B000FC0RL0 EBOK (2 page)

“Do you want to try it?” he said.

Before I could say “I’m scared,” he took out a wrench, lowered the seat, and I was on the bike.

“Now just pedal. I’ll be behind you, holding the seat.”

I obeyed. I could feel Leo’s hands on the seat, keeping me balanced. I felt safe.

“Go,” he said.

Suddenly I realized I was on my own. Free. Moving without anyone’s help. And at that moment I felt brave and powerful.

I
n 1953, I was in New York City looking for work. I was making rounds with Bea Mortensen, a tall, lovely, redheaded actress. I thought we’d be terrific doing an act together. That wasn’t all I wanted to do with Bea. She sensed that my hanging out with her was not solely in hope of theatrical employment, but I never made an overt pass and did everything to disguise my biological feelings.

We’d walk down Broadway holding hands, she in two-inch heels and me in my Keds, sending out a message: “See, we’re just two crazy show-business people.” Bea’s making rounds with me must have hinged on some bizarre expectation of hers that we’d actually strike it rich one day.

On this spring afternoon we arrived at a casting cattle call in an agent’s office. The place was full of chattering hopefuls seeking employment in a summer-stock company. As we waited our turn, Bea recognized a friend of hers, a tall girl, though not quite Bea’s height, with auburn hair and an angelic face. They got talking just as the receptionist announced that the agent would start seeing people. I was sandwiched between them. The conversation proceeded as if I weren’t there.

“By the way, this is Jerry,” Bea said.

“Hi,” I said, extending my hand in a kind of manly way. The angel-faced girl shook it. She looked sort of puritanical and smelled nice. She was wearing Mary Chess perfume, I later learned.

“Anne Meara,” the secretary called.

“That’s me,” the girl said. “I already know I’m too tall to play the ingenue and too young to be a character woman.”

She’s very self-demeaning,
I thought.

“Okay, wish me luck,” she said, disappearing into the inner office.

Bea looked at me soulfully and said, “That’s a nice girl.” I knew instantly that this was the kiss-off. “You’ll like her,” Bea said. “She’s a very sweet girl.” I felt like a baseball card being traded.

Before I could fully comprehend that Bea’s and my relationship had ended, the agent’s door flew open and Anne Meara, in tears, burst back into the room.

“What happened?” everyone asked.

“He chased me. He chased me all around the desk,” she said. Her face was flushed. “I think I’m going back to Rockville Centre. My father told me New York was a tough place.”

“Who’s next?” the secretary said. “Who’s Jerry Stiller?”

“I’m next,” I said.

I’d seen this agent on many occasions, and he’d always paid me the courtesy of saying hello. His walls were full of pictures of stars he claimed he handled. He wore a houndstooth sports jacket and always seemed to be on vacation.

He was basically harmless, but he also loved to play practical jokes on me. Once he asked me to light his cigar. I hesitated. “Light it,” he snapped. When I struck the match, it flared brightly. He went into hysterical laughter.

Today he asked, “What have you been up to these days?”

Suddenly, acting heroic, I asked, “Why did you chase that girl around the desk?”

“Because I liked her,” he replied with great aplomb. “And I like you too. Now it’s your turn.” He started chasing me around the room, laughing uproariously as I ran for the door. “Nothing for you this time,” he said, as I exited into the waiting room, where Anne was still recovering.

Bea indicated none too subtly that she herself had an appointment and suggested that perhaps I’d like to take Anne for a cup of coffee to help her recover her faculties. I looked at Bea sheepishly, still trying to fathom why I was being ditched.

“See you again sometime,” Bea said.

I asked Anne if she would like a cup of coffee, and she said yes.

We walked to Longley’s Cafeteria. I had barely enough money on me to pay for anything more than coffee and cake.

“I could bring him up on charges,” Anne said as I maneuvered her past the hot-food counter and toward the coffee machine.

“Are you going to have coffee?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Nothing else?” I said prayerfully.

“Nothing else.”

We sat down. I really didn’t know why I was with her, except that it was the way the afternoon was unfolding.

“Have you ever been bothered like that before?” I asked.

