It's Not Easy Bein' Me: A Lifetime of No Respect but Plenty of Sex and Drugs (2 page)

My mother’s father—my grandfather—was almost never referred to in that house. Rumor has it he’s still in Hungary—and still drinking. My dad wasn’t around much, either. I found out much later that he was a ladies’ man. Dad had no time for his kids—he was always out trying to make new kids. I was born on my father’s birthday. It didn’t mean a fucking thing. His first wife was a southern girl. It was literally a shotgun wedding—and the marriage lasted until my father went back on the road with his vaudeville act.

I was an ugly kid. When I was born, after the doctor cut the cord, he hung himself
.

M
y mother was my dad’s second wife. She was pregnant with my older sister, Marion, so Dad did the honorable thing.

I feel awkward referring to my father as “Dad.” When you hear that word, you picture a man who looks forward
to spending time with his family, a man who takes his son camping or to a ball game every once in a while. My father and I did none of those things. He didn’t live with us. Show business kept him on the road practically all the time—or was it my mother?

My mother and father in one of the rare moments I saw them together.

Courtesy of the collection of Rodney Dangerfield.

As you can see I was a serious kid. I had only one thing on my mind—to play Las Vegas.

Courtesy of the collection of Rodney Dangerfield.

When my father wasn’t on the road, he’d stay in New York City. About every six months, I’d take the train from Kew Gardens into New York to see him. We’d walk around for an hour and talk—not that we ever had much to say to each other—then he’d walk me back to the subway and give me some change. I’d say, “Thank you,” and then take the subway back home.

I figured out that during my entire childhood, my father saw me for two hours a year.

In my life I’ve been through plenty. When I was three years old, my parents got a dog. I was jealous of the dog, so they got rid of me.

A
lthough I didn’t realize it at the time, my childhood was rather odd. I was raised by my mother, who ran a very cold household. I never got a kiss, a hug, or a compliment. My mother wouldn’t even tuck me in, and forget about kissing me good night. On my birthdays, I never got a present, a card, nothing.

I guess that’s why I went into show business—to get some love. I wanted people to tell me I was good, tell me I’m okay. Let me hear the laughs, the applause. I’ll take love any way I can get it.

When I was three years old, I witnessed my first act of violence. I walked into the living room and saw my mother lying on the couch, being beaten by her four sisters. My mother was kicking and screaming.

“Get Joe!” She yelled, “Get Joe!”

I did what my mother told me. I ran up two flights of stairs and started pulling on her brother Joe to wake him up. I kept repeating, “Uncle Joe, downstairs! Downstairs!” He came down and broke it up.

What a childhood I had. Once on my birthday my ol’ man gave me a bat. The first day I played with it, it flew away.

F
rom the time I was four years old, I had to make my own entertainment. There was a parking lot next to our three-story building that was always vacant after dark. Every night I would hear voices below my window, and I knew what that meant—there was going to be a fight. This is where the local tough guys would come to settle their beefs.

From my windowsill, I had the best seat in the house.
Many nights, about twenty guys would be down there, rooting for whichever fella they wanted to win. The fight itself was usually over in a few minutes—the winner would walk away happy with his pals, while the loser was left on the ground, usually bleeding, usually with a couple of his consoling buddies.

Even as a little kid I always identified with the loser. Most kids fall asleep listening to a fairy tale. I fell asleep listening to a guy yelling, “Enough! I’ve had enough!”

I told my doctor I broke my arm in two places. He told me to keep out of those places
.

M
y mother was coldhearted and selfish, and her sisters weren’t much better. I remember being lied to by my aunt Pearlie when I was four. She was taking my sister to the movies and I wanted to go, too, but she wouldn’t take me, so I pleaded and pleaded until she finally said, “Okay. Go wash your face and hands real good, and I’ll take you with us.”

I was so happy that I ran into the house and up two flights of stairs to the bathroom to wash my face and hands. But when I came back out, Pearlie and Marion were gone. I could see them down the block, running away from me. I stood there crying and yelling, “Pearlie, I washed my hands and face real good…”

When I was a kid, I never went to Disneyland. My ol’ man told me Mickey Mouse died in a cancer experiment.

I
was four years old when I got my first laugh. One night when I finished my dinner I said, “I’m still hungry.”

My mother said, “You’ve had sufficient.”

I told her, “I didn’t even have
any
fish.”

Most of the time, my grandmother kept an eye on me, if you’d call it that. She would be in the kitchen doing her chores while I’d be in the backyard banging nails into pieces of wood all day. Once in a while she’d glance out the window to see if I was still banging.

One day I got curious about what was on the other side of our fence, so I put my hammer down and walked out of the backyard. I walked a half block to Jamaica Avenue, the main drag in the area, and suddenly I found myself in the midst of a hustling, bustling neighborhood. I thought,
Boy, this is fun. To hell with hammering nails
.

After that, I used to walk there every day. My grandmother never noticed that I was gone.

On one of my walks—I was five by this time—a man asked me to come up to his office. After I’d climbed a couple flights of stairs, he offered me a nickel if I’d sit on his lap.

Wow
, I thought,
a nickel!

