Easy Street (the Hard Way): A Memoir (3 page)

There is always a selfish side to death. There’s often an emotional response of feeling betrayed, as crazy as this may seem, that we sometimes get when the person we love goes and fucking dies on us when we need them most. As I drove I wondered to whom I could tell my stories now, as my dad, having been in the music business during the Swing Era, was the only one who understood. I would’ve told him how that summer I spent time with a local New York kid from the Bronx who would go on to have one of the most heralded movie careers of our time. I spent days with him after our troupe caravanned up to Provincetown.

I had met this Italian guy, then in his mid-twenties, six weeks earlier when I was assigned to drop off a script to his walk-up cold-water flat on Fourteenth Street, between Second and Third Avenues. He had just gotten out of the shower and answered my knock on his door wearing only a towel. He was very friendly to me: “Hey man, I appreciate that a lot. Who are you? Great. Cool, man, thanks.” That guy was Al Pacino.

Provincetown, at the tip of Cape Cod, was a saltwater taffy, boardwalked seaside resort that in those days had turned into a tie-dyed, acid-dropping hippie hangout. It was where a lot of the New York out-of-work actors went to escape the city and chill with friends who were acting in the Festival. Pacino was up there basically on the lam, hiding out from his agent and managers, who were getting movie offers coming out the wazoo. There was a huge buzz about him, and the world was suddenly after him. He was going to be anointed as the next big thing in movies, though at the time he wanted no part of it and was undecided about making the leap from being a serious theater actor to getting swallowed up into the Hollywood machine.

In Provincetown I spent a lot of time with Al, playing pick-up baseball games. Baseball was my thing, so he and I got along great, spending four or five hours a day shagging flies or hitting grounders with a Fungo bat and smoking doobies. I look back at those days and wonder
about the whole stardom thing. Then, Pacino’s dues card was paid up and he’d been chosen, a process that is both baffling and magical. When I knew him he was just a regular kid who grew up in the Bronx on Arthur Avenue. Yet even then he was an extraordinary person with incredible charisma. I’ll always remember my time hanging with Pacino that summer when he was on the verge of launching his amazing career.

I never worked with Al, but I’d see him around town. We seemed to have the same tastes in real Italian food. Out of respect for his privacy, I never went over to his table. But recently I thought,
Why the fuck not?
and crossed the restaurant to shake his hand. “Yeah, man, I know you. What’s up? Pull up a chair.” We then kibitzed about our summer. He got more and more into it when he recalled the details I described. “Yeah, man, we did that. I remember. Kids, man, we were fucking kids. How cool, I had forgotten that. Age fucking sucks.” Al Pacino went on from that summer in 1969 to amass a two-page list of major awards that he was either nominated for or won, including an Oscar for
Scent of a Woman
in 1993. He is an inerasably talented man and a deserved living cinema icon.

The long and silent car ride back to the city came to an end, and I was apprehensive as we finally found a parking spot. Holding my girlfriend’s hand, I made my way to the family’s apartment building, which by then was still in the Heights but a bit further uptown. Our apartment was on the first floor, a remnant of the doctor’s instruction to remove the three-flight walk-up my dad should avoid, having suffered what I thought was a mild heart attack a couple of years earlier. Little did I know . . . I guess my folks thought it best to protect me from the true gravity of that first episode, how devastatingly damaging it had been.

The apartment smelled different when I entered, maybe from me coming from the fresh mountain air or maybe from the smell that tears make, as if sorrow has its own aroma. When I got my mom
to calm down, which she did after a few moments of knowing I was there, she told me how it had happened. My dad was the most easygoing, likable person you could ever wanna meet. He played drums in the forties, during the era of the big bands like Bennie Goodman, Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, and the likes, but he had put his sticks away twenty-five years earlier when we kids came along. Making the kind of living it takes to support a family was an honor that distinguished the very few when it came to music. But wherever he found a band, he always managed to charm his way onto the stage to sit in for a few numbers.

