Nevertheless Page 2

  Our neighborhood was kids and more kids. The Jewish families had one or two kids. The Protestant families had two and three kids. The Catholic families averaged around five kids. This was an era when working-class parents still had large families built on faith, believing that Providence would see them through. Sports and games were the glue that held our neighborhood together. Nearly all of our neighboring families brought talent, if not greatness, to whatever games they were drafted to play. At least that’s what we told ourselves. With names like Fat Tony, Buff, and Steiner Forty-Niner, the kids could throw, run, hit, and tackle. They could drive, pitch, and putt. They were fast, tough, and had good hands. They would stand in T-shirts in forty-degree weather, ignoring the cries of their siblings or mothers. With a never-say-die glint in their eyes, they were focused only on the current, last-ditch effort to score another touchdown. Day after day, sunset after sunset, we never, ever wanted to go home.

  Our Winter Games were limited by topography. With no hills to speak of, our sledding runs lasted for only seconds down modest inclines. Snow meant snowballs as missiles, used in games that involved the risk we sought more as we got older. One winter you are building a snowman, the next you’re crouched down behind a fence inside the sanctuary of Hole-in-the-Wall, flinging snowballs at cars as they slowly curved around the Unqua Circle, the snowball thrower’s Dealey Plaza. The game was simple. Hit the car with a snowball, ten points; hit the windshield, twenty points; put the snowball into any open window, fifty points; hit the driver of the vehicle who has leapt from the car in order to scream at or threaten you, one hundred points. The Hall of Famer, the legend, the Sandy Koufax of this contest, was my brother Daniel. Many adult men, unwilling to leave their cars stopped in the relatively busy traffic circle, were gunned down by Daniel. Some were hit more than once. Imagine a car drives by and you hit it with a snowball. The driver gets out and BANG! You hit him. The driver spots you through the fence and he charges after you. But like Namath in the pocket, waiting that extra second for Maynard or Sauer to gain another step, you hang in. You go at them like the Pittsburgh defense, and BANG, you fire again. In the Winter Games, in our contests in every season, Daniel was the champion.

  Another even more frowned-upon activity was “skitching.” This involved waiting behind a parked car, a tree, or some other blind that was adjacent to a stop sign. Cars usually came to a full stop on those icy roads. The skitcher would get down low and scurry in behind the car, grab onto the bumper, and get pulled along streets that had yet to be plowed, salted, or sanded. You didn’t want to be spotted by other drivers, so our block, with the golf course lined with hedges and its stop sign, was prime. Few people went out for a drive right after a big snowfall, so there wasn’t a lot of traffic coming up behind you. If you grew up near a lake, in winter, I suppose, you ice fished. In the mountains out West, you skied. In Nassau Shores we threw snowballs at cars or grabbed onto their bumpers for a few minutes of thrills. This was our calling.

  2

  Squirrels

  Perhaps the most consistent bond I had with my dad was watching movies on TV at night. At around 10 p.m., just before she went to sleep, my mother would turn down the heat in our home to fifty-five degrees to save on fuel oil. Some nights, I actually thought I could see my own breath. I had devised some lame excuse that enabled me to end up in front of the TV most nights after 11 p.m. “I’m gonna wait up for dad,” I’d tell her, as if he had to be let into his own house, like it was some military base. My mother would moan some reply, lacking the energy to question me. Around 10 or 10:30, my father would walk in. Even when I was ten or eleven, still a young child, he showed me little affection. He had few kind words or gestures. But I persisted, asking him about his day. Tired and distracted as always, he went to the refrigerator to eat whatever was left over, and then lay on the couch with his newspapers and watched the 11 o’clock news.