So I sat on this man’s lap. He held me and then kissed me on the lips for about five minutes. Then he said, “You can go now, but don’t tell anybody about this. Come by again tomorrow, and I’ll give you another nickel.”

I never told anyone, and I kept going back to that man every day, and I got a nickel each time. How long did this go on? I don’t remember. It could have been a few days, a few weeks. Or maybe it was just a summer thing. Let’s face it—at five years old, I was a male hooker.

Thanks for lookin’ after me, Ma.

When I was a kid I got no respect. When my parents got divorced there was a custody fight over me…and no one showed up
.

I
was ten when the Great Depression hit. Money was very tight then, so my father arranged for us to live with his mother in the East Bronx, in a really poor and rough neighborhood. She had a small one-bedroom apartment on the top floor of a six-story walk-up. My mother and sister slept in the living room, and I slept on a cot in the foyer. My father stayed at his place in New York.

School was tough.

All the kids wanted to fight and the teachers hit you, too.

My teacher, Mr. O’Connor, was a strange man. He had a beautiful voice—an Irish tenor—and when he sang “The Rose of Tralee,” you loved him. It was hard to believe that this was the same man who’d tell students “you’re getting one” or “you’re getting two.”

If you misbehaved he would call you to the front of the class. “Put your hand out,” he would say, “palm up.” Then he’d tell you how many times he was going to smack you with his thick ruler, depending upon what you had done and his mood.

I made sure I was a good boy that year, but I slipped just before Christmas. The whole class built a beautiful cardboard display about the yuletide season—one day, I gently touched the display, but I guess I wasn’t gentle enough because my finger went through the cardboard and poked a hole in those snow-covered “mountains.”

As I pulled my finger back, I could see Mr. O’Connor looking at me.

Then I heard those famous words: “All right, front of the class. Put your hand out, palm up.”

I was hoping I’d just get one.

Then he said, “You’re getting two.”

He gave me the first one, and it hurt like hell. Then before I could recover, he hit me again.

As I was standing there in pain, my hand burning, I said to him, “How about a song?”

Then I got two more.

I like to date schoolteachers. If you do something wrong, they make you do it over again.

L
iving in the Bronx, the big thrill was at night when we’d roast “mickeys.” We would start a fire in the gutter against a curb, put in potatoes, and in an hour, they were delicious. We always put in extra potatoes. We knew we’d have guests for dinner. (Black tie optional.)

We lived in the Bronx for a year, then moved to a rooming house in Far Rockaway, Long Island, near the ocean, on July 19. My mother waited until that date so that she could get the place cheap—$39 for the rest of the summer. The three of us—my mother, my sister, and me—lived in one room, ten long blocks from the beach. But it was a beach.

My first day there I saw a kid I knew from the Bronx. He was selling ice cream on the beach. That became my job for the next four summers. It was hard work for a young kid—carrying around a heavy carton of ice cream loaded with dry ice so that the ice cream wouldn’t melt. It was also against the law but no one cared—a minor offense—and I could make at least a dollar a day. For that kind of money, I became a criminal.

That first summer I did pretty good. I saved $100, and my mother put it in the bank for me. When I looked at my bankbook a few months later, I was shocked. All my money was gone. When I asked my mother about
this, she just said that she’d needed it. And that was that. I said to myself,
Hey, what’s the big deal? It’s your mother
. But then I thought,
She should have at least sat me down and told me what was going on before she took it
. That would have been easier for me, but that was how my mother did things.

My old man never liked me. He gave me my allowance in traveler’s checks.

A
fter that summer, my mother wanted to live near her sister Pearlie. (You remember Pearlie. She’s one of the sisters who beat up my mother.) So we moved to Kew Gardens, in Queens, which was a much nicer area. But that was a problem—it was too nice. We were much too poor for the neighborhood, and I never fit in there.

We had a one-bedroom flat. To help pay the rent, my mother took in two boarders, Max—a gangster from Detroit—and his girlfriend Helene. Max and Helene slept in the living room; I slept in the bedroom with my mother and sister.

I couldn’t figure Max out. At first, I thought he was a nature lover, because he’d sit for hours just looking out the window. Then I realized he was on the lookout for trouble.

One night Max was drunk. My mother and I stood
there listening to him argue with Helene. Max was saying, “I’ll go back to Detroit and be a gunman.” I stood there thinking,
Boy, he’s a real gangster
.

My mother had only one thought:
I’m losing a tenant.

One time I asked Max, “Is that a real gun?”

He said, “Yeah.”

I said, “You gonna shoot someone?”

He said, “Only if they ask too many questions.”

I live in a tough neighborhood. They got a children’s zoo. Last week, four kids escaped.

W
hen Max and Helene left, we had to move again, to an even cheaper place in Kew Gardens, next to the Long Island Railroad station, but we were still the poor trash on a ritzy block. Not being able to keep up with the other kids financially made me feel inferior. The kids I went to school with would see me delivering groceries to the back door of their homes, so they looked down on me. I couldn’t play football in school because I didn’t have money for the equipment. Tennis was out. That cost money, too, so I played a game called “stoop.” You throw a ball against the stoop and try to make it land where your opponent isn’t. No investment required—except for the ball—the stoop is always there, always free.