A Freewheelin' Time Read online

  One of my father’s illustrations for the New York Times

  We moved from Sunnyside when I was about three, to another working-class Queens neighborhood, Jackson Heights, populated predominantly by white families from different backgrounds, including Irish, Polish, Jewish, and Italian. My childhood recollections originate in this new neighborhood. The complex was called Garden Bay Manor, or, as my mother referred to it, Garbage Bay Manure in Jackson Frights. She frequently expressed her frustrations about living in Queens, which she felt was the outback.

  The buildings were faux Tudor brick two-story attached apartments with basements. The long row of buildings faced each other from the back with a parklike space in between that was a haven for all the kids in the neighborhood. There were no back doors leading to it, and the grounds weren’t landscaped like a park or a playground. Instead it was an open communal area with trees and grass and a scattering of benches in the center walkway. To get to the park you walked to the end of the long row of apartments and rounded the corner.

  We lived on the ground floor somewhere in the middle. My father set up an electric saw in the basement of our building and made nearly every piece of furniture we had.

  This was the 1950s, the height of the McCarthy era. I grew up watching my older sister trying hard to fit in where we so obviously did not belong. She attempted for a time to make herself over into the mode of the girls in the neighborhood and to fight against the way she grew up. She wasn’t ashamed of how our family lived and what we believed; she was just at an age when it was important for kids to belong, to be like everyone else. We had bookshelves filled with books, a record player, and a collection of treasured 78s and 331/3 long-playing records. We listened to the radio; we didn’t own a television. The other apartments were carpeted, had curtains on the windows, not Venetian blinds, and no bookshelves in the living rooms.

  Most families in the neighborhood went to a church or a temple, to Sunday school or to Hebrew school. My sister and I were raised with no formal religion, but we were taught to accept the beliefs of others. We were brought up not to believe in the superiority of any culture or religion over another but rather to take people as they were, as individuals.

  I tried my best. The Catholic girl next door attempted to save my heathen soul and teach me about God, telling me God was everywhere, saw everything, and knew everything. She said that it was important to bow your head with every utterance of the name Jesus. I would challenge this God who was everywhere to come out from behind the prickle bushes to shake hands, and I would cruelly repeat JesusJesusJesus until she got dizzy from nodding her head so much.

  The Jewish kids were somewhat more accepting, but a few of their parents made a point of ignoring me. They would say hello to the other children and not acknowledge my presence at all, either because I was the only goy, or shiksa (as they called me), in the group or perhaps because they knew of my parents’ politics and were wary of associating with Reds and their offspring.

  Outsider status was inevitable. Culturally we were Catholic, but my parents had long ago left the church for the idealistic, as opposed to the hardcore Stalinist, wing of the American Communist Party. The only thing that passed for a religious education was sitting in my father’s lap while he paged through a big book of Renaissance Italian paintings with many pictures of the Crucifixion. I know I must have asked why that man was nailed to the cross—and no doubt my father told me.

  When my older sister was an infant our Sicilian grandparents managed to sneak off with her under false pretenses to their local church to have her baptized. After that, my parents never left me alone with them while I was a baby.

  At the time I finished elementary school and Carla was starting high school, we moved several blocks away to the second floor of a small two-story attached row house owned by the Shills, fellow Communists, who were doing a good deed by charging us an affordable rent. This was a better situation overall. The Shills had two daughters younger than we were, a TV set, and a finished basement, in addition to a house full of books. It was a Commie kids’ refuge of sorts. I put on plays in the basement, painting the scenery on large sheets of paper and taping them to the walls. I lip-synched a production of Hans Christian Andersen, using an album of the songs from the movie starring Danny Kaye. My father encouraged me, and when West Side Story opened in 1957 he took me to a matinee performance at the Winter Garden Theater on Broadway.

  My memories of Queens reflect my general unhappiness as a child. I just never fit in and even if I’d tried, as my sister had, I would have failed; the other kids just thought I was weird. I found solace in books and poetry and in making storybooks for myself filled with characters I created from an invented world. The good memories come from the culture I lived within, being around interesting adults from different backgrounds, all kinds of music, and all those books. Though we were economically working class and money was always an issue, we had a rich cultural upbringing that I relished; maybe that is what sustained me, compensating for the bad stuff later on. The relative wretchedness that we go through as wee ones notwithstanding, it is as adults that the real horrors of life are fully realized.

  Death

  I went to Bryant High School in Long Island City, Queens, a bus and subway ride from where I lived in Jackson Heights. When I graduated in 1960, at sixteen years old, my prospects were limited to an extended version of what had been my summer jobs. My father had died suddenly in 1958 and I missed two weeks of school. The first week was for obvious reasons, and the second was a gift of a trip to Puerto Rico.

  My mother worked for Samuel Rosen, an ear doctor who had originated stapes mobilization, a surgical procedure that cured a certain kind of deafness. The singer Johnnie Ray was one of his patients, but Dr. Rosen wasn’t able to do much for him. My self-educated mother knew French and Italian, and her job involved translating correspondence, some medical papers, and writings about his procedure.

