Authors: Jerry Stiller
“Vieni qua”
—come here—she commanded in a husky voice.
I obeyed.
“Come se gama?”
What’s your name?
“Joe,” I lied.
“You like me, Joe?” she said, removing her negligee, exposing her breasts.
“Yes,” I said. “You’re nice.”
“Okay,” she said. “Take off your clothes.”
I stood for a moment, then unbuckled my belt and struggled to remove my pants without first taking off my combat boots. The pants fell to the floor, hiding the boots. I finally untied my shoelaces and pushed off the cumbersome footwear. She watched patiently as the battle ended and I stood opposite her in my khaki shorts and stocking feet.
“Okay,” she said, waiting for the dance to begin.
“Okay,” I said, staring at her, knowing something was to take place, but not what. It seemed clear that nature was not taking over.
“What’s the matter?” she said, clearly upset by the unexpected turn of events. “You no like?” she said, her voice heavy with hurt.
“Yes, I like,” I said.
“Come on,” she said urgently. “Make love.”
I felt totally out of it. I tried to tell myself to do something, commanding my thing down there to do something. It seemed totally autonomous.
“Come on, Joe,” she said, getting angry. It was getting personal. I was insulting her. I could feel her desperation; her womanhood had been challenged.
“Wait,” she said. She called into the next room:
“Vene car.”
Suddenly our room was filled with girls. She spoke to them in Italian, explaining what was (not) going on. I could feel a wave of compassion sweep through all of them. It was totally incomprehensible to them that this could happen. It would clearly give the place a bad name.
“Come on, Joe,” one girl urged.
“You can do it, GI!” cried another.
After each utterance their eyes dropped to my groin, hoping some sign of life would appear. The more they urged, the more inert I felt. I could feel myself trying to make something happen.
The blonde—my blonde, with the dark roots—was now almost in tears. “What’s the matter, Joe?” she asked.
“It’s my mother,” I said. “I look at you and I see my mother standing next to you.”
“Mother,” one of her friends said.
“La mama.”
“Oh … oh …” A sigh that sounded like a symphony orchestra went up as they stared at me.
They left the room, one by one, knowing their womanhood was still intact. I dressed as quickly as I could. As I slipped out the door, the signorina in charge handed me back my 20,000 lire. “No charge, Joe,” she said.
I was assigned to the 977 Signal Company at Allied Force Headquarters, Caserta, and was put in charge of a film exchange whose library consisted of popular Hollywood pictures and VD films.
Eight Triple Zero,
in color, was designed to make GIs aware of the dangers of VD.
At one point I answered a call for recruits to the company football team. The ever-present hunger to be some kind of hero impelled me to put my name on a list to try out.
Football was a game I had never played before, except for the touch variety. Ignorant of any of the fine points of the sport, I lied and said I’d played guard in high school. Guard seemed to me to be a position I could learn quickly and which demanded the least amount of skill. I figured I simply had to stop an opposing player when he had the ball, or create some kind of hole for our own guys when we had the ball. I immediately made the team.
Being 5-foot-6 and weighing about 150 pounds seemed to be a great advantage. I was small enough to see through the legs of almost everyone in front of me, and my speed allowed me to be in the right spot to read the opposition’s plays and shout a warning to my teammates. In practice my sharpness surprised everyone, including myself. I suddenly seemed to fit into this peculiar game. I experienced a rush of good feeling from the men around me, a feeling of warmth and respect.
We had a couple of ringers on our team. The halfback was someone who had distinguished himself in college ball. It was our job to get him the football. Our first game was played in Victor Emmanuel Stadium, Caserta, before a full house of GIs, British Tommies, Mihailovich Yugoslavs, and Italians who worked for the occupying U.S. Army. Also present were German prisoners of war who now were working in U.S. Army kitchens or PXs.
The match between the 977th and the MPs had a built-in drama, and provided great pregame excitement. The MPs, as traffic cops of the Caserta area, had tyrannized the comzone with their meticulous enforcement of army regulations regarding traffic rules and the wearing of uniforms.
