Great Kisser (19 page)

I love them, as they were then. Unconditionally.

They had a copy of
Jews Without Money
, the classic proletarian novel by Mike Gold.

They
were
Jews without money.

The photo album, with its musty smell of crumbling paper, tells the story of my relationship with Rachel, my first girlfriend, starting in 1956. These are the pictures. There's a photograph of a corner of the tarred Elmhurst rooftop, a lone TV aerial. I recognize the trestles and brick sidings. I took Rachel up there, above her parents' and her apartment, with a blanket. The flapping of clotheslines, the trees and houses and Newtown High School, where we were both students, below us in the distance. There's a date on the back of the snapshot: September 1958. After I had lost her, I took the photograph. This was a year after Rachel went off to summer camp and left me behind. I was 15.

Pictures of Rachel when we were still together. Rachel backstage: posing with Zero Mostel, with Tom Ewell at
The Seven Year Itch
. Rachel, her hair long and dark, holding a black and white cat in the moonlight, on concrete. On the fire escape, beside the milk bottles at her door, perched on the upright piano. Behind the stairwell of the apartment house (we heard the click of heels as people walked up and down, not knowing we were there, holding each other), Rachel posing with the down-and-out troopers who made up the 8-act bill when the Palace revived vaudeville. The vaudevillians (like Frank Marlowe, who wound up his act at every show by plunging into the orchestra pit) lived in the side street hotels off Times Square.

On the Palace stage we saw Buck and Bubbles, Belle Baker, Pigmeat Markham, Gus Van, Whispering Jack Smith, Cliff Edwards, (Ukelele Ike), Helen Kane (the Boop-Boop-a-Doop Girl), Butterbeans and Suzie, Smith and Dale. (“I am da doctor,” said Doctor Kronkeit—Smith, in a filthy frock. “I'm dubious,” said Dale. “Glad to meet you, Mr. Dubious,” said Kronkeit.) Strutting in rented tuxedos, looking back over their shoulders, waving their hats, at their finales, flashing million-dollar grins at the audience from on top of the world. And back to the Strand Hotel, a steam pipe, tuna fish and bread on the crumbling window sill.

II

After my parents' divorce, I was living with my mother. Louis Armstrong lived ten blocks away, but I didn't know this, and near him there was an abandoned, gigantic street-long theater that, in my dreams at night, had reopened, neon lights shining. I was always dreaming of the resurrection of theaters. I was little Mr. Show Business, reading
Variety
, loving its raffish tone, that Jewish-Italian-Irish-immigrant mix, that color that Runyon aimed at in his writing but didn't really convey very well. I interviewed Sophie Tucker at the Concord in the Catskills for the
National Jewish Post
and at 13 I published a letter in the
New York Times
about the ethereal beauty of Audrey Hepburn in her Broadway debut in
Ondine
. I drew neon lights around my name and around Jolson's. “Jolson Sings Again” was my anthem. I wanted the New Amsterdam Theater to reopen its shuttered doors, I wanted its lights to blaze again on 42nd Street and the Ziegfield Follies to reopen there, John Steele singing “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody.” (I had seen him, an old man, sing it on the stage of the Palace). I wanted the Ziegfield roof gleaming again, stars shining overhead, and Flo Ziegfield seated resplendently in his office, high hat and tux, gold watch fob and flower in his lapel. And Oscar Hammerstein at Hammerstein's Venetian Terrace and Jolson at the Winter Garden singing until 4
A.M.

I wanted the razzle dazzle of the old Broadway I had never seen, the great white way, back. Vaudeville was the personal touch I wanted and needed, and movies had replaced it before I was born. The little snatches of it I saw, pathetically sandwiched between two films at the RKO Jefferson on 14th Street with a three-piece orchestra or later at the Palace, the performers giving every ounce of themselves to move an audience, gave me a human connection I desperately needed. I was witnessing the tail end of everything. The old-timers were still around in their straw hats; Joe Laurie Jr., bowtie, striped suspenders, cigar, big stomach, was at
Variety
on 46th Street on the balcony atop the winding staircase chronicling
Show Biz From Vaude to Video;
Leo Lindy was still dishing up cheesecake to all the guys and dolls at Lindy's, out-of-work actors, the stingy eccentric rich, and Utopian Socialists still hovered for warmth all night at the Automat on 47th street, Winchell cruised Broadway all night in a police car, sirens screaming to keep him happy, and the spiffy stage-door Johnnies stood with their flowers behind the Winter Garden beneath the fire escapes, waiting for the showgirls to appear. But it would all be gone soon.