My mom told me it was no different at the Tamiment, with Dad getting up on stage each night and doing these crowd-awing drum solos. On that final night he had the house on its feet as he moved the drumsticks like magic wands in his hands until the ultimate note. Near the finale his stick hit the cymbal in the sweetest of tones, and then . . . suddenly he was on the ground. According to my mom and the coroner’s report, he was dead before he hit the floor, victim of a massive coronary.

When I opened up this chapter about my childhood, referring to the tolling bell, a phrase used by poet John Donne and the title of Hemingway’s masterpiece novel, I was thinking of the sound that Dad’s final slam on the cymbal must’ve made. I can still hear it. Although I wasn’t there, I imagine this echo of his very last reverberation rippling out like a widening circle, the kind made by a stone thrown in a pond, until the very essence of his last harmonic act is still rippling endlessly across the galaxy.

It was the saddest story I ever heard my mother tell, yet, even at age nineteen, I was struck by how his death was the most poetically perfect thing that could ever have happened to him. Poetic because if you could name the thing that you wanted to do when you died and your death occurred when you were doing the thing you loved most, then my father went out big! There was no pain, no lingering, but instead he died in that last moment of glory with the sound of the drumbeats and cymbals ringing in his ears.

Jews bury their dead quickly, and within an hour of arriving home I went to the viewing where my dad was laid out. It was an open coffin and the first time I had actually seen anybody dead. My father looked so at peace and still so young, as if I could shout, “Cut!” and the scene would be over and he’d step out of the box as if nothing had happened. But it wasn’t a movie; it was real. And my dad was gone. For good.

Neither Dad nor I, then or now, had ever been too enamored with many of the Jewish traditions or dogma, but what we did find useful were gestures that were truly humane and helped move people through tough times in ways that were helpful, instructive, cathartic. Such was the traditional weeklong Shiva that Jews “sit” after a death. For one week the family stays home, the doors remain open for all to come pay respects, the food and booze are flowing, and a life is celebrated. All the people my dad knew—relatives, neighbors, coworkers—came to the apartment. You go through scrapbooks, you reminisce about what had been happening behind the scenes of old photos and snapshots, you tell stories and anecdotes, you hear things you never might have heard before. Because death provides a kind of perspective that life can never offer: it’s a way to make sense of a person’s life.

For me, I was seeing clearly the cloth from which I’d been cut. Performers must use even the cruelest and saddest emotional experiences as their source of inspiration. That’s what brings authenticity and raises the level of a performance from being “staged,” or fake, into one that transcends and becomes real. Sitting next to my aunt, I looked at a photo of me in my dad’s arms when I was born. Then in another black-and-white snapshot, there I was riding my first bike, Dad steadying the back fender.

I wish I could’ve told that kid as he sat there in this deep grief and loss, even if he appeared pleasant, polite, and strong for his mom in front of the visitors, that understanding and coming to peace with his youth would be so important. He would have to come to own it all. By owning I mean that each of the memories from our childhood must be appreciated, or at least come to terms with, because this foundation is what made us who we are, is what gave us our values and ways to cope.

For some, the weirdness and dysfunction and pain of their early years may have been great, but all of it, good and bad, has to be owned. No matter what line of work you do, success cannot truly be achieved until you own who you are. The most offensive liability then becomes an asset. It makes you perform your best, regardless of the challenges you might face.

When you’re acting and must get into character on command, these emotional experiences you have lived through and learned, every one of them, are each essential tools. Once tapped into, they make for the best performances and create the most believable presentations. When I go into character I use all the feelings—from loss, my perception of my physical and mental awkwardness, and my joys—to transform into character and make it real. I must, no matter the role, find the internal connection that makes me understand how the character I’m playing ticks and attempt to understand and emotionally connect to each role’s particular mindset, as written in the script. No matter the walk of life pursued, even if not in performing arts, owning and knowing the cloth from which you were cut makes you better, makes you succeed at anything you dare to dream, and helps you achieve it.

At that age I felt so much self-loathing at times. With my father gone, who would center me, encourage me, and boost me? No one from the outside world could give criticism with that kind of no-strings-attached, fatherly advice meant from the heart to help the way he did. Later, much later, all of these memories would become paramount in my effort to get better and persevere in the profession I love. But then, when my dad had just died, I looked at those handsome photos of my father and laughed—how did I miss that arrangement of good-looking bones? Sigmund Freud, quoting Napoleon Bonaparte, said, “Anatomy is destiny.”

