It's Not Easy Bein' Me: A Lifetime of No Respect but Plenty of Sex and Drugs (3 page)

A homeless guy came up to me on the street, said he hadn’t eaten in four days. I told him, “Man, I wish I had your willpower.”

G
rowing up, I got no guidance from my mother. The only advice I can remember getting from her was, “Never eat a frankfurter from the man on the corner with the orange umbrella. Those hot dogs are made of snakes.”

I believed her. I was a kid. What did I know?

My father’s place in New York was a half-hour subway ride from Kew Gardens. Once when I was about eleven, I went into town to see him. We were sitting at the counter in a drugstore—I was drinking a Coca-Cola; he had nothing. When I was done, he went outside while I paid the check. While I was looking for the waitress, I saw that I could walk out without paying, so I did. When I got outside, I was pretty proud of myself, and said to my father, “Hey, I beat the check.”

My mother would have congratulated me, but my father wasn’t going to. Disgusted, he said, “Who taught you that, your mother?”

He made me go back and pay for my soda.

I tell ya, I grew up in a tough neighborhood.

The other night a guy pulled a knife on me.

I could see it wasn’t a real professional job
.

There was butter on it
.

A
couple of months later, my mother and her sister Esther took me on a trip to Atlantic City. (You remember Esther. She’s another one of the sisters who beat up my mother.) But this wasn’t going to be a nice day at the beach with the family—it was an ambush. They had surmised that my father would be there on the beach with his girlfriend Lily. And they were right.

We got to the beach, and sure enough, there was my father with the big love of his life. My mother and my aunt went over to them and started yelling, “Look at him! He’s a tramp!”

As you might expect, a crowd gathered to watch this free freak show. “
This
is his wife!” my aunt screeched, pointing at my mother. And then she pointed at me. “He left this ten-year-old boy to be with that whore!”

With that, the crowd looked at me
like it was my fault
. It was awful. I wanted to crawl under the boardwalk. I was standing there sweating, sand in my shoes. My aunt said to me, “Jackie, when you grow up, punch him in the nose.”

What a day that was. But I tried to look at the bright
side—for a few minutes I got to see my father. I knew I wouldn’t be seeing him again for six months.

I was an ugly kid. I worked in a pet store. People kept asking how big I get
.

I
was always hustling to make some money because my mother never gave me any. I started delivering groceries when I was ten. The grocer gave me a choice—ten cents an hour or three cents for every order I delivered. I worked fast, so I took the three-cents-an-order deal. But I soon realized that I’d made the wrong decision. Every order he gave me was at least ten blocks from the store. Two hours later, I told the guy, “No more three cents an order. From now on, I’ll take the ten-cents-an-hour deal.” He said okay.

Then he gave me six deliveries—all going to the same apartment house.

When I finished for the day and was ready to go home, the boss turned out to be a good guy. He gave me an extra buck and a Swiss-cheese sandwich for the walk home. The sandwich he made tasted real good. He put something on it that I’d never had before—lettuce.

I tell ya, my wife’s a lousy cook. After dinner, I don’t brush my teeth. I count them.

M
y entire childhood, my mother never made me breakfast. She would sleep every day until about eleven. She never got up to see me off to school, so before getting on the bus in the morning, I’d go to a place called Nedick’s, a big cafeteria chain at the time. I had the same breakfast every day—orangeade, doughnut, and coffee—for ten cents. For me, this was a home-cooked meal.

Before I went to school in the morning, I would take care of a newsstand. I would make change for people who bought papers or cigarettes. Sometimes, my fingers were so frozen that I’d ask the people to make their own change. For this, I got a dollar a week and a nickel piece of candy.

As a kid I felt inferior to everyone. I was too shy and insecure to talk to girls. At around fifteen, there was a girl I liked, but the thought of speaking to her was petrifying. I would see her on the bus, and she really turned me on. I always made sure my books were on my lap.

I couldn’t talk about sex with my mother, and my father had his own life in New York, which didn’t include me. (As I grew older, I realized that he was a smart guy.) When vaudeville died in the late thirties, my father
became what they called a customer’s man in the stock market. He was basically a stockbroker—he invested money for a very elite clientele. He did extremely well for many years.

My mother would never listen to my problems and had no interest in how I was doing. I remember giving her my report card to sign one time. My marks were pretty good, and I was looking forward to some praise, but she didn’t give a damn. She just signed the report card without a word and gave it back to me.

I said, “Don’t you want to look at it?”

She said, “You know what you have to do.”

What a childhood I had. My mother never breast-fed me. She told me she liked me as a friend
.

W
hen you’re a kid, you have no way to compare mothers. I knew only mine, and to me she was the best. My entire life she never gave me a gift. But I remember I gave her one.

When I was fourteen I tried to start a newspaper and I failed, but I did have an egg route. Although I didn’t make much money, I put aside enough to buy my mother something for Mother’s Day. She liked to sit in the kitchen every
night and have a few beers. So I bought her a six-pack, and I made my own card:

Dear Ma,

Happy Mother’s Day.

Let’s hope I keep selling egg after egg,

So you can keep drinking keg after keg.

Okay. I’ll go back to prose.

What a childhood I had. My parents sent me to a child psychiatrist. The kid didn’t help me at all
.

M
y aunt Pearlie and her husband had a drugstore–soda fountain in Astoria, Long Island. After they’d worked that for a while, they leased the bar and grill next door. When my mother would visit Pearlie, they’d hang out in the bar.

I was around fourteen or fifteen at the time, and I sometimes worked behind the soda fountain at Pearlie’s drugstore. On my break one night, I walked down the sidewalk and looked through the window of the bar and grill. There I saw my mother sitting in a booth, having a drink with some old guy. What I saw next was even harder
to believe. When my mother’s drinking companion wasn’t looking, she’d throw her drink under the table. A few moments later she’d ask for another one.