The architect of these harsh policies was a Lieutenant Cranshaw, who came off as an MP bully. The sight of his yellow scarf and his motorcycle was the scourge of every GI for miles around. One day I had made an illegal left turn onto a dirt road off the main highway. Cranshaw hauled me over to the side, gave me a ticket, and, as the saying goes, chewed out my ass. His reputation as an unredemptive son of a bitch made him the center of conversation in every GI bar in the Naples area.
The name Lieutenant Cranshaw, playing fullback for the MP team, blared over the public-address system. His presence seemed to be one of the main reasons for the size of the crowd in the stadium.
We listened to “The Star Spangled Banner.” Then came the referee’s whistle. The MPs won the toss and elected to receive. The moment filled me with wonderment. What the hell was I doing here? I thought of football as a Neanderthal sport played by animals, and now here I was, wearing shoulder pads and a helmet, playing it myself.
I decided that I had to prove I was no longer a little Jew by playing the part of a tough guy in an all-American sport. Football was a battlefield that allowed me to hit, smash, and even maim. I could feel a real joy in all this. The chains of Talmudic teaching were no longer binding me. I was pure goy and beginning to love it. No apologies.
The whistle blew. Kickoff. On the first play from scrimmage the ball was snapped to a quarterback who handed off to fullback Cranshaw. Their guard opened a hole between me and our center. Cranshaw came charging through the line of scrimmage. I fell. He was lumbering past me and was as wild on the field as he was on his motorcycle. I was up on my feet. He was plowing through our secondary, with the open field just
ahead. Being small, I circled around my teammates. I had seen this move in a Ritz Brothers movie. Suddenly there I was, the only man between Cranshaw and the goal line. His head sank into his shoulders. He was coming straight at me. He wasn’t trying to avoid me. No sidestep. On the contrary, he wanted to take me with him.
In a split second I decided I could tackle him if I had the will. I also knew that if I tackled him at the ankles, he would fall like a tall oak in the forest. He kept coming. I was short enough to aim directly at those ankles.
Get him!
I screamed at myself.
Don’t be afraid.
I dove and caught one ankle. I heard a crack, and Lieutenant Cranshaw shrieked in pain. As his body hit the ground, I felt sorry for him. I heard the crowd screaming deliriously at the sight of the guy lying on the field, writhing in agony. What the hell had I done? There was another roar from the stands as a stretcher came out and Cranshaw was lifted onto it and carried off the field.
I played fifty-eight minutes that day, both offense and defense. When I left the field, two minutes before the game’s end, a roar went up in the stands that to this day I can still hear. Italians who were new to American football and who didn’t know my name stamped their feet and shouted my number:
Ootan doate, ootan doate
—eighty-eight, eighty-eight. I was so moved, I wanted to cry.
I played the following week, on Thanksgiving Day, when we went up against the team from the aircraft carrier
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
. My nose got broken, or at least some cartilage got misplaced, but I never knew it. I enjoyed every moment.
In the years since, theater has been the only other place where I could find the same kind of warmth and gratitude from total strangers, but I don’t think anything that ever happened to me in show business could rival the moment of sheer exhilaration I experienced in Victor Emmanuel Stadium that afternoon.
S
hortly after my army discharge, I moved back home with my parents. They were now living in another city housing project, Ravenswood, in Astoria. Deddy was still driving a bus, although he was no longer with the Triangle Bus Company, but with Fifth Avenue Coach.
One day, I went to the garage on 145th Street and Lenox Avenue and watched him check out. He seemed to be a favorite among the drivers. They’d call him Butch. They thought of him as some kind of sweet little puppy that somehow got misnamed. Since my father had been working steadily, and rent in the housing projects was determined by income, each pay increase had forced my parents to move. Living in Ravenswood was a little like being exiled. Astoria was a ghostly Siberia after the volatile Lower East Side. The apartments were essentially the same: five rooms with thin walls for a family of five. The project itself extended for blocks. The sameness of these buildings and apartments tore at your sense of individuality. My mother sensed this and hated it.
