Hollywood Animal (68 page)

CHAPTER 22

[Flashback]

I Live with Priests

GUS

It must be something, being a writer, making stuff up all the time.

CATHERINE

It teaches you to lie.

GUS

How’s that?

CATHERINE

You make it up, but it has to be believable. They call it suspension of disbelief.

Basic Instinct

MY MOTHER DECIDED
that she was going to speak French. She went down to the library, brought home Berlitz recordings, and listened to them. “Why are you learning French, Nana,” I asked her, “and not English?”

She said, “That’s my business.”

“Why is she learning French and not English?” I asked my father.

My father said, “Be thankful it’s not Russian.”

Jack Russell was the city’s political boss, the president of the City Council. He was Hungarian. He had come from Hungary as a boy at the turn of the century. He had been a junkman in the city’s East Side Hungarian community, working the alleys with a horse and buggy. One day he realized he knew just about every Hungarian on the East Side and decided to run for the council.

He was a fat man with a pale complexion and slicked-back, greasy hair. He smoked a big cigar.

“What do we need an interview for?” he said in Hungarian to my father. “I already sent the check for the ad. I send the check, you give me the endorsement—that’s the way it works, isn’t it? The priest I talked to didn’t say anything about any interview. You’ve got the money, so don’t waste my time.”

My father said, “Fein, Mr. Rusnyak,” and we started heading back out. He thought Rusnyak was Russell’s real name.

“Russell,” Jack Russell said. “Don’t give me any of that old-country bullshit.”

Many years later, when I was a reporter for the
Plain Dealer,
I wrote a story about Jack Russell that characterized him as an old-style Tammany boss, not much different from Jake Arvey, the Hungarian in Chicago who had engineered the Kelly and Daley machines. Jack Russell was offended by my story and asked me to come see him at his Buckeye Road office
.

He was a sick old man then, the weight hanging off of him, pale as a frog’s belly, the cigar unlighted in his mouth, his eyes so bad he had to wear sunglasses all the time
.

He had recently been deposed as the president of the City Council but he was still a councilman. He of course didn’t remember the sixteen-year-old Hungarian boy he had met with his father. He spoke to me in English
.

“You can call me a fuckin’ political hack or whatever other names you wanna call me in your paper,” Jack Russell said, “but remember this. When I first ran for council, they pissed on us Hungarians. The Union Club assholes and the Shaker Heights crowd. We were the niggers then
.

“And it was guys like me and Arvey in Chicago that changed all that. Because we looked these high-class phonies in the eye and said—‘No more!’ You play ball with us—you give me what I need for my people … a community hall, street repairs, cops that don’t shake you down … or I’m gonna make sure you don’t get what you need for
your
people!

“We didn’t go to school like they did, like
you
did. We barely spoke the language. But the fact that Hungarians don’t get screwed over no more, all those Hungarians who came out here or Chicago to work in the factories, is thanks to guys like me and Jake Arvey in Chicago.”

I said, “Maybe I’ll write an article one day about that, too, Mr. Russell.”

“I don’t give a shit what you write,” Jack Russell said. “I just wanted to look you in the eye and tell you so you can’t pretend to yourself you didn’t know it.”

I told him then about the visit my father and I had made to him when I was sixteen
.

“That’s what I’ve been tryin’ to tell you,” he said. “I took care of your old man with the money and he took care of me with the paper. The Hungarians took care of
me
at the ballot box and I took care of their streets, their neighborhoods. That’s the way this great country works. And maybe one day the day will come when you won’t stick your nose so goddamn high and mighty in the air about it.”

“Was there any politician you endorsed who didn’t buy ads in the paper?” I asked my father
.

“Just one,” he smiled. “Kennedy. Nixon bought many ads but I couldn’t bring myself to endorse him.”

“Did the Franciscans give you any of the money they got for the endorsements?”

“The Franciscans?” He laughed. “Those swine! You’ve got to be kidding.”

A Hungarian ball was held at the St. Patrick’s Church hall, just a couple of blocks from us on Bridge Avenue.