That was my apple-cheeked mom—hustling drunks for her sister.

I tell ya, my family were always big drinkers. When I was a kid, I was missing. They put my picture on a bottle of Scotch.

B
oth my father and his brother were in show business. They did a pantomime act in vaudeville, one that involved breaking a lot of plates, as I recall. When Eddie Cantor, the big star of yesteryear, was seventeen, he was broke, hungry, and trying to get into show business. My uncle Bunk took a liking to the kid, and took Cantor on the road with him.

One night, a singer on the show had one too many and couldn’t go on, so my uncle Bunk said, “Put Eddie on. He can do a couple of songs.”

So Eddie went on, did his best number—“Susie”—and the house went crazy. They wouldn’t let him off the stage. From that night on he was “Eddie Cantor,” and nothing could stop him.

Cantor never forgot what my uncle had done for him,
and Uncle Bunk was on Cantor’s payroll for the rest of his life.

When I was fourteen, my uncle Bunk arranged for me to be in the audience for the taping of
The Eddie Cantor Show,
a half-hour variety show they shot in New York City. Every week I got the best seat in the house—front row, center.

But one night my uncle Bunk said to me, “Jackie, we got a problem. You can’t sit in the front row anymore. After the taping last night, Cantor said to me, ‘Who is the kid who sits in the front row every week and never laughs?’ I told him you are Phil’s kid. To make it short, Jackie, you can’t sit in the front row anymore. You have to sit in the back.”

The next week, when I showed up for the taping of Cantor’s show, uncle Bunk put me in the last row of the theater. When the show started, no matter what Cantor said, I just kept laughing and laughing.

My uncle came over and said to me, “Why are you laughing so much?”

I told him, “I wanna get my seat back in the front row.”

My ol’ man took me to a freak show. They said, “Get the kid outta here. He’s distracting from the show.”

W
hen I was about fifteen I got a job as a barker for a theater, the Academy of Music, on Fourteenth Street in New York. I was the fellow standing outside yelling, “Just in time! Feature’s going on in ten minutes! Plenty of good seats! Win a twelve-piece set of dishes!”

What made it really tough was that the boss had his office on the fifth floor, and if he didn’t hear me, he’d call down to the assistant manager, who would tell me to bark louder. I was yelling all night so that the boss could hear me five flights up—and he had his windows closed because of the cold.

When I was sixteen, I was taking a walk down Broadway in New York City and I saw a sign—10 C
ENTS A
D
ANCE
. I didn’t know what exactly went on in those places, but I did know that they were for adults, but I thought,
I’m big for my age. I’ll give it a shot, see what it is.

The woman in charge met me at the door. She was extremely nice and walked me over to the girls. Right away, I saw one girl I really liked, so the two of us sat at a table and started talking. She seemed to really like me, too. She even held my hand. I thought,
Hey, I’m doing all right!
I was in love. We sat there talking for about ten minutes like a couple of lovebirds.

The next thing I knew, the nice manager came over to our table and said, “We have to get paid now. Your bill so far is six dollars.”

I said, “Six dollars? For what? I didn’t dance.”

I turned to the girl I’d fallen in love with and said,
“What’s going on? I didn’t dance, and I don’t have any money.”

Now the nice woman in charge and the girl I was in love with started yelling at me. The girl of my dreams screeched, “You fuckin’ idiot, you cost me money! I could have been dancing with someone else!”

Then the manager yelled, “Punchy! Get this creep outta here.”

I tell ya, the first time you see Punchy, you hope it’s a bad dream. But as he hustled me out of there, I tried to be funny. I said, “Maybe I’ll open my own place—eight cents a dance. When you come to my place, you’ll see big Hollywood stars.”

Punchy said, “Kid, you keep talking,
you’ll
see plenty of stars.”

With my wife, I got no sex life. She cut me down to once a month. Hey, I’m lucky—two guys I know she cut out completely.

A
t eighteen, I got my driver’s license, and I bought an old Ford with a rumble seat. They don’t make them like that anymore, thank God.

That car gave me nothing but trouble, but one thing I’ll say, it was very easy for me to find it. It was always on
a lift. I was always watching it, going up and down, up and down. I had the only car that had more miles on it vertically than horizontally.

When my wife drives, there’s always trouble. The other day she took the car. She came home. She told me, “There’s water in the carburetor.” I asked her, “Where’s the car?” She said, “In a lake.”

S
ometimes my car became a taxi. I noticed that the Long Island Railroad station had very few cabs, so when the trains would pull in and there were no cabs, I’d offer to drive people home. I’d tell them, “Pay me whatever you think is fair.” Most of them knew exactly what a cab would cost, and that’s what they’d pay me.

I got a couple of other jobs, too. Monday and Saturday I drove a laundry truck. Monday was pickup day, Saturday was delivery. Thursday and Friday, I drove a fish truck for the Little Fish Market in Kew Gardens.

One afternoon I was delivering some fish orders to Jamaica Estates, a rich neighborhood in Queens. I was stopped at a red light when a classy, good-looking chick in a sharp car pulled up alongside me. She smiled at me and waved, then signaled for me to follow her.

I thought,
Oh, man, did I get lucky! I should have taken a shower!

I followed her until she pulled into the driveway of a big, expensive house. I parked my truck behind her car, and snuck a peek in the rearview mirror to check my hair. Then I stepped out of the truck and walked toward her.

“Hi, honey,” I said. “Where do we go from here?”

She said, “Nowhere. I just thought I’d make it easy for you to find my house. You have my fish in your truck.”

I was gonna say, “
Honey, you should see what I’ve got in my pants
.”

All my wife and I do is fight about sex. The other night, we really had it out. Well, I’ll put it this way
—
I had it out.