Just Kids From the Bronx (4 page)

When the phone rang, whichever kid was there first took priority. And I was usually there first. You could only take part if you were tall enough to reach the phone. I’d pick up the phone and say, “Who do you want to talk to?”

“Well, Mr. So-and-so.”

“What’s the address? What apartment?”

Another kid waiting to answer the phone would have to say, “The next one’s mine.” So the phone would ring, and let’s say it was for Mr. Schwartz on Franklin Avenue. You’d put the phone down—and it was common knowledge that if the phone was down it was in use and you didn’t hang up—and run up the street to get Mr. Schwartz. If you were lucky, he would be reasonably close by, or if you weren’t so lucky, he’d be a long block away. Invariably, for some reason, and I have no explanation why this was, the person you went to was always if not on the top floor, then close enough to that to make it exhausting. Usually there weren’t apartment buzzers in the downstairs entryways so you had to run up to the floor where the person lived. I knew that if the apartment number was a 6 I had a five-story run, or if it was a 5 a four-story run, and so on. Once in a while, I got lucky and I only had to run up two flights of stairs.

When you rang their doorbell, the person would say, “Who’s there?”

“Telephone.”

“For who?”

I don’t remember a woman actually ever being called, and I don’t remember ever getting a tip from a woman. The call was usually for what we called “the man of the house.” Sometimes I’d be lucky and could yell up the stairwell, “Phone call!” I’d then wait and follow that person back to the candy store, so nobody would misinterpret that it was somebody else’s call. It was mine.

It wasn’t mandatory, but there was a certain amount of moral pressure for the person to give you a tip for getting them. It was very rare that anybody stiffed you, you know, didn’t give you a tip. Two pennies was a weak tip. A nickel was a good tip. And a dime? I mean, you had struck gold. A dime was rare but it was still possible.

With pennies or a nickel you could get candy, but for a dime you could get a milkshake, or a malted—similar to a milkshake but with some malt powder thrown in—or an ice cream soda. But the malted was the best. It wasn’t measured, but you knew that you were going to get two glasses. That’s how large it was. That was the imperative. Two glasses full of a thick, frothy cold drink. Anybody who used a straw was out of luck because it was too thick to sip through a straw.

MARY HIGGINS CLARK

Author of worldwide bestselling suspense novels

(1929– )

People just don’t get it. I simply say that there are only three places that have a “the” in front of their name: the Vatican, the Hague, and the Bronx, and that so much talent has come out of the Bronx. It’s also so beautiful. Not only is Fordham University there, but there’s also Mosholu Parkway, Pelham Parkway, and the Botanical Garden, for heaven’s sake.

There were also people in my own neighborhood who became well known. There was Jake LaMotta—the “Raging Bull”—the prizefighter, who lived down the block from me. I didn’t know it then, but Judith Rossner, who wrote
Looking for Mr. Goodbar
, also lived four blocks from me. And then there was a major counterfeiter who lived down the street from us. We always wondered why his son had such a snappy roadster. We found out he was on the “Ten Most Wanted” list.

When we first moved to our neighborhood, in the Pelham Parkway section, it was rural more than suburban. There was Angelina’s farm on Williamsbridge Road. She would come by and say, “God bless your momma. God bless your poppa. We got lotsa fresh vegetables today.”

We lived in what they call a semidivided house with a wall down the middle of two houses so it looked like one big Tudor house. I was in the neighborhood recently and I tell you our block is still lovely. These were city lots, twenty-five feet by a hundred feet, so you had a front yard and a long backyard.

When we were kids, the cars were parked in the back, so we all played in the streets. There were hardly any cars in the streets then and there were always kids on the block to play with. Every house had kids. You knew you could play stickball or jump rope in the streets, or the game where you say, “Move one step forward.” I think it was called Red Light. When there was snow, we would walk four blocks over to what we called suicide hill. It was all a field then. The Jacobi Medical Center and the Einstein College of Medicine are there now. Our mother used to say, “Watch out for Johnny”—my younger brother—“and be home before dark.” And we would run to be home before dark. We had lots of freedom and independence. And we explored. The neighborhoods were safe. Once you were of school age you were allowed to go out and play with the other kids.

My father died of a heart attack when I was eleven. The circumstances were shocking. He’d never been sick. Never. I was a daddy’s girl. We were very, very close. The only time he came home early from work—he owned a pub, a bar and grill—was the night that he died. He would usually rush back to work after a five o’clock dinner. Since he was the owner, he had to be there. He wasn’t feeling well that one night so he went upstairs. He must’ve been having a heart attack then, but we didn’t know it. He died in his sleep, and I’ve missed him all my life.

I tell you, my poor mother lost our house for lack of just a few hundred dollars. After my father died, she hung on to it for almost four years, renting the rooms, but that didn’t bring in enough money. She couldn’t hold on to the house anymore. People said to take Joseph—the oldest of the three children—out of school and let him work. My mother said, “Education is more important than any house.” After we moved, my mother would go to visit good friends still living on the block. She’d come back with her eyes glistening, saying how beautifully the roses had grown.