“Once,” she said. “A guy started following me down Broadway. He must’ve known I was an actress. I had a portfolio and was wearing makeup. When he got real close, he started saying dirty words. I started to limp, hoping it would turn him off. ‘Keep it up, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘I love women with afflictions.’”

I laughed. She seemed so unshowbusinessy.
She’s probably untalented,
I thought.
She isn’t trying to prove anything because there’s nothing to prove.

“How long have you known Bea?” I asked.

“She was in love with an actor I worked with at Smithtown. How do
you
know her?” Anne asked.

“Oh, I was thinking of doing a comedy act, and she was very tall and I thought it would be kind of funny, the two of us.”

“Are you a comedian?” she asked, as if she were talking about plumbing.

“Yes,” I said, “I guess you can call it that.”

“I hate comedians,” she said. “They do such awful things.”

“Like what?”

“Oh, I went out with one once. He played the Copa. He took me home and tried to attack me when I wouldn’t kiss him good-night. He had terrible teeth. Then he started to cry. I felt sorry for him. He was a grown man.”

“Well, I’m working on an act,” I said. “I did it in college, up at Syracuse.”

I felt like an athlete flexing his muscles. “Maybe you can come and see me sometime.”

“Where?” she asked.

I admitted I wasn’t performing anyplace just then.

“Well, I’ve got to go,” she said.

“Let me take your check,” I said like John D. Rockefeller.

“No,” she said. “I only had coffee. I’ll take care of it, but I could use some silverware.”

“What?” I asked.

“Just grab a knife and a fork. I’ll take some spoons. I live down in the Village with two roommates, and they lose silverware.”

I quickly slipped a fork into my jacket pocket. I’ve just become her accomplice in crime, I told myself. What am I getting myself into, hanging out with New York actresses? They’re all crazy. I’m a normal guy. Is this what I have to do to go to bed with someone? She’s committing a crime. I wanted to escape, and yet I wanted to prove I wasn’t afraid.

“Well, listen,” I told her as we hit the street. “I hope we meet again sometime. Here’s your fork.”

“Thanks,” she said, and she disappeared into the Sixth Avenue subway.

T
he town of Frampol, Poland, existed for me long before Isaac Bashevis Singer immortalized it in his stories. The Citrons—my uncles and aunts and my mother—arrived in America in waves, each child in care of the one before. My Tanta Faiga arrived first and my mother, Faiga’s kid sister, Bella, last. The entire Citron family (some of them spell it Citrin) lived in one building, a tenement at 61 Columbia Street on the Lower East Side.

Yussef and Devorah Citron, my maternal grandparents, never reached America. Having gotten their children to the land where the streets were said to be paved with gold, they were content to remain in Poland. My mother told me it was because her parents looked down on things modern; for their children, though, they knew America was the future.

My mother had been born in Poland around 1900. My father, William Stiller (called Willie), had been born in America maybe four years before that. His parents had arrived from Chijika in Galicia. When Bella Citron was in her twenties, her sisters and brothers, anxious to find a husband for the youngest sister, matched her with this young boy from Stanton Street. They were married soon after.

I was born June 8, 1927, in Unity Hospital, Brooklyn, two years ahead of my brother Arnold, three years ahead of my sister Doreen, eighteen years ahead of my sister Maxine.

We moved a lot when I was a kid: ten different places in twelve years. Then in 1939 we made the big jump to Manhattan’s Lower East Side, first to a fifth-floor walkup on Goerck Street, and a year later, to the projects,
the Vladeck Houses on Jackson Street, from where my father could walk to Houston Street to start his new job driving a bus to South Ferry.

My father, the oldest of ten children, never finished public school. He became a taxi driver, then an unemployed taxi driver, and later a driver for the Triangle Bus Company.

My mother’s wish was to become Americanized. She taught herself to read, write, and speak English. Her optimism was undiminished by the poverty that surrounded her.

On the morning my mother was to go down to take the test to become an American citizen, I sat with her at the kitchen table, going over questions like “Who was the father of our country” and “What are the forty-eight states?” Together we drilled until she could recite them by heart.

“Who wrote the Declaration of Independence?”

“Thomas Jefferson,” she said, puffing on a Chesterfield.

“How many presidents have we had?”

