700 Sundays (7 page)

CHAPTER 9

T
he next day the strangest thing happened. The car wouldn’t start. The gray-on-gray Plymouth Belvedere refused to go. He had driven this car a hundred miles a day every day for all the years that he had it. He took perfect care of it. It never failed him until this day. It knew that he was gone, and it refused to go without him—it just stood in the driveway with the hood up.

And Stan, the service man from the local gas station, was trying to start it. He and Dad had worked on the car for years together (and “Nellie” before that), and they’d kept it running perfectly. He was a stocky guy with blond hair, blue eyes, a jumpsuit, his name written over his heart. He always had a smile, and a big hearty laugh. But now Stan had tears in his eyes as he tried to jump the battery and the battery wouldn’t take the jump. He kept trying, over and over again.

I stood on the grass, watching. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I started having flashes of what I imagined happened to my dad, the night before, in the bowling alley as the medical people worked on him, trying to get him started too. The images swirling together through my mind, paralyzing me with their vivid intensity . . .

EVERYBODY GET BACK!

CLEAR!

And I’d see Dad not breathing . . . the car not starting.

CLEAR!

The battery not taking the charge, Stan crying: “Try it again!”

Someone pounding on Dad’s chest . . .

CLEAR!

People holding Mom back as she screams, “No! No! No!”

CLEAR!

And as Stan towed the Belvedere away, the grille of the car looked sad.

Joel came home. Rip came home. It was just the four of us now. There would be no more Sundays. And they told us that night we were going to view the body. Because the Jews bury very quickly. Very quickly. I had an uncle who was a narcoleptic, and he’d nod off and you’d hear digging. One summer they buried him five times.

I wish there was some way that you could edit people out of your life. Like it was a movie. People who come into moments both happy and sad, and you don’t want them there, and they’re stuck in your memory forever. But if it was a movie, you could cut them out. Cut him out. He doesn’t belong in the scene. Cut her. She doesn’t belong in this moment.

The person that I wanted to cut out was the funeral director at the funeral home, which ironically was in the shadows of Yankee Stadium in the Bronx. My life had just fallen apart. Why did I have to talk to this guy? He was an odd-looking chubby man, with a terrible speech impediment that made him sound like Sylvester the Cat. He pinned a black mourning ribbon on us all. They cut it, and then he chanted the Jewish prayer for the dead, which for this guy was a total disaster. He was spitting all over us. The more serious he got, the funnier it became to me. Lines, jokes were flying into my brain. I looked at my brother Joel. He knew what I was thinking, and he mouthed silently . . .

“Don’t.”

There must have been hundreds of great musicians there, all there to say goodbye to their great friend. The four of us just walked through them. They didn’t say a word. They just bowed their heads out of respect. And then the four of us now were led into the private viewing room and there was Dad. What a cruel fate, that the first dead person I saw in my life was my father. And it didn’t look like him. He was so still. Just hours before we were arguing about The Girl. And I kept thinking: Is this my fault? Did I make this happen? Did our fight bring this on? Why didn’t I get a chance to say I was sorry? Why didn’t I get a chance to say goodbye?

But he was so still. I got up enough courage to follow Mom closer, I saw that he had this terrible bruise on his forehead that they couldn’t repair, and I felt awful that he had been hurt before he died.

What had happened was, Mom told me later, he had made a very difficult spare the night before. The last thing my dad did on earth was make the four, seven, ten. It’s a tough spare to make, and he was so happy. “Whoa, Helen. Look at that. What a day . . .”

And he dropped dead, just like that. His head hit the scoring table, the floor . . . it didn’t matter because in my denial, I was more upset that he hurt his head, totally forgetting the fact that he was gone.

Aunt Sheila was behind me.

“Billy, darling. He’s just sleeping, dear. That’s all. He’s just sleeping. See how nice? Daddy’s just sleeping.”

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I turned, furious. “Wake him up. I thought he was dead. Go ahead. Wake him up . . .

“Let’s get the fuck out of here. This place gives me the creeps.”

She looked at me for a long time . . . “Leonard, get the car.”