  After my father’s sudden death, Sam and his wife, Helen, gently insisted that my distraught mother and I come with them, all expenses paid, to a medical conference in Puerto Rico. At fourteen years old I had never been in a hotel, but I knew this was an especially luxurious one, with a pool, a balcony, room service, and all. The Rosens were wonderful people.

  When I returned to school I was even more distracted and withdrawn than usual, and I didn’t do well. The only class I looked forward to was Drama Workshop, or maybe it was called Theater History. The teacher, Mr. Kaufman, did not give me a hard time about what I had missed. I was in the plays the class put on for the school, and he made sure I continued reading and doing scenes.

  Other teachers were less sympathetic about my circumstances. The science teacher gave me a D, citing excessive absence. Others left out the written comment but gave similar grades. I distinctly remember one teacher who chose to tell me directly what a loser I was and that I had better shape up or I would never amount to anything. He was the same English teacher who in my sophomore year felt it was his duty to use me to illustrate to the class what the expression lack of poise meant. Justice was mine, however, because many years later, while I was waiting for a subway train, I spotted him walking along the platform mumbling to himself with a large wet stain on his crotch. I knew who he was despite the change in his demeanor, but he didn’t recognize me.

  With nine hundred kids in the graduating class, Bryant High School worked on shifts, and the classes were overcrowded. I was aware that the teachers were overworked and underpaid and didn’t always know their students, but understanding that didn’t help. My attitude changed. I stopped caring and didn’t even attempt to keep up. I preferred the extracurricular activities the school offered. In addition to Drama Workshop, I did artwork and layout for the school newspaper and joined a current events discussion group. The result was a low average, which was not helped by the fact that I scored slightly above fool on my SATs. I didn’t do well on tests. In any case, college material I was not.

  Wrapped up in grie
f, my mother was in no condition to care. At forty-seven, she was widowed for a second time—her first husband had drowned in an accident when she was in her early twenties—but now she was left with two teenaged daughters. It was not comforting or comfortable to be around her. She spent a lot of time trying to find survival skills inside a bottle.

  Life at home was thrown off the last vestiges of balance. It was the end of our world as we had known it, the end of childhood—the end of innocence and the beginning of a new kind of fear.

  My father had suffered what was diagnosed as a mild heart attack two years earlier, shortly after President Eisenhower suffered a serious one. I don’t know if Eisenhower smoked, but my father did. He was six feet tall and in no way overweight, but he had had tuberculosis as a child, making him unqualified for military service. I’ve heard it said that TB takes a toll on the body, even if one recovers from it. Cigarettes certainly took a toll, but smoking in his day was promoted as good for you.

  My father worked at Mergenthaler, a linotype factory near the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He was a shop steward for the union and well liked by his coworkers, even though they were aware of his politics.

  He had bought a car, which made the trip to Brooklyn from Queens a little easier. When he had the heart attack he was driving home from work. My mother was very anxious because he was unusually late. When he finally made it home, he could barely climb the stairs. Apparently he had stopped the car by the side of the road several times to wait for the pain to subside before continuing.

  He took a medical leave from work and began to paint and to cook. It was strange having someone at home when I returned from school. Painting with oils was difficult in a small apartment, so instead he used gouache or watercolors, and he did a lot of drawing. I would often pose for him when I got home but after he died, in the upheavals that ensued, somehow the drawings were lost.

  His coworkers from the Mergenthaler factory visited him on weekends, and when the decision was made to leave his job for good, they took up a collection and bought us a television set. He planned to work as a freelance illustrator and take up painting again. Despite the fact that he had suffered a heart attack, he was noticeably happier. He sang as he worked on drawings at the kitchen table.

  He continued to smoke, however, even though the doctor told him to quit. Both he and my mother smoked unfiltered Chesterfield cigarettes. By then so did my sister, but maybe she smoked something with a filter, newly on the market. Not too many years later, I took up the family tradition.

  Just when he seemed to be getting stronger, my father was hit by some sort of ministroke that left half of his face paralyzed. I was embarrassed to have my friends see him with his face held together with medical tape, looking disfigured. Gradually the feeling in his face came back, but he did not look well. He was thin and drawn and looked much older than his years.

  On top of this, my mother had been diagnosed with an overactive thyroid and an ulcer; it was a highly stressful time. I was in my junior year of high school, and Carla had started Hunter College.

  Socialist realism for Christmas

  We both traveled by bus and subway to our respective schools, but at different times, so our paths never crossed. On an unusually mild February day, considering there had been a snowstorm a few days before, my sister chose to go home right after her last class ended, and we caught the same bus at the Roosevelt Avenue subway station.

  We thought that it was an odd thing for us to meet and we laughed over the coincidence. On the three-block walk home from the bus, we were in a good mood. Just a few yards from the apartment, Selma Shill came running out, calling, Girls, girls, come here! She sounded frantic. She ushered us in to her house to block our view of our father’s car, motor running loudly, with him slumped over the steering wheel.

