In the Catskills: A Century of Jewish Experience in "The Mountains" (31 page)

The best tavern I ever patronized was Kilcoin’s in Swan Lake, just down the hill from town. Al McCoy, owner and bartender, was a jolly man and a great card trickster. To see Allie’s tricks the unspoken rule was that you had to sit at the bar and drink liquor, not draft. Draft beer, sitting at the table, was fifteen cents for a small glass, a quarter for a mug pulled from a freezer and then filled with the coldest beer anywhere in the world (New York’s drinking age was then eighteen, and poorly enforced). Kilcoin’s was pure roadhouse—hard wood benches, jukebox, coin-op pool table, and no decor save brewery clocks with electric bubbling froth. I worked several years in Paul’s Hotel in Swan Lake, and had ample time to visit Kilcoin’s. During the year I worked at SGS Bungalows, and another year at the Commodore Hotel, most nights when I finished work at midnight in the coffee shop, I’d drive down for an hour of sanity. Even the years I worked far from Swan Lake, I was drawn back to this spot.

My friends from the Cherry Hill Hotel band got a great job at the Raleigh’s smaller bar, where they could specialize in mainstream and Latin jazz instead of endless repetitions of Catskill warhorses (“Hello Dolly,’ “Havenu Sholem Aleichem,” “Sunrise Sunset”). This was one of the few places where you could hear good jazz, apart from jam sessions held after the shows were over—when hotel owners allowed it.

Monticello Raceway was a major fun spot. “The Track” drew everyone—locals, staff, and guests. It was impossible for dining room staff to get there at post time, but a mad dash could get you in by the second or third race if you worked close enough to Monticello. When we got tired of rushing and frustrated by losing money, we often opted for the free admission to the last two races. The Track exerted a pervasive effect. Guests often requested fast service, with all the courses delivered at once, so they could make the daily double. At one place I worked, a busboy, Nathan, would grab the dining room mike and announce make-believe races during set-up time, only to be shut up by the maitre d’, lest guests in the lobby hear it.

The whole Catskills were full of thousands of other workers our age, and that contributed to a partylike atmosphere. You could go anywhere—laundromat, restaurant, bar, sidewalk fruit stand—and you’d find compatriots with whom to compare working notes, make new friends, line up dates, and learn of job openings if you wanted to make a switch. Most—probably 90 to 95 percent—of these young workers were Jewish, up until the middle 1970s. This was logical, since the milieu was so Jewish that the guests would best be understood by Jewish staff. Also, many staff got their jobs through family connections or via relatives who were guests. It was always noticeable who was gentile, but Jewish staff did not generally exclude people from social interaction. One hotel I worked in had some Polish waiters and busboys from Carbondale, nearby in Pennsylvania, and it was actually refreshing to have some people who were dissimilar from the rest of us. In another hotel, during Passover one gentile bellhop didn’t know what to call the rabbi’s wife when he served her in the tearoom, so he addressed her as “Mrs. Rabbi” until we corrected him.

T
HE
S
HLOCK
H
OUSE

What waiters and busboys really feared the most was working in a shlock house. How can I describe a shlock house? In Yiddish, “shlock” means junk, but the colloquial usage refers to something of poor quality, especially if it has pretentions. In the Catskills, what many people termed a shlock house was a run-down hotel which, if full, held maybe 75 to 150 guests. Above all, the shlock house was disorganized and crude. It had no real facilities beyond a pool, handball court (often with many cracks on the pavement), perhaps a decayed tennis court, sometimes a hoop and backboard on crumbly pavement. Entertainment in some of the very small hotels might be quite circumscribed—some didn’t even have a band, and hence couldn’t present singers. Not all small hotels were shlock houses. Some were run very well and tastefully, without the disorganization and cheapness of a shlock house.

You’d know a shlock house just by seeing it. One night some of us went down the road to pick up a friend for a night out. We had finished serving dinner, showered, changed, and gotten to the shlock house, and they were still serving! Everything was out of control, waiters and busboys aimlessly running about, helplessly behind. At any other hotel, outsiders like ourselves would be thrown out of a dining room for entering in the middle of a meal. Here, there was no one to notice, no authority or direction. Often, food in a true shlock house was served “family style,” with large bowls and platters in the center of the table. You wanted bananas and sour cream at lunch, your waiter brought bananas and you added the sour cream from the big
shissel
. At night, the waiter served your chicken, and you added vegetables from a common plate. One salad man proudly told how he started working at a hotel that served family style, and gradually weaned them to the more modern, less shlocky a la carte service.

Why would you wind up working in a shlock house? Maybe your parents knew an owner to give you your first job. Sometimes you could make just as good money as elsewhere, with lower tips but more guests. Perhaps you screwed up badly in your job, and there were no other jobs around. Maybe you just never got good enough to work anywhere else—I knew such guys. A high school friend from Florida wound up in a shlock house with his trumpet, but no real band to play it with. Many talent agencies put together pick-up bands, but they at least rehearsed them once to see that they could play. Not so in this case. The opening night of the season, I came to visit after I finished serving supper. Howard showed up, along with a piano player and drummer. None had ever seen the others before, and try as they might they could not play for the waiting guests. There were these three musicians basically pretending to play music for people who were fated to stay in shlock houses where they got this kind of treatment. Howard asked for help—he knew I played piano in the lounge at the Karmel after finishing a day waiting tables, then driving twenty miles to help my father in his concession, then returning. But I declined—this situation was beyond salvage. It was the essence of the shlock house.

