Old Neighborhood (3 page)

We had gone into a bar and we were served! But in the other important schoolboy rating, Barbara Semmelman and Cynthia Cohen never “let.” They were saving “that” for marriage.

“Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and the Comets was not my song. I preferred romantic love ballads and worked on my impersonations of the singing voices of Nat King Cole and Mario Lanza for the counselor show at the children’s camp in the Adirondacks where I worked the summer before I began college. I also wrote parodies for the camp sing, which was my ticket to nonvirginity. My big hit was set to the tune of Jimmy Durante’s “Umbriago” and was called “Impetigo.” “Impetigo, if you got it you go, if I got it, I go.” At night after the sing, my summer girlfriend, Carol Ershowsky, counselor for the Iroquois girls, on a blanket on the ballfield behind second base, told me how interesting a person I was, and with her sneakers on, her camp sweatshirt pulled up and her camp shorts pulled down, we did it—
actual.
I fumbled for one of the many “just in case” rubbers I kept in my wallet over the years and which usually turned questionable with age, and I accomplished the actual, hurriedly and inexpertly, but it counted. We made several trips to second base that summer, Carol Ershowsky swearing me to secrecy not to tell anyone in the world, and actually I have not until now. I think we have passed the statute of limitations on that sort of thing.

Carol went off to the University of Vermont and wrote to tell me she was engaged to be engaged and I entered college wondering if people could see the change in me over the summer. I continued to work part time in the candy store for spending money and in children’s camps during the summers. In the neighborhood, people my parents knew were moving to places like Rego Park and Kew Gardens in Queens, and some to the suburbs. We remained. My father was still working as a haberdashery salesman on Fordham Road.

My parents were overinvolved in my college career, my mother with persistent questions about schoolwork, fearful that I might flunk out of school like Morty Papkin, who left his mother in shock and mine in possible shock. My father’s involvement took the form of his reading my college textbooks. I would discover him late at night reading them as though they were his own.

My parents now seldom spoke to one another. A kind of language passed between them that had to do with the dumping of garbage and the buying of groceries. They did not greet each other, they barely talked. “That’s ancient history,” one would say to the other if someone tried to remember a pleasant moment, or more likely, tried to blame the other for an injustice. In this way, they created ancient history out of the daily events of their lives.

Half of my college courses were in business subjects and half in English, history and the social sciences, the idea behind the curriculum of business colleges in the 1950s was, I think, to turn out people who could understand a business story in
Time
magazine. The curriculum was not demanding and I worked in the business department of the school newspaper after classes. I ravaged the city’s landscape for cheap dates, ice skating, square dancing, and I went on “intellectual” dates to Broadway plays, the last row of the theater, and to the Ascot Theater in the Bronx, which showed foreign films. I considered myself a complex person, one part businessminded, one part intellectual. I was going to be a well-rounded corporation executive. I am embarrassed to think of myself in those years, traveling by subway to school each day, wearing a jacket, shirt and tie because it was what the young businessman would wear. I could not wait to be forty.

S
AM THE BOOKMAKER AFFECTIONATELY
called me “Joe College.” In my view, “Joe College” referred to people at out-of-town schools who wore white bucks, drove MGs and had girlfriends with straight hair. I was the little kid Sam knew who had read comic books in the back and was now in college, and that was an achievement to him.

“How you doing today, Joe College?”

“Well, Sam, some syrup, some milk, some seltzer and you’ve got yourself an egg cream.”

“That’s for now. You’re gonna be a big-shot executive.”

“Can I bet on it?”

“I’m telling you—the world is losing a fine bookie.”

“They still have you, Sam.”

“Me? I’m nickels and dimes. You’ll do terrific. You’ve always been a nice kid.”

“As Leo the Lip said, ‘Nice guys finish last.’”

“Not you, Stevie. You’re a class individual.”

I did not believe him, not when I went, out of curiosity, to stand under the clock at the Biltmore Hotel at Christmastime where, according to rumor, college people picked each other up, and discovered by eavesdropping that many of them were
staying
at the Biltmore—people my age staying at a hotel. I had budgeted myself to buy an out-of-town college girl a drink.