The funeral was the next day, and it was jammed. It seemed like all of those great musicians who posed for that famous photo,
A Great Day in Harlem
, were there. My dad’s mother, Grandma Sophie, couldn’t contain herself. His sister, Marcia, was consoling her, and then Uncle Berns walked in. He had been in Mexico, and had flown all night. Berns, our giant, couldn’t contain himself. Seeing him cry at the sight of his “big brother” was profound. He shuddered and moaned with sadness, holding the three of us, his brother’s sons, in his massive arms. Sophie, speaking only in her native Russian, was wailing Dad’s name, a mother screaming in pain for her lost child. I felt like I was in someone else’s life. Nothing made sense to me. Every second was excruciating. All the relatives, that I only knew laughing, were now all crying, shock and despair on everyone’s face. I never felt so alone in my life, and then I looked up, and three of my friends, Michael Stein, David Beller, and Joel Robins, walked in.

They had made their way to the Bronx to be with me. Michael had lost his mother, two years before, so he knew what I was going through. He had the same look in his eye that I had now. I couldn’t believe that they came. We all hugged, and when Mom saw them, she shook her head in wonder, and said, “Friends, such good friends.” I will always love them for coming.

After the service, we were driven to the cemetery, which is in New Jersey. We passed Yankee Stadium on our way. It seemed only right, I thought. Everyone gathered at the family plot, which until that day I didn’t know existed. Grandpa Julius had purchased this plot for all of his family we were told. “Someday everyone will be here,” Uncle Mac said. “Thanks for the good news,” I thought to myself. I stood there looking at all of my older relatives, thinking to myself, “Why Dad?” The service at the grave was the hardest part. Seeing the freshly dug grave, roots protruding from its walls, the coffin in place, following Mom, we tossed flowers, and then shovels of dirt on the casket, the sound of it hitting, slicing like a razor blade into my soul. What had felt so unreal before was now brutally true.

I looked at everyone as they mourned, their sobs and sniffles mixing with the birds singing in the trees. Willie “The Lion” Smith caught my eye, and he nodded, and continued praying in Hebrew. Just past the crowd, I saw three gravediggers, in workclothes, leaning on their shovels. One of them was looking at his watch.

After the funeral, everyone came back to the house. There must have been hundreds of family members, neighbors, friends, and a lot of food and conversation to keep your mind off it during the mourning period. It’s called a Shiva. But to me, the right word is “shiver” because the feeling of Pop’s death just made me tremble all the time. They make the mourners sit on these hard little wooden stools. Who the hell came up with this one? Isn’t it bad enough what has happened to us? Why do we have to suffer more? Aunt Sheila was upset that we covered the mirrors, a Jewish tradition, while I was upset that we didn’t cover Sheila. People kept saying the same thing to me, “It’ll take time, you’ll see, it’ll take time.” Grandpa couldn’t take it anymore. After hearing this for the umpteenth time, he turned to me and said, “Time is a bastard: When you’re sad there’s too much of it, and when you’re happy there’s never enough.”

And the whole feeling in the house, this house that was always filled with laughter and jazz, was now just so sad and dark. I stayed in my room. I didn’t come out. I didn’t want to see anybody. Friends would come over to try to talk to me, try to make me feel better, you know, but . . . I was one of the first of my friends to lose a parent. Nobody really knows what to say to you. Hell, we were fifteen. We didn’t know what to say about a lot of stuff. I didn’t come out. A living room filled with people, and I didn’t care. I stayed in my room, and I realized I still hadn’t cried.

And then one day, I heard laughter. Big laughs. Everybody having a great time. I had to come out to see who was working my room. And it was my crazy Uncle Berns. Performing for the family. He was making everybody laugh, even my mother was smiling. He was carrying on, making everybody else feel a little bit better, and taking some of the pain out of his heart as well. Berns was making people forget just for a few moments why they were there, and it was okay. He had just lost his brother, the person he was closest to in the world. And the message to me was profound because it meant that even in your worst pain it’s still okay to laugh.

