Hollywood Animal (60 page)

I broke up with Betsy the next time I was in L.A. I wasn’t going to leave Gerri and Steve and Suzi for her. I wasn’t going to offer her any kind of future. I’d wind up hurting her even more than I was going to hurt her now.

She was in love with me but it wasn’t reciprocal. She was too moody for me, too prone to black-dog depressions, too scarred maybe by the broken body of the little sister she had found in the street.

I’d continue to use her body, I knew, unless I ended the relationship … like I’d used the bodies of too many others and I didn’t want to do that to her. I liked her too much. She was an intelligent and attractive young woman who deserved a real future and a man who’d love her.

I told her that I was breaking it off because I was married and had kids and didn’t want
us
to hurt my family.

“You’re nuts,” she said. “You’re one of the loneliest people I’ve ever met. You stopped loving your wife a long time ago. Your kids are grown—they’re hardly home and off with their own friends. You’ve spent most of your life taking care of others and have neglected only you. You’ve got a great heart that’s sort of atrophied and unless you give yourself the freedom to really love another woman, you’re going to engage in the same kind of self-destructive behavior
you’ve
engaged in for much of your marriage. If you keep doing that, your atrophied heart is going to die.”

I thought about what she said for a couple moments and then I reached over and took her hand and brought it to my lips and kissed it.

“You’re right about everything you said—except one thing. You’re the wrong ‘another’ woman. I don’t love
you.”

Betsy looked at me, her eyes wet, shook her head slightly, said, “Oh, man,” and walked out of the room.

She sent me a forty-four-page letter after I broke up with her. It was more a long short story than a letter and my feeling was that she should try to get it published somewhere.

George Voinovich was elected to the United States Senate.

Betsy went back to Cleveland. She met a guy she loves … and who loves
her
… and had a baby they named after John Lennon.

CHAPTER 17

[Flashback]

Howdy Doody with a Ducktail

RAY

Hey—winning isn’t everything.

JOEY

That’s what you said, Dad.

RAY

There are more important things.

JOEY

Like what?

RAY

Happiness. Health. Enjoying each and every moment. What do you think, Joey?

JOEY

Bullshit, Dad.

Checking Out

TWO CATHOLIC HIGH
schools were supposed to be the best in the city—St. Ignatius was a Jesuit school only six blocks from where we lived. The other was Cathedral Latin, across town on the East Side, an hour and a half by bus from us.

I wanted to go to neither school. Both were all-boys schools. I wanted to go to West Tech, ten minutes away from us by bus, where there were girls.

But my parents insisted that I go to a Catholic school. I wasn’t admitted to St. Ignatius but Cathedral Latin accepted me.

My mother knelt down and thanked God.

On my first day at Cathedral Latin, I felt disoriented. The other boys had names like DeSapri and DeGrandis and Boravec and Bolan and Ondercin and Cudnik. There were Italians and Irish and Slovaks and Slavs, but there were no Hungarians.

Many of them, East Siders, had known each other in grade school and in Catholic CYOs and banded together here quickly. Relative to where I came from, they were rich kids. They wore colorful sweaters of fine weave and light, tan-colored pants, blue button-down shirts and shiny, pointy-toed black shoes. I wore the gray flannel pants we had bought at the Salvation Army. And a white shirt my father no longer wore which was baggy and bunched out of my pants. And the shoes which were too big. And I had my Hungarian accent.

Many of these kids had their own cars, most of them shiny and new.

I still looked like Howdy Doody, but Howdy Doody with a ducktail haircut.

I heard the word “asshole” directed at me soon and, more commonly, the word “greenhorn.” My ears stuck out and the kids sitting behind me flicked them with their fingers.

When I turned around to hit back, the teachers said, “What are you doing, Mr. Esterhose?” and the kids laughed.

It became my Cathedral Latin name: Joe Esterhose.

The teachers were Marianist priests and brothers, most of them young men in their twenties and thirties. None of them seemed able to pronounce my name. It came out “Esterhash” and “Esterhanz” and “Esterhaze” and “Esterass” and “Esterhose.”

I sat alone at lunch. I hated the three hours each day that I spent going back and forth on the buses and the rapids to Cathedral Latin.

I wore the same clothes almost every day—I had two pairs of pants my father had bought and two of his shirts.

One day, when I switched to my other pair of pants, a brother said to the class, “Well, Mr. Esterhose has a new pair of pants today.” The kids laughed.

“How was school?” my father asked me each day.

And I said, “Fine.”

I couldn’t tell him that I was miserable, that I hated every moment of it, that the kids and the brothers made fun of my name, my clothes, my ears, and my accent. My father had enough problems.

“
Fein
,” he said. “Always
fein
like all the other Americans. You, too, Jozsi, a liar like the other Americans.”

“I’m not lying, Papa,” I said. “I’m fine. Everything’s fine.”

“I am glad to hear it, Jozsi.” My father smiled. “Me too. I am
fein
, too. Everything is
fein
with me, too.”

