Easy Street (The Hard Way) A Memoir Page 3
I remember, even as a kid, thinking there’s something wrong with this reality. It was okay with my mom and most of my family for me to be this big kid, but in truth, it was costing me a lot to be this guy out in the world. Thankfully I found baseball in my younger years, and that provided moments of salvation. I hung with a very small group of neighborhood kids who accepted me for who I was. Of course, these guys, who I still love, were all losers and outcasts in other ways. I didn’t have to be anything more or less with them, and at least I was the king of our little oddball group because of my skills at playing ball. For as long as I was on the field or playing at the school lot or park, I had a new identity, with a reputation as a kid who could hit the ball farther than anybody else. When choosing up teams I was always the first picked and batted fourth. That’s why I played ball every chance I could as a kid. It was a way to take my mind off the fact that I was basically a misfit everywhere else.
My second-oldest memory, a tradition that started almost as early as I was able, was walking from our apartment on 171st Street down to 155th Street, crossing the bridge over the East River to the Bronx, then walking up to 161st Street and River Avenue, buying general admission tickets (around six bucks and change), and taking our seats in the upper deck of the right field stands at . . . you guessed it, the house that Ruth built, the old Yankee Stadium. The seats may have been cheap and the view to the field was close to “rumor-like” insofar as you could barely see the field (we were so far from the field we had to keep asking our neighbors whether the game started yet!), but for some reason when the old man and I watched a game I felt like Rockefeller.
Once you were able to focus on the field, what you saw was pure magic: left field, Enos “Country” Slaughter; right field, Héctor López and, eventually, Roger Maris; center field, Mickey Mantle, my—and every other New Yorker’s—very first larger-than-life, straight-out-of-central-casting, mythological, dyed-in-the-wool hero; third base, Cletis Boyer and, eventually, Greg Nettles; shortstop, Tony Kubek; second base, Billy Martin, then Gil McDougle, and, eventually, Bobby Richardson, the fifties version of Derek Jeter; first base, Moose Skowron; on the mound, either Whitey Ford, Don Larsen (only World Series perfect game!), “Bullitt” Bob Turley, and the renowned, heat-throwing Rhyne Duren. In fact, here’s a little-known side note about old Rhyne: he was a relief pitcher—never came in before late in the eighth or the ninth inning. I think he was the first one I knew of to throw a hundred-mile-an-hour fastball. And he wore coke-bottle glasses—blind as a fucking bat! And wild to boot. Now back in the early fifties there was no net behind home plate, nuthin’ to protect the fan from the screaming foul tip. So you sat there at your own risk; there were even signs posted to that effect. Well, old Rhyne Duren would come in in the ninth inning, and his first warm-up pitch usually soared into the sixteenth row. He managed to get his second and third into about the third row. Now not only would this terrify the guy in the on-deck circle he was about to face, but he was also giving poor, unsuspecting fans who were in the middle of a cracker-jack transaction concussions routinely. I mean who’da thought ya had to pay attention during warm-up tosses! So if ya wanna know why there’s a net behind every home plate in the majors . . . it’s because of old blind-as-a-bat Rhyne Duren, the most explosively exciting relief pitcher to ever wear the pinstripes.
Wait, I ain’t done! Catching, Yogi (yes, that Yogi) Berra. Or Elston Howard. That team was the one I watched throughout my childhood all through the fifties. That team was second only to the ’27 Yankees. That team went to the World Series almost every year. And I’m not sure if you heard me, but that team had “The Mick” in center. And oh, by the way, all those guys I mentioned stayed Yankees their entire careers. ’Cuz there were no sports agents, there were no lawyers, there was no such thing as “free agency”—there was only loyalty. And grit. And if you were a Yankee fan, magic! I mean jeez, how can a Rockefeller feel any better’n that? All that and hot dogs too. All that seeping into me courtesy of the biggest Yankee fan of all, my dad. His love for the game, its purity, its meritocracy, its nuances of strategy, its fairness—all seeping their way into me. If that ain’t as American as Horatio Alger and apple pie, I don’t know what is!
If you walked out of my building and went to the right, you’d be on Fort Washington Avenue. There was kind of nothing down there except other apartment buildings—very residential. But if you walked out and went left, you were on Broadway, the longest street in America. But on my little patch of Broadway there was just one business after another business, after another business, after a restaurant, after a deli, after a meat shop, after a candy store, after a movie theater, and so on and so forth and so on. Broadway had everything. If you went south on Broadway from 171st Street to 170th, you’d find an optometrist, a luncheonette, hair dressers, barbers, and you’d eventually hit Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and then Audubon Ballroom, made famous as the site of Malcolm X’s assassination, and the Museum of the American Indian—hadn’t reached the status of “Native” yet; after all, it was only the fifties!—and a whole bunch of shit.
