My Remarkable Journey (4 page)

“Listen, there’s no reason to hang around until tomorrow to tell the school,” Herbie told him. “You can go home to Jersey
after you’re done with the phone company. We’ll go to the office tomorrow and inform them of the situation.”

“Will you do me that favor?” the cousin asked.

“Sure.”

The cousin left. We were walking down the street. I can still see this, and it still goes through my bones. Herbie said, “I
got an idea.”

“What? What are you gonna do?”

“We’ll tell the school that Moppo died. In the meantime, as Moppo’s best friends, we’ll go around and raise money to send
flowers to his family. We’ll collect the money and use it to get hot dogs and knishes at Nathan’s. It’s foolproof. The school
is gonna call the house. But nobody’s there. The school don’t know about the cousin in Jersey.”

“Yeah, but what happens if Moppo comes back for high school?”

“We’ll all be at Lafayette by then,” Herbie said. “It’ll become a joke.”

We decided to go along with it. We went to Mrs. Dewar’s homeroom the next day looking incredibly forlorn.

“Moppo’s dead.”

Oh, the crying. The girls. The friends.

Mrs. Dewar reported it to the office. The principal, Dr. Cohen, called the house. The operator told him the phone had been
disconnected. The office staff wrote “Deceased” on Moppo’s records. Herbie, Brazzi, and I went around collecting money for
flowers. Then we headed off to Nathan’s and stuffed ourselves on hot dogs and knishes.

A couple of days later, a message was waiting for us at homeroom. Herbie, Brazzi, and Larry were wanted in the principal’s
office. As we were walking down the corridor, I was almost crying. My father was dead and I was in trouble again. Brazzi was
going, “I’ll never be a doctor. I’ll never be a doctor.” Herbie was saying, “No problem. No problem. We’ll just tell ’em we
heard
that Moppo died. We’ll act thrilled that he’s still alive. We’ll say we sent the money to charity and we’ll do our best to
get it back.”

We went into the principal’s office and Dr. Cohen was beaming. “Sit down, my young friends,” he said.

He started to tell us that junior high schools had been looking for a way to attract positive publicity. Most high schools
were able to do this through coverage of their sports teams—but not junior highs. At a faculty meeting, a question was raised:
What can we, at PS 128, do to show ourselves in a good light?

“Somebody mentioned how the three of you raised money on behalf of your friend Gil Mermelstein,” he said. “We thought it would
be a good idea to have an assembly. The Gil Mermelstein Memorial Assembly. It’ll be a couple of weeks before graduation. We’ll
present a plaque to the outstanding student in the school. At the presentation, we’d like the three of you to be onstage in
honor of your late friend. The
New York Times
has agreed it would make a good feature story.”

This would have been the perfect time to confess. But we were either scared, caught up in the ego of the moment, or both.

We left the room, and Herbie actually said, “You know, when you think about it, some day Moppo will die. This award
will
kick in.”

Time passed and the day of the ceremony came. The three of us stepped up to the stage dressed in suits. The whole school filled
the auditorium. The winner of the Gil Mermelstein award was there to get the plaque. The principal was giving it his all for
the
New York Times
reporter.

That day, that damn day, Moppo came back to school. In the annals of the history of tuberculosis, this was medicine’s finest
moment. Moppo had been cured.

The corridors were empty as Moppo came into PS 128. He didn’t know from nothing. He found a janitor or someone, asked what
was going on, and was told that the entire school was at a special assembly.

Moppo went down to the auditorium. There were two ways he could enter: through the side and some Chinese curtains (very inconspicuous).
Or through two big brass doors in the rear that opened to the light.

Moppo opened the brass doors just as we finished the Pledge of Allegiance. The first thing he saw was a banner:
GIL MERMELSTEIN MEMORIAL
.

Herbie immediately spotted him. He was thinking,
Moppo is not the brightest guy in the world. But he knows what “memorial” means.

Moppo froze. The kids in the back row sized it all up immediately. Moppo was alive. Herbie, Larry, and Brazzi glommed us for
money. The kids knew it the second they saw him, because they were New York City kids. New York City kids are a step ahead.
Laughter began to fill the room. The principal didn’t know what was going on. He didn’t recognize Moppo. But the
New York Times
reporter was sitting up front, so there was obvious discomfort. Herbie stood up—to this day he doesn’t know why he did this—and
said, “Go home, Moppo, you’re dead!”

