My Remarkable Journey (5 page)

Herbie said, “Hoo-ha, Howie says that there’s a Carvel in New Haven that serves three scoops for fifteen cents.”

Hoo-ha forgot about his mother. He forgot about his father. He said, “I’ll bet you, Howie. I’ll bet you they don’t. Nobody
serves three scoops for fifteen cents.”

So Hoo-ha bet him. Now, Howie had about twenty dollars in bets.

We pulled into New Haven and it was snowing. It was an early-season snowstorm.

Howie said, “Hold it. That block! There it is! Right there!”

We could see the guy inside closing up. We drove into the parking lot. But Herbie said, “Hold it. This could be a trick. Howie
might know this guy.” That’s just the way Herbie thought. “Howie could go out, tell the guy about the bet, and set the whole
thing up. Larry, why don’t you go out, order three scoops, and see how much it costs.”

“OK,” I said. I got out of the car and went into the store. I stepped up to the counter and said, “Three scoops, please.”

The guy said, “Fifteen cents.”

I went back and told Herbie and Hoo-ha we’d lost the bet. We decided it didn’t have to be a total loss—this was some bargain.
We decided to eat the guy out of Carvel.

Hoo-ha said, “You know, if I have twenty of them, I’ll be even.”

So we were ordering and ordering. Finally, the guy looked up and said, “Fellas, can I have a word with you?”

“Sure,” we said.

“I’m having my best day since the Fourth of July… and it’s snowing. What are you doing?”

“Well, we came to your Carvel.”

“You live around here?”

“No.”

“Where do you live?”

“Brooklyn.”

“Brooklyn? There’s hundreds of Carvels in Brooklyn.”

“Yeah, but we wanted to come to
your
Carvel.”

“Why?”

“Cause Howie said that you served three scoops for fifteen cents.”

The guy said, “Doesn’t everybody?”

“No.”

He said, “No wonder I’m losing money!”

Now the story gets a little bizarre. We’d never seen New Haven, so we went downtown. God, I can see this like yesterday. We
were driving down a street and suddenly cars stopped in front of us. Cars pulled in behind us. People came out of doors and
they were putting signs on cars. The signs said:
REELECT MAYOR LEE
. They put these signs on cars in front of us. On cars behind us. They put a sign on our car.

It was election eve. There was a rally for Mayor Lee supporters at New Haven High School, and we were caught in the middle
of it.

Herbie left the sign on his car and Lee ended up getting write-in votes from Brooklyn.

We went to the rally at the New Haven High School gym. They had all these seats set up. Chairs were set up onstage for the
speakers. They had coffee and doughnuts. Hoo-ha was putting doughnuts in his pocket. He was way ahead of the game now. He
had doughnuts to bring home.

Someone came over to me and said, “You know what your friend Herbie is doing? He’s going around telling everybody how hard
you work. He’s telling everyone you’re the hardest working kid in New Haven for the mayor.”

“He’s doing that?” Well, then I was going to talk about him. So I went around telling people about Herbie.

I swear to God, the PR director for the campaign came over. “Fellas, come here. The mayor’s going to speak. We’d like to have
the two of you onstage with him as a symbol of youth in politics.”

So we went up on the stage. Howie had wet his pants he was laughing so hard. Hoo-ha was in the back with him.

There was the PR director. There was the mayor. We didn’t know him from Adam. We shook hands. Herbie said to the PR director,
“I’ve got an idea. Why don’t we let Larry introduce the mayor? It’ll be great.”

The place was mobbed. The PR guy got up and said, “We have these two hardworking young men, Herbie and Larry, with us tonight.
And Larry’s going to introduce the mayor.”

I stood up. I think it was the first time I had actually been in front of a microphone. It had to be. I was looking around,
thinking, What am I doing here?

“Uhhhh. I’ve been asked to introduce Mayor Lee. Uhhhhhhhh. But I think it’s better that my friend Herbie has the honor.” I
turned the mike over to Herbie.

Herbie got up—and he did twenty minutes.

He did the Declaration of Independence, and he didn’t stop there. “I give you not just the next mayor. No. Not just the future
senator. No. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you… maybe… the future president of the United States.”

The crowd was going crazy.

The mayor came up and spoke. The rally ended.

Now it was about one in the morning. Everyone was leaving. The lights were out in the gym. The only light coming into the
gym was from the moon. I can still see this. Mayor Lee said, “Fellas, can I have a word with you?” The mayor asked the stragglers
to go outside so he could speak to the four of us.

