Just Kids From the Bronx (17 page)

I have a couple of acres in Briarcliff, fifty minutes away from where we’re sitting in Manhattan. The view of the Hudson is unbelievable. There’s no building across the way. It’s north of the Tappan Zee Bridge. It’s one of the great places. It’s the views. It’s the Hudson River School of painting. I never get tired of it. So when I come to the city it’s more of a novelty for me.

There were things in the Bronx everyone seems to think of nostalgically and positively, but part of that is because we were young and we had fun. Sunday nights I do
not
have fond memories of. It took me many, many years to get out of the slight gloom, because Ed Sullivan was on and the next day was school and as much as I’m thankful for the most wonderful free education it was dull, except for a few courses in high school and a few in college.

At my age, I realize another important thing about that life. It had to do with women. When you live compactly, you know everyone else’s business, and it’s amazing how they pretended they didn’t, but the women were incredibly strong for each other. Much more so than the men. Men in the building—there’d be some talk, and this and that, but the women, they bonded, they knew each other’s business. Even women who didn’t see each other socially would confide in each other. I remember the word “divorcée,” the women talking about this other hardworking woman with two kids, a divorcée—the very sound of it scared me—and that with my parents arguing every day. I didn’t know if there’d be a divorcée in our family. I didn’t know anybody who was divorced.

I have a collection of books, mostly from the Bronx Historical Society and the Museum of the City of New York, with pictures of when the Bronx was farmland. I love those pictures. Farmland! These beautiful photos are of something that will of course never exist again.

JULIAN SCHLOSSBERG

Theater, film, and TV producer, movie distributor

(1942– )

Long before the Javits Center, long before the New York Coliseum, there was the Kingsbridge Armory. The Kingsbridge Armory was the largest armory in the world, and I lived across the street from it. In that armory there were motorboat shows and car shows. All the things they now show downtown, in Manhattan, they did in the Bronx. And what’s so extraordinary is that in the middle of the Bronx, in that same Kingsbridge Armory, there were rodeos. Bucking broncos, catching steers, roping heifers. Unbelievable! And there I was, eight, nine years old, going to these shows. It was extraordinary. It was so extraordinary that I was able to meet, in person, my Western heroes, Buster Crabbe and Johnny Mack Brown. Buster Crabbe was a big Western movie star who also did
Flash Gordon
serials. For a kid, he was a giant in that field. And Johnny Mack Brown was one of the many cowboys. That was an amazing thing. A rodeo with those Western heroes right across the street from me in the middle of the Bronx.

I knew all the local stores in our neighborhood. The barbershop, the cleaners, the candy store, and the bowling alley, for instance. Every time there was a new show, any show, at the armory, these shopkeepers would be given two free tickets for opening night. I’d go around and say to each of them, “If you’re not going to the show, would you save your tickets for me?” So I would get their free tickets and then sell them. So instead of, let’s say, three dollars a ticket, I would sell them for two dollars. My concept at eight or nine years old was to give them a discount. One third off. Well I wasn’t paying for them, so I thought I would at least give them a break on the price.

I was never caught, except for this one time. There was a comic book called
Scrooge McDuck
. This character, Scrooge McDuck, was Donald Duck’s uncle and probably the granduncle of Huey, Dewey, and Louie. He had a pool full of cash. In the comic book, he would go up on the diving board and dive into this money. So I spread these dollar bills from my ticket sales all over my bed—my mother was out working—and I’m diving into them, about seventy or eighty dollar bills, throwing them into the air, when my mother unexpectedly walks in. She comes in and goes crazy. “Where’d you get this money?” I tell her and she says, “You must promise me that you won’t do that again.” And I promised, “I won’t do that again.” Of course, I was referring to diving into the dollars and she was referring to my not continuing to work the armory.

Even at that age I knew what money was, and I wanted it. It wasn’t as if my parents were misers, or that they really loved money. All they wanted to do was to pay the rent, which sometimes they couldn’t quite do and so they hid from the landlord. They always paid, but sometimes a little late.

At about ten years old, I actually worked in a drugstore, delivering prescriptions and milk of magnesia. I was hired to do these deliveries, which I did for two weeks. Two weeks later I’m dusting the shelves and sweeping up because the regular delivery boy came back from vacation, but no one had told me. They weren’t kind enough to let me know that I was now the cabin boy of the ship and so I quit.

But I didn’t quit until I had another job. I was now eleven years old and got a job working for a dry-cleaning store, Dorsey Cleaners. I was the delivery boy. I got a little more than sixty-five cents an hour. About two dollars for three hours. That part was okay except the hangers dug into my hands when I delivered the clothes and the people at the other end weren’t always home when I arrived. There weren’t any doormen in these buildings, so I’d schlep the clothes there, and I’d schlep them back.