“Thirty-two, including President Roosevelt. I’ll have to write,” she fretted. “My handwriting is terrible.”

“It’s fine. Don’t be nervous, you’ll pass,” I told her.

I knew she would. She spoke English without any accent.

“What do you call the first ten amendments?”

“The Bill of Rights.”

“Right. What was the Eighteenth Amendment?”

“Prohibition. The Volstead Act.”

“And the twenty-first?”

“Repeal, thanks to President Roosevelt.”

There seemed to be something unfair about a country that allowed me to be a citizen automatically because I was born here, but not my mother. “America-
gonif
”—I was getting away easy.

“You know, my friends think you were born here,” I told her. “You speak perfectly.” It seemed to be just what she wanted to hear.

“It comes natural. I feel like a citizen,” she said, taking another puff.

I loved it when she smoked. It made her look so modern, the way American women were supposed to look. They all smoked in the movies—Joan Crawford, Jean Harlow, Bette Davis—a certain sophistication.

“Why don’t you go downstairs and play. But watch out for cars,” she said. “When I come back I’ll be an American citizen. Wish me luck.”

I kissed her, and she headed for City Hall.

A week later she was notified: Bella Citron Stiller was an American citizen.

My mother was no longer a greenhorn.

A couple of years ago I came across a photostat of her citizenship papers. They were dated June 8, 1937—my tenth birthday. But my memories go back a lot farther than that.

Mothers in Brooklyn were always telling their kids to watch out for cars because kids were always being run over. In fact, there were so many kids being hit by cars that my public school invited Irving Caesar, who wrote the lyrics of “Tea for Two,” to come and teach us at assembly to sing “Cross at the green, not in between.” He’d bring a pianist, Gerald Marks, with him.

The truth was that getting run over got you lots of attention, as long as you weren’t killed. To a child, it was a sort of rite of passage into manhood.

When my brother Arnie was three he was almost run over on Roebling Street. Almost. He ran out of my mother’s grasp when she was pushing my sister, Doreen, in the carriage. The wheel of a car screeched to a halt just short of Arnie’s head. The next day the kids came up to me and said with admiration and envy, “Your brother was almost run over.”

“Yeah, almost,” I boasted.

Two years earlier, when
I
was three, I really had been run over but no one but me believed it had actually happened. My mother and cousins refused to believe a laundry truck had backed up over my leg. All they saw was me sitting on the curb. But my leg was broken. What really hurt was that I was robbed of the attention that was my due.

It was a hot summer day. My cousins Dottie, Jeanette, and Bluma were walking with my mother and me up Blake Avenue toward my Uncle Charlie’s house. My mother, who always had a loving ear for my cousins’ stories, was totally caught up in their lives as we approached Wyona Street. I saw a laundry truck parked close to the curb. The chrome rear fender seemed wide enough for me to sit on. What if I hitched a ride? I thought. They’d all see me riding away on a truck. I’d love to see the look on their faces. I’d be laughing at them.

I timed my move. As my mother and the girls kept walking, I boosted myself onto that rear fender. Just then, the truck backed up and I fell off.
The next thing I remember, I was sitting on the curb with my mother and cousins surrounding me, asking what had happened.

“I was run over,” I said.

“Run over? How?” my mother asked with disbelief.

The truck was gone.

“I was run over,” I insisted, but nobody believed me.

My leg, it turned out, was broken. It was put in a cast. Days later, my Uncle Jake came to visit. He and I sat outside on a bench, with a bag full of peanuts, feeding the pigeons. The hungry creatures flocked around my uncle, fighting among themselves to reach his palm. My uncle spoke calmly to them and told me not to be afraid.

Uncle Jake, Tanta Faiga’s husband, was a small and gentle man. He had no hair, no teeth, and didn’t work. He and my Tanta Faiga were childless. She sold towels door to door. One day, when my father was out of a job, she came to see my mother. I could hear her begging my mother to take fifty cents for food. My mother refused it, and Faiga got upset. But in terms of her own marriage it was perfectly appropriate for Faiga to work, going door to door to sell towels, and for Jake to feed the pigeons. My aunt asked for a glass of water, then kissed my mother and me good-bye.