Hollywood Animal (61 page)

My father watched me listen to the fight on the radio and said, “Why do you like people hurting each other?”

I couldn’t answer him.

One of the radio stations, WJW, began a program which I never missed with an announcer named Tom Carson. Tom Carson drove at night in a car with the radio station’s letters on its side and went to the scene of crimes.

He reported from there, live, describing holdups and shootings and bar fights. I listened to Tom Carson prowling the streets of Cleveland every night.

Once he said, “The shooting is at the corner of Fulton and Lorain. I’m at 65th and Lorain now, I should be there in three minutes.”

I ran to the living room window and waited and here he came, right by our window, Tom Carson with the car that said WJW on its side!

As a newspaper reporter in Dayton, Ohio, and in Cleveland, I drove cars with “Journal Herald” and “Plain Dealer” painted on their sides
.

When I cracked my own car up in Dayton, I “borrowed” the
Journal Herald
car and drove it to Cleveland on weekends
.

The
Plain Dealer
car even had a telephone in it and, sometimes, driving through the city, I’d hold the phone to my ear to look important
.

Even when there was no one on the line
.

The only part of Cathedral Latin I liked was the pep rallies. I had never seen anything like it. All nine hundred of us packed into the gym. All boys. All boy cheerleaders screaming their lungs out: “Beat Ignatius! Beat Ignatius! Beat Ignatius!” Or “Beat Holy Name! Beat Holy Name! Beat Holy Name!” Or “Let’s Win One for the Purple and Gold!”

It went on until we were red-faced and out of breath, hoarse-voiced, and foaming at the mouth. Even the brothers were foaming at the mouth, waving their fists and screaming.

I took the bus alone to our game against Holy Name High School. I sat alone in the stands rooting … for Holy Name High School.

I heard the best cheer I’ve ever heard anywhere. I heard it from the father of a Holy Name player.

The dad yelled, “Fuck ’em in the belly, Jimmy!”

The most revered people at Cathedral Latin were the jocks, the stars of the pep rallies.

They proudly wore their letter sweaters and made speeches: “What did I say?
Beat Ignatius!
Who we gonna beat?
Ignatius!
What are we gonna do?
Beat Ignatius!”

The letter sweaters were a snowy white with the letters C and L in purple and gold sewn on them along with your first name. You were awarded the letter sweater by the priests and brothers for achievement.

I resolved that I, Howdy Doody, the Greenhorn, the Asshole, the Creep, would somehow achieve such a Cathedral Latin letter sweater!

I joined the Cathedral Latin Speech and Debate team. My debate partner was a midget. He wasn’t even four feet tall.

We must’ve been a sight—Howdy Doody with a ducktail and his midget sidekick, pontificating about whether or not America should withdraw from the United Nations. One debate we were for it and the next debate we were against it. We never knew which side we would represent until the judge told us.

We couldn’t
believe
in either position but we had to be persuasive in advocating either position. The midget and I traveled to different high schools, debating the differing sides between ourselves.

Sometimes by the time we got there we were so confused my partner and I
argued
different positions while debating the other team. But the other team was confused, too, and the same thing happened to them sometimes.

“What kind of foolishness is this?” my father said. “How can you put your soul into both sides of an argument?”

“This is how they do it in America,” I told him.

“They are teaching you,” my father said, “to believe in nothing. They are teaching you to lie expertly. They are teaching you to be American politicians.”

I failed algebra. The brother who failed me was the same one who had said, “Look, Mr. Esterhose is wearing a new pair of pants today.” But he wasn’t wrong to fail me. I was as bad with numbers as my mother was good.

I told this brother I hated numbers.

He said, “Unfortunately, Mr. Esterhose, you need to know about numbers in life. How are you going to keep track of your money in life if you can’t count? How will you be able to pay your taxes?”

I said, “I will be very rich and will pay others to keep track of my money and my taxes.”

“How will you become very rich?” he asked, trying not very successfully to hide a sneer.

“Like Shondor Birns,” I said.

He said, “Who is this?”

I said, “Shondor Birns is a pimp, a gambler, a numbers king, a gangster. A great Hungarian.”