But the main reason I went south on Broadway was to hit the deli on the corner of 170th; I mean a real, bona fide deli, which even now makes my stomach growl just thinking about it. In the fifties and early sixties there were delis on every street in New York—good delis. There were also Chinese restaurants on every street. And they were all good, all authentic. Delis and Chinese, everywhere ya looked—a Jewish kid’s dream!! There was also a pizza shop on every block. So on the next block down from my apartment, between 170th and 169th Streets, there was this place called Como’s. It was where I had the first slice of pizza in my life, where I learned how to fold it so the oil could run down your elbow. Pizza. To this day my number-one favorite and the one reason I will never, ever be svelte! And heroes: chicken parm, meatball, eggplant! If I was hooked on Italian food—and trust me when I tell ya I am—it’s ’cuz of Como’s Pizzeria on 169th and Broadway.
Then if you went left on Broadway, heading further uptown, halfway up the block you’d come to Epstein’s drugstore. This drugstore is where you went for everything from filling prescriptions or, if you got something in your eye, the druggist would take it out with a Q-tip or clean out a scraped knee and put a bandage on it. The druggists knew everybody on a first-name basis, and they were very protective of the neighborhood kids. You went to Epstein’s if you couldn’t find your parents or if you got locked out of your apartment. I felt safe with those guys. They knew me; they knew my family. Next door to Epstein’s was a candy store. And I’m talking about penny candies, every kind of penny candy you could possibly want. It had a fountain with seltzer and had been there probably exactly as it was since the 1930s. The place had a small counter with a few stools where they made, before your eyes, homemade egg creams, floats, chocolate sodas, sundaes—you name it. Everything you could do with a soda fountain was in there. Plus, every newspaper, magazine, or comic book that you would ever want to buy as well as pink rubber balls called Spaldings, stickball bats, balsawood airplanes, crossword puzzle books, and dime novels.
When I went two blocks up to 173rd Street I was at my elementary school, PS 173. The school yard was great for baseball. They had one major diamond and a couple of minor diamonds, but they also had handball courts where we played stickball. We rarely went east, toward the East River, because the neighborhoods got more dangerous, what with the dramatic influx from Puerto Rico, thus making the ’hood way more territorial than it had been.
There was a park on 174th Street and Fort Washington Avenue, called Jay Hood Wright Park. That was famous because it had a low wall around it, which was a popular hangout. The wall had been a meeting spot when my parents were growing up, both of whom were born in Washington Heights. They met on that wall. And then I met my first girlfriend on that wall. I don’t think anybody’s hanging out on that wall anymore, but boy, back in the day the Heights was some ’hood.
My father even scrimped and saved to pay fo
r me to take piano lessons for five years on that upright that sat in the living room. I sat through every hour dutifully, but it was plainly clear to my piano teacher and eventually my parents that the only time I hit that piano was during the hour a week the teacher showed up; I never practiced. Thus, the pattern that informed my entire life was set out then and there: in order for me to find things I could excel in, it would have to be things that came to me as naturally as hitting a baseball.
All the things I ended up loving to do were things my dad loved to do. It was me and him through most of my early years. Going to Yankee Stadium nearly once a week during season, going bowling—it was me and him. When I first started learning how to shoot pool—me and him. We used to go shoot pool at least once a week. It was me and him when we went to the movies, it was me and him watching TV shows, and I developed this insatiable love for all those things . . . well, except for bowling; I never could stand bowling. I’m sure the fact that I sucked at it had nothing to do with it. But all the rest of that stuff . . . still favorite things to do.
When you think about it, especially as I see it now from my vantage point, the memories of our childhood years get cut up into editorial pieces. Like in making movies, a scene is filmed from a variety of angles, in a number of different sizes. The director later figures out how he wants it interpreted, deciding what’s needed and more potent when telling his vision of the story. What you see on TV or in cinema is often not actually as it happened but rather the result of editorial decisions made during the slicing-and-dicing process after all the scenes are in the can. It’s more or less the same sort of method applied to our childhood memories in terms of the “scenes” we wish to recall. The majority of what we experienced gets left on the cutting-room floor. In other words, what we wish to hold onto as memories can be very revealing.
There’s a longstanding squabble in psycho-therapeutic circles concerning “nature versus nurture” (we’ll tackle that way more when we get up to Hellboy), as to which is more formative and important in determining the ideals we come to hold as true, what we believe in, and who we become. Or, more simply, is how and by whom we were raised more vital than the fixed set of genetic traits we were dealt when we landed on this planet? Obviously, you can’t pick the family you were born to or the era in which you came of age, but there’s a palpable argument that we wouldn’t be who we are—and what we ultimately make of our lives—without looking at the forces that formed our core values during our earliest years. If I ask the question, “Who are you?” you might say I’m a student at a university, studying whatever, or a mom, a banker, a taxi driver, an actor, a writer, a sister, a father. And yes, that’s what you’re doing, but who are you? What do you believe in, and what is the purpose of you being here?
I could not even begin to answer that question in complete honesty until I was well into my forties. Even after big studio film credits, a Golden Globe win and Emmy nominations, and having a cover of US magazine as the year’s sexiest man (although it was in my Vincent mask from Beauty and the Beast), I still felt like I was this undeserving fraud. Yes, I was a fuckin’ beast on screen, but I was also still one in my perceptions of myself. No praise seemed to change my self-inflicted slow death by this false perception of myself. When the pain got to be too much I was forced to get my ass to a place where I got to look at all these perceptions for what they were: bullshit! I had it all wrong, backward.
