Filthy Truth (9781476734750) Read online

  For me, the first big event of our return home was my bar mitzvah.

  Because it happened soon after we’d returned from Florida, I hadn’t had a lot of time to prepare. I was not exactly a star student with my Hebrew lessons, but I’d learned a couple of quick prayers and written a nice little speech in English. The big party was held at the Marquee Room, right there on Nostrand Avenue near Sheepshead Bay. Making it even stranger—and better—was the fact that it was happening on Halloween night. Dad honored the promise he’d made six years before when I saw Ringo Starr on Ed Sullivan. He presented me with a beautiful shiny new white Pearl drum kit that he bought at a music store down the street from Grandma Shirley’s apartment. Drums spoke my language, and I’d been playing for almost half my life at this point. The kit was all set up and ready for me to sit in with the hired band, comprised of older guys who could really play. I kicked off with the Stones’ “Honky Tonk Woman” and followed up with Sly Stone’s “I Want to Take You Higher.” Feeling like a million bucks, I crushed both songs. My family and friends cheered for me like I was John Bonham with Led Zeppelin or Carmine Appice with Vanilla Fudge.

  Among my friends at the party was Jimmy D. Maria, one of my pals from Hudde Junior High, a six-foot-three hulk of a kid. He had red cheeks and red hair that told you right away he was 100 percent Irish. He was also a member in good standing of a gang called the Avenue M Animals. In the playground during recess, Jimmy D. was always playing craps. Maybe the reason I liked him was ’cause he was a gutsy gambler.

  “Hey,” I told Jimmy D. one day in the schoolyard, “I know what the ‘D’ in your name stands for.”

  “What?”

  “ ‘Dice.’ I’m calling you Dice.”

  He laughed it off. “Okay, I’m Dice.”

  The kid was a tough guy, and I liked it when the tough guys liked me.

  “Hey, Dice,” I told him. “I’m glad you showed up.”

  Jimmy was a little pissed off because he was in the middle of a giant Halloween egg fight when his parents called him in and made him come to my party. But once he got there, he had a ball. Everyone did.

  The party went on till late that night, and I got home feeling terrific. When I woke up the next morning, I kept hearing the phrase “Now you’re a man.”

  Funny, though—I didn’t feel like a man. I still felt like a kid. A horny kid. But still a kid.

  The sexual revolution came late to Brooklyn. When it did arrive, it skipped my neighborhood entirely. When I was fourteen or fifteen, a date meant taking a girl to see Sean Connery as James Bond in Diamonds Are Forever or Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry. You’d buy the chick a box of popcorn and awkwardly throw your arm around her, hoping to get some side tit. You’d hope that the side tit would get her going, but that didn’t happen, ’cause her tits were shoved into an industrial-strength bra made of material that felt like iron. If you happened to find a girl who was a little more liberal, after the movie she might let you dry-hump her in the stairwell of her building. In theory. I wasn’t there yet. But that was my goal: coax a girl into a stairwell. For some reason, I always found the stairwells of Brooklyn buildings to be incredibly sexy places. Later on I had some of the best blow jobs of my life in those stairwells.

  But let me be clear. I wasn’t even close to actually touching a real live pussy. Between me and the wet box were overcoats and sweaters and blouses, pantyhose and leggings and all sorts of other shit. I was dying to get to it, but basically I was a nice Jewish boy chasing after nice Jewish girls or nice Italian girls whose niceness was icing me out. Besides, I was a gentleman.

  THE BIG FIGHT

  I HAD MORE than sexual frustrations. I had problems with an Irish gang at school. The trouble started the day that Mom asked me to run down to the German deli to pick up some groceries.

  I was walking out carrying a bag of groceries when this gang was waiting for me. Must have been nine or ten of ’em.

  “What you got in the bag?” asked one.

  “What you think I got? I got groceries.”

  “Wiseass, huh?”

  I didn’t say nothing back. I just started walking home, and they were following me, right on my heels. I kept walking. They got even closer, and finally when I was close to our apartment building they started taunting me and calling me names. I wasn’t really scared except I didn’t want to get hit from behind, so I turned around and said, “Look, I don’t even know you guys. So I don’t know what the problem is.”