  At 11:30 the local CBS station aired the Late Show, a movie broadcast that ran until around one. At 1 a.m., they showed the Late, Late Show, playing another classic movie. Some nights, they actually had the Late, Late, Late Show at around 3 a.m. Network movie programming at that time relied entirely on old studio libraries. Weekdays brought the 4:30 Movie on the local ABC station, which, for a period of time, showed the same film the entire week. A precursor of the VCR, this was for viewers who could not watch a movie in one sitting. (While home sick one week, I watched Inherit the Wind five times and memorized every line.) CBS had Picture for a Sunday Afternoon. There was Chiller Theatre, showing horror. On our TV, the Late Show broadcast movies like How Green Was My Valley, Five Graves to Cairo, or Passage to Marseille. At night, the pattern was always the same. My dad would say, “You’d better get up to bed.” Then he would read the old capsule movie reviews from the New York Times TV section. These were pithy, often funny one-liners that described the film. (Example: “Ball of Fire: Barbara Stanwyck tells Gary Cooper where he can go.”) My father would let out a low whistle; then he would say, “Witness for the Prosecution. Now that’s a good one.” I’d ask if I could watch some of it, and he would say, “OK, but just a few minutes.” He’d smile at the opening credits, and within fifteen minutes, he was out. The first film I ever stayed up to watch with him was Sorry, Wrong Number with Barbara Stanwyck and Burt Lancaster. It made me a die-hard fan of both stars, and I would go on to watch that movie again perhaps twenty or thirty times. That film and A Christmas Carol with Alastair Sim are movies I still watch regularly, and although my dad has been gone for many years, when I put them on, I feel as if he is in the room with me again.

  I watched hundreds of movies on TV. Before VCRs and DVDs, you had to pay attention. There was no rewind button. I learned every line. “That’ll get you in real good with your boss,” Bogart intones to Elisha Cook Jr. “Whaddya hear, whaddya say,” Cagney chirps in his signature style. “Fasten your seat belts, it’s gonna be a bumpy night,” Bette Davis sneers at her dinner guests. “Whatever you do, don’t leave him lyin’ here like this,” Brando implores Eva Marie Saint. I watched every movie I could and memorized as many lines as I could, which was actually easier than you’d think because actors back then had a style you don’t often see anymore. To watch Kirk Douglas or Elizabeth Taylor or Gregory Peck is to see film acting at its apex, because it was newer then. It was more important and mysterious. Even a battalion of stars who were not necessarily leading men and women but rather pure and wonderful supporting actors could enter your consciousness and never leave. From Franklin Pangborn to Thelma Ritter, from Slim Pickens to Maureen Stapleton, from Lou Costello to Hermione Gingold, I ate them up. My first acting lessons were in that room, with my dad, and they were the best I’d ever have. Gable taught me how to act. Peter O’Toole taught me. William Holden taught me as much, if not more, than any other. Orson Welles, Teresa Wright, Vera Miles, Jerry Lewis, Rock Hudson. There are more acting lessons, real lessons, in watching To Kill a Mockingbird than in an entire year in most drama school classrooms. When Brando shouts to Lee J. Cobb, “I’m glad what I done to you,” a lump comes up inside me every time. These films are treasures to me. And every emotion I could not express passed through me whenever I watched them.

  * * *

  Massapequa sits in the southeast corner of Nassau County on Long Island. The next town over, Amityville, had a significant black population, particularly in the working-class area north of the Long Island Rail Road. The man who ran everything in the Massapequa school district was a New York lawyer named Lew Ames who also owned a local real estate company called Big Chief Lewis. The Massapequa High School football team is called the Chiefs, and Lewis had an enormous version of an old cigar store Native American in front of his office. Ames, who was bald and brusque and resembled the actor William Frawley, eventually became president of the school board. My father told me that Ames had kept Massapequa a “lily-white” town by making sure that brokers never showed their listings to black families. To do so would have cost them dearly.

  Ames ran the s
chool board, and he handpicked the superintendent of schools. That superintendent was handed a list of Ames’s “enemies” who were to be sidestepped for promotion within their departments and throughout the system. My father was beloved by his students, and this resulted in an almost Billy Budd–like resentment on the part of some higher-ups. He was never offered a position as department chair, vice-principal, or principal. Those teachers who played the game and kissed Ames’s ass moved ahead. Many of them were skilled and respectable educators; others, not so much.