The Indians had a player I liked as much as the now departed Roger Maris. His name was Rocky Colavito. He was a home run hitter. He was exciting to watch. He’d put the bat over his shoulders, stretch his muscles, point his cap, step up to bat, and a lot of times hit a home run. The whole city was excited about him.

The Indians traded him.

Jerry Lee Lewis wasn’t on TV or on the radio anymore. His songs were out of the jukebox at the Royal Castle. The
Plain Dealer
said preachers were putting his records into stacks and burning them. All because he had married his thirteen-year-old cousin.

Even Elvész Prezli was gone, off the radio and the TV and out of the jukeboxes. In Germany, in the army, his ducktail gone, too, wearing a crew cut, signing autographs on the breasts of Nazis now probably.

My portable radio broke. A kid at Cathedral Latin named Jack Harrison knocked it out of my hand as I was putting it into my locker.

I hit him in the mouth. A brother started screaming at me and took me to the principal’s office.

The principal took a file out of a drawer, studied it, and looked at me.

“Mr. Eszterhas,” he said, pronouncing it right, “if you’re ever brought into this office again for something like this, I will expel you from Cathedral Latin.”

“He started it,” I said.

“I don’t care who started it,” the priest said. “I won’t care who started it. Do you understand me?”

I said, “Yes, Father.”

I took the radio home and was trying to tape it together.

“What happened to it?” my father asked.

“I dropped it,” I said.

“How?”

“It just fell out of my hands.”

“Clumsy of you,” my father said.

I looked at him. He was looking into my eyes.

“Yes,” I said.

“Maybe I can help you fix it,” he said.

Even my mother helped. That shocked me because she had to touch the
tubes
which she believed emitted the rays that tortured her. We taped it together with black electrical tape, all three of us, and it worked.

“You see,” my father said, “I am a genius!”

“You did nothing,” my mother said, “I fixed it.”

“We did it together.” My father smiled.

After I broke Jack Harrison’s teeth, none of the other kids at Cathedral Latin shoved me or flicked my ears or knocked things from my hands.

They just pretended I wasn’t there.

The brothers ignored me, too, and hardly called on me in class.

One of them, though, said to the class, “Look, gentlemen, Mr. Esterhose has a new haircut today. Doesn’t he look handsome?”

I didn’t much look forward to Christmas.

“You’re older now,” my father said. “You know that everything costs money. You know that we don’t have much money. So from now on I will ask you what you want for Christmas each year and then we will discuss it. We will find out how much it costs and if it’s too expensive, I will ask you to pick something else. That way you’ll be helping us with the money.

“So,” my father said, “what do you want for Christmas this year?”

I said, “Nothing.”

I got nothing and they got nothing for each other, either.

I was seeing my father less.

We weren’t playing much of our button soccer game. He was going out at night often again. He was taking a political science night course at Case Western Reserve University and a drawing course at an art school.

“I have to try to make more money,” he said to me. “Maybe I can teach political science somewhere. Maybe I can draw things and sell them to the magazines.”

He kept his drawings in a big case that was always tied together. Alone in the apartment one day, I opened it. All I saw were drawings of naked women.

When my mother was in the printing shop downstairs, I asked my father why he only drew naked women.

“How do you know I draw only naked women?” he asked.

I shrugged and he glanced at his case and knew.

“The course I am taking at the art school is called figure sketching,” he said. “There is a model sitting there naked and the students draw her.”

“She is naked
sitting right there?”
I asked.

“Yes,” he said, “that’s what models do.”

“Can I learn figure sketching, too?” I asked.

He laughed. “Whatever you do, don’t tell your mother,” he said. “She doesn’t know what I’m drawing.”

I didn’t tell her and he hid his case filled with his drawings in the same tiny alcove where I had hidden my discarded sandwiches.

My mother found them.

My father stopped going to art school.

I discovered Joseph Conrad and Turgenev and Hawthorne and I kept reading Steinbeck. I realized that there were people in America who were even poorer than we were. And I realized from reading Steinbeck that there were Komchis, Reds, who spent their lives trying to help these poor people. I didn’t say anything to my father, though, about the good Komchis I was reading about.

Conrad particularly interested me. He was Polish, an immigrant who’d lived in England. Polish was his mother tongue. He couldn’t even speak English until he was in his forties. For the rest of his life, he spoke it with a pronounced accent. And yet he had learned to write in English so well that he was a world-famous, immortal writer.

I discovered a whole new world on television: boxing. My new heroes were Archie Moore, the Old Mongoose, who ate steaks by spitting them out and swallowing only the juice … Floyd Patterson, who played peekaboo with his gloves as he fought … Carmen Basilio, whose face looked like raw meat at the end of a fight … Joey Giardello, a brawler who sometimes hit below the belt.

When Ingemar Johannson and his right hand of “Toonder” knocked Floyd Patterson out, I felt like crying.