Old Neighborhood (4 page)

I rewrote letters to advertising agencies that had already rejected me, I kept calling Evans, the one employment agent who had bothered to interview me. Finally he arranged to send me to the McCann-Erickson agency. I was nervous about the interview for days, but it turned out to be a perfunctory meeting with a woman in the personnel department who said there were no openings, they would keep my resume on file, and did I realize that it was strongly against me that I had not been in the army yet? I was not close to getting a job. I was ashamed of the place where I lived. Was there anybody at the McCann-Erickson agency, or any Madison Avenue agency, who lived in a neighborhood like mine? I hated the fact that I had to put a Bronx address on my resume. I was convinced my address alone disqualified me.

By summer’s end, thoroughly frustrated, I joined the army. I found an Army Reserve unit where I could complete my military obligation with six months of active duty. This was not what I had in mind. I wanted to be an advertising man. I had the vision. I had the hat.

I was not exactly General George Patton in the army. A young man who always had trouble with buttons, hooks and buckles, and who is not mechanically inclined, will not find the army a hospitable place. I had one moment of particular notoriety during basic training when our instructor in the lofty subject of “The Assembly and Disassembly of the M-1 Rifle” stopped the class of two hundred to announce:

“We have heah a man named Robbins. Remember the name, gentlemen. Robbins has just done what ah have nevah seen in mah life. He has attempted to put the trigger housing group of the M-1 rifle in—upside down. Now that’s a first.”

My parents came to visit, “What have they done to you?” my mother asked, noting my short haircut, green uniform, green complexion and barracks cough.

“I’m being integrated into America,” I said.

She brought me a salami and back copies of
Fortune.
I closed out my career on active duty in delicious anonymity in my job of distributing clothing to new recruits. The supply hero returned to the Bronx and to the ranks of the unemployed.

Before I was finished with the army, and vice versa, I went into a subway photo booth and had pictures made of myself in uniform. I took the pictures, clipped them to the top of my resume and sent off copies to the people who had driven me into the arms of Uncle Sam in the first place. I wrote across the top, “Back again! Not draftable!” hoping someone, anyone, would think I was, at the very least, resourceful. Walter Evans called me three days later.

“Still around, I see.”

“Yes.”

“You look terrible in uniform.”

“I know.”

“Well, you’re trying. It was a nice idea for a mailing piece.”

He set up an interview with a man named Colby who owned an advertising agency in Los Angeles. Colby had come to New York looking for several people to work for his agency in California. One of the jobs was for a junior copywriter at $75 a week. I went to Colby’s suite at the Plaza Hotel. He was a large ruddy-faced man in his late forties, who had in his possession my resume with the army photo attached.

“I like this. It’s a zippy notion. Are you zippy?”

“Very zippy. The zippiest.”

“A good, zippy answer,” he said.

He looked over my portfolio, then examined my resume again.

“I’m looking for New York types. That’s why I’m here. Is that you?”

“Is the Pope Catholic?”

“Good. You’re showing me a lot of zip.”

He looked at my ads again.

“The people I have working for me—they’re too slow. You’re not slow, are you?”

I had run out of zippy. All I could think of was to shake my head no, zippily.

“That’s not an answer,” he said.

I was convinced by now that he was crazy and I had no chance for a job here.

“What do you do for hobbies—do you like to sail?”

I was going to tell him the truth.

“I’ll tell you where I am with water sports, Mr. Colby. At Camp Indianhead, I cracked the spine of a bark canoe by getting out of it the wrong way.”

“Well done,” he said. “My people all sail—and they’re no good.”

He told me he would let me know within twenty-four hours. I barely slept. He was eccentric but he was offering a real job, writing copy, not just working in a mail room, and in California, a place no one I knew had ever been.

“You can’t take it,” my mother said. “It’s three thousand miles away.”

“We’ll never see you, Stevie,” my father added.

“It’s a real opportunity. And after I get some experience I can always come back.”

“You’ve just
been
away,” my mother argued.

“Mother, I can’t even get arrested here.”

“Don’t talk like that. Next thing—you’ll get arrested.”

My mother was a true fantasist.