I became the business manager of my college newspaper, selling and writing ads for local merchants, and qualifying to attend a convention of college editors and business managers which was being held in Detroit. I went by plane, my first plane trip and my first stay in a hotel—for serious panel discussions on “The College Newspaper in America,” and even more serious party-going, necking in hallways and, for some, alleged actuals in bathtubs. This was my first exposure to people my age from different backgrounds. I noticed—I did not think I was imagining it—that the boys from the “better” schools were clearly more poised than I, they were better dressed, in tweed jackets and rep ties, while my best jacket was tan linen bought wholesale. I made a move for a pretty girl from Bennington, we were discussing theater and I thought my background did not matter, when someone from Yale broke into the conversation and eventually spirited her away. All those poised people from rich schools. I wanted to rip off my nameplate with the “CCNY” on it. I had never felt so low-class and poor.

Fanny Pleshette helped my confidence. A junior at Barnard, her phone number came to me through a cousin of Jerry Rosen’s and I called her in the “You don’t know me, but …” tradition. Fanny was a chubby brunette who referred to her former boyfriends as “lovers,” who lived with her mother in a doorman building in the East Sixties in Manhattan and who had been to Europe. She was on a first-name basis with her parents, Jim and Flo, as in “Jim and I had lunch today …” and her parents were divorced. This was not a girl from the Bronx.

She went with me on my under-$5 dates, a category in which I was a true expert—try Czechoslovakian folk dancing. She told me I was intelligent and took me to her apartment when Flo was off on her own affairs. This was the actual actual, in a bed with an adjoining bathroom that had perfumed soap. What passed for a hot time in the old days, rubbing up against girls in hallways, heavy petting in the living room, worrying if the parents would wake up, all that was the activity of a much younger man.

Fanny and I did not survive the school year. During Easter vacation she went with her mother to Palm Beach, Florida, and returned in the midst of an affair with a senior from Dartmouth.

“Why Dartmouth?” I said, wounded.

“It was just one of those things that happened between two people,” she said. “I’m sorry, Steve, I like you a lot.”

“Well, I think I loved you,” I told her before hanging up, which was a highly romantic remark, as well as highly conditional, implying that I was not certain, and in any case, it was past tense.

“One can’t always be successful in these matters,” I said to Jerry on one of our walks through the neighborhood. “This is a valuable learning experience.” What I really wanted was to learn nothing from it and just be with her.

My senior year was ending and my business career was due to begin. My mother began to leave copies of
Fortune
and
The Wall Street Journal
on my bed with key passages underlined so I could gain an edge on the future. I had decided that advertising was the most interesting of the fields of business I had been exposed to, I did not know of anyone in the neighborhood who worked in advertising, the field was not within the social context of the neighborhood. This was very appealing to me, to be the first, a truly sophisticated person. I made a selection of advertisements I had written for the college paper, took advertisements out of magazines and wrote what could be the next installments in those campaigns, creating a portfolio for myself. “I’m going into advertising,” I said to Carla Friedman’s mother. Carla was the girl I was seeing, a junior from Hunter College who did not “let” when I dated her briefly in high school and did not “let” now. She was very smart, though, and we went on cultural dates together, such as anthropology lectures at the Museum of Natural History and dance recitals by Pearl Primus.

“Advuhtising, that’s nice,” Carla’s mother said. “Ya hear that, Sol? Davie here is going into advuhtising.”

“Stevie, not Davie.”

Sol looked up from his coverage of the Dodger game, which he was watching in his sleeveless undershirt.

“Zoomar lens,” he said. “Brings ya right in there.”

These people, my background—I would be getting as far away as possible from all that by being in advertising. At twenty-one I had decided the most dazzling job in the world was to be an advertising copywriter downtown and write the travel advertisements that appeared in
Esquire
magazine, cultivated people sipping cocktails in elegant settings. I would look advertising and talk advertising and be advertising and the rich boys from colleges like Yale and Dartmouth would have nothing on me. I would pass in their world. I would get out of the neighborhood.

