Kiss and Make-Up (9 page)

Even though I was playing music at home and at camp, in Queens and all around Long Island, it didn’t occur to me that I might be able to make a career out of being in a rock band. I had always worked, making deliveries or in the butcher store, and I saved like a madman. I never spent a dime on anything. I took great pride in the wad of cash I had accumulated. So I was never afraid of finding a job or making money. I knew how to do that. But as the band began to take up more of my time, it seemed like I might be able to find some way to make a go of it professionally. To make sure I didn’t do anything stupid, Mom agreed to let me pursue my band, or whatever else I wanted, as long as I had something to fall back on. She told me that I would need to go to college and get some kind of degree, in case my other plans didn’t work out. It never occurred to me to challenge this condition. My mother’s approval was extremely important. She was the reason I never smoked or drank or got high—not when I was a teenager, not to this day. Because of her horrible experiences in the concentration camps of Europe, I was always very clear on the fact that I didn’t have the right to break her heart. She had suffered enough. As a result, I’d always try really hard in whatever I did to never embarrass her or in any other way hurt her. She gave me life. The least I could do to repay her was to give her happiness.

I could have
gone to school downstate or stayed in the city, but all my life I had grown up surrounded by Jews and the Jewish experience. On television I saw a much broader and more diverse world, with blacks and Christians who were from different places and spoke differently and wore different clothes. Up until that point, I hadn’t been out of Israel and New York, except for my brief trips to summer camp, and everyone there was Jewish, too. The few experiences I had had with other kinds of people, like the black friends I had in sixth grade, were all positive experiences, and I wanted to explore them some more after I graduated from high school. I packed up and went upstate to South Fallsberg, New York, where I attended Sullivan County Community College.

When I got to Sullivan County, I made sure that both my roommates there were black. My mother was scared something would happen to me, not because they were black, exactly, but because she had lived through the Holocaust, where she had almost been wiped off the face of the Earth. Anyone from the outside was a threat to her. She tried to strong-arm me; she said that if I didn’t move out, she would disown me. Eventually she came upstate, and we had a heart-to-heart conversation. “Mom,” I said, “I know you love me. I know you’re trying to protect me and do what’s best for me. But I have to try to figure this out on my own.” It wasn’t easy for her, but she let me go my own way. Once I was there at college, I tried to confront my own racism, or what there might be of it, by seeing whether I could live with these two guys. Were they any different
just because they were black? The three of us got along fine. We played records for each other, we hung out together, and we ate together. There was a difference culturally. Some of it was in the speech; I couldn’t quite understand some of the patois, and some of their cool references were completely alien to me. One of the guys’ friends actually made money, he said, by being a gigolo. This seemed bizarre to me. Women paying for men?

South Fallsberg was a tiny community. The entire town had ten streets in all, and the school was the center. Primarily it was a hotel and culinary school, where people came from all over the world to learn to cook and run restaurant kitchens. I went up there to get a liberal arts education and to get away from my Jewish roots. I ended up smack-dab in the middle of the Jewish mountains—the Catskills.

Some musings from when I was going to school in Staten Island.

I wound up being a lifeguard at the Pines Hotel during the summer. I had learned to swim and gotten my swimming credentials at Surprise Lake. When I then took the test to become a lifeguard, the Pines Hotel hired me. That was the place where I had my first sexual escapades in which I actually took the bull by the horns. There was a black maid who cleaned all the rooms, including the rooms of the staff who worked at the hotel. We had these little rooms, just big enough to fit a bed and a sink in. One day I was leaving my room, and she was saying “Okay, are you ready? I need to clean up the room.” As we brushed past each other, I got aroused and closed the door behind me. She didn’t object. She was young enough but older than I was. I have always had respect for a clean room, never more so than that day.

Being a lifeguard was a job, and I assumed it was an easy job—in an Olympic-size swimming pool, you’re never going to have to save anybody. Right? Wrong. One day I was sitting by the pool, watching over the place, and this classic Jewish couple came along—she about three hundred pounds, he about a hundred pounds, she torturing him verbally, he barely alive. To me, they might as well have been a hundred years old, although they were probably in their forties. She decided to take a dip. All the way in, walking toward the pool, she was talking her head off to him, talking, talking, talking. He wasn’t even looking at her; I’m sure he had heard it all before, a million times. She dove into the deep end of the pool—and promptly sank to the bottom. I looked up at him, thinking,
Please God, make him dive in and get his wife.
But he didn’t move a muscle. Nothing. I had to jump up, get in there, get her up, and stick my hip under her, which is a kind of life-saving method. She was fighting me every step of the way. Even when I got her to the side of the pool and tried to hoist her up, I thought,
Okay, he’s going to come over and help me hoist this three-hundred-pound whale up out of the pool.
But he did nothing. When she finally got up, with the help of other people, she went and lay down next to him on the recliner. She didn’t look at him. She didn’t verbally abuse him about not helping her. They both just stayed there quietly staring ahead. I thought it was the most bizarre thing I had ever seen. He didn’t lift
a finger to save her, and she didn’t berate him for not saving her. That’s marriage for you.