Moppo ran, ran right out the doors. There was pandemonium in the auditorium. In the middle of the chaos, we could hear the
winner of the Gil Mermelstein plaque asking, “Do I still get the award? Do I still get the award?”

The principal looked at us and said, “Report to my office immediately!”

We walked to Dr. Cohen’s office in panic. I was almost crying. My poor mother. How was she going to get me out of it this
time? Brazzi was saying, “I’ll never be a doctor. I’ll never be a doctor.” And Herbie was saying, “Let me handle this.”

When we got to the principal’s office, Dr. Cohen said, “I’ve never been so humiliated in all my years in education. You are
all suspended from school. Go to your lockers. Take all your stuff out. Go home. Get out of my sight.”

Herbie said, “You’re making a big mistake.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s true, we invented Moppo’s death. And you’re definitely right to suspend us. But think of the consequences. You’ll have
to file a report with the school board. Somebody on the school board is going to say to you, ‘Let me get this straight, Dr.
Cohen. Three nudnick kids come into school one day and tell you that a student is dead. You make one call to the house. The
phone is disconnected. You write the student up as dead and plan a ceremony in his honor?’

“Oh, yes”—Herbie was on a roll—“we’ll be suspended. But I don’t think you’ll ever be a principal again in the city of New
York.” Herbie didn’t stop there. Oh, no. “Right now, it’s local,” he said. “Why don’t we just forget it?”

Dr. Cohen shook his head, a beaten man. He went out to talk to the
New York Times
reporter, who viewed the events as more of a
Daily News
story and agreed not to write anything about it. Herbie went on to advise presidents and became a part of the Strategic Arms
Reduction Talks team that negotiated with the Soviet Union. Brazzi became a brain surgeon in Buffalo. Moppo is still alive
and lives in Florida. And I got my diploma with the rest of them.

Looking back, I could compare our childhood in Brooklyn to improvisational theater. We wouldn’t have called it that at the
time. We were just making our own entertainment. Herbie and I invented a vaudeville comedy routine called Spark and Plug that
cracked up high school audiences. But there really was no better stage for our antics than Sam Maltz’s candy store on the
corner of Eighty-fifth and Twenty-first Avenue.

Maltz was a grouchy little guy shaped like a snowman. He always had a cigarette in his mouth, though I never remember him
taking a puff. In front of his store was a gum-ball machine that dispensed a handful of sunflower seeds for a penny. Four
booths lined one wall. There was a jukebox, a place for newspapers and candy. And a counter where you could get the greatest
drink ever invented—the chocolate egg cream.

I don’t know how the egg cream was named. There is no egg in it, nor any cream. The ingredients are milk, Fox’s U-Bet chocolate
syrup, and seltzer. There’s a right way to make one. First, you pour in the milk, then the syrup. You stir a little. Then
you fill the glass up with seltzer until you get a foamy top, then stir again until the foam looks like the head on a beer.

Sometimes I didn’t have the required seven cents, or maybe I did, but just wanted to bust Maltz’s chops. So I’d order a two-cents
plain. That was ordinary seltzer. I’d take a drink, lean over the counter, and say, “Maltz, do you think you could squirt
in just a little syrup?”

Maltz would grunt and give me a quick pump of syrup. I’d stir, take another sip, and say: “Maltz, would you happen to have
just a little milk?”

The joy wasn’t so much in the drinking, it was in the drama of watching how far we could push Maltz before he exploded.

One day we noticed that we didn’t need to put a penny into the machine with sunflower seeds out front. If we turned the knob,
a handful of seeds spilled right out. So we all sat and ate sunflower seeds the entire day. Oh, the buildup. Anyone who came
through the door would get a cupped hand over his ear and a whisper: “Free sunflower seeds…” We watched Maltz smile all afternoon
as he glimpsed the run on his machine. It was empty when we left.

The next day Maltz cornered us in a craze.

“You robbed me! I saw you eating sunflower seeds all day long! I had dreams of five hundred pennies in the machine! But there
were no pennies! And my dreams did not come true! You robbed me!”

“Not so fast,” Herbie said. “Can you prove this in a court of law, Maltz? Do you have any witnesses?”

Maltz sold the store not long afterward, and it was said that we’d run him out of Brooklyn.