He looked for a moment like he couldn’t believe what I’d said.

Then he smiled and said, “Of course.”

“How could you fail algebra?” my father said. “Now I will have to pay to send you to summer school.”

“Do you know algebra?” I asked him.

“Somewhat.”

“What use has algebra ever been to you in life?”

“That’s not the point,” my father said.

“Was there any moment of your life—ever—when you thought, ‘Oh, I am so happy I know algebra!’?”

My mother spoke up unexpectedly.

“I have worked with numbers,” she said. “I have even worked as a bookkeeper. I don’t know algebra. I never studied algebra.”

“You see?” I said to my father.

“Why are you saying these things to him?” my father said to my mother.

She said to him, “You aren’t right about everything. Sometimes
I’m
right, too.

“You’re wrong a lot,” my mother said to him. “You’ve
been
wrong a lot. But no, we never talk about that! Oh, no! You are the great leader!
Everybody applauds!”

She stopped as suddenly as she had begun and turned back to her stove.

“Look what you started by failing algebra!” my father said to me.

I went to West Tech for summer school—the place were I’d wanted to go to high school—and I saw most of the kids I’d met in the playgrounds and the alleys near Lorain Avenue.

They were kids like me, dressed like me. No one called me names. The teachers pronounced my name as best they could but mostly called me “Joe.” We ate lunch together out on the grass behind the school from brown paper bags. We shared our smokes and an older kid even shared a can of beer with me sometimes. No one flicked my ears; no one knocked things out of my hands.

And when we took the final test, a girl named Marcy Jacobs secretly shared her answers with me, which was the only possible way I could pass algebra.

There was a new kid at Cathedral Latin. His name was R. J. Wilkinson. He wore a Nazi uniform—the black uniform of an SS officer complete with gleaming silver skullheads. He had a black Nazi cap and a flashing cape with swastikas on it.

He was a freak. His face was pale, his skin saggy. He wore thick glasses. He spoke with a lisp and stuttered. He stuttered about Hitler and Jews. He walked into a classroom, looked at the teacher, threw his right arm into the air, and yelled “
Sieg Heil!
”

I avoided R. J. Wilkinson, but watching him at a pep rally, screaming “Beat Ignatius! Beat Ignatius!” in his Nazi uniform, his face red and his fist in the air, he looked like he was in his element.

He wasn’t at Cathedral Latin long. Word was that a teacher had ordered him to stop wearing his uniform and Wilkinson had refused.

I told my father there was a kid at Cathedral Latin who came to school each day in a Nazi uniform and he stared at me.

“I told you,” he said, “Americans are crazy.”

Whenever I saw that Bob Hope was going to be on TV, I always watched. He was Cleveland’s most famous native son, besides John D. Rockefeller, of course.

He was in town often—to throw out the first pitch at an Indians opener or to cut the opening day ribbon at the National Air Races. He was sometimes seen at the Theatrical Grill on Short Vincent in the company of Shondor Birns.

Bob Hope on TV always made me laugh, almost as much as Larry of the Three Stooges or Spanky on the Little Rascals. I loved his nose—probably because, from what I could tell, it was even longer than mine.

I wondered if, when he was growing up, the other kids had called him “Schnozz.”

And when I was a famous American screenwriter, I asked Bob Hope that
.

“My friends
all
called me Schnozz,” Bob Hope said
.

We were at a party in Beverly Hills thrown by Guy McElwaine, who was also Bob Hope’s agent. I saw that his nose was actually longer than mine and when Guy told him that I, too, was from Cleveland, Bob Hope was so happy that he sat down in a corner with me
.

We had a lot of things in common, besides our noses. Schnozz was an immigrant, like me. He came to America from England when he was five. He grew up just down the street from Cathedral Latin—on East 102nd and Euclid. He hung out on the corner of East 105th and Euclid, where I caught the bus to go back home after school each day. He was part of a gang of Irish kids and got into some juvenile trouble. He went to East High School, which was part of the same conference as Cathedral Latin
.