And then one day, Wild Bill Davidson came over. And he sat down, and he took out his trumpet and played the blues. Then Edmond Hall came over and took out his clarinet, and he played the most beautiful version of “My Buddy.” And Arvel Shaw came over and Eddie Condon, Tyree Glenn, Willie “The Lion” Smith, Zutty Singleton, and there was a jam session in a Shiva house that people will never, ever forget. Even my mom was tapping her foot. Because once you hear the music, you can’t stand still.

Then it comes time for everybody to go back to their lives, including an old friend . . . The gravelly voice, the moist eyes, the scent of bourbon . . .

“Hey, Face. It’s going to be all right, Face. It’s going to be all right . . . How do you know you never going to see him again, Face? We don’t know what this is.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant.

“Face, consider the rose. The rose is the sweetest-smelling flower of all, and it’s the most beautiful because it’s the most simple, right . . . ? But sometimes, Face, you got to clip the rose. You got to cut the rose back, so something sweeter-smelling and stronger and even more beautiful will grow in its place. You see?

“Now you may not understand that now, Face, but someday you will. I guarantee it. Someday, Face, you’re going to consider the rose. Can you dig that . . . ? I knew that you could.”

CHAPTER 10

J
oel left first. He had to go back to college, the University of Miami. Rip went back to the University of Bridgeport. Hard goodbyes. It was just me and Mom now.

Uncle Mac took me aside. “Billy, don’t take this personal, but your brothers are gone now, you got to be the man of the house. That’s your job.”

Aunt Sheila, pinching my cheek . . . “Billy, darling, we’re so proud of you. Be strong for Mommy, okay? You’re the man of the house. That’s your job.”

I didn’t want the job.

Then after everybody’s gone, you’re left with it. You’re left with the shit of it, the size of it, this opponent in your life, this hole in your heart that you can’t possibly repair fast enough. And the first thing that happens to you is you get angry. You get so mad that this has happened to you at this point in your life, you want answers. I was so furious I could storm right into God’s office.

“Excuse me. I would like to see him . . . No, I don’t have an appointment, but . . . What is your name . . . ? Peter what . . . ? Leviiine?”

I feel his presence. “There you are! How could you do this? How could you do this to her? Why would you do this to us . . . ?

“You move in mysterious ways? I can’t believe you actually said that! You call yourself a fair God? Really? If you’re fair, then why would you take him, but you leave Mengele out there? How is that fair? Why would you do this to me? WHY?

“It’s the hand I’m dealt? The cards I get to play? Oh, that’s just great. Are you God or some blackjack dealer? I mean, Jesus Christ! How could you say . . . Oh, hi. I didn’t see you there. You look great. No. I didn’t recognize you with your arms down. You look great. Went into business with the old man, huh . . . ? Well, maybe I wanted to do that too.

“You know what? I will never believe in you. How can I? Look what you’ve done to me. I will have other gods before you. There should be an Eleventh Commandment. Thou shalt not be a schmucky god . . . I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” I turn to leave, but I can’t . . . “Would you do me one favor, please? When you see him, would you tell him that I passed the chemistry test?”

Getting back to school was so hard because I had this boulder to take with me everyplace. But then I developed something else. The best way I can describe it is by what I called it. I called it the “otherness” because that’s how I felt. I wasn’t here. I wasn’t there. I was in an other place. A place where you look, but you don’t really see, a place where you hear but you don’t really listen. It was “the otherness” of it all.

I pushed the boulder up the hallway in school. Friends flying by me having a great old time. Some of them staring at that stupid black mourning ribbon I was wearing. I looked like I had won a contest for making the very worst pie. People either avoided me, or they looked at me in a strange way.

I thought I knew what they were thinking: “There’s the kid whose father died in a FUCKING BOWLING ALLEY!” I would feel angry at Dad, embarrassed, because he died there. This isn’t how it should be. You should die in bed with all your family around you, smiling at each of your loved ones, telling them you love them, and that it’s okay. You’re ready, and not afraid, and don’t be sad, didn’t we have a great life? And with them almost rooting you on to the next place, you leave this earth—that’s how it should be, not dying on the floor of a bowling alley surrounded by people wearing rented, multicolored shoes. I was seething . . . at my life, and that I felt that way.