I read James T. Farrell and Richard Wright and Budd Schulberg and Frank Norris and Dreiser, the urban naturalists, the writers of the stoops and elevateds and tenements that I knew, the pushcart vendors selling hot roasted chestnuts in winter, their breath billowing in the cold air. I got hot reading Zola's
Nana
and Harold Robbins'
A Stone for Danny Fisher
—even the covers of those 25-cent Signet paperbacks got me horny and I hid them under my pillow (oh man, the scene where the gangster tells the broad to show her tits and he feels her up like he owns them)—even my taste in fiction was of time almost past, racing past me as I hungered for it.

I had done my comedy act at Grossinger's, but I was too small to reach the microphone and the audience stared in puzzlement, and it was at Grossinger's that I had my first big erections playing ping-pong with a girl named Francine Yaswen.

I was fearless then, I'd played stickball and softball and potsy on the Elmhurst streets, I'd hung out on the stoops, I'd had overnights with the kids in the neighborhood. Just two floors beneath me lived Lazarus Goldenlake. I met him through his father, who was tremendously proud of Lazarus and talked to me in the elevator about his son's great future. In adjoining beds Lazarus and I talked all night, secret delicious talks about spanking the very shapely bottoms, lusciously rounded and soft, raised high in the air, of girls at school, making them very red, until we fell asleep. Lazarus and I drifted apart as strangely as we had gotten together. His father still talked to me in the elevator about his son's future, and seemed to assume I shared his high expectations for Lazarus. He never mentioned my future, so I think he felt we agreed it was Lazarus who was the chosen one. And then there was rich David Peel who lived on Central Park West, went to Miss Northrup's dance class and introduced me to frozen foods in his frig. Lazarus and David had money in common and brittle, dry flaking skin and medicine cabinets full of lotions to treat it. David's in prison now for stealing millions of dollars in paintings in Europe. But at the time we just wanted to meet girls. David and Lazarus were desiccated young men, cynical and worldly, not like me. I was amber, molten hot. I was a romantic mess. When I sang “Rosie, You Are My Posie,” I meant every word.

On stormy days in Elmhurst, the gutters overflowed. Alone in my mother's apartment and dreaming of meeting a girl, I would peer out of the windows. The street had turned into a river. The air was mint fresh. Children made rafts for the river. I imagined that while I was indoors they were sailing on them.

Everything stopped on those days. I felt a deep inward calm, knowing that things did not always stay the same. You could step outside the door and be borne away on dark green days.

I would walk away from the window, but afraid I was dreaming, I would go back, and there was the water moving by with leaves, bits of tree bark, rafts with flags, as far as I could see. I watched, and listened to the wind and the shouts and cries and laughter of the children of Whitney Avenue; then the unearthly stillness, the green smell, the lapping of water.

I found Rachel in the first place because of the telephone.

I lived on 90th Street in Elmhurst, Queens. The Bender sisters, Carol and Marcia, lived six blocks away on Junction Boulevard. Both had frizzy black hair, were dizzingly beautiful, and they were very kind girls. Carol was younger. I had never actually spoken to her, but had seen her at school and looked her up in the phonebook after finding out the first name of her father. She was so beautiful, and she had a melodic voice. I wooed her on the phone, playing Jackie Gleason records by the headpiece to get her in the mood and let her know I was a man of sophistication. Finally Carol said, “Why don't you come over?” I never called her again. But I cursed myself for my fear and cowardice.

