Kiss and Make-Up (6 page)

America was many things to me. It was a new language. It was new family. It was economic opportunity. But above all, it was entertainment: television, comic books, and the movies. Kids who grew up during the fifties say that they were raised by television, and sometimes they say it in this self-pitying tone, like they missed out on something. For me, it was the best experience I ever had.

That first summer, out in Queens, was all about television. All the other kids wanted to go out and play baseball. I didn’t care about baseball. Once I discovered television, why would I ever want to leave home? It was free, and there were endless, endless shows, and they weren’t confined to the Earth. There was
Planet Patrol
, which went into outer space, and
The Vikings
, and
Superman.
All those images are indelibly etched in my mind forever. And magically, I started to speak English with a Walter Cronkite flavor to my accent.

Television led naturally to movies. When I did get a chance to go, I went to a theater in Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, where for twenty-five cents I got to see three movies and cartoons. The theater
was right under the elevated subway, and when I first started to go to yeshiva, I remember wanting to go to the movies so much. I had never been inside a movie theater in my life. In Israel they set up benches and a screen outside, and we watched at night. So one day I just stood outside the theater, looking at the poster on the wall. There was a John Wayne movie—there were always John Wayne movies—and
Gorgo
was playing. That was a
Godzilla
rip-off. At ten
A.M.
in the morning, there I was, waiting for people to start going in. Eventually the theater owner came by, and a truck delivered the film canisters. The owner took one look at me and said, “If you carry this all the way up to the projection booth, I’ll let you come in, and you can have popcorn.”

The film must have weighed as much as I did. The canisters felt like a body bag. But I carried them up, all the way up, one step at a time, with both hands. I remember thinking my hands were going to fall off, because I’d never lifted anything so heavy. But I got it done, and the rest of that day I was the king. I sat all the way up in the top tier and ate popcorn until I almost threw up. It was one of the most amazing days of my life.

Television had the same effect, except it was easier because it was free and at home. At first it didn’t matter what I watched. It was all America. Over time I developed favorites based on costumes, and the bolder they were, the better. On television I never missed
Superman.
I’d watch
The Mickey Mouse Club
, but I didn’t like the girls on the show. They did girl things. They danced around and cooed and couldn’t run as fast as the guys, and the guys would always have to watch out for them, and they would just get in the way. The guys did Spin and Marty stuff. They were adventurers. I do remember watching
The Vikings
on television, which was a series based on the movie, I suppose. I remember Jet Jackson, this guy with a big fast jet. And I remember the cartoons, especially the Warner Bros. cartoons. I enjoyed
Tom and Jerry
, but there was never a sophisticated story line, only the chase. Although they were beautifully drawn and the gags were funny, the different levels that Bugs and Daffy worked on were astonishing. There were a lot of in-jokes, double entendres, sexual innuendos. Bugs Bunny dressing up as a woman,
marrying Elmer Fudd. It was just the most outrageous stuff. Many years later, after home videotaping became popular, I used to tape Saturday morning cartoons and watch them over and over again. Even if I had company at the house—other musicians, actors, celebrities—I was intent on watching these cartoons. People didn’t understand my obsession, but then a few years after that everyone acknowledged these cartoons as seminal works of postwar American art. But I always knew they were.

Overall I was drawn to anything with adventure, anything that would let me go to new places and do bold things and save the world. Pretty soon I started to have a love for science fiction and fantasy films.
Gorgo
, the
Godzilla
rip-off I saw in Williamsburg, was only the beginning. I loved
Conga
, which was a rip-off of
King Kong.
I loved
The Crawling Eye
, which was an English film with this hideous octopus-looking thing with one eyeball in the middle of its head. That scared the pants off me.

The third ingredient in this new consciousness was comic books. One day during one of the half-hour play periods at 206 Wilson, I saw my first comic books. They were
Superman
and
Batman
comics, and I was hooked. I knew Superman from TV, but I had no idea who this Batman was. But the other kids all seemed to. I went down the street to the house of one of the other yeshiva kids, and he had a pile of comics, not just superheroes but
Challengers of the Unknown
and
House of Mystery
and many more. I would read and reread them, and they took me far away from where I was.

Meanwhile all around me society was changing and shifting. This was at the very beginning of the civil rights era, and if there were signs of progress, there were also persistent signs of unrest. After a year in the yeshiva, my mother and I moved from Brooklyn back to Queens, to Jackson Heights, where I attended a public school on Junction Boulevard and Ninety-third Street. That marked another chapter in my American education, because it was my first contact with black kids. In fact, my two best friends were black, because they were the tall guys, and they stood in the back of the
line with me. The fact that they were black and I was white never dawned on me. It wasn’t something that I had much experience with in Israel, and it wasn’t emphasized around my house. But slowly I began to get the sense that there were racial lines drawn between people.