  This political bossism came into sharper focus when I walked into my tenth grade French class and noticed that my teacher had a distinctly odd attitude toward me. My father told me that this teacher had been an organizer for Ames’s school board campaigns and had once contacted my father, trying to cajole him into finally coming around to support Ames. My dad told her where to go.

  When I was a child of perhaps eleven or twelve, my father asked me a simple question in order to, hopefully, set my moral compass. My dad had attended Boys High in Brooklyn and had played football at a championship level with many black teammates. He deplored racism, which wasn’t necessarily common for a white man of his generation reared in Brooklyn. “What do you think you would do if you were black?’ he asked me. “Would you choose the route of Martin Luther King, the patient, nonviolent route? Or would you emulate Eldridge Cleaver and fight for your rights using violence, if necessary?” I recall saying something like, “I’m not sure how long I could be patient and nonviolent.” My father let out a little laugh and said, “I thought so.”

  My father taught in Massapequa for twenty-eight years, spending his entire career in the classroom and with no advancement. As the provider for a large family, and one who sought to make his career in education his sole source of income, he might have played that one hand cautiously, but he was someone who let his stubborn sense of personal integrity overtake his common sense.

  My childhood is divided into two parts, the line being the death of my father’s parents. Part one is up until I was ten years old, and during that time, my father seemed happy. He was always present, and we spent a lot of time together as a family. At school, my father took on many tasks. He taught classes in American history and economics. He coached football and riflery. He chaperoned dances, supervised weekend recreation programs, and served as the director of one of the school district’s summer camp programs. For him, it was one-stop shopping, a synergy between his commitment to education and community. Some years he was a Little League coach or Cub Scout master. His energy seemed inexhaustible. Other teachers, however, had second jobs to supplement their modest incomes. Some owned businesses that cleaned carpets or polished floors. Others spent the summer working construction to bring in cash. With six children at home, my mother probably hoped he would join them. However, my father received nearly all his income from a single employer, and as his friend Arnie Herman told me, he needed to be somewhere that people valued him and what he had to offer. Arnie said, “The students in your father’s classes weren’t relying on him to paint the house or pay the bills. In his classes, they simply wanted him to teach them.” Herman was right. My father’s relationship to his students defined him. They rewarded him by making him the first teacher they dedicated the school’s yearbook to while he was alive and active, a distinction normally given to one who was retired or deceased. They dedicated it to him twice.

  As a man with so many balls in the air at the school, my father had a key ring rivaled only by the custodial staff themselves. He could get into the rifle range, the gymnasium, equipment lockers, storage rooms, locker rooms, A/V storage, you name it. This key ring offered us pretty unlimited access to the trove of athletic equipment that characterized a significant period of our childhoods, especially for the few weeks in summer that my father was free from work. He would load bats, balls, gloves, rubber bases, and even a volleyball net into the back of our old, beat-up station wagon, which was covered in dents and dings, with bald tires and a worn paint finish. My parents would fill a cooler with eggs, bacon, bread, orange juice, tuna salad, bologna, and cheese, and pack paper plates, silverware, frying pans, a cheap grill and charcoal briquettes, and anything else needed to prepare and serve both breakfast and lunch to eight people. The image of us hauling all of this from the parking field to the shore of Jones Beach would later make me think of what it must have been like to film Lawrence of Arabia. We’d set up, cook, eat, and then swim and play some kind of ball game until around four o’clock, while my parents alternately watched us or read—the Sunday Times for my father, the latest from Sidney Sheldon for my mother. We baked brown in the sun. My sister Beth, the eldest, not one for sports, was usually overwhelmed or fatigued by her four brothers’ incessant activity. She typically sat and read magazines, or would elect not to come and would go off and visit friends instead. On the way home, we’d stop at Marjorie Post Park, one of two spacious community parks in Massapequa. My father would herd us through a quick shower in the pool-area locker room. “I’m not gonna have six children backing up my septic tank when they can shower here,” he would toss at my mother, who always seemed to sigh at all the corners we had to cut.

