Just Kids From the Bronx (14 page)

In first grade at school, I was extremely obedient. In about the second grade, the teacher started putting me in school plays. And then she had me read for the assembly. The Bible! I was the guy who got up and read the Bible to start assembly.

There was this teacher, Blanche Rothstein, the drama teacher, who went to my apartment to talk to my grandmother and to tell her things about me. To this day I don’t know what they were, but I think they had to do with encouraging me to be an actor. She actually climbed those five flights of stairs to say that to my grandmother.

This is why to this day I say “It’s the teachers.” That’s why when anybody says “teacher” I light up. There it was, in this South Bronx public school, recognizing something I was doing that made her say that there was real hope there. I don’t know, because otherwise I think I was pretty hopeless.

The conduct thing started when I hung out with kids that sort of pulled you with them. You were influenced by them. They were influenced by you. It worked both ways.

After third grade, my mother had to come to school pretty much once a year to talk to the teachers. Their conclusion? That I needed a dad. My mother was adamant. She said it was because we were poor and, because of that, she had to work. And besides which, she said, I had a great relationship with my grandfather.

As I got older, I noticed that I would become close friends with males who became my father figures, like my grandfather had been to me—like Lee Strasberg of the Actors Studio, for instance.

When I was a young teenager, three or four of us hung out together. We were extremely close. We played tag on the roofs, believe it or not. We’d hop from one roof to the next. One time I was running full out to leap over to the next roof when I saw this alley between the roofs. I pulled myself back just in time. I swiveled around and went back because I knew I was going to go down. We also scaled the roofs when we were about ten or eleven. Remember those TV aerials? We’d kind of hold on to them as a balancer—and we’d walk on the edge of the rooftops. Now I couldn’t even look down if I had to. Nobody ever fell, thank God.

Some of my closest friends, like my friend Cliffie, became drug addicts. They started taking drugs at ages fourteen, fifteen, but they had IQs that went through the roof. At the same time they were into drugs they had little pocket books of Dostoyevsky in the back of their pants. I was very fortunate. I wasn’t into drugs.

My mother kept me off the streets on school nights. My friends weren’t controlled that way. They had the kind of freedom and abandon that led to drugs and difficulty. I was so angry with my mother for keeping me home when I wanted to go out. It wasn’t until later in life that I fully realized what she had done for me. What can I say? I hope my kids don’t take that long.

ROBERT F. LEVINE

Entertainment lawyer, literary agent

(1940– )

As a kid I was fat and I was smart, and my mother supported me unconditionally. When she took me to the family doctor who told her, “You know your son is too fat and you should do something about that,” her response was, “My son is too fat? Look at your wife.”

I was always at the top of my class in public school. I was smart enough to manipulate my world to avoid activities in which I couldn’t be the best. Even now, I find myself gravitating toward things that I’m good at rather than changing myself. For instance, I don’t want to ski. I’m not interested. It comes from a combination of built-in fear and wanting to excel. I figured out how to manipulate my world so it worked for me. I avoided sports because I wasn’t good at them. I hated phys ed because I wasn’t good at it. I found climbing ropes really hard. I wasn’t good at it. Instead of building my body and learning how to climb the damn ropes, I figured out how to avoid the class.

In retrospect, it limited my life. And not being good at sports was a source of some humiliation for me. I was good enough at other things so it wasn’t held against me, but it bothered me. When you’re used to being the smartest in the class and then you’re the last one picked for the team, it feels like shit.

When I went to Bronx High School of Science, my views expanded because it was a window onto the world. When you grow up as a working-class, lower-middle-class Jewish person in a Jewish neighborhood, the world is very small. The world is your neighborhood. The world is your building. You know everybody in the building. The kids in the building play together. You know all the people in the neighborhood because they all play together. When I went to Bronx High School of Science, all of a sudden the world got bigger. Really much bigger. One weekend you’d go to a party in a Bronx tenement. The next weekend you’d be at a party on Park Avenue. The high school had kids from all over, which is why it worked. There was this mix. Upper-middle-class kids from Manhattan professional families went to school with kids like me who were from these very limited Jewish neighborhood places. Seeing how other people lived made me want to get away. To get out of my small world, my parents’ world.

My mother grew up during the Depression and that defined everything. The people who grew up that way had a level of fear about the world that was scary. My mother was one of the most frightened of people. She was terrified. Terrified of risk. Everything needed to be secure. The intention of life was to be safe, so I grew up with a fear of taking risks, of being out on a limb. You have to have a safe job. You have to be a professional. I bought into it, I guess.

I was very young in high school. This was a period when kids were skipped in school, meaning you skipped grades if the teachers thought you were very smart. They would keep pushing you forward without any sense of where you were socially. So I graduated high school just before I was sixteen and I managed to get myself out of the Bronx.
I have to get out. Go to school out of town.
My parents said, “Why can’t you go to City College or Queens College?” I knew that if I stayed my world would stay small.
I gotta get out!