  Selma was saying over and over that something terrible had happened. And of course it had. Our father had been headed to meet his painter friend, Ralph Fasanella, who worked in a gas station for many years and wasn’t discovered until the 1970s, to see the studio they were planning to rent together. Afterwards he was to pick up our mother at Dr. Rosen’s office in Manhattan. My father had gone to the car, turned on the motor, and died. Selma said later that she kept hearing this strange sound, and when she looked out her window, she saw him in the car. Realizing what had happened she called an ambulance and then sat in wait for it and for us. At some point I saw from the window my father lying on the ground in front of the building, covered by a sheet. A crowd had gathered. People were standing nearby staring, and the neighborhood kids were dancing around and playing. They had no idea the sky had fallen. It was fortunate that my sister and I came home together that day.

  The year my father died I was reading the poetry of Lord Byron and Edna St. Vincent Millay. I came across her poem “Lament,” which begins:

  Listen, children:

  Your father is dead.

  And concludes:

  Life must go on,

  And the dead be forgotten;

  Life must go on,

  Though good men die;

  Anne, eat your breakfast;

  Dan, take your medicine;

  Life must go on;

  I forget just why.

  Its accuracy stunned me.

  As I grew up and older and my life became what I made of it, I acquired a habit of taking special note of technological developments. I would think of a way my father, who died in 1958, might regard these new inventions. We had a telephone back then and a TV, and Dr. Rosen had given us a reel-to-reel tape recorder. So reasonably my father could have grasped the technological evolution to cassette tapes and portable music. Cell phones, CD players, DVDs, and videos—he could have handled all that. Computers were problematic, but once I walked him through the other stuff, he might grasp it.

  It was a game, really. I didn’t for one minute believe anyone could come back alive. It was a way to think about the world as it was and to inventory the changes I would normally take for granted.

  A trauma creates a freeze frame, stopping time in a still series of snapshots that pop up in total recall if the day or subject is referenced in some way. The year 1958 became my yardstick.

  But a thought struck me as the century ended and the new one began. It’s not so much the technological advancements that show how different our world is: it is the change in people. The people of New York City in 1958 were predominantly white or black. Immigrants came from Europe, as my father had. To compare the faces on a subway train in 1958 with the faces in the twenty-first century becomes incomprehensible. I couldn’t possibly walk someone through the immense cultural changes, both the visible and the invisible. So I let my father go. I no longer idly sift through the changes around me and attempt to define them. I let them accumulate and use what I need to live in the present.

  Beginnings

  McCarthyism reigned supreme during the 1950s, its influence—like a slowly retreating flood—permeated the decade, and the damage left in its wake was evident in the beginning of the next one. In the span of ten years Stalin had died and the Rosenbergs had been sent to the electric chair. General Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, was elected president in 1952 and served two terms. A notable act he was responsible for, in addition to denying executive clemency to the Rosenbergs, was completely desegregating the armed forces.

  Since we didn’t own a television set until 1957, the radio and the phonograph held sway. The music we listened to included recordings of folk music from around the world, the Édith Piaf and Billie Holiday records my mother loved, opera arias my father sang along with, classical music, and Toscanini conducting the NBC Radio Orchestra. A program called Make-Believe Ballroom delivered mostly bland popular music until the day the DJ placed a single titled “Sh-Boom” on the turntable, inaugurating the arrival of rock and roll on mainstream radio.

  Folk music had been sidelined as being for radicals, especially after the nationally known folk group the Weavers, with the Communist Party member Pete
Seeger on banjo and vocals, had become victims of the blacklist, making it impossible for them to appear on TV or in concert halls and clubs. The Cold War had hit its stride.

  My sister Carla was seventeen in 1958, in her first year at Hunter College. She had a group of friends whose families had a political background similar to ours. I was a withdrawn fourteen-year-old, and our mother might have asked her to take me under her wing. For whatever reason, she decided to bring me along to a party she was going to. She and a girlfriend put a few tissues in my bra, undid my ponytail, and gave me a cute skirt to wear so that I’d look less like a kid. I was still very awkward, but progress was being made. They schooled me in a few dance moves and made sure I knew the words to the Gene Vincent song “Be-Bop-A-Lula.” I was happy. Usually my sister treated me like a bug she needed to swat away, but life had radically changed a few months previously with the death of our father, and now I was getting some friendly attention.

  With Carla and my mother, ca. 1959

  I had a great time at the party. There was no way to hide in a corner with this group. Right away a few boys headed my way, to my amazement. In school I was another sort of bug, to be avoided by boys and even some of the girls. In contrast, this party was heaven. I felt less like an outsider with these people. We actually had things to talk about. One boy read the same poetry I did and told me he was learning to play classical guitar. The other boy liked opera; I didn’t think anybody knew about opera but my family, some of our friends, and the man who played it on the radio. He invited me on a date (a date!!) to go to the Amato Opera House on the Bowery to see a performance of La Bohème the following week. The boy who read poetry looked a little miffed. I lied and said I was fifteen when he asked my age and for my phone number. He was sixteen, and I thought he was very intelligent.