Just Kids From the Bronx (8 page)

GS
: Our local movie theater was originally the Tuxedo Theater.
Those were the days, my friend.
We went to movies at ten a.m. and saw two complete double features, cartoons, short subjects, Pathé news, and the great serials the
Green Hornet
and the
Lone Ranger
, which were cliff-hangers. Then we’d get out of the theater at four.

My dad gave me an allowance, like twenty-five cents a week. It cost a dime to go to the movies. For six hours of movie pleasure it was ten cents. Eventually, it went up to twelve cents and then it went up to a quarter. Thinking back, we were noisy. In the kissing scenes, the love scenes, we would all boo. During the comedy, whether it was Abbott and Costello or the Marx Brothers, we would just laugh loudly and applaud, but if there was a romantic kissing scene we’d go “Booooo.” When the bad guy got shot in a Western we’d yell “Yay, yahoo” and clap. “Serves you right, you bastard.” That wasn’t such a bad word. We used bad language but “bastard” is as bad as it’s going to get for now. After six hours in the theater, when we went out, we were blinded by the daylight and brought back to reality. No complaints.

HW
: We’d go into the Tuxedo Theater and we were talkative. Sitting there, waiting, we’d make spitballs to throw at the girls in front of us. And when we talked too much, the matron would come with a flashlight and then we’d shit in our pants,
Matron coming
. We’d duck down, and she’d leave, and we’d do the same thing all over again. The matron, fear, the spitballs, the girls—we were unruly, as they would say.
Unruly!
We had a great time.

So we’re older now and we’re dating. And we’re on a double blind date. Someone fixed us up. Neither one of us ever met the dates before. And you’re going to recognize the name of this theater—the Loew’s Paradise, this magnificent theater with the stars in the ceiling where they gave away dishes and stuff. Now this was not a very good double blind date. Georgie and I said to the girls, “We gotta go to the men’s room,” whatever. And we went and never came back. That’s not nice. We never came back. We left. All because we didn’t like the looks of the girls.

GS
: There was this metal railing on Mosholu Parkway, where all the kids used to sit. It was better than any singles bar today. People would just come and go. It was the park and you were meeting girls. It was a gathering place where we talked and flirted, even at night when we were out of P.S. 80. We also had parties. Pot wasn’t in, but if it were available then, I’m sure we would’ve been smoking it. We had delicatessen and drinks. We all drank and then some of us would throw up, rest a little, and walk home. We always found places to have a party. No one had a car so we all walked. That was one of the beauties of growing up in the Bronx. You were so mobile. You walked to schools and to the parties or you took the subway or the bus.

HW
: We drank a
lot
at the parties.
Whose parents aren’t home? Who has an empty house? Whose parents are away? Whose parents don’t come back until midnight?
We drank and ate and tried to have sex, mostly unsuccessfully. You’d find a bedroom. Someone would stand guard.

GS
: When we were seventeen years old, Howie and I stole a car. You’re asking embarrassing questions, but I say to that, “No tengo miedo.”
I am not afraid
, in Spanish. I speak Spanish because in southern California es muy importante hablar español. Porque todos personas hablan español.

Before we could officially drive, Howie and I used to dream about having a car. People who had parked their cars on the street would often leave the doors open, so we’d go in and sit and talk about when we could drive and go out on dates with girls, or to be able to go up to Yonkers Raceway. Places that were hard to get to without a car. So one time we were in a parked car and we saw there was like this little switch. It wasn’t a key. We turned the switch and it started. We knew a little bit about driving because one of my uncles had taught me to drive in his car. So we drove around up and down streets, you know, not far—but it was stolen. We stole it—and then we brought it back. We had our joy ride and then we parked it again a block or two from Howie’s house on Kossuth Avenue.

HW
: When we saw the car, it was parked close to one of our favorite candy stores, Mr. Baum’s. I lived a block and a half away from there.
There’s a car
—and I opened the door. We got in and challenged each other. We didn’t know it could start. We turned a knob in the car and it started.
Let’s go for a ride.
So we did, and then we started to crap in our pants. That we’d be in a stolen car, we’d get stopped, we’d get locked up, we’d be in jail—and we’d better go back. We went back and parked the car exactly the way we found it, including turning the tires the way they were.

We both lusted to drive so we both decided to buy a car together. I’m checkin’ the
New York Times
and I find an ad. A Mr. Levitt. I still remember his name. A 1940 Oldsmobile and he said, “It’s a cream puff.” Five hundred dollars. It was 1949 so that was a chunk of change for us, but we bought the car. For two working kids in college earning their own money—we put over two thousand dollars into that car. By comparison, a new Ford was twenty-six hundred dollars. We were just pouring it in. So I have the car on my weekend and it’s one of those snowy days where there’s ice on the road. I’m going down a hill around the corner from my house near Montefiore Hospital, and I hit the brakes to slow down, but there was the ice and I crash into another car that’s parked. We get it repaired—we always split everything—and now I’m warning Georgie, “Don’t do what I did. It’s icy. Tap the brakes lightly.” A whole repeat. He has to see if I’m right. He does the same thing I did and smashes up the car.

GS
: We worked in the Catskills on the weekends and on holidays, at Grossinger’s and a place called the Flagler Hotel. There was an agency where you could sign up to work and get tips, and that helped pay my tuition to NYU. So we borrowed our friend Elliott’s car, which was a 1937 Plymouth. The car was fourteen years old. A creaky little car. We were heading down a hill when we hit a bump and all of a sudden we saw that the engine of the car got dislodged and bounced out of the car. So we’re at the top of the hill, rolling down, and we’re watching this engine rolling down the hill in front of us. I was driving.
I guess we’ll coast down to the bottom of the hill
, and I steered over to the side of the road. There was no way that the engine was gonna work again since it was all battered and beat-up. I think that the car is still there to this day.