Colby called and offered me the position, all expenses paid to Los Angeles. “You’re a street kid. I like that. Give me the zip and I’ll give you the cash.” He may have been strange, but he hired me. I had a job. I was getting out of the neighborhood. I had wanted so desperately to find a job in advertising and could not—because of my background. Now I was being hired because of my background.

My mother nearly went into a coma over the news. “California! Who do we know in California?” My father said, “Congratulations,” in a quiet voice. I flirted with the notion of asking Carla Friedman to marry me but I did not believe I loved her, and the idea of going to the frontier, traveling light, appealed to me. I told her the news and she cried. I thought I could have had her for the first time if I wanted to, but I did not take advantage. I left her crying. I felt like William Holden.

Arthur came in from White Plains where he was living and we all had one last Chinese meal at Lu Wong. Jerry, Arthur and I took a long walk through the neighborhood. We were out until two in the morning, not wanting the night to end. We reminisced—the wonderful way the seasons would change, the marbles season, the touch football season, the stickball season, we talked about good times, growing up, girls. Then we stopped in front of the house on Morris Avenue. “I’m going to miss you,” I said to them, and we shook hands all around, and trying to be mature, we fought off our tears, knowing we were going in different directions and would probably never see each other again.

P
ALM TREES AND NO
subways. I could not believe I was in a place that had palm trees while the people in my office could not believe I did not know how to drive a car. “It never came up,” I said to my immediate supervisor. “If you can get a place close to the office, I suppose you could bike to work,” he told me. I did not know how to ride a bicycle either. I took an accelerated driving course, passed the test, bought a used Ford and managed to aim the car from my garden apartment to the office.

The Colby Agency handled the advertising for retail stores, car dealerships, real estate developers and a few California-based household products. By New York standards we were understaffed by about twenty people and, as a result, all of us worked on everything. Within a year, when I might have still been in a mail room on Madison Avenue, I had written radio campaigns that had been on the air locally, advertisements in
Sunset
magazine and commercials for local television. I was very impressed with myself. I could ride to work and hear my commercials on the radio, “Don’t just wave at that housefly. It doesn’t want to know you. Slay it with Marvelspray.” I had a date with a beautician and I sweet-talked the poor girl not into going to bed with me, but in staying up until 2:17
A.M
., with her eyes closing, so we could watch my commercial of a ballplayer batting a plastic dinner plate past the pitcher without breaking it. “I thought of that,” I said, glowing. “Uh-huh,” she managed.

Tom Ross was my supervisor. Imported by Colby from New York, he was a careful copywriter and he taught me to edit my work. His wife had arranged for me to meet the beautician whom I managed to bore into not seeing me again. Once every four months or so Colby would stop at my desk and say, “How are you doing, Robbins?” I would say, “Zipping it out there,” and he would say, “Good. Tell Accounting to give you a twenty-dollar raise.”

Two new junior copywriters were hired, and Marvin Liebowitz and I moved up to become senior copywriters. Liebowitz was from NYU and came into the agency from New York the same time I did. He was a hyperactive man, which appealed to Colby. Five feet five, Liebowitz was a person trying to create an art form out of superlatives. His favorite copy lines included: “Incredible beyond belief …” “More fantastic than fantastic …” “The biggest sale in the history of the planet …” He also had an exaggerated sense of his social life: “The greatest piece of tail in Western Civilization …”

By his account, Liebowitz lived a life of pre-laid, laid, and just laid. My social life consisted largely of sexual daydreams about the girls I left behind. I was learning a standard lesson of adult life. Once a person is out of school the office becomes his source of social life. In this case, Colby supplied us with a pool of old gray-haired ladies. “They’re more reliable,” he told Ross. While Liebowitz, according to Liebowitz, met girls at traffic lights, car washes, movie houses, “We were eyeing each other right through the movie, so I made my play and we went home for the real thing.” California girls were not dropping off the trees like oranges for me and Liebowitz was experiencing “the best two consecutive days and nights ever. …”

He offered me a handout, he was going to set up a double date, “Top of the line. California quality,” as he phrased it. Peggy and Sue or Sue and Peggy, I never knew which was which, were student nurses and they spent the night giggling, as did Liebowitz. After a movie and hamburgers, Peggy or Sue kissed me goodnight and went giggling off. Liebowitz had been necking in the back with his date while I drove the car. On the way home, Liebowitz declared:

“Well, I scored again. Best quiet quickie in the back seat of a car ever. …”

“Quiet quickie? That may be alliterative, Liebow, but it’s not true.”