“I think we should go,” my father said to my mother. “It will be a big Hungarian event. As the editor of the paper, I should be there.”

“You go,” my mother said, “I’m not going.”

She changed her mind. She found a long black dress at one of the rummage shops on Detroit Avenue and told my father the morning of the ball that she was going. He was happy and hugged her. Even I was going. I had agreed to work in the kitchen and wash dishes with other Hungarian kids for a dollar an hour.

I watched them from the kitchen when they arrived. He wore his favorite suit—a white flannel one from St. Vincent DePaul’s. Her new used dress looked good on her—a little tight maybe. She’d gained weight again. She wore lipstick and makeup, which she rarely did.

As the ball began, I saw them sitting with other Hungarians, talking, enjoying the waltzes. I saw my father dance with other women. I knew how shy my mother was and how much she hated to dance.

I was washing dishes in the kitchen when my father came in.

“Have you seen your mother?” he said.

I went out into the hall with him but we couldn’t find her anywhere. No one had seen her.

“Maybe she went home,” my father said. “We should go.”

We left, walking quickly down Bridge Avenue toward our apartment. It was late and very dark. We came up 41st from Bridge and hurried down Lorain Avenue.

As we passed Nick’s Diner, I saw her out of the corner of my eye. She was inside, sitting at the counter. Neither my father nor I could believe our eyes. My mother never went inside American bars or diners or restaurants.

I stared at her a moment. She was wearing her long black rummage store
dress,
a cup of coffee in front of her, a cigarette in her hand. Her head was down. She seemed to be examining the counter. The place was nearly empty.

We went inside.

“What are you doing, Mária?” my father asked, his voice shaken.

Next to my mother on the counter I saw, neatly placed on a napkin, her new false teeth.

“I’m drinking a cup of coffee,” she said, her voice even. “My teeth hurt. The hot coffee feels good on my gums.”

My father said, “Let’s go home, Mária.”

My mother said to him, “When did you stop loving me? Did you ever love me?”

My father said, “Mária, please, don’t act like this. Let’s go home. I love you. Jozsi loves you.”

She looked up at him and smiled. “No,” she said, “you don’t.”

It was like I wasn’t there. She never looked at me.

“I am not going home,” my mother said, “you go home with the boy.”

She sipped her coffee and calmly lit up another cigarette.

“Jozsi,” my father said, “go home. We’ll be there in a little while.”

He saw me staring at her and asked, “Please Jozsi, let me talk to your mother alone!”

I was lying down on my couch when they came in about an hour later. They thought I was asleep and said not a word as they went into their bedroom. They didn’t talk or whisper in there, either, and I fell asleep.

Sometime in the night, I felt her lips brush my face but I pretended to be asleep. She hadn’t kissed me in a long time. In the morning, when I woke up, I thought maybe I’d dreamed it.

I saw her in the kitchen and said, “Good morning, Nana,” but she didn’t respond. It was one of those days when she said nothing. A few days later, I saw that she had thrown her new used black dress into a garbage can.

My father was asked to go to a meeting with other fathers at Cathedral Latin. He took the buses and the rapid transit just like I did every morning; something was wrong with our new used Ford.

When he came home late at night I saw he wasn’t in a talkative mood but I pressed him anyway.

“What did they talk to you about, Papa?”

“Money,” he said. “They want money for new classrooms.”

“What did you say to them?”

“I told them I’m a poor man and I can’t give them money.”

“What did they say?”

He didn’t answer the question for a moment and then he said, “Nothing. And then this priest laughed at me. And then the other fathers laughed at me.”

I said, “I’m sorry, Papa.”

He smiled. “Perhaps they thought I was making a bad joke.”

The United States Marine Corps was staging an amphibious landing on Lake Erie. It was in the
Plain Dealer
and on the radio and the TV. Everybody was talking about it. A hundred thousand Clevelanders would watch it from specially constructed bleachers at Edgewater Park.

My father told me we were going to see the marines land.

He took me to an office downtown and he explained in his broken English that he was the editor of the
Catholic Hungarians’ Sunday
and I was his newspaper’s American correspondent. They took our photographs and put them inside plastic tags that said “Press.”