The mayor remembered this all his life. Years later, when he was close to ninety, he invited me back to New Haven for an event
to commemorate the evening. People knew about it because I told the story on national radio. After the first time, people
would call in asking to hear it again. So I’d tell the story about once every six months.

Herbie, Hoo-ha, and Howie and I were standing there. The mayor said, “Fellas, I’ve heard how hard you work. But at the same
time I have to mention something to you.”

Hoo-ha said, “Go ahead, Mayor, get it off your chest.”

The mayor said, “I have lived in New Haven all my life. I have two campaign offices that I visit every day. Please don’t take
this personally. But I have never seen either”—he looked at me, looked at Herbie—“of you in my entire life.”

And Hoo-ha said, “We don’t know who the hell you are either.”

The mayor said, “What?”

Hoo-ha said, “We’ve never been here before. This is our first time ever in New Haven. Except for Howie. Howie was in New Haven
before.”

“Where you guys from?”

“Brooklyn.”

“Brooklyn? You have relatives here?”

“No.”

“You go to Yale?”

Ha! Ha!

“No,” we said, “we don’t go to Yale.”

The mayor said, “What brings you here?”

And Herbie said, “Mayor, Howie said that there was a Carvel in New Haven that served three scoops for fifteen cents.”

And Mayor Lee said, “That’s impossible! They can’t serve three scoops for fifteen cents.”

So we told the mayor where the Carvel was, we said goodbye, and we left. We drove back to Brooklyn. We were driving down Hoo-ha’s
street. Hoo-ha had never called home. It was now snowing in Brooklyn.

Standing in front of the apartment were Hoo-ha’s mother and father. This was Jewish masochism.
Our son has not come home. We will stand out here in the snow. We will get pneumonia. We will suffer. We will die. And he
will feel it for the rest of his life.

We got out of the car. The snow was coming down. Hooha’s mother said to Hoo-ha, “Don’t lie to me! Don’t lie! I’m going to
ask you a question! Just answer. Answer! Vhere vere you tonight?”

Hoo-ha said, “Carvel.”

“Don’t lie. Don’t lie. Don’t lie! I made your father put on his galoshes. I made him go to the Carvel. The owner said that
my Bernie vasn’t there. So, vhere vere you? Vhere? Vhat Carvel vere you at?”

“New Haven, Connecticut.”

She said, “I’m gonna die! I’m gonna die!”

People were opening up their windows and looking down.

Mr. Horowitz came forward, grabbed Herbie, pulled him next to him, and said, “Vhat the hell did you go to New Haven for? Vhat
da hell? You’re a bum! You’re a bum! You’re a bum! Bum! Bum! Bum! Bum! Vhy did you go?”

Herbie said, “Well, Howie said that there was a Carvel in New Haven that served three scoops for fifteen cents.”

And as God is my witness, Mr. Horowitz said, “That’s impossible!”

F
RIEND

Friends are chosen people. You stay friends with someone over a long period of time because they make you feel better than
you are.

I’ve been friends with Larry for sixty-five years. I’ve known him longer than my wife. My wife once asked me, “Who’s the number
one person in your life?” I said, “Let me see. In terms of longevity and closeness, Larry is number one. Hoo-ha is number
two. But you’re three—and moving up.”

You can imagine how she reacted to that…

Growing up in Bensonhurst gave us our basic values. One is that people are unique and different. If there were anybody here
exactly like you there would be no reason for being here. There was nobody like Larry. Larry would stand on the corner and
announce cars going by. We called him Zeke the Creek the Mouthpiece because his mouth was like a creek that was constantly
running.

One of my major slogans in life is: A nose that can hear is worth two that can smell. I don’t even know what it means, but
I say it a lot. How did it help Larry? Larry understood instinctively that not conforming to the norm was an asset. He had
that gruff Brooklyn voice. When you turned on the radio and heard that voice, you knew it could only be Larry.

B
ROTHER

Larry was not a good student. He barely got out of high school and never went to college. “You realize your brother has attention
deficit disorder,” my son said to me a few years ago. The observation caught me by surprise.

