a famous American writer, he knows all the big words, but he can’t spell them. So he pays someone to spell all the big words for him—a lawyer, I think. When you are a famous American writer, you will pay a lawyer to spell words, too.”

I passed the playgrounds slowly sometimes but kept walking. The alleys and streets were not the lure they had once been. The rawness and edge of the alleys didn’t amount to much compared with the worlds I lived in in Tennessee Williams and Faulkner and Mickey Spillane.

I ran into Chuckie Chuckles on the way home from school. He had a brown paper bag of Manischewitz and offered it to me but I shook my head.

His family was heading back to Kentucky, he said, and José’s older brother had been killed while holding up a grocery store on Clark Avenue.

“Dumb shit,” Chuckie said. “He goes in with a zip gun and the guy behind the counter has a real Luger he brought home from the war.”

My father made me a soccer game with his own hands. It was a piece of wood painted green with wire mesh nets at each end and metal rims around the sides.

The game was played with buttons. Larger coat buttons were the players and a little white shirt button was the ball. We took turns flicking “the ball” with the larger coat buttons toward the net.

The coat button “players” soon had distinctive “personalities” and my father and I rummaged through the button jars at the Salvation Army and the Volunteers scouting new player buttons. It was the first time that going to the Salvation Army or the Volunteers was ever fun.

I played the game so much either with my father or by myself that my thumb got badly blistered.

For Christmas he bought me a toy printing set with rubber letters and its own ink supply. I decided to publish my own newspaper, the
St. Emeric Herald
, which I left on the desks at school early one morning.

It was filled with local news—“Frances Madar Seen Necking with Robert Zak in Cafeteria” was one headline.

I wrote an editorial that said, “Masturbation is not a sin. It will not make you blind. Everybody does it, even Father John, Sister Rose, and the other sisters, especially the sisters.”

Sister Rose immediately summoned Father John, who, I thought, was going to kill me. All copies of the
St. Emeric’s Herald
were collected by Sister Rose and burned in the alley.

“Are you forgetting the promise you made to me?” Father John scolded.

“No, Father,” I said. “Look. I wrote a whole newspaper. All by myself. It was hard work.”

“I don’t know what will become of you,” he said, “I just don’t,” but he was smiling … sort of … just a little.

My father bought me a BB pistol that I had been eyeing in the front window of Sam Finesilver’s hardware store. It was for the two of us, he said, to be used only for target practice.

We drove out to Metropolitan Park in our old Nash, put bull’s-eye paper targets on the trees, and fired away. We were laughing and having fun together.

I loved that BB pistol and just couldn’t leave it up there on top of the bookshelf until the next trip to Metropolitan Park.

When my mother was in the kitchen or my father in the printing shop, I snuck to the living room window with the pistol and waited for targets to come along.

My favorite target was a fat Hungarian prostitute with a huge derriere. Each time she passed beneath our window I’d shoot her in the butt. All she did was smack herself back there as though she’d been stung by a mosquito.

Then I started on the big blazing Papp’s Bar neon sign right next to our window. First I shot out all the green lights, then all the red lights, then all the yellow lights … until the big neon sign was dark.

When the policemen came, I couldn’t even deny it … they’d picked all the BBs out of the gutter right underneath our window.

When the policemen left—after my father had agreed to pay old man Papp for the damage—my mother went completely berserk, screaming that my father was teaching me to shoot people.

I said, “All she did was scratch her behind, it didn’t even hurt the fat
kurva
.”

My father turned calmly away and started to play his violin.

My mother screamed at him. “A murderer,” she said. “
Your
son.
Your
son. A murderer. Like you!”

I said, “Nana, really, she didn’t even feel it.”

She kept screaming about murder. My father kept playing the violin.

I went into my nonbathroom, stuck the Kleenex in my ears, and read
War and Peace
.

I read: