Easy Street (the Hard Way): A Memoir (4 page)

My earliest memory was my dad teaching me how to turn on a baseball. I was around two and a half. Of course he taught me that skill, one for which I became quite prodigious, from the right side of the plate, never stopping to realize that I was wiping my ass with my left hand, thus setting off a lifetime of dyslexia and all the joys that engenders. To this day I can only read one word at a time, which translates into my reading time for Tolstoy’s
War and Peace
taking four and a half years. On this count, however, I must give the old man a pass, ’cuz at two and a half years old I don’t think I was wiping my own ass yet anyway!

At home it was a sanctuary, because mostly everywhere else I was always feeling like the odd man out, at least during the elementary and middle school years. It was like I was always wearing two left shoes. I went to PS 173, followed by junior high school at PS 115. I wasn’t a problematic kid, neither excelling in studies nor getting in trouble. I remember, without exaggeration, that all the way from my first day in kindergarten and throughout middle school I never failed to be the biggest kid in every class. There was simply nowhere for me to hide, and no matter where I went, it was impossible for me to be anonymous. The only life I had before school was completely surrounded by family. I thought everything was cool. Then when I got to school I was one of thirty students in a classroom every year, and for the first eight years, known as the fat kid. There are always two or three of us fat kids, and I was one of ’em. That was my identity: “Oh that’s Ron. He’s the fat kid.” Put my head down so they wouldn’t call on me; put my head down so I don’t get in any fights with anybody; put my head down so nobody has to know how shitty I feel about myself. Just keep my head down except to pick it up to make a quick joke about myself. Before somebody else could.

I remember, even as a kid, thinking there’s something wrong with this reality. It was okay with my mom and most of my family for me to be this big kid, but in truth, it was costing me a lot to be this guy
out in the world. Thankfully I found baseball in my younger years, and that provided moments of salvation. I hung with a very small group of neighborhood kids who accepted me for who I was. Of course, these guys, who I still love, were all losers and outcasts in other ways. I didn’t have to be anything more or less with them, and at least I was the king of our little oddball group because of my skills at playing ball. For as long as I was on the field or playing at the school lot or park, I had a new identity, with a reputation as a kid who could hit the ball farther than anybody else. When choosing up teams I was always the first picked and batted fourth. That’s why I played ball every chance I could as a kid. It was a way to take my mind off the fact that I was basically a misfit everywhere else.

My second-oldest memory, a tradition that started almost as early as I was able, was walking from our apartment on 171st Street down to 155th Street, crossing the bridge over the East River to the Bronx, then walking up to 161st Street and River Avenue, buying general admission tickets (around six bucks and change), and taking our seats in the upper deck of the right field stands at . . . you guessed it, the house that Ruth built, the old Yankee Stadium. The seats may have been cheap and the view to the field was close to “rumor-like” insofar as you could barely see the field (we were so far from the field we had to keep asking our neighbors whether the game started yet!), but for some reason when the old man and I watched a game I felt like Rockefeller.

Once you were able to focus on the field, what you saw was pure magic: left field, Enos “Country” Slaughter; right field, Héctor López and, eventually, Roger Maris; center field, Mickey Mantle, my—and every other New Yorker’s—very first larger-than-life, straight-out-of-central-casting, mythological, dyed-in-the-wool hero; third base, Cletis Boyer and, eventually, Greg Nettles; shortstop, Tony Kubek; second base, Billy Martin, then Gil McDougle, and, eventually, Bobby Richardson, the fifties version of Derek Jeter; first base, Moose Skowron; on the mound, either Whitey Ford, Don Larsen (only World Series perfect game!), “Bullitt” Bob Turley, and the renowned, heat-throwing Rhyne Duren. In fact, here’s a little-known side note about old
Rhyne: he was a relief pitcher—never came in before late in the eighth or the ninth inning. I think he was the first one I knew of to throw a hundred-mile-an-hour fastball. And he wore coke-bottle glasses—blind as a fucking bat! And wild to boot. Now back in the early fifties there was no net behind home plate, nuthin’ to protect the fan from the screaming foul tip. So you sat there at your own risk; there were even signs posted to that effect. Well, old Rhyne Duren would come in in the ninth inning, and his first warm-up pitch usually soared into the sixteenth row. He managed to get his second and third into about the third row. Now not only would this terrify the guy in the on-deck circle he was about to face, but he was also giving poor, unsuspecting fans who were in the middle of a cracker-jack transaction concussions routinely. I mean who’da thought ya had to pay attention during warm-up tosses! So if ya wanna know why there’s a net behind every home plate in the majors . . . it’s because of old blind-as-a-bat Rhyne Duren, the most explosively exciting relief pitcher to ever wear the pinstripes.

Wait, I ain’t done! Catching, Yogi (yes, that Yogi) Berra. Or Elston Howard. That team was the one I watched throughout my childhood all through the fifties. That team was second only to the ’27 Yankees. That team went to the World Series almost every year. And I’m not sure if you heard me, but that team had “The Mick” in center. And oh, by the way, all those guys I mentioned stayed Yankees their entire careers. ’Cuz there
were
no sports agents, there
were
no lawyers, there
was
no such thing as “free agency”—there was only loyalty. And grit. And if you were a Yankee fan, magic! I mean jeez, how can a Rockefeller feel any better’n that? All that and
hot dogs
too. All that seeping into me courtesy of the biggest Yankee fan of all, my dad. His love for the game, its purity, its meritocracy, its nuances of strategy, its fairness—all seeping their way into me. If that ain’t as American as Horatio Alger and apple pie, I don’t know what is!

If you walked out of my building and went to the right, you’d be on Fort Washington Avenue. There was kind of nothing down there except other apartment buildings—very residential. But if you walked
out and went left, you were on Broadway, the longest street in America. But on my little patch of Broadway there was just one business after another business, after another business, after a restaurant, after a deli, after a meat shop, after a candy store, after a movie theater, and so on and so forth and so on. Broadway had everything. If you went south on Broadway from 171st Street to 170th, you’d find an optometrist, a luncheonette, hair dressers, barbers, and you’d eventually hit Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and then Audubon Ballroom, made famous as the site of Malcolm X’s assassination, and the Museum of the American Indian—hadn’t reached the status of “Native” yet; after all, it was only the fifties!—and a whole bunch of shit.

But the main reason I went south on Broadway was to hit the deli on the corner of 170th; I mean a real, bona fide deli, which even now makes my stomach growl just thinking about it. In the fifties and early sixties there were delis on every street in New York—
good
delis. There were also Chinese restaurants on every street. And they were all good, all authentic. Delis and Chinese, everywhere ya looked—a Jewish kid’s dream!! There was also a pizza shop on every block. So on the next block down from my apartment, between 170th and 169th Streets, there was this place called Como’s. It was where I had the first slice of pizza in my life, where I learned how to fold it so the oil could run down your elbow. Pizza. To this day my number-one favorite and the one reason I will never, ever be svelte! And heroes: chicken parm, meatball, eggplant! If I was hooked on Italian food—and trust me when I tell ya I am—it’s ’cuz of Como’s Pizzeria on 169th and Broadway.

Then if you went left on Broadway, heading further uptown, halfway up the block you’d come to Epstein’s drugstore. This drugstore is where you went for everything from filling prescriptions or, if you got something in your eye, the druggist would take it out with a Q-tip or clean out a scraped knee and put a bandage on it. The druggists knew everybody on a first-name basis, and they were very protective of the neighborhood kids. You went to Epstein’s if you couldn’t find your parents or if you got locked out of your apartment. I felt safe with those guys. They knew me; they knew my family. Next door to Epstein’s
was a candy store. And I’m talking about penny candies, every kind of penny candy you could possibly want. It had a fountain with seltzer and had been there probably exactly as it was since the 1930s. The place had a small counter with a few stools where they made, before your eyes, homemade egg creams, floats, chocolate sodas, sundaes—you name it. Everything you could do with a soda fountain was in there. Plus, every newspaper, magazine, or comic book that you would ever want to buy as well as pink rubber balls called Spaldings, stickball bats, balsawood airplanes, crossword puzzle books, and dime novels.