  “The problem is,” said the gang leader, “we’re gonna kick your fuckin’ ass.”

  And just like that, they came at me. They circled me. Without my seeing what he was doing, one guy kneeled down behind me. Another guy told the leader, “Why don’t you just take him in the grass and fight him?” I didn’t have a problem with that. I welcomed it. But before that happened, the leader shoved me so hard that I fell back over the guy kneeling behind me. As I tried to get up, I felt a foot split my face open. Blood came pouring out like it was coming out of a faucet.

  I barely made it up to our apartment, where Mom freaked and started screaming for Dad. Then we were in the family Pontiac rushing to the ER of Brookdale Hospital, where Mom was screaming, “My Andrew’s not gonna be scarred for life! I’m not having some ER student practicing on his face! No one’s laying a hand on my kid until I find the best plastic surgeon in this hospital!” Because Grandma Shirley worked at the hospital, we actually were able to get the best plastic surgeon. To this day you can’t see a trace of a scar on my face.

  Crazy as it sounds, a few months later it happened all over again. It was the same Irish gang. They were called the Shed because they hung out under a shed in Marine Park. When they saw me and my friends walking down Avenue S on our way home from a school carnival, they started chasing us. One of them caught me and flung me against a pointy fence that ripped open my hand. As I looked down at the blood streaming from my hand, another guy ran up behind me and hit me in the back of the head with a blackjack. I was back in the hospital, getting stitched up, and Mom was beside herself, pacing, planning; I could almost see her mind at work.

  When we got home, I went into my room to sleep off my headache, and my mother started making calls. As I lay in bed, I heard her say a name, and it clicked. The lowlife piece-of-shit motherfucker who coldcocked me was in my gym class.

  My head throbbing, I burst out of my room. “I know the kid,” I said to my mother, who was still on the phone. “He’s in my gym class.”

  She saw the rage in my face. She cupped her palm over the phone. “You stay away from him,” she whispered urgently.

  “Ma, I’m telling you—”

  “It’s handled, Andrew. You hear me?”

  I couldn’t speak. I just burned.

  “Promise me you won’t go near him,” my mother said.

  I bit my lip so hard I thought I’d drawn blood.

  “I promise,” I lied.

  I didn’t want my mother to worry.

  I went back to my room, and Mom went back to making calls. I got into bed vowing one thing: that kid was a dead man. Then I heard my father on the phone, too. Both of my parents began talking with urgency. I couldn’t hear everything they were saying, but I got the gist. Because my parents were from the neighborhood, they had connections all over the community. They knew who to call. I was a curious kid and I knew something was happening that concerned me, so I stayed up. I listened to all the calls and conversations between Mom and Dad. I learned that their connection told Mom—not Dad—to make a call to the father of the kid who fucked up my head and slammed me with the blackjack.

  I got out of bed, tiptoed across my floor, and put my ear to my bedroom door. I heard Mom on the phone. “This is Jackie Silverstein, Andrew’s mother,” she said. “The boy your son beat up twice. With all due respect, your son is an animal. First he kicked Andrew in the face and sent him to the hospital, and then he blindsided him with a blackjack. Two different beatings, two trips to the hospital, surgeries, stitches,
a nightmare. I also want to mention that it was ten kids against one. Now, I’m not calling you because I want you to pay the hospital bill, because I don’t. We don’t need your money. I’m calling you because I want you to hold up the phone as you go in his bedroom, wake up your animal of a son, and beat the shit out of him. I want to hear him crying and yelling for you to stop. And then I want you to beat him up some more. If you ask me why you should do this, look out your window. Look right now. Parked outside you’ll see a white Lincoln. Inside are three men who also want to hear the sounds of you beating up your son. If they don’t hear those sounds, they’ll kick down your door. You don’t want that to happen. Trust me. You do not want these gentlemen inside your home. You just wanna go and beat the crap out of your son.”

  Mom must have taken the phone off her ear and held it up so Dad could hear as well. Even behind my bedroom door I could hear the sounds of the screaming kid. That was enough for Mom.

