Hollywood Animal (71 page)

Boobock
is what Hungarians called black people.

The word has no meaning in Hungarian, although Hungarians also call blacks
rigos
(crows) and négers, which translates not to “nigger” but to “Negro.”

Our new landlord’s son, an American-Hungarian man in his forties, offered to sell my father a gun for $20.

“For the
boobocks
,” the landlord’s son said. It was a .22 Beretta. My father bought it and kept it in his pocket.

“For the Komchis,” my father said to me.

· · ·

I was back at Cathedral Latin with the classmates and priests and brothers I loathed, but it was different somehow.

Maybe, I realized,
I
was different. Maybe I wasn’t intimidated anymore. Maybe it didn’t matter much to me that these kids were rich, that their clothes were better than mine, that they wouldn’t pronounce my name right. I had seen the real America at Youngstown Ursuline. I saw that I fit into the real America just fine. And I had been kissed many times by the beautiful Kay Jeffries!

I stopped calling Kay—finally understanding that it
was
too expensive—and she stopped calling me.

She skipped some letters and I skipped some letters and slowly, painfully, I started trying to forget her. The disc jockeys stopped playing Shep and the Limelites and I heard a new song that I loved: “
He’s a rebel and he’ll never be any good. He’s a rebel ’cause he never ever does what he should!
”

My mother and father spent their days in a small storefront office just off Buckeye Road on East 116th Street: the American Hungarian Catholic Society Life Insurance Company.

Old Hungarians who lived in this, the city’s largest Hungarian neighborhood, dropped by to make their monthly payments, usually in cash taken from the stash they still kept under the mattress.

My mother went into the office with my father every day, even though she wasn’t paid, to do the bookkeeping. She was the one who worked there, really, even though her headaches were so bad that she kept an icepack on her head in the office.

My father spent all day in the insurance company office writing his articles for the newspaper.

They left the office at six o’clock at night, walked across the schoolyard of the St. Margaret of Hungary Church, up some steps, and they were on East 117th, directly across the street from our apartment.

We ate our dinner quickly and my father continued working on his articles. At nine o’clock, or at 9:15 at the latest, he and I jumped into the Ford and drove downtown—a forty-minute drive—to the main post office.

My father waited in the car and I ran inside and threw the envelope into the Special Delivery slot—the last pickup was at ten o’clock.

Then we drove back to the apartment the same way we had come—up Carnegie and then Woodland Avenue, through the heart of the city’s black neighborhood.

Going both to and back from downtown, my father clutched the Beretta in his pocket.

We did that five days a week.

· · ·

Johnny Holliday was the hot new disc jockey in town at WHK. He had a slightly Southern twang and a fast, slurry style delivered in a sleepy kind of voice. Everyone at Latin listened to him. Every high school kid in Cleveland listened to him.

The most popular part of his daily show was “The WHK High School Hall of Fame.” Kids were supposed to mail postcards to him nominating their most popular classmate in school.

I bought a bunch of postcards, signed my classmates’ names to them, and nominated myself to be in the WHK High School Hall of Fame.

About a week later, on my way to the bus taking me to school, my transistor radio in my pocket, I heard Johnny Holliday say “In the WHK High School Hall of Fame today, from Cathedral Latin High School,
Joe Eszterhas!
” The station played Johnny Holliday saying that every hour for the next twenty-four hours.
He’d even pronounced my name right!

By the time I got to school, I saw by the sneering looks on my classmates’ faces that the news had spread. Some of them even glared at me. But a couple kids who’d hardly spoken to me in the past said “Congratulations” and “Nice goin’!”

After school, I went to the American Hungarian Catholic Society office and put my transistor radio on for my parents.

We waited until we heard Johnny Holliday’s voice placing me in his High School Hall of Fame.

“This is fantastic!” my father said. “It is
fantastic
!”

“
Kon-gra-tu-lay-shon
,” my mother said in English.

They asked me how I had been selected for this very public honor.

“The teachers at each school,” I explained, “pick out the student they think has the most potential for success.”

My father turned to my mother: “You see, Mária, all the work we do for the boy, all our sacrifices for him, they are worth it!”

He was calling me “Joe” now, even when he spoke to me in Hungarian, not “Jozsi.” And I was calling him “Pop” when I spoke to him in Hungarian and not “Papa.”

It had begun as a joke. I teasingly called him “Pop” a few times and he teased me back by calling me “Joe” and then we started doing it for real.

I was scratching my groin with my hand in my pocket one day as we were walking down Buckeye Road.

“What are you doing, Joe?” he asked me.

“My
pimpli
itches,” I said.

“You don’t have a
pimpli
anymore.” He laughed. “It’s too big to be a
pimpli
, I’m sure. Now you have a
fasz
.”

I liked that.

No Hungarian, after all, ever said “
Lo pimpli a seggedbe!
”

“How do you say
fasz
in English?” he asked.

“Dick,” I said.

He thought about it.

“Dick! Dick!” he said, and started to laugh. “
Dick Nixon!
”

Now that I was a senior, I was allowed to join the staff of the school newspaper, the
Latineer
, and I convinced the editor, Stanley Osenar, that the
Latineer
should run some article that the students would actually read instead of the holy-holy religious BS the
Latineer
was usually filled with.

What was it that almost every student at Latin had in common? That almost every student was passionately interested in?
Besides
sex? Rock and roll!

Ricky Nelson was coming to town. He was at the height of his fame with hits like “Travelin’ Man” and “Hello Mary Lou.”

“Let’s do an interview with Ricky Nelson,” I told Stanley Osenar.

“The brothers would shit!” he said. “Rock and roll? In the
Latineer?
Oh boy.” But Stanley went for it.

I got on the phone, called the radio station sponsoring the concert, and identified myself as a reporter for the Cathedral Latin
Latineer
. He referred me to Ricky Nelson’s publicist in Hollywood, a man named Jerry Folidaire, who told me to call him at the Cleveland Hotel when he got into town. I did and he told me Ricky was too tired to talk now but did I want to have breakfast with him in his suite tomorrow morning? And did I want a backstage pass for the show tonight?

Yes, I did!

In the dressing room that night I met Joey Dee and Cozy Cole and the next morning I had breakfast with “Rick” and Jerry Folidaire. I asked one question dumber than the other, but they were both nice to me, even when I said, “I noticed last night in the dressing room that Joey Dee and his guys all had guns in their pockets or suitcases. Do you carry a gun, too, when you travel?”

Ricky looked at Jerry Folidaire not knowing what to say and Jerry Folidaire said, “No, you know, it’s those New York guys, it’s part of their tradition.”

“I’m from California.” Ricky smiled and laughed.

I laughed, too, but I was hardly paying attention.
Here I was having breakfast at the city’s most famous hotel, a place I’d never been, in a suite, a thing I’d never seen, with one of my all-time rock and roll heroes, who was being very nice and friendly to me!

An awestruck
Latineer
photographer took our picture as Rick and I came out of the Cleveland Hotel together and, in the next issue of the
Latineer
, there was the story bannered across the top of the front page—“Rocker Rick Nelson Voices Views on Talent.” And next to it was a big picture of me shaking hands with and looking buddy-buddy with Ricky Nelson!

I enjoyed watching my classmates and the priests and brothers, who hated me, as they looked at my picture across the top of the front page!

The priests and brothers went crazy. No more rock and roll stories, they told Stanley Osenar. But my father was impressed. There was my picture across the top of the front page of the
Latineer!
This after I had already been picked for the WHK High School Hall of Fame!

Stanley now let me do a regular column. My photograph would be next to the column in each issue. The column would be entitled “A Touch of Ease.” (
Ouch!
)

For my first one, I wrote a review of Tennessee Williams’s
Night of the Iguana
, praising the play and underlining the fact that the main character was a whiskey priest who had lost his faith in God.

It was my last column.

Stanley Osenar almost got fired.

Letter sweaters were awarded by the priests and brothers for distinction in activities like sports, journalism, or speech and debate. Even though I had written more articles for the
Latineer
than anyone else and was now the features editor, the brothers didn’t award me a letter.

I admired the sweaters—Stanley Osenar had one and I saw how the girls were drawn to him at record hops.

Stanley told me that even though he had been awarded it, he still had to pay his own money to buy it at the school bookstore.

“How do they know at the bookstore that you’re eligible to have one?” I asked. “Do you have to have a note or something?”

“They
don’t
know. They just sell it to you.”

Then Stan looked at me and said, “Don’t even think about it! They’ll throw you out of school!”

I immediately went down to the bookstore and bought my letter sweater. I wore it to the hops where the priests and brothers never came. I explained to my parents that being awarded a letter like this was a great honor.

First the WHK High School Hall of Fame! Then the big photograph with Ricky Nelson! Now a letter sweater! My parents were beginning to view me as an American success story.

And many years later I wrote a movie about me and the WHK High School Hall of Fame called
Telling Lies in America.

It got the best reviews of any I’d written
.

Newsweek
even said that with the lies I told in the movie called
Telling Lies in America,
I’d redeemed myself
.

And when I was a successful American screenwriter, Stanley Osenar sent me
his
Cathedral Latin letter with a note that said, “I think you’ve earned a real one!
”

Our green Ford was rusting out and we needed a new car. Now that I had a temporary driver’s license, my father said I could help pick it out.

We drove from one East Side used car lot to the other. The moment I saw it, I was in love with it. It was a 1956 red-and-white Ford convertible with red leather seats.

“This is the stupidest car we could possibly buy,” my father said. “Look at it. The floor is already rusted. This car got wet too many times. The seats are cracking. Look, this crack here—it has been glued together. The top is difficult to put on and take down. It will break. What will we do in the winter? Cold air will come right through the top and the sides. We will freeze, that’s what we will do.”

I thought it was the most beautiful used car I’d ever seen. I imagined myself driving it—my hair slicked back, the radio blasting, sunglasses shielding my eyes, a gorgeous girl cuddled up against me … parking it at a lovers lane spot around Shaker Lakes.

We looked at five or six other used car lots but I saw nothing that I liked. I couldn’t stop fantasizing about the red-and-white Ford convertible. We went back again to see it.

“I would look like an idiot driving this car,” my father said. “I am fifty-five years old. I have a belly. I wear thick glasses. I am almost bald. I wear a beret. This car is not meant for a man who looks like me. Anyone seeing me driving this car would laugh. This car would make me look like a joke. Don’t you agree?”

“No,” I said, “you could drive this car—”

“The truth, the truth,” my father said. “Don’t you agree?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Okay, maybe, if you look at it that way.”

“Maybe?” He laughed. “No maybe. Absolutely, positively, certainly one hundred percent without doubt!”

My father bought the car.

I saw him driving our Ford convertible one day in the winter. The top had broken and was half down. It was snowing. My father wore his trench coat, a scarf, gloves. My father wore thick glasses and a beret. That moment I loved my father very much.

The very day we drove our new used convertible home from the dealer, I bought a red Ban-Lon shirt and a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses.

I pulled the convertible’s top down and turned the radio up full blast: “
Come on, baby, let’s do the twist! Come on, bay-bee, let’s do the twist!
”

I cruised up and down Buckeye Road for hours. The old Hungarians stared at me, the
Elvész Prezli
of Buckeye Road!

The next week I put three coats of wax on it and shined it for days. Then I drove it down one morning to Cathedral Latin. A group of my classmates stood nearby, staring, slack-jawed.

I put the top up, locked it, said “Hey, how ya doin’?” and
bopped
by them.

I went to Mass with my parents each Sunday at St. Margaret of Hungary but one day after Mass I told my father: “I’m not going to go to church anymore with you, Pop.”

“What do you mean you’re not going to go to church anymore?” he said. “We go every Sunday.”

“It doesn’t mean anything to me,” I said.

“What doesn’t?”

“The church. The priests. Their sermons. Confession. Communion. Praying. All of it. I don’t believe any of it.”