When my husband Warren died, I was so sorry to realize that my young daughters were going to experience the same kind of loss. I took the two littlest girls to the funeral parlor because I thought that’s the only way I could get them to understand that their daddy wasn’t coming back. He had been in and out of the hospital and I knew that Patty, who was five at the time, would be standing at the window waiting for him. I thought, I can’t have this. I knew that they were just too young to cope. At the casket I explained that Daddy was now in Heaven and that he wasn’t coming back. Two weeks later while in bed with me, Patty said, “When Daddy was home, he was in his pajamas. When did he change into his clothes?”

My aunt was working at the Shelton Hotel in Manhattan when I was fifteen. I got a part-time job from four to seven p.m. afternoons and weekends. It was one of those switchboards, “Hotel Shelton, good afternoon.” And then you would connect the person who was asked for in room 502, for instance. I loved it because I loved to listen in. There was a Ginger Bates, a permanent resident of the hotel who was also the “lady of the house.” She got a lot of phone calls from her many admirers. It was never salacious. It was more like, “I wonder if you’d be free on such-and-such a date.” One time she said to the caller, “Don’t say another word. That damned operator is listening in.” And I said, into the phone, “I am not!” Then I just disconnected her. A minute later the chief operator asked, “Who had Ginger Bates on the phone?” I managed not to get caught.

The Irish have a gift of storytelling. Nobody ever came back from the store with milk without having a story to tell. Then there’s the gift of laughter, the sense of humor, and of course I’ve always loved that quotation from Yeats: “Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.” I have that framed on my desk. I absolutely love it.

My mother encouraged my writing from the time I was little. She said that I was going to be a successful writer one day. The funny part is that when I had my first short story sale for fifteen hundred dollars to the
Saturday Evening Post
, to her that was the epitome of success. “Put it in the bank,” she cautioned. Of course, I already had a list of all the things I was going to do with that same fifteen hundred. Shocked, she said, “But Mary, you’ve used your idea!”

JULES FEIFFER

Cartoonist, illustrator, and writer

(1929– )

My sister Mimi was a big shot in high school. She got good grades, she was articulate, and she was also a dogmatic Stalinist. She was a Communist and she was going to convert me. She got me to join a youth organization, American Youth for Democracy. AYD. It was a Communist front, which in those days, to the world at large, was presented as progressive. What is now called progressive had nothing to do with what used to be a “red” word. As a matter of fact, when they formed a political party, they called it the Progressive Party and got as many people from the outside as possible. They ran Henry Wallace for president in 1948. If you were on the left at all, you supported Wallace for president. Do you remember the comedian Milt Kamen? Milt was a friend of mine. In his act he talked about his boyhood in Brooklyn, and he said, “When I was a kid in the Depression, my Jewish neighborhood was a very political one. There was the Communist Party, there was the Socialist Party, there was a Socialist Workers Party, there was a Socialist Labor Party, and there was the American Labor Party. I had to be twenty-one and move to Manhattan before I even heard of the Democratic and Republican parties.” And that’s pretty much the way it was for us too.

But my sister’s Communist friends were infinitely more interesting and smarter and wittier than my friends, and I liked them better. My friends were these would-be thugs who I adjusted to because that’s who we were hanging around with. Like every kid, I had an assortment of friends who I thought of as best friends and better friends and first best friend and second best friend, but none of them had my interests. I mean, they all knew that I was going to be a cartoonist or wanted to be a cartoonist. They didn’t read but I did. They weren’t political and I was. The way that gays were closeted in those days as a young man or woman—I was a “closet Jules.” I hid out. I didn’t even know what a Jules was at that time, but I knew that I wasn’t like them. At one point, three or four of us were walking around Parkchester, which was a neighborhood I enjoyed walking in because it was middle class and upper middle class. It was about a fifteen-minute walk from where we lived on Stratford Avenue. There was a beautiful sunset. I commented on the sunset and I was called a fag. I learned what I could say and what I couldn’t say, and I accepted all of that.

I was also an abject physical coward in every possible way. Therefore most of my real life was lived inward in my imagination. Radio was a close personal friend. Movies were close personal friends. Fred Astaire became a role model, and to this day I follow his lead. He took something that was impossibly hard and made it look effortless. And that’s my goal as an artist. To make it look as if you’re not doing anything. I use that image both as a cartoonist and as a writer. To leave no footprints. About ten years after
Carnal Knowledge
came out, I saw a screening of it somewhere and halfway through the movie when I saw Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel, I thought, they’re making up their lines. They’re improvising. And I was very pleased that that’s how it felt. It didn’t feel as if those lines had been written.

I used to be able to remember my dreams. I always loved this. I would dream that I was in a movie theater and I would walk in, in the middle of whatever the movie was. I’d see the movie to the end and then it would start again. Then it comes to where I had come in, in the dream I say, “Oh, this is where I came in,” and then I’d wake up.

I was always terrified of leaving the neighborhood or leaving home because I had then, and have now, no sense of direction. It isn’t as if I have a bad sense of direction. I have
none
. Even in New York, if I get out of the subway I can walk half a block and not know where I am, right in the middle of Manhattan. So I got lost all the time when I was a kid. And in those days I would be terrified because I didn’t know where I was and would be embarrassed if I had to ask people how to get to Stratford Avenue, where I lived. I wouldn’t go to Manhattan until I was in my late teens because I was terrified of getting lost. To this day I get lost all the time.