  But it wasn’t enough for me.

  • • •

  I had my share of fights. I kicked plenty of ass. I also got my ass kicked plenty of times. I get my head split open in a street fight? I could live with that. But getting coldcocked from behind? No way. I didn’t give a crap if this kid’s old man, old lady, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, cousins, grandparents, and dog took turns beating the shit out of him every night while they watched Wheel of Fortune. This gutless fuck hits me from behind? I didn’t care what Mom arranged. I was gonna repay the favor.

  I didn’t really have a plan. I just felt a wave of rage. I waited nearly three weeks for the kid to recover from his father beating the hell out of him and for him to think that the incident was over. One day we had “free play” in gym class. I kept to a corner of the gym, hanging with my boys, playing badminton or some shit while the kid and his buddies shot hoops across the way. I went over to the gym teacher, Mr. Harper, and told him I had to take a squirt. I ducked into the hall, waited ten seconds until I saw Mr. Harper turn away, then snuck back into the gym and went straight for the rack that held the baseball bats. I grabbed the first one and, my neck pulsing with pure heat, headed straight for the kid, who stood at the free-throw line, his back toward me. I broke into a run and cut the distance between us to about thirty feet, the rage inside me building.

  Then I sprinted.

  Twenty feet away.

  I heard a voice behind me: “Andrew!”

  Fifteen feet.

  “Andrew!”

  Ten feet.

  I started to swing the bat. The kid turned. He saw the fury in my face. He saw the bat. His eyes widened in sheer terror.

  Wham!

  Mr. Harper hit me from the side with his shoulder, locking his arms around my knees in a textbook tackle. I grunted as I went down, the bat flying out of my hands, cartwheeling and clanging on the gleaming gym floor.

  “You all right?” Mr. Harper said to me.

  I grunted again, the wind knocked out of me, and looked up.

  The kid’s entire face was dripping with fear.

  “I’m okay,” I said.

  “I was waiting for this,” Mr. Harper said. “Your mother called the school.”

  “She did?”

  “Yeah. She knew one day you’d go after him.”

  I exhaled, and when I did, two thoughts escaped with my breath.

  First, thank God for my mother. If she hadn’t called the school, the entire course of my life could have been completely different.

  Second, as that kid now knew, you don’t fuck with me.

  THE MAIN EVENT

  DESPITE GETTING MY head split open, things weren’t all bad. I actually had a couple of dates back then with cute chicks. I even went to Pips, the first comedy club in the country, right there on Emmons Avenue in Brooklyn’s own Sheepshead Bay. That night was special, ’cause Rodney Dangerfield, already a legend, made a surprise appearance, causing a commotion with his “I can’t get no respect” jokes. I laughed my ass off but had no idea—how could I?—that one day this guy would change my life.

  As a sixteen-year-old, my life got better when I hitched up with my first girlfriend, Cheryl. She lived in Sea Gate, a gated neighborhood at the end of Coney Island.

  We met at a dance on Nostrand Avenue. Cheryl’s sister, Bonnie, was tight with my sister, Natalie, so we knew people in common. That helped us skip a lot of the usual awkward bullshit small talk. We soon found ourselves just talking casually and laughing easily. We danced to a couple of fast songs, and then toward the end of the night the DJ played Chicago’s “Colour My World,” a beautiful slow song. As soon as the instrumental part that kicked off the song started, Cheryl and I both looked away, staring in opposite directions. Then, somehow, I got the guts to lean in and ask her to dance.

  We started stiffly, my hands barely touching her waist, her arms lightly on my back. As soon as Terry Kath started singing “As time goes on . . .” we looked into each other’s eyes and smiled simultaneously, and I pulled her closer and Cheryl put her arms around my neck. We stayed that way, our eyes closed, our bodies swaying, hardly moving. I felt so . . . comfortable, so natural. And when Terry Kath sang “Color my world with hope of loving you . . .” we opened our eyes at the same time and we kissed.

  My first real kiss.

  Man.

  The room blurred. Time stopped. My whole body felt warm, from my haircut to my feet. Every fiber of my being felt like it was glowing. We held the kiss for what seemed forever, and then as the song ended, we pulled our lips apart, slowly, gently, sweetly, and we both smiled.