But then I started to think about it. My mother—she should rest in peace—used to be called to the school all the time. But
what were the criticisms? Larry was restless. Inattentive. He couldn’t stay focused. He was always talking to other kids.
If there had been Ritalin back then, maybe he wouldn’t have become Larry King. Think about it—he would have been calmed down.
They would have made him a good student because he was smart. It might have changed the entire direction of his life.

I remember Larry once saying to me, “Marty, you go into the office for eight hours, and you stay in the office?”

I said, “Sometimes I go to lunch. I go to the bathroom. I walk around.”

He said, “I couldn’t do that in a million years.”

I was telling a child psychologist about my brother a while back. She said, “When intelligent adults with ADD have to concentrate
they are usually very good at what they do.”

If you see Larry at the studio, for that hour he is totally engrossed. When he has to keep up with four people on the screen
at once, his mind is right at home.

N
OW THAT WE
’
RE BACK
from New Haven, let me back up for a moment. I’ve never been very good at backing up. I don’t stop and look back. I’ve been
a
Let’s go! Let’s go!
kind of guy ever since I was a kid. I can remember going over to my friends’ houses early in the morning before Dodgers games
and shouting
Come-mahhhhn! Let’s go!
If the game started at 1:05, I was pleading with them to get moving to the park at 9 a.m.

I was never, ever, ever, ever late for a Dodgers game. I was never late for a batting practice. We needed to take two subway
lines to get to Ebbets Field. There was usually a long line to get into the bleachers, and we always wanted to be among the
first ten or twenty. I can remember so many days of standing in line with everyone, yelling, “Open the gates, you creeps!
Our sandwiches are spoilin’!”

Then the gates would open, we’d rush through the turnstiles and make a dash for the first two rows. Those were the best seats
for anyone who was paying with coins like us. I wasn’t fast. Herbie wasn’t fast. Hoo-ha wasn’t fast. But Natey Turner was,
and he’d get there first and hold seats for us.

From the time I started listening to the Dodgers on the radio, my hero was the feistiest guy on the field—Leo Durocher. Leo
was the Dodgers’ manager. They used to say that when you played against Leo, you played against ten men. He was angry and
fiery, the first one out of the dugout to argue a call or back up his players. Early in his career, when he played for the
Yankees, he got into a fistfight with Babe Ruth. That’s why the Yankees traded him. You didn’t fight with Babe Ruth. But that
was Leo—gambler, hustler, pool shark, high-living Las Vegas kind of guy. He was married to a Hollywood starlet.

I wasn’t a very good ballplayer, but I always wore number 2 on my little uniforms—just like Leo.

These days, Joe Torre is a great manager and a nice guy. But you look at him in the dugout and you don’t know if he’s winning
or losing. Leo was the complete opposite. Stick it in his ear!

That’s the kind of attitude you needed if you were going up against my nemesis, Davy Fried, a snarling rat of a New York Giants
fan. Or Herbie, Sid, and Asher, who rooted for the Yankees. Look up the word
gloat
and you’ll see Herbie’s picture in the dictionary. Yankee fans were arrogant, conceited dolts who were above it all. Their
attitude was,
Why are you and Davy even bothering to argue? We’re gonna beat whoever wins between you.
Most of the time, they were right. The Dodgers became very good. But the Yankees were always a tick better—and luckier.

There were Dodgers fans who even believed the Yankee Stadium grounds crew put little objects like nails in the infield grass.
So that when a Yankee hit a ball, it would strike the nail and bound over the fielder’s head. It had to be a plot! Between
1947 and 1953, the Yankees won the World Series six times. Four times in that span they beat the Dodgers, and all we could
do was fume, “Wait ’til next year!”

That’s when my come-mahhhhn changed. It went from, “Come-mahhhhn, we’re gonna be late for batting practice,” to “Come-mahhhhn,
you bums, you’re breaking my heart!”

But Dodgers fans had something special. We had Jackie Robinson. We had the guy who broke the color barrier. My friend Aaron
Sobel and I kept a newspaper scrapbook of the entire 1947 season. But looking back, I’m not sure we understood how monumental
Jackie’s achievement truly was. There wasn’t any prejudice in my house. I can remember one of my cousins marrying a black
guy and her parents disowning her. But my mother had my cousin and her husband over and always made them feel welcome. So
I saw Jackie the way Leo saw him just before Leo got suspended for consorting with gamblers at the start of that ’47 season.
“I don’t care if this guy is yellow or black or if he has stripes like a zebra,” Leo said. “I’m the manager of this team and
I say he plays.”