“You couldn’t tell, Steve. You were driving.”

“Liebowitz, what you need is a definition of terms, or a discussion of the birds and the bees.”

In a service grocery store near my apartment, I met Rodi Collins, a divorcee of twenty-one, a thin, nervous woman who worked in the office of a construction company.

“I’m going to be a girl singer,” she told me.

“You’re already a girl.”

“That’s the expression—in the music business. Girl singer.”

During our first night in bed I did my Nat King Cole impersonation.

“Not bad,” she said. “Maybe you should be a boy singer.”

She stood me up several times, was late for appointments, was on an avocado diet because she said avocados were good for her vocal cords, and claimed Patti Page had taken a personal interest in her career. Needing company, I ignored the oddities. Ultimately I could not ignore her voice. She finally sang for me, “My Funny Valentine,” in a thin, cracked voice. Liebowitz would have said, “One of the two or three worst voices west of the Rockies.” I had to concede that she was no more a possible relationship for me than she was a possible girl singer.

I went to bars along the Strip, the women at the bars were prostitutes. I was not a native, not a college student, Los Angeles was a sprawling place that lacked a center for a person of my age to meet “a nice girl.” I was on my own and I was lonely. I thought the local campuses might be a social avenue for me. If I could have met an older coed or a graduate student I might have been able to outmaneuver the college boys with my professional standing.

A square dance at UCLA was advertised as being open to the public and I went for the fiddling and the calling of Montana Joe Turntree and his Montana Boys. I noticed two blondes in their late teens or early twenties in a corner and I approached one of them. She was about five feet six, slender, her face was soft, a pretty girl with the palest blue eyes I had ever seen. I wanted to say “Excuse me, I may have just fallen in love with you.” Instead I tried “Excuse me, didn’t we meet once in Montana?” which I thought was an outstanding opening line, considering the ambience.

“I have never been to Montana,” she said gravely.

Her friend went off to dance with someone.

“Are you a student at the college?”

“Yes.”

“I’m not doing very well, am I? My name is Steven Robbins. And yours is—?”

“Beverly.”

“Beverly. Will you be my partner? Please.”

She agreed to dance with me and after a while we went out for a cup of coffee. She was a senior at UCLA, an art history major, Beverly Hillman from Sacramento. She had never been east of Nevada. I regaled her with tales of The New Pioneers, meaning myself, who boldly crossed the Rockies to make A Good Living in the West.

I went out with her four times before she would come to my apartment where we necked heavily until my lips were bruised. I had decorated the place with oak furniture and the obligatory 1950s butterfly chair and bullfight posters. I made dinner for us, a beef stew, the recipe off the tomato-sauce can, and I lit candles. I was working very hard to impress her and kept up a constant banter. Now and again she would smile at something I said which I took as encouragement to keep going. When the evening was over, she kissed me gently, took my face in her hands and said, “Why don’t you calm down?”

Beverly was quiet, intelligent, I knew she was not going to sit up for my early-morning screenings of thirty-second television spots. We went to concerts, art openings, film series, lectures. Beverly was more widely read in the classics than I, her aesthetic sense was more developed. She planned to take a graduate degree in art history and eventually work for an art museum. I was thrilled to be with her, just to be seen with her. She had such a pure, beautiful face. And she was kind. She brought me books she thought I would like, and she gave me a lovely graphic by a California artist. I had never received spontaneous gifts from a girl before. In the Bronx all my relationships had a feeling of negotiation. Was the girl going to get you to take her to eat
and
the movies, or just the movies? How much was she going to “let” for how much would you have to give? After Beverly and I had gone to bed and sex became part of our lives and not subject to negotiation, I was in a situation unique to me, where kindness between people was important.