We didn’t have suitcases, so we had our stuff in bags, like big laundry bags. We looked like refugees. We hitchhiked to the Flagler Hotel and called Elliott. “Elliott, your engine fell out and the car’s on the side of the road and I don’t think it’s ever gonna work again.” I must say he was pretty gracious about it. Another reason I love the boys from the Bronx. He understood that the car was old.

HW
: Waiters, busboys—we worked all over the place and we didn’t have a car for some reason, so we borrowed Elliott Liss’s old beat-up car. That car was called
The Poop
, it was so bad. It’s huffing and puffing when the engine falls out. We abandon the car and decide to take the license plate off so they can’t trace us.

Did Georgie tell you what happened at the Flagler? Did he tell you where we slept?

The place was full, and they had nowhere for us to sleep except across the road in a barbershop. The only thing available to us were barber chairs. So we slept in the barber chairs. That’s what happened to us when we went to the Catskills. We slept in the barbershop in the chairs.

GS
: Howie and I, we went to school together, we bought our first car together, we became lifeguards together, we worked at William Morris Agency together, and when I came to LA I brought him out to work at William Morris in California, and then we formed this partnership together, Shapiro/West Productions.

HW
: Georgie and I are like glue.

GS
: I always felt lucky, happy, and so nourished in the Bronx. For the time I had my mother and my father, they just showered me with love. I carried that with me and I passed this essence on to my own kids. The other guys from the Bronx had similar experiences. And don’t forget the freedom we had. Those reasons are why you see the joy in
The Bronx Boys Still Playing at 80
. A lot of the guys who live on the East Coast ended up in Florida, so I’m going there for New Year’s. We’ll go to a Thai restaurant for dinner, then we’ll go to Lenny Kulick’s house to celebrate with champagne.

MARK CASH

Lawyer, with a specialty in tax law

(1931– )

We had been living in Westchester and I met—I can’t remember his name right now—a very bright person who had gone to our elementary school. We were on the train together, and he told me about a celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the construction of P.S. 76. There was going to be a gathering at the school, so I called up my sister and I called up my cousin who had lived across the street from us in the Bronx, and I told them I’d meet them there.

We left late, and I got down to our old neighborhood to go to P.S. 76, and there were cars all over the place. When we grew up there were never any cars. This was really the first time that I had driven around those blocks. I drove around looking for a place to park when it dawned on me that in all the years I had lived there, I’d never even been to the east side of P.S. 76. The east side was Italian, and to the west of the school it was basically Jewish. That’s the way the neighborhood was set up. We lived to the west of the school.

My grandparents and my aunt lived across the street from us on Arnow Avenue. They were Orthodox Jews. The rest of the family wasn’t. Out of respect for my grandparents, my mother kept a kosher home, but I was very interested in
not
being Jewish. In integrating. My grandmother spoke Yiddish. Only Yiddish. I refused to speak it. I would listen and I would understand, but I wouldn’t speak it. Now I live on the Upper East Side. There are all these young kids wearing yarmulkes all the time. This is something we never saw when we were growing up. We never saw any religious young Jews in our neighborhood, although there was a synagogue across the street and the rabbi lived at 788 Arnow Avenue. Most of us in our building shied away from the “old country.”

Our parents, by the way, let us run all over the place by the time we were six, seven, eight years old. One Passover we were going to have a Seder at my grandmother’s. I got dressed up in my holiday suit and then I went downstairs to where all the kids were playing. I don’t know how we wound up there, but we found ourselves late in the afternoon in the park. We were actually playing in Bronx Park, and I’m wearing this suit. We went down to the Bronx River, and there’s a mattress lying at the bank of the river. The mattress looks like it would make a great boat. We got on the mattress in the water, maybe two or three of us. It looked sturdy enough. We launched the mattress into the river and the next thing we knew we were sinking. We actually thought that we would just float away. We didn’t think of where. Once the mattress started sinking, we figured we had to get off that thing. Fortunately, the river was shallow there so I got off. I walked home dripping wet in my Passover suit.

The Depression and the losing of jobs and money were a big influence on us as kids. I think that most of the families in our building were relatively small because of that. There were even a lot of single kids in our building although I had a sister and we lived in a one-bedroom apartment. Once while I was sleeping in our living room on a hot day, we left our front door open to the hallway so the air could circulate. I woke up in the middle of the night with a big dog licking my face. It was common to sleep with the doors open in the summer. Because of the stories I had heard about the Depression, I think I definitely knew that we were a lot luckier than many who lived before us, in tenements.

But at about that same time, something happened that was really terrifying. That’s when the polio epidemic hit. Everybody was affected by the fear of getting polio. Our parents knew about the 1918 flu epidemic, where people in New York were dying like flies. In Philadelphia, they were lying out on the street. My parents never told us anything about it. Never mentioned it. When polio hit, they were terrified all over again. A few kids in our building even got polio, as I remember. It made my mother very protective. I couldn’t go to the pool in the summer and summer camps were closed because of the epidemic. When we were kids at that time in the 1940s, I think that some people wore something around their necks to ward off polio. It was some superstitious thing. I don’t remember what it was. Maybe it was a clove of garlic.

ARLENE ALDA