“Let’s get out of these projects. Why do you have to tell them your salary? Why should anyone have to know how much you make?”
My father didn’t seem to mind, but for my mother, the projects were a constant reminder that she could no longer dream.
I knew that it was time to contribute to the household. I read a want ad promising huge weekly salaries for highly motivated men who could sell. “Veterans please take notice.” Since my only means of supporting myself was twenty dollars a week from veterans’ entitlements, the ad intrigued me.
I arrived at an office on West 42nd Street and was met by a sales manager whose first question was whether I had ever sold door to door. I told him no, but because I was a veteran he said he was willing to train me. A few hours later I was out on the street with a young man named Tommy who would be doing the actual selling. Tommy had a great smile. I could see his teeth every time he spoke.
We drove down to a quiet neighborhood in Flatbush, Brooklyn, where we went to a restaurant and joined four or five other guys sitting at a table. One, the district manager, assigned the territories that were to be taken by each of us. Tommy got his blocks and we hit the streets.
As we were leaving Tommy told me, “Put on your ruptured duck.”
The ruptured duck was the gold pin the army issued that indicated you were an honorably discharged veteran.
“Just listen when I knock on the door.”
We approached a two-family house. Tommy rang the bell and a woman answered.
“Excuse me,” he said smiling, his teeth flashing. “I’m taking a survey. I’m a veteran and my friend Jerry is one also. Was anyone in your family in the service?”
The war was over and anyone who had had a member of the family in the service was quick to let it be known.
“You know, veterans are having a tough time of it now,” Tommy continued. “They’ve given a lot for their country and many are out of work. By the way, are you receiving any magazine subscriptions right now?”
The woman said no.
“Well, what my company does is offer you a two-, three-, or four-year subscription to
Life, Look, Pic,
and
Liberty
magazines. What you’re doing is getting a discount on the magazine which you’d be buying anyway and giving something back to the veterans who gave so much.”
“How much is it?” the woman asked, reaching into her bag.
“Why don’t you take it for three years. You save a lot. You Italian?” Tommy asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“Me too,” Tommy replied.
“Uno mano lavo nada”
—one hand washes the other. In minutes the transaction was completed.
“Thank you,” Tommy said, handing her a receipt. “You’ll get your first magazine in a month.” They shook hands.
We said good-bye and were knocking on the next door. It was like
clockwork. The next day I was out doing it myself. I was no Tommy, but I did the spiel and it worked. Part of the magic was the neighborhoods. Two-family houses, Italians, Jews, and Irish were very receptive. For about ten weeks I was selling and making about $125 per week. I was living at home and making more than my father.
On one occasion I knocked on the door of the DeMarcos. The DeMarco sisters were a family that sang on Fred Allen’s radio show. The door opened and one of the sisters invited me in. I didn’t have to say two words. The checkbook was out and I had my order for four years.
One man was not so receptive. He said he had placed an order a couple of months back and not received his magazine. That disturbed me. Of course, it could’ve been a slipup, but it made me suspicious. I went to the sales manager’s office and told him about this man who had not received his magazine. “It’s in the mail. Sometimes it takes a while.”
Suddenly my territory was now shifted to the Inwood section of Manhattan with mostly six-story apartment houses. The tenants were largely Jehovah’s Witnesses.
I knocked on a door.
“Are there any veterans in the family?”
“Come on in,” the woman said. “You a veteran?”
“Yes.”
“Would you like a cup of coffee?”
“Why not,” I said. This job was turning into an adventure. She introduced me to her daughter.
“Please sit down,” they said very sweetly. They sat me down at a table and listened to my pitch. When I finished the mother said, “I really can’t do anything until I consult my husband. He doesn’t come home till 4
P.M.
He’s a motorman on the IRT.
“You’re Jewish?” she added.
“Yes,” I said.
She handed me a Bible. “You know, we have many Jewish people in the Jehovah’s Witnesses. The Jewish people were the ones who gave us the Torah.”
For the next two hours I listened as she tried to convert me. She brought me food, coffee.
Finally I said, “I really have to leave.”