When I went two blocks up to 173rd Street I was at my elementary school, PS 173. The school yard was great for baseball. They had one major diamond and a couple of minor diamonds, but they also had handball courts where we played stickball. We rarely went east, toward the East River, because the neighborhoods got more dangerous, what with the dramatic influx from Puerto Rico, thus making the ’hood way more territorial than it had been.

There was a park on 174th Street and Fort Washington Avenue, called Jay Hood Wright Park. That was famous because it had a low wall around it, which was a popular hangout. The wall had been a meeting spot when my parents were growing up, both of whom were born in Washington Heights. They met on that wall. And then I met my first girlfriend on that wall. I don’t think anybody’s hanging out on that wall anymore, but boy, back in the day the Heights was some ’hood.

My father even scrimped and saved to pay for me to take piano lessons for five years on that upright that sat in the living room. I sat through every hour dutifully, but it was plainly clear to my piano teacher and eventually my parents that the only time I hit that piano was during the hour a week the teacher showed up; I never practiced. Thus, the pattern that informed my entire life was set out then and there: in order for me to find things I could excel in, it would have to be things that came to me as naturally as hitting a baseball.

All the things I ended up loving to do were things my dad loved to do. It was me and him through most of my early years. Going to
Yankee Stadium nearly once a week during season, going bowling—it was me and him. When I first started learning how to shoot pool—me and him. We used to go shoot pool at least once a week. It was me and him when we went to the movies, it was me and him watching TV shows, and I developed this insatiable love for all those things . . . well, except for bowling; I never could stand bowling. I’m sure the fact that I sucked at it had nothing to do with it. But all the rest of that stuff . . . still favorite things to do.

When you think about it, especially as I see it now from my vantage point, the memories of our childhood years get cut up into editorial pieces. Like in making movies, a scene is filmed from a variety of angles, in a number of different sizes. The director later figures out how he wants it interpreted, deciding what’s needed and more potent when telling his vision of the story. What you see on TV or in cinema is often not actually as it happened but rather the result of editorial decisions made during the slicing-and-dicing process after all the scenes are in the can. It’s more or less the same sort of method applied to our childhood memories in terms of the “scenes” we wish to recall. The majority of what we experienced gets left on the cutting-room floor. In other words, what we wish to hold onto as memories can be very revealing.

There’s a longstanding squabble in psycho-therapeutic circles concerning “nature versus nurture” (we’ll tackle that way more when we get up to
Hellboy
), as to which is more formative and important in determining the ideals we come to hold as true, what we believe in, and who we become. Or, more simply, is how and by whom we were raised more vital than the fixed set of genetic traits we were dealt when we landed on this planet? Obviously, you can’t pick the family you were born to or the era in which you came of age, but there’s a palpable argument that we wouldn’t be who we are—and what we ultimately make of our lives—without looking at the forces that formed our core values during our earliest years. If I ask the question, “Who are you?” you might say I’m a student at a university, studying whatever, or a mom, a banker, a taxi driver, an actor, a writer, a sister, a father. And
yes, that’s what you’re doing, but who are you? What do you believe in, and what is the purpose of you being here?

I could not even begin to answer that question in complete honesty until I was well into my forties. Even after big studio film credits, a Golden Globe win and Emmy nominations, and having a cover of
US
magazine as the year’s sexiest man (although it was in my Vincent mask from
Beauty and the Beast
), I still felt like I was this undeserving fraud. Yes, I was a fuckin’ beast on screen, but I was also still one in my perceptions of myself. No praise seemed to change my self-inflicted slow death by this false perception of myself. When the pain got to be too much I was forced to get my ass to a place where I got to look at all these perceptions for what they were: bullshit! I had it all wrong, backward.

Who I was depended on others’ accolades, how much money I made, the gigs I had, what I owned, what my TVQ was, whether my phone was ringing (meaning my manager was calling with work). It took a long, dark decade and a good dosage of therapy to finally turn inward before this change happened. But the amazing thing is that despite of, or perhaps because of, my career’s twists and struggles, which were anything but facile, I did, in fact, find relief. And
then
some!