Look what that little general did to quell the naysayers. Damn, he nearly conquered the world. Through his persistence to show how
big
he was, Napoleon is still remembered to this day, and he is not merely lost atoms, ashes of a person’s life scattered into obscurity. That day in August 1969, there in that apartment of grief, I would tell my past self
to listen to me, this guy you would become. Your face is perfect, exactly as it was meant to be. That’s how you accomplished every dream you ever wanted and achieved goals bigger than even imagined—because of that anatomy you once cursed. I wanted to tell him that someday he would look in the mirror and say, “Yes, fuck them all. I may not be as financially well off as I’d like—whoever is?—but I have what’s better than gold. I have self-satisfaction and, simply, I like myself . . .”

A coupla cannibals are eating a clown. One says to the other, “Does HE taste funny to you?”

—Bert Perlman, 1919–1969

(CHAPTER 2)

A Coupla Drunks Walk Out of a Bar . . .

My first address was 633 West 171st Street. My apartment was on the third floor in a building with no elevator, or what we haltingly called a
walk-up
. The neighborhood was called Washington Heights, so named because it was the highest point in Manhattan. It was the place that allowed General George Washington to have the vantage point he needed to attack and defeat the British as they made their march for New York. It made for a decisive turning point in the war for America’s freedom—no small accomplishment. That was the second-most important fact regarding Washington Heights, with the first, of course, being that it was the eventual birthplace of yours truly.

My building was located between Broadway to the north and Fort Washington Avenue to the south. The neighborhood mirrored New York in general insomuch as it was a melting pot: some Chinese, some Italians, some Irish, and a burgeoning population of Puerto Rican, a trend that led to the imagining of the greatest musical of all time,
West Side Story
. But what Washington Heights had in most abundance were European Jewish émigrés, some arriving before the insanity of the onslaught of the Third Reich and some actual survivors of the Holocaust. My family was the former, my mom being
first-generation American, and my dad, third or fourth generation. (Every time I go to
ancestry.com
to get the answer to that, all I get is chopped liver!)

My apartment was the old-fashioned railroad flat, quite popular in a city where living space was at a premium. Let me describe the set, so to say, of this apartment, which had been the “stage” where my childhood years were played out.

Our place had one long hallway. You opened the door, and just to your left was the first bedroom, the one my brother and I shared. It had twin beds on opposite sides of the room, with his, as the older brother, of course, in the better spot next to the window. Our room was completely unadorned. Maybe there was a picture that he cut out of
Downbeat
magazine, of Charlie Mingus, Miles Davis, or some jazz player he was into at the time, tacked to his side of the room. I had a chest at the bottom of my bed for my baseball bats and gloves and maybe some roller skates. That’s it. There were no pictures or posters on my side. Neither of us had bikes; we couldn’t afford them. Then you go down the hallway another four feet and you were in a cramped bathroom with one of those bathtubs on four legs taking up most of the space. Then you go down that same hallway another four feet and you were in the kitchen that had a Formica table and four chrome frame chairs with vinyl checkerboard-patterned seat covers. And the cheapest fuckin’ stove no money could buy. As for the dishwasher—her name was Dotty Perlman.

Go down the hallway again and you were in the living room, which had a sofa and two chairs. There was a big cabinet of a furniture box that housed the TV with its small screen, which we used throughout the fifties and early sixties. There was an upright piano against one wall, and catty corner to that was a Victrola in a cabinet with all of our records. There was no small amount of LPs and 45s inside the cabinet, with more stacked on either side, because my dad had tons of music; there was always something playing on the turntable, mostly Sinatra. Then the last room of the hallway, which was a straight line from beginning to end, was my parents’ bedroom. Hence, railroad flat. It’s a
floor plan meant to imitate coaches on a train—what poor guy and his family wouldn’t want to live their entire fuckin’ lives on a train?!