On the day of the mock Marine Corps invasion, as the other Clevelanders sat in the bleachers, my father and I were allowed on the ships and on the landing crafts and on the beach as the marines charged ashore.

“Are you having fun?” he asked me as armed vehicles roared by us.

I was wide-eyed and excited.

“Yes,” I said, “this is great!”

“You see?” he laughed. “Your hunkie DP greenhorn father is a powerful man, isn’t he?”

The Cleveland Indians had a player I liked as much as the now departed Rocky Colavito. His name was Walter Bond. He was 6-7, 235 pounds. He was a towering home run hitter. Casey Stengel said, “Everything he hits is in the trees.”

He was exciting to watch. The
Sporting News
compared him to Hank Aaron. He was traded. And then he died. Of leukemia.

Big news!

The Franciscans were moving the
Catholic Hungarians’ Sunday
to Youngstown, about eighty miles southeast of Cleveland. They had already bought a monastery there. We would move, too. They would buy us a house there!

There was one wrinkle: the move wouldn’t take place until next March, but my junior year of high school was beginning next month. I couldn’t switch from Cathedral Latin to a new school mid-year, so I would have to go to Youngstown next month and come back to see my parents on the weekends.

Where would I live while I was alone in Youngstown?

With the Franciscans
… at the monastery!

I was overjoyed that I could leave Cathedral Latin, but I was sick that I would be living with the Franciscans.

I loved my parents and would miss them. But I wouldn’t miss seeing my mother cementing windows, going mute, or laughing her hyena laugh.

The Franciscans enrolled me at Ursuline High School in Youngstown and we drove down to their new monastery. It was a castle, with its own wooded park grounds and was bigger than Louis Bromfield’s Malabar Farm. The Franciscans even had servants and maids.

“The newspaper, I see, is doing very very well,” my father said ruefully as he looked at their new monastery.

He was responsible for the newspaper’s success. It was thanks to him that the Franciscans were able to buy their new castle and pay their servants and maids … while we lived in our cramped, dank apartment on Lorain Avenue and they paid him $100 a month.

It was decided that I would live in a room above the monastery garage. I would eat with the Franciscans. One of them would drop me off at school in the morning on his way to saying Mass at a parish downtown.

My father gave me a present before they drove back to Cleveland: a transistor radio small enough to fit into my shirt pocket.

From my room above the garage, I watched my father and mother drive away in our green Ford. I missed Lorain Avenue already. I missed the cussing, foul-mouthed voices in the street. And I missed my blazing neon Papp’s Bar sign.

Father Peter was in Youngstown. So was Father Gottfried, whom I’d hailed with my chunk of lead … and Father Ákos, still grilling his rats.

There were other Franciscans I hadn’t met on Lorain Avenue, including Father Steve, a second-generation American Hungarian who spoke better English than Hungarian.

At dinner, the priests were mostly silent, eating heaping platters of sausage and dumplings prepared by the Hungarian cooks. When they spoke, they spoke angrily about the presidential election only a month away. They hated the Catholic candidate, these Catholic priests. “Kennedy is surrounded by Jews,” they said. “He is a Jew-lover. He is just like the Jew president, Rosenfeld.”

I had two joyous moments my first few months living at the monastery in Youngstown. When Bill Mazeroski of the Pittsburgh Pirates hit a home run in the World Series and beat the hated New York Yankees. And when John F. Kennedy was elected president of the United States.

One of the Franciscans I hadn’t met on Lorain Avenue, Father Lászlo, offered to drop me off at Ursuline my first day of school. He had come to America after the freedom fight.

He was in his thirties, grossly overweight, and bald. When we got into his car, he reached into the back seat and put a white cowboy hat on. He had a tape recorder hooked up to his radio and switched it on. It blasted Elvész and Paul Anka and Frankie Avalon.

When we stopped at traffic lights, he reached over and picked a microphone up. If a girl or an attractive young woman was crossing the street, he whistled or said “
Gimme litta puszi puszi
.” He had a loudspeaker under the hood of his car.