  My mother grew up in Syracuse, New York, as one of seven children: six girls and one boy. Her father was a relatively successful businessman, and they lived in a nice home in downtown Syracuse. They weren’t wealthy in the sense that they spent all of his money, but they lived well, with maids and nannies. I never knew my grandfather, who died when I was one year old, but I’m told that he was a generous and loving father, always coming home from business trips with gifts for his children. My maternal grandmother was ill during my earliest childhood and I never knew her either, as she lived out her last years in a nursing home, spending any money her husband had left behind for her nursing home care. Many of my mother’s siblings and their families, a large group, lived in the Syracuse area, and we visited them many summers when I was a small child. We rented a moldy house adjacent to Lake Ontario in a spot called Sandy Pond, where the houses had names like Camp Rendezvous. We swam in Lake Ontario or rowed a boat in the small pond for a couple of weeks, during which time the grown-ups drank, gossiped, and traded war stories about raising children with little money. These were the only family vacations we ever took. Not to Manhattan or Disneyland. We went to Pulaski, New York.

  My father had two brothers, one of whom retired from the NYPD and convinced my father to cosign a loan for him to buy a small inn on Lake Wallenpaupack in Pennsylvania. He defaulted on the loan, and my father was hit with a judgment to pay a few thousand dollars. The bank threatened to garnishee his salary to collect. I think that was the financial hit that my father never quite recovered from. My uncle essentially vanished after that. My father’s youngest brother, Charles, was a figure out of either a Ken Kesey novel or a Wes Anderson film, depending on the circumstances. Family legend was that Charles had a remarkably high score on his army IQ test. He enrolled briefly at Syracuse University, where both my parents went, and met and married my mother’s sister. That was my family: two brothers married two sisters. Within a few years, my uncle Charles left his wife, my aunt Becky. She arrived on our doorstep with her three girls, Ruth, Marion, and Louise. My father was her ex-husband’s brother. My mother was her sister. These girls were my double first cousins, the blood in their veins nearly identical to mine. My father, whose Christ complex would surface at the most inopportune times, let them move in. He enrolled them in school. He fed them and clothed them. They stayed with us for almost a year. My father, who had one hand tied behind his back with the loan default from one brother, was now raising the other brother’s three kids. I look back and realize that this is not the recipe for a long life—an honorable one, maybe, but not a long one.

  My father had grown up in Brooklyn. As children, we visited my grandparents often on St. James Place, in the Fort Greene area. In the 1960s, the neighborhood was blighted. Unemployed men, nearly all Hispanic or African-American, sat on st
oops or sofas that had been left on the sidewalk while drinking beer or liquor from paper bags. I’d walk with my grandfather to the newspaper stand to get all of the daily New York papers, perhaps six or seven of them. Next he’d pick up a carton of Chesterfields and a few quart bottles of Ballantine or Schaefer beer. Once he was stocked, he went inside and hit the sofa and, exactly like the guys outside, smoked and drank all day. The only thing separating them was a law degree and a navy pension.

  My father would bring us to his parents’ house on a Sunday afternoon, and my grandmother would cook dinner. She was a world-class cook who spent the better part of the afternoon preparing the perfect turkey, the perfect mashed potatoes, and the perfect cookies. My grandparents had no money, but they made sure we felt special by buying us Cokes in the old glass bottles. I have countless memories of watching television in their living room. There was The Jackie Gleason Show (“Live, from the fun and sun capital of the world, Miami Beach, Florida!”), Candid Camera, and The Ed Sullivan Show. I met Paul McCartney on that couch in Brooklyn in August of 1965, during one of his later appearances on the Sullivan show. Around 9 p.m., my father would gather up my siblings and begin to load them into his station wagon. In summertime, with no school the next day, my grandfather would mouth to my father, “Let him stay,” pointing at me. As my grandfather’s namesake, I was the Dauphin. My father would roll his eyes and sigh. Granting this request meant he’d have to drive back to Brooklyn the next day, but he’d agree, and everyone would trudge off except me. “Why do you and I get along so well, Grandpa?” I’d ask. “Because we have a common enemy,” he’d reply.