  Coney Island, the scene of our first date, should have been a romantic backdrop. It was great getting hot dogs and crinkly fries at Nathan’s. It was great riding the spinning Ferris wheel. But ten minutes later, as we walked down the boardwalk, it wasn’t so great watching Cheryl lean over the railing and throw her guts up into the sand. That wasn’t the only stumbling block. After Cheryl cleaned herself up and we were back on our way, holding hands and enjoying the ocean breeze, I saw this big kid coming toward us. His hand was wrapped in a bloody towel and he was holding a knife. He stopped us cold and told me to give him a half a dollar. What should I do?

  I figured I could probably kick the knife out of his hand and take the prick down. I wasn’t afraid of him or his knife. But I knew Brooklyn. I knew Coney. I heard the rumblings of his friends under the boardwalk right beneath us. There were probably six or seven of ’em waiting to attack. I wanted to keep those guys happy, so I said, “A half buck’s not enough. How about five bucks?” That disarmed him. After taking the money he went away, and I walked Cheryl to her house in Sea Gate. Fortunately her parents and her brother weren’t home, so we got in about fifteen minutes of heavy petting.

  It never went further than my sweaty hands up her shirt. Cheryl was sweet and I was sweet and neither one of us was ready to do the deed. During our months of courtship, in fact, my main memory doesn’t have to do with sex. It has to do with Frank Sinatra.

  My parents had tickets to see Sinatra in the Main Event, his big splashy concert at Madison Square Garden. I was at Cheryl’s in Sea Gate when the live show came on TV. We were sitting with Cheryl’s parents, along with her brother and 110-year-old grandmother. No one wanted to miss Sinatra.

  I can still hear the nasal voice of Brooklyn’s own Howard Cosell doing the introduction. Normally Cosell was talking about some sporting event that I didn’t give a shit about. But this was different. This was Howard saying, “Tonight from the Garden, the most enduring champion of them all, Frank Sinatra, comes to the entire Western Hemisphere live with the Main Event: Frank Sinatra in concert!”

  The Chairman of the Board was kicking ass. He was singing “The Lady Is a Tramp” and “You Make Me Feel So Young” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” I was doubly excited to see him because my parents were there. My parents were his biggest fans. They told me about how, in the 1950s, he was down and out until he came back with an Academy Award–winning role in From Here to Eternity, how he was al
ways coming back, how he always got back in the ring and brought the action. I needed to be right up next to the action. It made no sense that I was in Sea Gate when Frank was in the Garden taking over the world. I wanted to take over the world like Frank. I wanted to command that kind of crowd, that kind of energy. I wanted to take over the Garden.

  TEN BUCKS

  I ALSO STILL wanted to get laid. But there I was, a horny teenager working on weekends at the Jeanery, one of the first all-denim stores in New York, with my friend Larry Katz, who spelled it out to me.

  “If you wanna get laid,” he said, “they gotta get paid.”

  “Who’s they?” I asked.

  “The hookers, schmuck. Who else? They’re the only ones who’s gonna give you what you want.”

  “How much?”

  “Ten bucks.”

  I could afford ten bucks. I’d been saving money since I started taking odd jobs. The first one was working with my sister for Stanley Kaplan, a super-smart guy whose business on Kings Highway provided preparatory materials to students taking the SAT and other tests. My sister was a brain, so she fit right in. But being a smart aleck, I’d hand out the wrong tapes or I’d rip pages out of the student guides just to make the kids a little crazy. I didn’t last long in the job.

  I was better suited for work at the Jeanery, also located on Kings Highway. I wasn’t a half-bad salesman, especially when it came to telling the female customers that the jeans made their ass cheeks look great. A couple of them liked my approach and let me take them to the candy store for a chocolate egg cream, but that was it. I still wasn’t getting inside their panties—which was why I decided to follow Larry’s advice and buy ten bucks’ worth of pussy.

  “Okay, Larry,” I said. “Where do we go to pay for the lay?”

  “Where else?” said Larry. “Times Square.”