The Hardest (Working) Man in Showbiz (4 page)

It wasn’t her appearance that really caught my attention. There was something about her that was more exceptional than any of the other girls I knew in Bayside. Under her tough-as-nails exterior, there was a vulnerability that she only hinted at. With the other girls, they were eager to share everything with me. With Mandy, I had to work to break down her walls and catch a glimpse at the real person underneath. Maybe I just liked the challenge of it, or maybe I was shocked that she trusted me enough to let me see the raw skin beneath her armor.

I was flirting with Mandy from the moment I saw her during recess in junior high, but it took years before she’d let me so much as hold her hand. And then another few years before she let me kiss her. She was always the instigator, and I was only along for the ride. She kept me at a distance at first. We were just friends who “occasionally” fooled around. She didn’t seem to want anything more, and I was happy for whatever I could get. I knew enough not to ask her out, as any request for a proper date would only be greeted with laughter. Without saying a word, she made it very clear that
she
was running the show. If we were ever going to become more physically intimate, she would be the one to let me know that the time was right.

On a hot summer day in 1968, the time was right.

When you’re a teenager living with your parents, there aren’t many ideal conditions for experimenting with sex. You could try doing it at home, in your bedroom, but there’s always the danger that you’ll get caught. As if having sex for the first time isn’t scary enough, you don’t need the added tension of having your parents walk in on you. If it was ever going to happen, you had to be creative, and Mandy knew just the spot.

There were abandoned lots next to most of the public schools in Queens. And at one particular school lot, near PS 46 at Sixty-fifth Avenue and Springfield Avenue, there was a rock notable for its remarkable size that we could hide behind. It was about five feet high and roughly eight feet long, just big enough to conceal, oh, I don’t know, a couple of sex-crazed teenagers looking for some privacy.

Mandy and I visited the rock often during our courtship. Our first attempt at sex wasn’t exactly one for the record books. We never slowed down long enough to get undressed, so we had to make do with dry humping, though I did manage to cum in my shorts. We tried again a few weeks later, and this time we had the forethought actually to get naked. But even with this obvious advantage, it was only slightly more successful. I say “slightly” because, though I did achieve penetration, I’m not entirely sure if it was
her
that I penetrated. In my haste, I had put the rubber on backward, and the lubricated side was rubbing against my penis. So I basically screwed the rubber. Whether I was actually inside Mandy, well, your guess is as good as mine. It felt like I was, but it’s hard to say. I might have just been resting my cock against her pelvis while I fucked the living shit out of a well-lubed condom.

And that was how I lost my virginity. Maybe. Depending on your point of view.

The funny thing is, I thought we were being creative. I thought that we alone had discovered this rock, and we had brilliantly picked it as the ideal setting for a bit of covert nookie. But when I bragged to my friends about our encounter, instead of applauding me for my ingenuity, they said, “You mean the rock over by lot 46? That’s where I lost it, too.”

“Seriously?” I asked them, stunned and a little hurt.

“Oh, yeah. My older brother told me about it. He’s been using it for years. And our dad lost his virginity there, and our grandfather. Everybody goes there.”

As it turned out, the lot 46 rock was Grand Central for underage sex in Bayside. It was a miracle that we didn’t run into another couple heading there to do the very same thing. That it wasn’t covered in used condoms and graffiti boasting of sexual conquests probably attests to the fact that it was, and remains, one of the neighborhood’s most revered and closely guarded secrets.

Until today, anyway. Sorry about that, guys.

Not long after our sorta-maybe-kinda sex, Mandy and I stopped seeing each other. We were never technically dating to begin with, so there wasn’t much of a relationship to fall apart. I eventually became involved with a nice Jewish girl from Little Neck named Karen. I’m not sure why I chose her as a steady girlfriend. Maybe it was the convenience—we both went to the same high school and took many of the same classes. Or maybe it was our shared interests—she was an actress, too, and we performed in several plays together. But in the back of my mind, I was still pining for Mandy, though I didn’t have the guts to admit it yet.

Karen and I were having sex—
actual
sex, not just fucking a condom—and I soon learned that Mandy had moved on as well. She was seeing a guy named Charlie, who was older than me, better looking, and considerably more experienced. Just the idea of her fucking Charlie was enough to give me nightmares. I could see it all so clearly: Charlie crawling on top of her and pumping his eighteen-year-old penis into her, as she howled with ecstasy and scratched her fingers down his brawny shoulders. Oh God, it was horrible. I’d wake up some mornings in a cold sweat. (It was
later
that I realized that romance made me more jealous than just sex.)

A few months later, Mandy and I started dating again, and we didn’t waste a moment making up for lost time. We screwed at every opportunity, regardless of whether it was safe to do so. We screwed in bedrooms, in the backseats of cars, at her family’s summer home in upstate New York, on a canoe drifting down the Delaware River—any place where we could find even a few seconds of privacy. I discovered an elementary school in Little Neck where the windows were left unlocked at night. Telling our parents that we were at the movies, we’d sneak out to the school, shimmy through the windows, and then proceed to have sex in every classroom in the building. At one point, we even screwed on a few tables in the cafeteria. Because the school had running water, we were able to take a sponge bath afterward and come home without the telltale “sex funk” that might have otherwise given us away. It was our escape from the outside world, and sometimes we’d just lie for hours on the dirty hallway floors, cuddled together on a blanket and counting the constellations on the insulated ceiling tiles.

Photographic Insert I

Even as a young kid I was always ready for the camera.

My mother was a spy during World War II. These are her identification papers.

My father, Arnold, fighting in the Philippine jungle during World War II.

My cousin Eliot Weiss won the Purple Heart and the Airman’s Citation of Honor for his heroics during the Battle of the Bulge.

With one of my first girlfriends.