And then I’d see The Girl with The New Boyfriend. Blond-haired, blue-eyed football player, Impala-driving, Nazi bastard. And I’d get confused. I’d get so confused sometimes. I didn’t know what I felt worse about, the fact that my father was gone or that I didn’t get The Girl. I’d feel so guilty. I’d feel so torn apart. I mean, who was I grieving for? Was I grieving for him, or was I grieving for me?

Basketball tryouts. The sign was posted in the hallway. I wanted to be on the varsity basketball team. That was the glamour team. The whole town would come out for the Friday night games. I played three years of varsity baseball in high school and the only people who came to the games were the players. I had made
junior
varsity basketball the year before, but I had to make the varsity team because my brother Rip had been on the varsity, and I wanted to do whatever he did because I thought he was the coolest (except for the kicking leg). I also had to do something just to get out of the house.

It was probably too soon for me because the first day of tryouts, somebody threw me the ball, and it bounced right past me. I just couldn’t see it. I would dribble the ball off my foot because I was in some other place. The otherness was blinding me. The ball kept going places I didn’t want it to go. I couldn’t guard anybody. I couldn’t keep up because I had this boulder to take with me everyplace I went. Three days of trying out for the team, total disaster, total. Embarrassing play.

After the third day of this, the coach, Gene Farry, called me into his office after practice, I thought to cut me. Instead, he asked me something that nobody had asked me since October 15.

“Bill, are you okay? How’s everything at home?”

I stared at him, unable to speak. Suddenly, tears welled up in my eyes. I just exploded . . . the words, making their way out of my heart . . .

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Coach. I’m sorry.

“There’s nobody home.

“I am so lonely.

“I don’t know what I’m doing from one second to the next.

“I’m failing every subject.

“I just don’t know anymore.

“There’s nobody home. You know what I do after school every day, Coach? I run home and I cook. I make dinner for my mother because she’s out looking for work. She’s out trying to get a job, and I want to have food on the table when she comes home, so she won’t have to do it herself.

“And she looks so sad and so tired. And I try to make her laugh, but that’s not working either.

“And I’m trying to keep up. I’m really trying to keep up with my studies but I can’t. I go into my room in the back, and every time I open a book, I can hear her in the next room.

“I can hear her moaning and sobbing herself to sleep every night because the walls are too fucking thin.”

The tears ran down my face like they were escaping from prison, the wetness of them oddly reassuring. I wasn’t embarrassed. Coach Farry, only twenty-four at the time, smiled at me, and said, “Take all the time you need, I’ll be out here.”

He put me on the team. That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me.

We have our first game. It’s an away game at a school on the Island called East Rockaway High School, and I’m sitting in the bleachers watching the JV game, which preceded the varsity game. I’m sitting there all alone, except for my boulder, looking but not seeing, hearing but not listening. Two friends are behind me, Harvey and Joe.

Now our fans are arriving at the away game. And as they drift into the gymnasium to watch the game, Harvey innocently says to Joe, “Hey, your father’s here.”

And I stood up and said, “Where?” I thought they were talking to me.

I couldn’t believe it happened, but it did. I didn’t know what to do. It was just . . . out there. What could I do? I mean, I couldn’t turn around. What was I going to say? “Sorry guys, I thought my dead father just walked into the gym to watch me play”? So I just sat down as if nothing had happened, just staring straight ahead but not seeing, listening but not hearing. I couldn’t imagine what was going on behind me . . .

I didn’t talk to Harvey again for the rest of high school. If I saw him coming down the hallway, I went the other way.

The next week was November 22, 1963. Another Jack died.

Now the whole country had the otherness, except I had a double dip. And this misery continued for all of us for years and years, with a president from Texas who we really didn’t like and a war that we really couldn’t win . . .

And then one Sunday night in February of 1964, Mom and I were watching the Ed Sullivan show. Because that’s how I spent every Sunday night now, just she and I watching Ed Sullivan. And something great happened for the country, something that made everybody forget what a hellhole the world was becoming. The Beatles were on Ed Sullivan. And for the first time in months, I smiled. And for the first time in my life, I liked another kind of music. And all through this magical broadcast, I heard this ticking noise. No. It wasn’t
60 Minutes
. It was Mom, making that disapproving sound. I was seeing the Beatles. She was seeing the death of jazz.