He told me that he sold the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
on the corner of 105th and Euclid and each day John D. Rockefeller stopped in a limousine and bought a copy. One day John D. Rockefeller gave him some advice: “If you want to be a success in business, trust nobody. Never give credit and always keep change on hand.”

I asked Bob Hope how well he knew Shondor Birns and Schnozz laughed and said
, “Shondor Birns!
Did I know Shondor Birns? Oh boy did I!”

I told him the story Shondor Birns had told me about the night he made love to Marilyn Monroe
.

“Shondor Birns said he made love to every famous woman who came through Cleveland,” Bob Hope told me with a laugh
.

“Now if you want to know about Marilyn”—he winked—“
I
can really tell you about Marilyn.”

We both laughed and Bob Hope said, “You know, she had the most amazing translucent skin. You could just about see the veins under her skin
.

“At certain moments, that is.” And Schnozz winked again
.

Our old blue Nash was dead, its transmission left in the street on 28th Street near Bridge Avenue.

My father and I went down to Dunajszky Motors on Lorain Avenue, where all the West Side Hungarians shopped for their used cars. We picked out a light green 1952 Ford, only seven years old, with only fourteen thousand miles showing on the odometer. Old man Dunajszky said it had been owned by a widow lady who hardly ever drove it.

I was fifteen years old, a year away from being able to get a temporary driver’s license, and my father said that he would teach me to drive.

We began slowly, moving back and forth in the parking lot of Fisher Foods when there was no one there. Then he let me take the wheel on small streets like Whitman Avenue. When it was time to use the brake, he yelled “Brake!
Brake!”
and stomped the floor with his foot, as though he were braking.

He wanted me to use my horn all the time—as I turned, at stop signs, at green lights. “The most important weapon in America with all these crazy Americans is your car horn,” he said. “They
know
they are crazy, that’s why
they
use
their
horns so much. If they are close to you, shout at them with your horn before they shout at you.”

I drove up and down the West Side tooting my horn. My father and I were our own parade. The American drivers looked at us. Sometimes they tooted back at us. Often they waved in the American way—with their middle finger.

My father didn’t know about this American wave with the middle finger. I explained it to him.

“
Baszd meg
,” I said, “that’s what it means.”

“The pigs!” He laughed. “They wave all the time.”

“Only when
we
are driving,” I said.

He gave me a look. “How do you say ‘
Baszd meg
’ in English?”

“Fuck you,” I said.

He practiced it quietly a couple times but it came out “Fucky you.”

The next time I honked and an American waved at us with his middle finger, my father yelled, “Fucky you!”

The American looked at my father, his middle finger held high above the beret on his head … the American stomped on the gas … and got
the hell
away from us.

The Hungarian old-age home in Chagrin Falls, a rustic Cleveland suburb, held an annual St. Stephen’s Day celebration. My father was the featured speaker.

I still didn’t have my temporary license, but my father allowed me to drive. My mother sat between us in her velvet dress. She looked terrified.

My father stomped his foot each time I braked. I hit the horn every ten seconds. Somebody gave me the finger—my father waved his middle finger back at him and cried, “Fucky you!”

“What did you say?” my mother asked him.

“Move over,” my father said, “that’s what I told him.”

“Why did you point to him with your finger?”

“It is an American custom,” my father said. “Jozsi taught it to me. I am teaching Jozsi to drive and he is teaching me how to behave with Americans.”

When we got to the old-age home, I drifted away from them as my father made his way with her to the stage. I went back to the car and when he started to orate, I started the Ford up and took it out on the road. I knew from
bad
experience how long my father’s speeches were. I figured I had plenty of time.

I took the car out on the two-lane rural roads and stomped on the gas, getting it up to eighty and ninety. I turned the radio up as high as it would go. The sun was shining. The smell of burning leaves was in the air.

I was in bliss.

I don’t know what happened. Maybe I lost myself somehow in the speed, the music, the sun. But when I got back to the old-age home, most of the cars were gone. Standing there in the parking lot, waiting for me, were my mother and father. His face was purple. Hers was snow-white. I could tell she’d been crying. I pulled the car right up to them and got out.