People had their young daughters with them, these horny Jewish girls who were coming up there to meet boys. During the weekends, I’d work at the hotel, and at night there would be Holiday Inn dances where AT&T telephone operators would come for the weekends. Once my friend Stephen Coronel came up to visit me on the weekend. We danced with girls and so on and got a room and picked up two girls and brought them back to the room. One of the girls fell asleep, and the other one was ready to be active with me, but I got engrossed in a movie. As I was watching it on the floor, Steve took my girl and started to do his business, finishing up what she had begun with me. I felt a little robbed of the experience and a little mad at Steve. But the next morning when we woke up and she was long gone, Stephen complained of a tingling sensation. He cockblocked me but caught the clap.

On campus the guys lived at the Green Acres Hotel, which was a run-down property that had too many vacancies to stay afloat on its own, so it let its rooms be taken over by the state university system. The girls lived at another hotel down the way. I romanced one girl who was quite a beauty. I have forgotten her name but not her face. One weekend I arranged for her to come over and meet me in my room. I had the habit of inviting more than one girl, thinking most girls wouldn’t show up, and that if you asked more than one, the chances were good that one of them would show up. So in addition to this beautiful girl, I invited a girl named Nancy.

I took a shower at two o’clock. I got dressed. Three o’clock, which was the appointed hour, was drawing near. And there I was in my dorm apartment. I had my hot plate. I had my cans of beans. I had my Twinkies. I had all the things that were necessary to impress a girl when she came over to your room. The knock came at the door. I opened it, and it was the first girl. We didn’t waste any time. My mattress was on the floor, and I took her down for the count. At some point, there was another knock on the door. I’m not sure that I heard it; even if I did, I wasn’t about to answer it. My roommate opened up the door, and there was Nancy, the other girl. She was so
shocked that she started running down the hallway crying. I jumped up, put on my pants, and ran after her, and I eventually cornered her in one of my other friends’ rooms, where I apologized to her profusely. She came back. By that time, the other girl had gone, and Nancy’s tears turned to passion. She stayed with me that night in my room, and I took her virginity.

She was, I think, the first girl whose virginity I ever took. They say this is a big moment for girls; for boys, it’s slightly different. I don’t remember anything more than just being excited by the moment and continually but softly trying to break through. I felt like a doctor with a scalpel, because that’s how you had to be. Later that night I got up to go to the bathroom, flipped on the light, and almost had a heart attack, because there was blood all over the sheets. I wasn’t prepared for that. I thought she was going to die. But I gave her a hot bath, and we stayed awake most of the night. The next day was a Sunday, and we basically just cuddled and watched TV. This initial drama turned into a relationship, and we would meet in the afternoons. She started thinking of me as her boyfriend, and I didn’t do anything to discourage her. But I have to say that even when I was seeing her, I dillydallied. I took a theology class with an Episcopalian clergyman (I was a theology major) and one day his college-aged daughter came to visit him and attended his class. I was eyeing her throughout the session, and afterward I immediately cornered her and asked her how long she was visiting.

“Just for the week,” she said.

“Do you want to meet me tonight?” I said.

That evening she picked me up in a truck. We drove out into the cornfields and had each other. But these were side projects. I still had an emotional urge to go back to my girlfriend, and so I did.

When summer came along, I decided to stay upstate instead of going home to New York City, and I started working at Zackarin Brothers, which was a hotel supplies warehouse. I was a gofer for the manager. I was still with Nancy, and she and I moved into an apartment right next door to Zackarin Brothers. We lived in the same apartment building as her best friend, Maria, and her boyfriend, who was a chef. Between all the cakes he baked and brought home
every day and the food that Nancy made for me, I ballooned up to 220 pounds. My average day went something like this: wake up, eat some cake for breakfast, go next door to work, make some money, come home for lunch, repeat until satisfied. During the weekends I would play with my band, Bullfrog Beer. It was a great time. Around us things were in turmoil—the country was being torn apart at the seams. But I have to say that it didn’t affect me too much. Vietnam wasn’t a factor. I saw more of it on TV than I ever encountered in life. Every once in a while, the school would be closed, and people would be marching up and down the street. I never marched with them. I always wanted to go to school, because I had taken out a bank loan. I thought they were preventing me from going. Besides, I didn’t feel that most of the marchers had it in their hearts politically. Protest was more of a social event, and most of the hippies were just rich white kids who didn’t want to work for a living.

College was a great experience. My musical career was coming along. My experience with women was proceeding to my liking. But when I got my associate bachelor’s degree and my time at Sullivan County ended, I moved back down to New York City, back in with my mother, and then went to school at Richmond College in Staten Island, which was part of the New York City university system. I was finishing up my education, getting my degree, which was part of my deal with my mother. But in my heart, I was planning how to make it in a rock band.

When I first started to play in bands, we were following in the footsteps of a class of bands slightly older than us that had already made names for themselves. Billy Joel’s first band, the Hassles, were already local heroes, and I was aware of them. I was aware of the Pigeons, who later became Vanilla Fudge. I was aware of Aesop’s Fables and the Vagrants. In general, these bands were Guido mods, Italian versions of English bands. They had shag haircuts and thick New York accents and emulated the prevailing fashion, which was dictated by bands like the Who and the Kinks and the Faces. Imagine a guy named Tony trying to be Rod Stewart, and you’ll understand
that scene pretty well. For the most part, having a band was simply a tool for getting access to other things, mainly girls. Still, I was lucky in that I was in bands with friends who were obsessive record collectors. Stephen, for example, bought records like crazy, and he listened to everything from the Ventures, to obscure British invasion bands, to Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels.