Ernie: The Autobiography (4 page)

My father, God bless him, was always out hustling and always found work. The lessons of Oscar of the Waldorf were not lost on him. He was always trying harder, pushing, and he always ended up as one of the bosses, whatever job he was on. When the WPA came to town, he really managed to prosper.

WPA stood for Works Progress Administration, which was government money building things to keep people employed. My father was a foreman on various roads and bridges that were built in New Haven. Those structures are still standing, today. Even at the age of thirteen I thought the WPA was a wonderful idea. I don’t understand why we can’t do that today.

We had a bigger and bigger garden every year because Mom wanted to grow corn and tomatoes and flowers for the table. So every day in springtime, before we went to school and work, my father and I would get outside and spade the ground. I loved that work, not just because it was something my Dad and I did together, but because I could see the results as the garden grew. If you’ve never eaten something you helped to grow, you should try it. Nothing on earth will ever taste better than a carrot you raised from a seed. In fact, many days I’d run home from school to work the soil. You’d never believe it to look at me now, but in those days I got pretty lean from all the running and hoeing. In fact, it was so satisfying that when summertime came around I got work on a local farm owned by wonderful people called Manto-vani. I made some money and stayed out of mischief and learned on my own what my father had always talked about: the work ethic. It made me feel good inside and out. And best of all, there were times when I caught a smell or saw a bag of seed and it whisked me back to the farm in Italy. Yes, people and places are different the world over. But most things, the basics, are the same.

Speaking of the world, we had a kind of mini-world in our own backyard. There were a bunch of kids on Cherry Ann Street. We had Poles, we had blacks, we had Italians, we had Irish, we had just about every nationality there was. We all used to congregate under a big streetlight in front of the Yardleys’. I think they were more afraid of what a bunch of young teens might do than what we did do, which was mostly playing hide-and-seek or thinking of a way to get to the Long Island Sound for a swim. We also liked to race, from corner to corner or around the block. I loved the sound and feel of the wind rushing by my ears. Like tilling the earth, there was something primal about it—like I was a lion or an ancient hunter.

More early acting? You bet!

When enough of us got together we played baseball, we played football, we played everything except basketball. In those days it was considered a rather sissy game because after you sank a basket you walked away from the key and got back in line to do it again. It wasn’t anything like it is today, running around full-court. Besides, girls played it too, standing flat-footed in front of the hoop and throwing the ball from between their knees in an underhand toss.

I never dated in my teenage years. For one thing, I rarely had enough money. I gave everything I earned to my parents. Also, I was too shy. You wouldn’t think so, because I was around my mother and sister and aunts and cousins all the time. But they didn’t look at me the way some of those other girls did. In fact, they didn’t
look
like some of those girls did! They caused strange stirrings that I didn’t understand. So I hung with the guys at a time when hanging with the guys meant nothing more than they were your buddies.

Holidays in our home were always my favorite time of year. The big ones were the Fourth of July, when we got together with family and neighbors—even the Yardleys—and celebrated our great nation. I also remember Armistice Day—now Veterans Day—which was a little more solemn, when we honored our war heroes. And, of course there were my favorites: Christmas and Easter.

Money was usually pretty tight, so Christmas was a time of homemade gifts. Except one year, when some guy came along with $14.00 that he owed my father. I was lucky enough to be the one who answered the door and pocketed the money. On Christmas morning I got out of bed very early, stole downstairs with two of my socks. I put $7.00 in one sock for my parents and $7.00 in the other for my sister and myself. Then I went upstairs and said to my parents, “Look! Santa Claus came!” My mother and father were crying, they were so happy. I never did find out what happened to that man, though. If my Dad ever found out where the money came from, he never let on to me.

I’ll never forget when I got my first pair of good pants for Easter. I was fifteen or sixteen. When we got back from the clothing store I laid them across the bed and just looked at them, and said, “Boy, that’s a far cry from knickers.” I felt like a real gentleman, like a country squire back in Italy.

