I'm Not High (3 page)

“Man, we’re going to be old,” Phil said, cringing at his own imagination. “Like over thirty.”

“By then,” I said with all the confidence of youth, “I will have met all of the New York Mets. I will have hung out with AC/DC. And I will have acted with Joe Pesci, Robert De Niro, and Jack Nicholson.” I didn’t know how it was going to happen, but I was certain fame was coming my way.

Even by age fifteen, Joe Pesci was already my favorite actor and my inspiration. I watched him act in everything, from movies like
Raging Bull
, where he had a huge role, to
Easy Money
(which to me is a classic) to a bunch of films where he had bit parts. He just had such electricity. I was captivated by him and had started doing impressions of him when my friends and I played stickball in the street. “Come aaaahhhn,” I’d moan in my best Pesci-ese. “Pitch da bawl. It ain’t gonna bite ya. Jeez. Hey. Whatsa matta witch yoo? Ya trow like ya take it up the wazoo.” Doing Pesci impressions was where it all started for me, and the reaction I got for it told me that I’d make a living at performing someday.

Phil had heard my Pesci and knew that I was committed to my dream, so on that night when I predicted I’d have it all, he said simply, “I believe it.” And that’s what I loved about him. He never said much, but he always had my back, and that was about the best endorsement of a dream a guy could get in Valley Stream.

“Yep,” I blathered on. “I am definitely going to be famous one day.”

Back then, in addition to my big dreams, I also felt like the world was looking out for me, and that if I stayed true to myself I’d someday be able to share my talents with everyone. And when I say the world was looking out for me, I mostly mean that I’ve always been blessed and lucky. That goes all the way back to before I was born, as I almost didn’t even make it into the world. I was nearly aborted.

Let me explain.

By the time my mom, at age forty, wandered into the Rock Front Tavern, in Valley Stream, in the mid-1960s and met my dad, a garbage man moonlighting as a bartender, she had already had enough kids. There were Eddie, Bobby, Dorene, and Patti, and they came from an array of different fathers, one of whom was dead and one of whom was a crazy maniac who almost killed them all before Mom made a midnight escape, driving from Florida to Long Island in one straight shot with her young brood.

So life hadn’t worked out the greatest for Mom. But she found a way to get through it and even had some fun along the way. She was usually the life of the party, and she loved to flirt and carouse. I figure that if she had been born a decade or two earlier she would have been a burlesque dancer. She still likes to kick up her heels, belt out tunes, dance around, and laugh from the bottom of her belly. Even into her golden years now, sometimes I’ll catch her batting her eyes at a strange man after she’s had a few martinis, and I’ll have to tell her to knock it off. That’s just who she is—and I inherited a lot of that from her. But I also think that some of her partying was an attempt to take the edge off a rough life.

Mom was born in the mid-1920s, grew up on Long Island, and as a teenager fell in love with a man named Edwin “Lefty” Troy. He was her first love, and he was great to her. He’d take her dancing and was always a gentleman, doing all of the chivalrous stuff that made Mom believe that love was a wonderful thing. She and Edwin had big plans to build a life together. There were only a couple of small problems.

The first was that Edwin’s family hated her. The Troys were Catholics and Mom was Lutheran. To me that doesn’t seem like a big deal, but to them, in that era, it was bitter like a race war. It crushed my mom that they couldn’t get married in Edwin’s church. And his family certainly wouldn’t attend a wedding in her Lutheran church. So they ended up having a simple civil service at city hall. And Edwin’s family still wouldn’t attend. It was completely out of the question. So she doesn’t have a wedding day memory of smiling in-laws looking on as their son placed a ring on her finger. Instead she remembers that in the days leading up to the wedding, Edwin’s father told her father, “I’d rather my son be dead than married to a Lutheran.”

And there was the second problem: Edwin’s father soon got his wish. Edwin was sent off to fight the Nazis in World War II under General Patton. Two months before he was to be discharged, he was killed in action.

Mom tells me of knowing it was coming. Of feeling it for a few days. She was pregnant when Edwin left, and losing the father of her child was what she dreaded most. And sure enough, one sunny afternoon, she was looking out the window of their little Long Island home—their baby, Eddie, who would never meet his father, cooing in a basinet behind her—and saw two soldiers walking somberly and purposefully up the sidewalk. They knocked on the door and Mom could barely open it. She dropped to her knees, sick with the knowledge of what they were about to tell her. She knew that as soon as she let them in, her life would change forever.

“Mrs. Troy?” the taller one inquired. To her he didn’t look much older than her Lefty. “We’re here today to regretfully inform you ...”

They handed her the official documents and left. She was the first person they told. Mom pulled it together enough to call her father, who then placed a call to Edwin’s father. When he answered, Mom’s father simply told him, “Well, you got your wish. Your boy is dead.”

There was a service for Eddie at his parents’ beloved Catholic church, and the priest would not acknowledge Mom or baby Eddie. The whole ceremony was about a great Catholic man who left behind his parents. There was no mention of Mom or their son, who were, of course, seated in a pew right in front of the guy.

My grandfather was there, too, and he grew angrier and angrier at the callousness of the priest. Eventually he squeezed Mom’s arm and said, “Get up!” through gritted teeth. Mom was mortified. She was there to mourn, not to draw attention to herself. It took her a second to gather up the baby and shuffle sideways out of the pew after her father. The priest had just finished his remarks and the organist was beginning to play when her father addressed the priest and the whole church with his booming voice.

“This man had a wife and a son, thank you very much!”

After what Mom went through with Edwin, her take on organized religion was that it was nothing but a scam and a business. To her, the church didn’t represent God, it represented money and the worst kind of clannishness, and that turned her off forever. But it didn’t diminish her faith, which she passed along to me when I was young.