I called and I called and I called. The phonebook was my friend. I called teachers who were kind to me, I called blacklisted actors who were in the news (I found their names in the phone book too) and expressed my solidarity. How cute they thought I was, but I knew what I was doing. I wanted their gratitude; I wanted the connection. I was comfortable with the down-and-outers, the elderly, the castouts. When I was 10, I started calling a faded Ziegfield star I'd seen on stage named like Belle Baker. She had been a flower girl on the lower East Side, had worked in a dress factory when she was nine, and came out of the Yiddish theater. Irving Berlin had written “Blue Skies” for her and she'd introduced it in the Follies show, “Betsy,” in 1926. She had once shared the bill with Sarah Bernhardt at the Palace and Bernhardt sat in a wheelchair in the wings watching her sing “Put It On, Take It Off, Wrap It Up, Take It Home, Call Again.” I loved her deep, sorrowful, maternal voice, the way her singing had a sob in it. She held a big white handkerchief, that was her trademark, and she sang “My Yiddishe Momma” with beautiful feeling. Her voice had cantorial weeping in it and longing and kindness. Every week when I phoned her, her maid would call Belle Baker—
the
Belle Baker!—to the phone and she would take the time to just listen to me. The first time I spoke to her, she asked me, “Are you an orphan, child?” She knew! When she died, I turned up at the funeral at the Riverside Chapel and went up to her son, Herbert Baker, a comedy writer for Jerry Lewis. He peered down at me and I said to him, “Your mother was very proud of you.”

My father hated synagogues, he was antsy sitting there, he didn't know the language, the history, the Bible, anything but Georgie Jessel's mortuary orations and Jack Benny and Fannie Brice and Eddie Cantor and Cantor's crusade for the March of Dimes, and of course he knew the food, hot brisket with potato latkes and applesauce, kasha varnishkes, hot pastrami on rye with a kosher sour pickle, knishes, white fish and lox and bagels—that was our catechism—but he sensed that the Jews were somehow special and he marveled at it, and so did I, the two of us half-assed, ignorant and bereft of culture, of history, going nuts in those fucking shuls, listening to the humming moaning wailing crying indecipherable sounds all around us, people bobbing their heads up and down in prayer, we were waiting to eat at last.

But although we sat there dutifully and without understanding, still we knew that we were in the presence of something. But what was it? My father turned the pages of the
New York Times
and said of the scholars, the actors, the writers, the gangsters, the producers, the artists, the scientists, the explorers, the psychiatrists, the pickle kings, the hot dog kings, the entrepreneurs, my father pointing, turning the pages furiously, laughing: “He's Jewish! He's Jewish! She's Jewish!” Even when the names were goyishe, they were Jews who had reinvented themselves, Jews in disguise. “How is it possible?” my father said, shaking his head in wonder at the level of achievement. First the Holocaust, then Israel making the desert bloom. My father couldn't figure it out. Hunger, tradition, crazed ambition, persecution, obsession had done it; but God knows it didn't rub off on my father, lying back in his recliner eating a banana. And yet it had: in his fantastic, glistening, boisterous, failure, my father, the loser of all time, had outrun the competition.

My father with his big cock, sweating, drops rolling down his dark cheeks, when stripper Sherry Britton popped up unexpectedly in a vaudeville revival show on 14th street at the Academy of Music, my father peeping at me, not knowing what to do, my cock stretching to the seat in front of me, my father and I sat with our hard-ons, sweating and screaming inside.

I listened to the radio most of the night. Barry Gray broadcast his program on WMCA from Chandler's Restaurant. Barry had been beaten up by hoodlums. The rumor was that he'd offended Walter Winchell and that Winchell was behind it. Somehow I was outraged and I wrote a petition protesting Barry's beating. Then I crossed over the roof of my apartment house and rang the bell of an apartment on the second floor. I had no idea why I chose this doorbell to ring.

The door was opened by a girl with a round swarthy face, dark red lipstick, and wide eyes. Her name was Rachel Bernstein. She was wearing a yellow blouse, black skirt and red knee socks. She was curvaceous and extremely short, and gazed up at me with a cheerleader smile. She looked vaguely familiar.

“Hi!” she said.

“I protest—” I began.

“Sure! Come on in.” She signed my petition immediately without glancing at it, and said, “Don't you recognize me?”

When there was a shortage of seats in home room, there was a girl who had recently plumped herself down beside me at my tiny desk and pressed against me. I was so shy that I couldn't bring myself to look at her, although I must have peeked. Now for the first time I saw what she actually looked like.

Inside the apartment, we went into Rachel's room. She sat down on a peeling chair facing me, adjusted her guitar, and played, very badly, and sang off-key, a torch song her Aunt Hannah had written about her husband, a degenerate gambler and a louse. But I didn't mind how she sang: she was singing for me. I tried not to peek at her plum-like breasts. She tilted her head back, and I was fascinated by her small double chin. I had never noticed one before. And her lovely neck, which I wanted very much to kiss.