Who I was depended on others’ accolades, how much money I made, the gigs I had, what I owned, what my TVQ was, whether my phone was ringing (meaning my manager was calling with work). It took a long, dark decade and a good dosage of therapy to finally turn inward before this change happened. But the amazing thing is that despite of, or perhaps because of, my career’s twists and struggles, which were anything but facile, I did, in fact, find relief. And then some!
Anyway, another abiding and burnished memory from back in the day were our summer vacations, which during the early, early years were all spent at this little Catskill dive called the Heiden Hotel. It didn’t of course compare to the crème de la crème places in the Catskills, like Grosingers or the Concord or one of those places you see in movies like Dirty Dancing. This was a resort for poor people, people who didn’t have a whole lotta discretionary income, but the place had all the bells and whistles to make you feel like you had escaped the ordinary, if only for a brief bit. It had a day camp for the kids and a swimming pool. It had a little restaurant where you went every night and ate dinner and where you had your breakfast in the morning, and that was our summer vacation. We did this for the first fourteen years of my life. Then when my brother, who was four years older than me, segued into being a professional musician, he started doing gigs up in the Catskills at the ritzier places. My mom, dad, and I would then go to wherever he was playing. My dad eventually found a way to play at these places too. While my bro played in bands that might be doing anything from jazz to the Beatles, there was usually another house band that played for the Perry Como and Sinatra generation. Dad always fandangled his way onto the stage.
I remember feeling so good to see my brother’s fucking genius and marveled at his instinctual talent on the drums. It was also great to see my dad become a totally different man when he had the sticks in his hands. I mean, the focus was incredible. He had this crazy and furious zeal when he played. He had this heat coming off his back and a sizzle about him because he was so fuckin’ happy. Really, his connection to whatever true passion he had in life was playing those drums. When he wasn’t on the drums he was just this ordinary, schlepping lower-middle-class dude trying to make a living and be the best dad he could be. But when he was behind the drums . . . well, it was something else. Something mythical touched him.
Back in the neighborhood the other thing my dad and I did was go to the movies. There was a Lowe’s on 175th, which eventually turned into Reverend Ike’s tabernacle, with gilded ceilings and gorgeous murals, built when movie houses were Victorian classic beauties, decorated in full detail like stages that had once only been meant for kings and crowned heads. Dad and I would go at least once a week for the admission of a handful of coins; we could feel like royalty for two hours in the dark theater, just for two bits and a ten-cent bar of candy. If I was on Easter break or summer vacation or Christmas vacation, we went to the movies two or three times in a week. We also went to the RKO Coliseum on 181st and Broadway. So between those theaters, which had had different distribution deals with 20th Century Fox, Paramount, or Warner Bros., for example, Dad and I watched pretty much every movie that came out all through my childhood.
As I write this it makes me remember how important my father’s total absorption and near-fanaticism for watching movies was to me. It’s a big part of the “who” I became. It was also one of those magical moments I still see vividly. It was so enthusiastically contagious to watch my dad’s reaction to a film. It was like I was the dad and he was the kid. That’s how much movies floated his boat. Whenever there was a cheaper ticket for a film revival going on at one of the movie houses we might go every day to see one classic masterpiece after another. I went with him to see the 1939 version of Robin Hood at least ten times. That one was made for the big screen and in color. It was one of the very first experimentations in Technicolor in Hollywood history. For my dad, it was his number-one movie of all time, and Errol Flynn was his number-one guy.
Flynn was an overnight sensation from the moment he hit Hollywood in 1935 with the release of Captain Blood. He was instantly typecast as a swashbuckling romantic. In the early days of film typecast was a big part of the contracted actor agreements the studio made with talent. You were a cop type, villain thug, happy brainless guy, sexy, or whatever box you could fill. It still happens to this day, and getting typecast can be a blessing or a curse. But Flynn rode that golden crest of fame with the full pedal to the metal. He also made some of the biggest box office–grossing movies for the next ten years. In life he was as suave and debonair during his heyday as he wa
s on film, although he was a heavy drinker from the start. Unfortunately Flynn possessed a dark side. A dashing heroic golden boy in the eyes of the world, his genius ultimately was no match for his penchant for self-destruction. He would eventually squander all the majesty his magical side had accumulated. He became destitute in the fifties and spiraled down to an early death. Indeed, the curse of creativity versus self-destruction that so many in the arts struggle with had beaten Flynn in the end. He died at age fifty of heart disease, degeneration, and cirrhosis of the liver.
I was ten years old when Kennedy got elected. With Kennedy, it was toes all the way up: this guy appealed to you and broke through all this American hard-held tradition. You think the Presbyterians wanted to give up power to some Catholic upstart? No way, man. All they had going for them was power. Well, that’s not all they had going for them, but the ruling class had always been WASPishly dominant in positions of higher power. I remember all of these discussions in our house between my father and his friends: “Oh, a Catholic guy will never get to be president.” That’s when I began to realize that there are forces at work in America that are bigger than anything I ever could discriminate.