Dad, on the other hand, was pretty much a hard-core atheist from the word
go
because he didn’t have a lot of things to convince him otherwise. He was born in Dayton, Kentucky, the youngest boy in a family of ten kids. His mother died giving birth to his younger sister, who was stillborn, when he was four years old. His father was a massive alcoholic who’d issue beatings for small infractions like milk spills and overlooked chores. At age six he had to walk along railroad tracks to find coal every day for heat and hot water. Dad’s tough childhood came to an abrupt end when he joined the navy at age seventeen and became a gunner in World War II, stationed most of the time in the Philippines.

And so that upbringing made him cynical about everything, but especially about notions that a great reward awaits those who live a virtuous life. Throughout my life, whenever a discussion of God has come up, he’s been extremely dismissive, but not without a twisted touch of humor.

I’d ask him, “Do you believe in the afterlife?”

“It must be pretty good,” he’d say with a wink, “because no one ever comes back.”

If I asked, “Do you think that we have souls, or a spirit that lives on after us?”

He’d say, “Sure! Sure we do. They look just like Casper the Friendly Ghost. Floating around above us.” Then, without fail, he’d point up in the air and say something like, “And there’s your uncle now. How ya doing?” And give a sarcastic little wave.

Anyway, after three and a half years in the war, seeing a lot of combat along the way, Dad wound up back in the United States. Many of his veteran buddies now worked in sanitation on Long Island, and they hooked him up with a job as a garbage man. He got married and had three kids with his first wife, but then they got divorced and he was trying to support them by moonlighting as a bartender. That’s when Mom walked into the Rock Front Tavern and batted her eyes at him. Soon they were dating, and then Mom got pregnant with me. Only she didn’t know it right away.

She had been having some bad bleeding, so she went to her doctor. Pregnancy was the furthest thing from her mind. The doctor gave her a quick exam and explained that she probably just had an early miscarriage, and she wrote it off as that. The bleeding stopped and she never gave it a second thought. A couple months later, she and my father went out dancing at an Elks club. She was back to partying like crazy as usual (with my developing brain along for the ride). Dad gave her a twirl on the dance floor and she felt a kick in her stomach. She stopped mid-spin.

“What’s the big idea?” he said. “I thought I was doing pretty good out here.”

“I can’t tell you here,” she said, somewhat horrified. “But, boy, do I have some news for you.”

The next day she was back at the same doctor, and he confirmed that she was pregnant, which is when all the abortion talk—due to Mom’s increasing age—began. Everyone she knew tried to talk her into it, even Dad’s sisters.

But from the moment he knew, my dad never wavered. He wanted her to have the baby, even though I’m sure he knew what a rough ride he had in store for himself. He was in his forties and probably thought he was done raising kids. But Mom trusted his input and she prayed. And the message she got in return was clear. “Something told me over and over again not to abort this child,” she told me. I was born on June 21, 1967, the first day of summer.

To this day, if anyone ever asks Mom about me, the first thing she says is, “All the doctors said that I should abort him.” Thanks, Mom. She makes sure to add that they also warned her that her baby could have physical or mental defects. Of course, many people I know think that the doctors were right.

A lot of my early life was spent at the Rock Front with my dad behind the bar. It was just a local Long Island hangout, but to me it had a smoky
Goodfellas
mystique, with regulars who had names like Tricky Dick, Whistling Dick, Dan Dan the Oil Man, Shady Pete, Lucky Lucy, and Jimmy the Rat. Not
the
Jimmy the Rat, but close enough. While my dad slung them brandy old-fashioneds, vodka sours, and longneck Miller High Lifes, these guys taught me, at age four, to play pool and shuffleboard.

And I taught them about the New York Mets. My love for the team came from my dad—baseball is one of the first things he ever shared with me. At the bar, the Mets games on TV and my baseball card collection were my babysitters when Dad got busy. He challenged customers to quiz me and I was rarely stumped. I knew the stats for any guy on the Mets’ twenty-five-man roster across a three- or four-year span. To me, it was unbelievable that these gods played their games just a few miles away and had a pitching staff with guys like Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman, Jon Matlack,
and
Tug McGraw.

If I wasn’t at the Rock Front I could likely be found at the house of my sitter, an Italian American woman named Mary. She and her husband were a little older than my folks, in their fifties, and for a long time they were really like another set of parents. While my parents worked, I’d spend every afternoon with Mary playing army men, coloring, and helping her with household chores, and all the while she’d never stop singing, “Fairy tales can come true/It can happen to you.”

Mary and her husband, Jimmy, lived in a modest house, not far from where life for me started out—the Fenwood Apartments, a low-income housing development in Valley Stream—and as I spent more and more time at Mary’s house, her singing decreased. Her relationship with her husband took on a new wrinkle—at least to me—and it confused me. Jimmy looked a lot like Uncle Junior from
The Sopranos,
bald on the top, with a little hair on the sides. At first, I thought he was great. I even called him “Grandpa” for a long time, but I eventually saw him transform into an animal. I’d be watching
Chico and the Man
on TV or playing Matchbox cars on Mary’s kitchen floor, he’d come home, and it would get ugly. He’d start chasing her around trying to slap her.

“Get over here,” he’d yell menacingly, rolling up his sleeves, spittle forming at the corners of his mouth.

“No,” she’d cry. “Wait! Not in front of little Jimmy.” She’d push him away and scoop me up and put me in a bedroom. Then she’d take her beating from him. The closed bedroom door didn’t do much to muffle the sounds and it scared the hell out of me.

When he was finished, he’d scram, and Mary would do her best to pull herself together, even though she’d often have bruises all over her body. One day at school, my teacher, Mrs. Gerdick, pulled me aside.