Oh, I wanted to be like one of the Beatles. If I could be like one of the Beatles, maybe I could get The Girl.

Once a month I got my hair cut from this wonderful barber in Long Beach. Remember barbers? His name was Cosmo. He cut everybody’s hair. There was always a wait for Cosmo. I would sit in the chair. He’d put the smock around me. And I’d say to him, “Cosmo, leave it long in the back, okay? Long in the back.”

“Sure, Bill. Like one of the Be-ah tuls, huh? Everybody wants to look like one of the Be-ah tuls. You will look like a Be-ah tul too.”

He then started to clip my hair off . . .

“What are you doing!”

“Your mother called.”

At the end of my junior year, something good finally happened for us. Joel graduated college and got a job teaching art in the very, very same junior high school that we all had gone to in Long Beach (he had become a really wonderful artist). He decided to live at home and give Mom most of his salary. So a little bit of the pressure was off Mom now. Until the draft board made Joel 1a, ready for induction. The buildup was starting in Viet Nam, and the army wanted him. Mom wouldn’t let them take him. She made an impassioned speech in front of the military draft board pleading her case, that Joel was now the head of the household, with two younger brothers to support. She won, and Joel was spared.

Then came my senior year in high school. This time I made the basketball team the way I wanted to make it. I worked at it all summer. I was playing baseball wherever I could, but at night I worked on my shot, on my defense, my passing, and I played a lot that year. We were a very good team, the Long Beach Marines of 1965, and there’s one game that they always talk about. This was the game we played against Erasmus Hall High from Brooklyn.

They were a fantastic high school basketball team. They were the number two high school team in the entire country. The number one team was from the City, a team named Power Memorial. And their center was Lew Alcindor. Eventually, he becomes Abdul-Jabbar. (In between he was Izzy Itzkowitz, for about three weeks. He said the food was too gassy, and he felt guilty, so he became a Muslim. We almost had him.)

One of our coaches had played at Erasmus, and knew their coach, and they arranged a special exhibition game, and mighty Erasmus, a predominantly black team, agrees to come out to Long Island to play us, a mostly white middle- to upper-middle-class school, in a predominantly Jewish town. This is unheard of—a City team to play a Long Island team? It was big news in the local papers, almost like the Knicks were coming. I mean, Custer had better odds in Vegas than we did.

Erasmus terrified us by the way they arrived at our school. They show up at our school in a Greyhound bus for the team, and another bus for the children of the team. We’re in the locker room before the game having our legs waxed and—well, it’s a home game, you want to look good. And Coach Farry comes in and says, “Listen, guys. Erasmus is a great team. But we’re pretty good too, so let’s show ’em who we are. Take the court. Come on, Marines, fight.”

We run out there. It’s our home court. We’re greeted by a thousand Erasmus fans, stuffed into their side of the gym, and they’re all in dashikis, African tops. This was a terrible time for whites and blacks in America. The South was literally exploding: dogs biting, people rioting, churches with children in them blown to bits, buses burning, civil rights workers murdered, “Blood on the leaves, blood at the root.” Black people were starting to turn back to their African roots. The heavyweight champion had changed his name from Cassius Clay to Cassius X and then finally to Muhammad Ali. It was an edgy, scary time.

The Erasmus crowd was on their feet now, as their team warmed up. Even the cheerleaders could dunk. They’re swaying back and forth, their arms waving back and forth in these choreographed African-feeling chants: “Erasmus, Erasmus. KILL THEM.”

And our cheerleaders were on the other side of the court singing (to the tune of Hava Negilah), “Please don’t hurt our players. They’re very nice boys, and they bruise easily. OY!”

So we’re down 55 points as the second quarter begins, and I’m just sitting there. My mom’s in the stands. She came to every game, and every game that we fell behind, she did the same thing. Yell at the coach.

“Put Crystal in. Let’s go coach. Number 11. We can’t be any further behind. Let’s go. Let everybody play. I pay a lot of taxes in this school system, and I—”

Oh, God. Coach Farry turned to me and said something that terrifies me to this day.

“Go in.”

“Are you nuts? There’s a
game
going on here.”