I remember going to one of the black kids’ houses after school. His name was Walter, and he was my friend. His mother would fix us sandwiches, and we would play games. As darkness came, his mother would reappear in the room and remind me that it was time to go home. I had another black friend named Alfred, and some afternoons he would lend me a second bicycle, and we would go riding around near LaGuardia Airport. As we headed for home, we would get close to Junction Boulevard, and he would say, “Well, you better not come bike riding in there, it’s not safe.” I didn’t understand, even after he explained it to me. I was very naïve at that time, even willfully so, because I was not a street kid. I was a television kid. I lived in the world of
Superman
and
The Twilight Zone.

One of my best friends in Newtown High School was black, and he and I would hang out after school and sing doo-wop. Two or three of us would get together and harmonize—nothing fancy, just a chance to sing. And after Martin Luther King was shot, he showed me a small ax he had hidden in his shirt and told me that maybe he and I shouldn’t hang out with each other, because his friends were really angry. But I remember feeling scared, telling him that I was sorry about what had happened, and that I didn’t have anything to do with it. He said, “Yeah, but my friends don’t understand. They’re really angry.” That was the end of our friendship. Educated Jews, well-read Jews, were very interested in the civil rights movement, because they saw the parallels between the way the blacks were treated in America and the way the Jews had been treated throughout history—we had been slaves in Egypt and they were slaves in America. But an intellectual and emotional interest in social conditions didn’t always translate to the street.

However complicated the social conditions of mid-1960s America were—and they were very complicated—I could always lose myself in television. Not that I watched indiscriminately. At the time, live TV did nothing for me. There were variety shows that my mother would watch, but they didn’t interest me. The camera stood still, which was a pretty severe technical limitation, and as a result you couldn’t really be swept away. A still setup with a guy talking and the camera standing still? I’m snoring. But the one thing that did interest me was the fact that on some of these shows, girls would scream for the performers. I hadn’t put it all together yet—the girls on
The Mickey Mouse Club
who always seemed to be wasting the boys’ time, people screaming on TV. But it felt like something major.

Then one day I was looking out of the window at 99 South Ninth Street in Brooklyn. I was twelve years old, probably. And I saw a Spanish girl jumping rope. She had long black hair that hung down past her waist. It was straight and it shone like vinyl, and every time she jumped, the hair would slap against her backside. I didn’t see that girl’s face. I have yet to see her face. But that was the first time I had this odd tingly feeling, and over the next few months, as it happened over and over again, I figured out that something strange was going on, in my mind and in my body. It’s almost like when you’re developing a cold. My muscles started to ache, and I started to feel bizarre, like I’d never felt in my life. Different parts of my body got engorged, and I started growing hair in places where I didn’t have hair before, and I got scared. I would run to the bathroom with scissors and try to cut the hair off. I couldn’t speak of those things to my mother:
I’m feeling weird, there’s this girl I like, and I’m starting to grow hair between my legs. Oh, my God, the world is ending.

Gradually, I started to see all this as a good thing. My mother and I would watch
The Ed Sullivan Show
on Sunday nights—that’s when she was home—and every once in a while we would see a teen idol on the show, Bobby Rydell or somebody like that. And we’d hear the girls in the audience scream. When I was ten or eleven, that didn’t make any sense to me. When I was twelve, even though I still thought it was bizarre, I liked it. It struck me that these teen idols
had a kind of power over these screaming girls, and also that there was something extremely pleasurable about watching these girls lose control. Still, it was a very respectable kind of screaming, almost subdued. Just a year and a half later, when I was a bit older, I would be watching
Ed Sullivan
again. But the screaming wouldn’t be quite so subdued. And onstage there wouldn’t be a single teen idol with slicked-back hair but four teen idols with shaggy hair and funny accents. When I saw that, I understood everything about the world in a flash.

I was oblivious
to Elvis. I never saw him on television, so in some sense he didn’t really exist for me, and while I was vaguely aware of him as a recording artist, I didn’t think much of him. He was just another one of those guys who sang, and besides “Hound Dog” and “Jailhouse Rock,” it really wasn’t the kind of music that I was interested in. It was crooning, and it was too smooth. So when Elvis appeared on
Ed Sullivan
, wriggling his pelvis, it wasn’t a major turning point for me. But then in 1964, my mother and I were sitting around one Sunday night, in the middle of our usual ritual: dinner and
Ed Sullivan.
I was eating homemade hamburgers that my mother used to make, and peas. I wasn’t a fan of most vegetables, but I didn’t mind peas, so she must have just loaded me up with them whenever she could. So there I was, with the hamburger, the peas, and Ed Sullivan, and Sullivan started saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, tonight on our show, we have the Beatles.”