I was able to get into Cornell. I went to the Industrial and Labor Relations School, which was what I was actually interested in. I did this all by myself, even though I was only sixteen. The school gave me scholarships, and my parents helped out a bit with some money. My first dorm room at Cornell was shared with this six-foot-four farmer from the Midwest who had gone to one of the fancy prep schools. There I was, this sort of fat Jewish kid. I didn’t even know what clothes to wear. I was two years younger than everybody, which made it hard for me socially. So I graduated in three and a half years, not four. At that time, I was nineteen and a half and still on a fast track.

After college I went into the Air Force Reserve so I could get that over with. That was the era where there were lotteries and a draft, and all eligible guys had to serve. Can you imagine what basic training was for someone like me? I don’t know how I survived. After that I went straight to Harvard Law School. I moved forward without taking a breath. Without looking back for a moment.

When I was at Harvard, I had the good fortune to work with Derek Bok, who at that point was a professor of labor law at Harvard Law School. He went on to become dean of the law school and president of Harvard University. He and I used to have lunch on a regular basis. When he heard about my life and the way I had steamrolled myself through all of these activities, he said, “You have to stop for a minute.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I think you should spend a year in Europe to start living a little bit.”

I still didn’t know what he was talking about. But he prepared me for applying for a Knox Fellowship, which was given to promising students to study at universities in the United Kingdom. I got the fellowship and went to England, to the London School of Economics. Cornell was another planet, but this was another universe. I took a course in industrial labor relations and for the first time in my life I didn’t do the work. I carried this one textbook around for months. I remember it so clearly. It was called
Industrial Democracy in Great Britain
. It couldn’t have been more than two hundred pages and it took me months to read. I really didn’t need another degree, so during that one year I traveled all over the world. A condition of the Knox Fellowship was that twice a year you had to write to the dean of the law school and tell him what you were doing. I did that, but for the first time in my life I shirked my other responsibilities. It felt great and it changed my life. Somehow I realized that I didn’t have to be on a constantly moving fast train through my life. I could take some deep breaths and make some decisions that were not simply based on a forward trajectory.

It’s very interesting. When I look to formative processes, like in therapy, look at leaving my family, it wasn’t an unpleasant separation. It wasn’t that I had a family I had to get rid of because I was being abused. It was a separation toward self-creation. That’s what I think about when I think about the process. It’s the process of coming from a place—your family, your neighborhood—and then creating something new. I knew that change was not about money, but an interior process about understanding who you are. What you see the world as being. There’s a kind of self-confidence that comes with that.

SUZANNE BRAUN LEVINE

Feminist writer, author, editor

(1941– )

I loved nature and being outside, so when we moved to Fieldston from Washington Heights, the idea of living in a place with a lot of trees and private houses was very appealing. Fieldston, which is a section of Riverdale, looks a lot like Larchmont or Scarsdale, but unlike Larchmont or Scarsdale it has hills and rocks so the houses aren’t in straight rows. Some are up on big outcroppings of rocks, and others, like ours, are below on the street level. I don’t think I knew that Riverdale was part of the Bronx. I don’t think I was aware of the boroughs at all.

I was a tomboy. My favorite outfit was my flannel-lined jeans with matching flannel shirt. You got dressed up in a skirt or dress when you went “into the city,” and I didn’t want to get dressed up, so I avoided going into the city. The Fieldston School, which was a few blocks from my house, was my home base.

I loved being on the basketball team. I loved the practices. I loved getting on the bus to go to away games. I loved having a number. Seventeen. Years later, Title IX (legislation that banned sex discrimination at government-funded educational institutions) changed the nature of sports for girls.

In my day, teams like the one I was on were second-class citizens. We played in an old gym, while boys monopolized the new one. No one came to watch us. Even our parents didn’t come. I guess it didn’t seem as important a school event as, say, a class play. When I got to college there was no girls’ basketball team at all. It’s hard to imagine today; my daughter played volleyball all through high school and college and now plays on a coed city team. She loves volleyball the way I loved basketball and she’s been able to make it part of her life. Title IX was too late for me, but it has affected me in watching my daughter. I think it was one of the major achievements of the women’s movement.

Being popular was as important at Fieldston as anywhere else in the fifties, even though the Ethical Culture philosophy that guided the school made a big point of community building and respect for each other. Socially, the goal was to be “a fabulous kid.” It meant you were a team player. That you were well rounded. But most of all, it meant that people liked you.

There were a hundred and three kids in my class. One day, one of them, who was a friend of mine, said, “You’re so great and you’re so popular and you’re head of the student council—and I only know one person who doesn’t like you.” I went bananas and I got out all the yearbooks and I made lists of who it could possibly be. It obsessed me for weeks. And later—years later—it dawned on me.
I know who that one person was. It was the person who told it to me.

Like most women of my generation, I expended a lot of energy trying to be liked. I never asked,
Do I like this person? Do I want to be with this person? Why am I working so hard to make somebody like me who I have no interest in?
Now I do.