What might have been a small but somewhat fancy hotel in the 1940s and 1950s could become a shlock house by virtue of neglect, or even failure to expand. Those of us in the small- and small-to-medium-size hotels were sometimes just a category above the shlock house, working in what we called “2–250 houses,” hotels holding between 200 and 250 guests. Guys we knew in larger places even told us
we
were working in shlock houses. Shlock was always a measure of superiority over the next lowest rung on the ladder, whether it be working in the Catskills or one’s choice of clothing or furniture.

The Pool

Eileen Pollach

I
always suspected I had been chosen by God for some special fate, but I didn’t receive proof until I was nine. It was summer, mid June. Where could death hide on such a bright morning? Nowhere, I thought, and poked one bare foot out the bungalow door. How soft the grass looked! I longed to turn cartwheels, climb the old oak, perform a few miracles to take up the hour until the pool opened and I could show off my new lime-green two-piece.

“No,” my mother told me. Her fingers closed around my suit straps.

“Why not?” I demanded.

“Put on your shoes first.”

I wrinkled my nose.

“You heard me, Miss Piss.”

In my mother’s opinion, deadly microbes were breeding in every warm puddle. The germs of paralysis were tiny sharks teeming in each muddy drop.

“If you go around barefoot, you might pick up TB.”

For years I had assumed she was saying Tee
Vee
. The current ran through the earth like a snake of hot sparks. If you stepped on the snake with bare feet, the pictures shot to your brain. One afternoon, when my mother wasn’t looking, I took off my sneakers and searched for the spot. I planted my right foot, paused, saw no pictures, planted my left foot a few inches over, stepping and pausing until I had signed every patch of the Eden with my footprints. But I couldn’t find the current. I even tried pressing my ear to the ground and listening for voices—Fred, Ethel, Rickie, and the red-headed Lucy for whom I had been named, or so my brother told me.

I kept doing this until Arthur discovered me down on all fours, ear to the ground. He jumped on my back and wouldn’t let me up until I admitted what I was doing. Then he laughed so convulsively I could feel my body shake beneath his. He sputtered his last laugh and took pity on me, explaining the truth: that our family’s hotel once had been a refuge for patients who coughed furiously and spat blood until they choked, eyes bulging, tongues black. Their mucus, Arthur told me, still wriggled with germs, which waited to crawl in the blisters on my feet. He thought this would scare me, but it excited me to think that the Eden was haunted with dead people’s germs, and these lived on, unseen, awaiting a chance to make contact with me, inhabit my blood.

“Put your shoes on this minute,” my mother ordered, “or no swimming for a month.”

I didn’t bother to tell her that I wasn’t afraid of catching tuberculosis. What would that matter? TB was only one of a hundred virulent devils waiting to prey on a girl in bare feet.

“If you step on a rusted nail you’ll get lockjaw.”

I savored this tragedy. Arthur would be chasing me across the front lawn. I would step on a nail and stumble. He would catch me and threaten to pull down my bathing suit, as he often had done before, and when I tried to beg for mercy my jaw would lock shut. Slowly, he would realize what dreadful affliction had silenced his sister. He would beg my forgiveness, which of course I wouldn’t grant.

Not that I believed I would die. How could such puny villains—a microbe, a nail—strike down a girl of rare visions and dreams? If anything, I sensed on that brilliant June morning not death but a challenge, an occasion to prove my powers at last.

I put on my flip-flops and dodged past my mother.

“Come back here!” she shouted. “Those things are so flimsy, a piece of glass could go through!”

But she didn’t have time to run after me and tie real shoes on my feet. Flip-flops smacking against my heels, I ran to the camp house, an unpainted shack with a dozen old mattresses piled high inside. The raw wooden walls were inscribed with the signatures of campers now in their fifties:
YUDEL LOVES EDITH; SHEL CLOBBERED MILTIE
8/10/32. Standing on my toes, I was just able to reach the top cubbyholes. Wasps dove from the eaves, but I wasn’t afraid. I had given them instructions to strafe all intruders and leave me unstung. From the only cubbyhole with a door I withdrew a shabby book—a present from my Grandpa Abe the year before, on my eighth birthday. He had bought it for himself when he arrived in America; he wanted to own a copy of the Bible in English, and the bibles for adults were too hard to read.
OLD TESTAMENT FOR CHILDREN, EDITED, ABRIDGED
the title said in block letters. A smiling man and woman posed behind a tree; I recognized them as the couple tossing the beach ball on the Eden’s main arch. In his soft stumbling voice, my grandfather started to read aloud the story of Moses. I interrupted to ask why he pronounced the
w
’s as
v
’s.

“Vell,” he said. A troubled look passed his face. He leaned forward, the book slipping from his lap. He opened his mouth to speak, and I sat waiting for an answer until my parents appeared in the doorway with a cake, which we didn’t get to eat. Though my grandfather lived on another eleven years, he couldn’t move or talk, so it seemed to me as if God bestowed the Torah, not on Moses, but on me, Lucy Appelbaum, then He lay down to sleep while I studied His gift, preparing for a test I knew would come soon.

The more I read the Bible, the more I believed that Moses and I were two of a kind. Hadn’t a bush with flame-red leaves ordered me to kneel beside the shuffleboard court because the ground there was holy? And that same afternoon, hadn’t a radio emitted a wail, after which the announcer, in his resonant voice, commanded me to await instructions regarding the mission God had reserved especially for me? I heard God speaking often, praising my deeds. In return, I asked Him favors:
Please, God, let the sun stand still so I can swim one more hour
. My prayers sometimes worked, but never when any witness was near.