It was the first time I felt like a man. And
that
wasn’t acting!

I also liked Mother’s Day, when I’d bring Mom a great big bunch of flowers. I always told her I’d picked them in the woods. I didn’t dare tell her that I got them from the cemetery. It may not have been kosher, but I felt my mother would enjoy them more than the deceased did.

In those days, my best buddy was a kid named Joey Simone. He was much shorter than me and my mother used to call us Mutt and Jeff, after the newspaper comic strip about two friends, one very tall and one very short.

Joey was a young Italian boy whose family was from Sicily. They always spoke with a wonderful, thick Italian accent, a dialect of the Bareza region that had been their home. The mother and dad always used to work on a farm and you’d often see them in the fields hauling around these big bundles of grass they used to feed the animals. They worked hard, but they were always smiling. They seemed genuinely happy to be working together.

Mrs. Simone was amazing. When she came home each night, around 6:30, she would not only prepare dinner but also do the wash—by hand. You always knew when she was doing that because you’d hear her singing. In fact, when I think back, my youth was filled with the sounds of community. Her folk songs, the mixture of different languages on the street corners, the sounds of chickens some of the residents kept in pens. Kids growing up today don’t have those sounds. They shut them out with cell phones and iPods. I think they’re missing something, a sense of roots and heritage, warm memories they would treasure in their older years. It’s too bad, really.

Mrs. Simone made a lot of pizza. That’s how pizza got started: with moms who had dough left over from making bread. They’d roll it out and spread some tomato sauce on top with some salami and mushrooms or whatever they had there, and heat it for dinner. Today, people like Mrs. Simone, making homemade pies, would be wealthy! Maybe she should have gone to New York and worked with Oscar.

My favorite activity was hiking on Pine Rock Mountain. Joey and I felt like explorers, picking among the boulders and thistles. You didn’t worry about Lyme disease back then. If a tick bit you, you burned it off with a cigarette or hot match. If you got poison ivy, you washed and scratched.

We used to go everywhere together. We’d go swimming, always bare, at Martha’s Hole and Ear Hole and all kinds of places. Back then nobody thought anything of boys skinny-dipping. We didn’t go in the lake—which was actually some kind of quarry that had filled with water—because too many people had drowned there. If you threw something in you couldn’t see it hit bottom. It was that deep.

We also used to go to Farnham’s Farm to steal apples and vegetables we couldn’t grow. We didn’t do it to be mean but to help our folks. The more we ate there, the less we had to eat at home. I’d always tell my mother “I ate at Joey’s,” and he’d tell his Mom he ate at my place. Fortunately, Mr. Farnham never caught us. I don’t know what story we would have told him. He was always busy with a big stone crusher he owned. It kept grinding rock that was hauled from Pine Rock Mountain. The stone was used to make roadbeds and such. Maybe it was Mr. Farnham, or maybe I just got bigger, but when I went back to my old home Pine Lock seemed more like a hill than a mountain.

One night, we went looking for celery because we wanted something to munch on. We were crossing the Beaverdale Cemetery when we came to a big hedge that separated the graveyard from a large garden. As we started to go through it, up popped several heads. We ran like the dickens.

“Hey, where you going?” hissed a voice.

It was three of our buddies who had just finished searching for potatoes in the same garden. It was crook meeting crook. Since they were already over there, they grabbed a few stalks for us. They weren’t just being nice; they liked the danger.

Joey and I also knew a spot where bakery trucks would drop off cartons of two-day-old bread they couldn’t sell anymore. They left it outside the bakery where, I suppose, it was going to be ground into bread crumbs or croutons or some such. We always took as many of those boxes as we could carry. Sometimes more, hiding some of them and then going back. The first time I brought it home, my mother asked, “Where did you get all this stuff?”

I told her and she worked some wonders with it to freshen it up—putting it in the oven with water, remoisturizing it—and it tasted just fine.