Then I got a bit more industrious and went to the bowling alley underneath the cleaners and became a pin boy. That was the hardest job I ever had in my life. This was before automated pins. Even before semiautomated pins. There go the balls, and there come the pins! Those pins go flying, and I’m sitting in between the two lanes. I’m working two alleys and I’m eleven or twelve years old. And those pins are coming up and I’m hitting them down, at nineteen cents a game. That was really tough stuff. It was backbreaking. The bowling alley guy knew I worked upstairs at the cleaners, but the guy upstairs didn’t know I worked downstairs. I decided that I had to wear sneakers and run with the clothes, run back, go down, do a couple of games, and run up again. It was an interesting way of being industrious.

Later on, but still at a very young age, twenty-seven, I was made head of a theater chain called the Walter Reade Theaters. At that time, I was supposedly the youngest head of a theater chain in that business. Whether it’s true or not, I don’t know, but that’s what
Variety
said. When I went to meetings with all the studio heads who were in charge of sales, to a man they would ask, “Where’s your father?” You know,
Who are you?
They really intimidated and wanted to intimidate. So the first thing I did was to grow a beard, because I had read somewhere that a beard made you look older. That helped a little bit.

What was fascinating was that these men had risen through the studio ranks, but they had started in Texas, in Oklahoma, in Iowa. They didn’t start in New York City. I was a city kid. I knew how to handle myself. They had the advantage of age, but they didn’t have the street smarts that I grew up with. Those streets made you grow up quickly and you learned from your experiences.

ANONYMOUS

Writer

(1942– )

I was a very shy girl and pretty much of a loner. My sister was six years older than I, so my pal was my cousin, who was a year and a half younger. She was more social than I was, so naturally she wanted to have other friends too. Whenever that happened, I would tell her that the other person was no good. I just didn’t want her to have other friends. I knew other kids, but I never really hung around with them or played with them. I was also very frightened of people. I think a lot of it had to do with my father, although it’s unclear how early things started with him. I think it may have started when I was about five years old and lasted until I was seventeen. I don’t know if I’ve told you. There was incest in my family between my father and me.

He would say that it was all about what he did for me, so that I could have a house and, you know, how hard he worked. Basically, he said, I owed him. If I got a gift or an ice cream cone or a bicycle, there was a payment to be made. That colored my whole life. My sense of reality was never really developed because he also told me that whatever was happening to me was not happening to me. I was told there’s nothing wrong with what he was doing, but yet don’t tell anyone because then they’ll think that I was crazy and then he would have to institutionalize me. You know, he was really demented. As you can imagine, I haven’t even talked about this in years, but it sure did color my trust of people and of being around people. I was afraid that someone would find out. I had this terrible secret that if I told I would be put away in an insane asylum. And that it would also kill my mother. I think that my mother knew, but she couldn’t deal with it.

So that was why I couldn’t be around other kids. And on some level, I didn’t know. Didn’t this happen in everybody’s house? I just didn’t know.

I didn’t even confide in my sister because my sister was, until the day she died, one of the meanest people on Earth. I actually didn’t tell anyone until I was nineteen. Now don’t laugh. I told my charm school teacher, after I had moved from the Bronx.

I was most happy in my imagination. I was happy on Saturdays when I went to the movies or when I was playing. You know, when I was in a whole other world. I can still picture the playground where there were these big concrete tunnels that you could climb into. God, I’m really remembering things I haven’t thought about. I used to run away a lot. I used to run into the playground and hide in the trees, or I’d hide in the tunnels, or I’d hide wherever I could. I would come home from school, change into my play clothes, and then not come home. They’d be calling for me all over the neighborhood, but I would be hiding. Sometimes I’d go to a neighbor’s apartment and nobody would know I was there. And the neighbor wouldn’t know that anyone was looking for me. I would kind of disappear. I think that I was just hiding from life.

My father died in 1974 of a rare disease at the age of fifty-eight. It seemed fitting that this was his fate. There was this big funeral for him in Paramus, New Jersey. He was well liked by mostly everyone, never having revealed his dark side. To them, he was a kind, friendly, benevolent person when, in truth—well, we know the truth.

At the graveside, the rabbi gave me something to read and I gave it back to him. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t grieve or cry or feel anything but relief.

RICK MEYEROWITZ

Artist/illustrator, writer

(1943– )

There was this full-city-block empty lot across the street from our building. It was filled with gravel, broken bits of glass, sharp pebbles, crabgrass, stunted trees, and mounds of garbage. And we played there day and night. We played in that lot because we were told it was safer than playing in the street. “Because of the cars,” my father said. And you’d look up and down the block and there’d be maybe six cars parked on the entire block because this was the forties and nobody had cars. And I said to him, “What was it like when you were a kid? You told me you played in the street all the time.” And he said, “Well, yeah, we didn’t have to watch out for cars because there were no cars when I was a boy growing up on the Lower East Side, but you had to watch out for horse shit because the streets were filled with it.” And I said, “Well, that must’ve been awful.” He said, “I don’t know. It made sliding into second base pretty easy.”