After preparing my portfolio and resume I took a serious step toward integrating myself into corporate life. I bought a gray hat in a Madison Avenue store. “The Advertising Man,” the hat was called. I wore it downtown as I made the rounds of employment agencies. In my hat, at twenty-one years of age, I must have looked like a tall Toulouse-Lautrec.

Arthur, Jerry and I tried to see each other, but with Arthur at college in Boston we were restricted to school vacations. We established a ritual of getting together whenever Arthur came into town for Chinese food at the Lu Wong Chinese restaurant on Fordham Road. This was one of the tonier Chinese restaurants in the Bronx in that it had a bar, six squeaking stools facing a discolored picture of Miss Rheingold. A specialty of the house was chicken chow mein which was served in a gelatinous state.

Arthur was in for a weekend, looking very solemn. At the restaurant he dropped a bomb, heavier than the Lu Wong wontons.

“Fellas, I’m getting married.”

He produced a color snapshot of a small, round girl who looked something like Arthur. She was standing in front of a house that appeared to be Tara.

“Her name is Sandy. She lives in White Plains.”

“Very, very attractive,” I said, as though I were looking at a picture of someone’s baby.

“Are you getting married or are you getting engaged?” Jerry asked.

“June. Married.”

The information was absorbed in silence.

“Congratulations, buddy,” I finally said, and having located the appropriate behavior we shook hands with Arthur.

“She’s terrific. And her father is loaded. He’s got the largest food-delicacy importing business in the East.”

I did not know how a food-delicacy importing business worked, what I understood was that our Arthur was marrying a rich girl from White Plains.

The wedding at the Delmonico Hotel in Manhattan that Mr. and Mrs. Morris Mandell arranged for their daughter, Sandra Linda Mandell, and Arthur Robert Pollack, cost $12,500, the bride’s aunt announced while standing at the buffet, which Morris Mandell personally provided from his food-delicacy importing business. Like co-captains, both Jerry and I functioned as the best man. The photographer took a picture of the three musketeers in our formal wear. I thought we looked like a trio of magicians waiting to go on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” When the ceremony was over, Arthur told us he was not entering law school after all. His father-in-law was bringing him into the firm for a slice of the Nova Scotia.

I sent letters to thirty-six New York advertising agencies and followed up with phone calls to the personnel managers. I was awarded two interviews. In one I was given an aptitude test and told I was strong in clerical skills and they did not have a job for me, the other was conducted on a couch facing the elevators in the reception area, I was given employment forms to fill out and was told they did not have a job for me. I was registered with all the employment agencies that specialized in advertising jobs, and they did not produce an interview. I may have wanted to get away from my background, but I could not escape my background. An employment agent named Walter Evans, a well-dressed man in his forties with a cynical edge to his voice, capsulized my situation.

“You’re starting out with two strikes against you, Robbins. You’re from City College. People in advertising want to relate to their own kind.”

“I speak English good,” I said, hoping he would smile. He did not.

“Maybe two agencies in New York would hire you, Grey and Doyle Dane. And they don’t have anything.”

“I worked on my school paper. It was like a real job.”

“I know.”

“I’m very bright,” I said, desperately.

“I’m sure you are.”

He turned the pages of my portfolio without comment. Then he went through some cards in a file on his desk.

“There’s a spot with a bathroom-scale manufacturer in Long Island City. They’re looking for a management trainee.”

“I heard that with some agencies you can start in the mail room.”

“Robbins, tell me something—do you play golf?”

“No.”

“Do you play tennis?”

“No. Basketball.”

“Basketball. It figures. They don’t want somebody from the schoolyard. They want somebody from the club.”

On the day of my graduation from college, my mother wept at the sight of me in my cap and gown. My father shook my hand and said, “I envy you your possibilities.” He had to return to work that afternoon, and in a celebration lunch that as much as anything revealed our family as to social caste, we went to a delicatessen with tables, located near Fordham Road.