I started seeing less and less of Joey as we grew older, since he had to work with his mother and father so they could save money and buy a house. Occasionally, when I had the time, I would help them out. My buddy Joey Simone had gone into business selling fish and chips. He had a little store of his own and also brought his products to factories to sell. I remember one day Joey and I were rattling along in his truck. You could hear every bolt and piston and spring in that thing—
boom, bidda boom, ping, bang.

I said, “My God, doesn’t this thing drive you crazy?”

Joey said, “No, I just turn up the radio a little louder.”

Now that I think of it, maybe Joey was the forefather of the iPod generation!

Chapter 5

A Little Family History

N
orth Haven, Connecticut, was our family town. That’s where my parents and their siblings stayed and had children. My Uncle Freddie became a good mechanic. My father was a jack-of-all-trades. My Uncle Joe ran a steam shovel for the International Silver Company in Meriden, Connecticut. To paraphrase Dickens, it was the best of times…and also had some of my worst times.

When I was still a young man, my mother started having delusions that everybody was against her. She didn’t recognize family members from time to time. We understand this illness today; back then, we called it senility, even though she was only in her late fifties.

I think the worst of it was at the very beginning, when I didn’t know she was sick. My mother told me about my sister coming in late, that she must be running around like a whore.

I said, “Mom, you’re wrong. Evie has a job. She isn’t doing what you think.”

My mother would get angry and say, “No, no, believe me! I know what’s happening. I know what’s going on. She smoking, she’s running around.”

Well, I didn’t know what to do. My mother was
so
certain. When my sister came home that night—my father was still at work—I faced her. I repeated what our mother had said.

“She’s lying!” my sister said.

Hearing those words triggered something in me and—I’m ashamed, now, to say it—but I hit my sister. I really gave it to her, bad, slapping her around.

She cried “No, no, Ernie. I’m not a whore! Mom is wrong—she’s sick!”

That was the first time anyone had dared to say that, but some part of me knew it must be true. My sister was a good person. I felt sick about what I’d done and I held her close and begged her forgiveness—not just then, but many times since. She forgave me at once; she’s that kind of woman, generous to her bones.

That was the beginning of a long decline for my poor Mom. I can’t account for the onset of her illness at such a young age. I do know that her life had not been easy since our return to America. In addition to the hardships of the Depression and watching out that my Dad didn’t slip back into his old ways—his resolve was strong, but he was still only human—she had experienced great tragedies in her family.

Before we had gone to Chicago, Mom’s younger sister had married a gentleman in Hamden. I never knew his name. It was one of those situations back then when you had to get married. They had twins and then one more child. My mother worried openly to my Dad, at the time, that this was going to be a bad marriage and that something terrible would happen all through this family. She spoke of it almost like a curse was put on us. At the time, I had no idea what she meant, only that her voice and expression scared me.

Sure enough, the man that my mother’s sister married became violent, abusive, a real lunatic, and was put away by the courts. Feeling alone and hopeless, my aunt took her youngest child and committed suicide under a train. We had just returned to America and her two lovely, orphaned twins were left in the care of my mother.

One day, when they were about five, the twins wanted to go down and watch people ice-skate. My mother bundled them up nicely, gave them money to buy a snack on the way, and off they went. But there were no skaters to watch and, disappointed, they went onto the pond to skate themselves. The reason there were no skaters is that the ice was too thin, and they fell through. With nobody there to rescue them, they both drowned.

That tragedy weighed on my mother’s mind for the rest of her life. Shortly after the accident Mom came down with tuberculosis. She went to a Dr. Pakosta, a chiropractor, who was the only medical man we know. He actually kept her alive for a long, long time. But she was getting worse. She finally went to a doctor at New Haven hospital, a Dr. Posa. He told her she should pack up and go to somewhere warm like New Mexico or Arizona. Of course, she wouldn’t leave her family. She continued to work as hard as ever, on her garden, keeping the house white-glove clean, making sure her children were well cared for. She was sick on-and-off for sixteen years, her mental state deteriorating for a year or two before she finally passed away.