The guy who bought it was fiery and we loved to drive him crazy even more. Moe, his name was. One day we played Frankie Laine
singing “The Cry of the Wild Goose” on the jukebox.

My heart knows what the wild goose knows,

I must go where the wild goose goes

Wild goose, brother goose, which is best?

A wanderin’ fool or a heart at rest?

It’s one of those songs that just spin around in your head and won’t ever come out, which was bad enough, but we played it
over and over on the big Wurlitzer, maybe thirty-nine straight times. It must have seemed like a hundred and thirty-nine to
Moe, but when he tried to stop us, Herbie refused.

“We’re good-paying customers,” Herbie said. “We have a right to listen to the jukebox and play anything that’s on it!”

That was too much for Moe. He snapped, nearly leaped over the counter, and yanked the mighty Wurlitzer out of the socket,
pushing and kicking it out the door as he screamed: “You want to know where the wild goose goes? This is where the wild goose
goes! Now play what you want on the jukebox, my little lawyer shyster. Out! Out!”

There’s another story that I’ve got to tell even though it happened a few years later. I love the Carvel story. So I’m going
to tell it now.

It happened in November of 1951. I was eighteen years old. Me, Herbie, and Howie Weiss were standing around the corner arguing
the merits of ice cream. Its cost and its taste. We were arguing, arguing, arguing, back and forth.

Herbie said, “You can’t beat Breyers and the cost is pretty good.”

I was saying how I liked Borden’s.

And Howie said, “Yeah, but we gotta talk about Carvel.”

Carvel is a chain of ice cream stores. They were all over back then. They had soft ice cream and they had hard ice cream that
you could get in scoops. The company was created by Tom Carvel. I came to know Tom very well. Years later, he came on my show
to talk about this story.

Howie said there was a Carvel in New Haven, Connecticut, where you could get three scoops for fifteen cents. Herbie said that
was a lie. I said it was a lie. Nobody gave you three scoops for fifteen cents. It just couldn’t be done. So we were betting
Howie that this Carvel in New Haven didn’t serve three scoops for fifteen cents.

The only way to prove this, of course, was to go there. So we called our parents and told them we were going to New Haven.
But, of course, we couldn’t go to New Haven without taking Hoo-ha. You had to take Hoo-ha. Hoo-ha added to any scene he stepped
into.

He wasn’t funny. Well, he was funny, but he didn’t know he was funny—just like Yogi Berra. Yogi Berra never said anything
to be funny. When someone once asked him, “Do you know what time it is?” and he said: “Do you mean, now?” he meant that seriously.
There are shadows in the outfield of Yankee Stadium. When Yogi said, “In Yankee Stadium, it gets late early,” that was a very
definitive statement. Everything Yogi said was 100 percent right. “Nobody goes to that restaurant because it’s too crowded.”

Just listening to Hoo-ha’s voice made everything he said better. Hoo-ha’s voice is comically deep and earnest and impossible
to describe but not hard to imitate. Once you hear it, you’ll never forget it. I’ll do it on the audio book. Herbie used to
imitate it for his kids. They grew up thinking Hoo-ha was a character Herbie had invented. Then one day, Hoo-ha showed up
at their house and one of the kids ran to the other and said: “Hoo-ha is real!”

When we got to Hoo-ha’s house he was just sitting down to eat dinner.

“Hoo-ha, you want to go to Carvel?”

We could have said, “Hoo-ha, you want to go to Afghanistan?” and he would have gone.

His mother said—she called him Hoo-ha, too—“Ve’re eating.”

Hoo-ha said, “It’s Carvel, Mother. It’s dairy and we’re having dairy. It’s OK.” His family kept kosher. “Carvel is two blocks
away. I’ll be right back.”

He got in the back of the car. We didn’t say anything. We just started driving along. We pulled onto the Belt Parkway and
into the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel. Hoo-ha had no objections. We were talking football, talking baseball.

We were on the West Side Highway. Then we were on the Major Deegan Expressway, passing a sign that said: “Massachusetts/Connecticut.”

Hoo-ha said, “I hate to interrupt this very stimulating conversation. But about three hours ago, you came to my house and
said, ‘Hoo-ha, you want to come to Carvel with us?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ And now I see that we’re going to either Massachusetts
or Connecticut. Will somebody tell me what the hell is going on?”