Great Kisser Page 10

  On the Bowery, he pointed out to me where the homeless and the legless beggars gathered in filthy hallways or stared out of storefront hotel windows, and told me how lucky I was.

  It was a gaslit world I shared with him into the late 1960s, with memories of the El rumbling overhead, the Willy Lomans and Frank Cowperwoods still making deals, the Laffmovie on 42nd Street where the silents and Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers still reigned. In the 1960s he was consigned to the “bullpen” at the insurance company he worked for, one room filled with the men who weren’t doing enough business to rate offices of their own. There his colleagues tortured each other, sizing up each other’s suits and stroking each other’s ties disdainfully.

  My father never kissed, but waited to be kissed, like a boy waiting to be taken care of. I would embrace him and he would sit quietly, full of aggrievement and wanting me to make up for all the wrongs that had been done to him.

  “The world is your oyster, kiddo!” or “It’s your America, mister!” he shouted in his manic moods, waving his arms and skipping down the streets, jerkily running like a robot out of control. On weekends, like Cinderella at the ball, glowing and jazzed up, keeping time to the radio music by bopping the driving wheel or belting out “Smile, Darn Ya Smile,” “When You’re Smiling,” “Let A Smile Be Your Umbrella On a Rainy, Rainy Day,” “The Best Things In Life Are Free,” and “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” he drove me up to the Concord or Grossinger’s in the Catskills, where he somersaulted across the lobbies. There we would mingle with a “better class of people” and my father would practice his rhumba steps with the platinum blondes. He would always say he wanted me to “feel that you are as good as the next person.” He asked me, “What father would do what I do for my darling son?”

  Beside the pool at the Concord, composer Henry Tobias sat at the piano and crooned his hit, “Miss You (Since You Went Away Dear),” Sophie Tucker played cards in her bathing suit, towel bunched atop her head, and Buddy Hackett wooed Cherie, his wife-to-be, with funny faces and his squeaky voice. On Sunday nights, we would gloomily return to Astoria near the Greyhound bus arcade and climb the stairs of his boarding house (he’d moved out of the Paris Hotel room again) with its stale food smells.

  But the wildly sunny, perfect moods could not last. There would always be something to disturb him, some outrageous speck of reality: a dirty fork I left in the sink, my turning a soup spoon toward rather than away from myself in the classy hotel dining room, and my father would be sent reeling to earth in a spasm of rage.

  How had he become a father, this man of smoky hotel lobbies and boarding house rooms?

  X

  He was not a good father, but he saved my life—at the start, from my mother, who would have let me go under when she and my father separated. Years later, my mother would frequently ask me when I was going to be drafted. The Vietnam war was on and she didn’t want me to miss it. I asked her if she wanted me to be killed. She would never reply, but smile at me silently.

  Although my father was anything but a wealthy man, he sent me away to boarding school in Connecticut, and on to St. John’s College in Annapolis and the New School in New York.

  For forty-two years, we would reunite at the same table at the Automat, where he would hold forth in his very loud voice with that same monologue, recounting my faults while an audience of strangers at our table and nearby listened with fascination. Our best lines:

  He: You’re not a man! I was too good to you. I made you soft. You’re soft.

  Me: I am a man! I am a man!

  He: Sure you are. I was only kidding. Listen, I couldn’t cut the mustard either.

  Sometimes, gritting his teeth and clenching his hands, he would say, “I just want to murder you, you make me so mad.” I believed this was true. His hatred and jealousy would boil over about my going out with girls, or about my writing. His favorite story, by W. Somerset Maugham, was about a young man who gives up everything (which he thought I was doing by not becoming an insurance salesman like him) to pursue a career as an artist—a concert pianist. My father always climaxed the story by asking me with gleaming eyes: “Guess what happened to him?” And I let him have the punch line again and again: “He discovers he has stubby fingers and can’t play worth a dime!”

  And then he took out his fucking calculator. “Just for fun, Michael, let’s figure out how much money I’ve given you over the years. Let’s see—you’re fifty years old”—he gleefully punched the buttons—“ I’ve given you $323,857.23. Let’s see how much you’ve given me.” He punched away with a big grin on his face. He laughed wildly. “Guess how much, Michael! Fifty years—$67.18, and that includes the tie you just sent me. Sixty-seven dollars and eighteen cents! Isn’t that amazing?”

  There were things he insisted I must not do: fuck a woman, have a loving relationship, leave him to fend for himself “alone like a dog,” become a father myself, have a successful career as a writer—rise above him, leave the Goldberg male domain of sullen, rancorous, passive, silent and raging men who did mostly nothing at all. To do any of these things was to betray him and break his heart. He had loved me best as a small boy. “That was the time you said you loved me very much,” he told me. “That was the only time I really felt it.”

  My achievements ruptured his hold on me. But he was genuinely proud of them as much as he hated and feared them. He carried a patronizing poem I wrote about him, “Portrait of an Insurance Salesman,” published in The Nation when I was eighteen, in his wallet and whipped it out to show to anyone he met. He did not want me to succeed, because he was so afraid he would lose me. But in the end, he could not bear to let me fail either. And so, bitterly and grudgingly and with unstinting stinginess, he gave me the things I need to achieve the career, if not the life, of my choice.

  He was so fearful because he was truly faithless about the human condition. “Only money matters,” he said again and again, or drawing on his experience in the insurance world, “Money does terrible things to people.” To aspire, to risk, to give, to love—it was all useless. Everyone betrayed, especially women. Money determined all survival in the end.

  And he was, of course, faithless toward himself. He would laugh before the joke was told, would not listen after asking for directions, because he was so anxious about the impression he was making while listening.

  In the end, the balance sheet comes out almost right. For my father did have character and honor. He never cheated anyone. His word was his bond. It was simply beyond his understanding that others lied or stole or cut corners, even though in the business he was part of, many of his associates lived on the margins of truthfulness.

  There were times I tried to help him, times when things really seemed to be said, digging new paths we could follow together. But then he would turn to me and say, “Be honest. I’ve been discussing this with the fellows at the office. Which is the best roast beef sandwich; Arby’s or McDonald’s?” Or he would proudly turn to me with a mischievous grin on his face and show me a large envelope from Publishers Clearing House and a letter in large print addressed specifically to “Dear Izzie Goldberg.” I would stare at it, and he would ask, “Who says your father isn’t important? Who says your father doesn’t count in this world?”

  XI

  The candle is burning down and soon I will blow it out. The candle of my father’s unlit, untapped life.

  I remember him bringing me my copy of Variety each week when I was eight years old because I loved it so much, and a kosher pot roast and potato salad sandwich that left me limp with pleasure and gluttony. On the morning of Al Jolson’s death (which I had already learned of), how he tiptoed into my room in the morning where he thought I was still sleeping, to tell me the news, his infinite tenderness and understanding of how I felt. I was six years old. Seated next to my father at the Palace, or in front of the TV, watching the immortal comics from the tenements: Durante, Eddie Cantor, Burns and Allen.

  And how, later, my father made me afraid of being a l
over or a father or a man.

  How he talked on the phone about me to relatives, whispering, “psychiatrist … therapy … mental problems …,” drawing a wall around us against the world so there would be no family: only us, my father and myself.

  By my late twenties, I would stop in every doorway to inspect the remaining strands of hair on my head, reflected in the window, and comb them down. I was terrified of life. Even my father’s apartment was somewhere to go.

  In the final years before he entered the nursing home, when he was in his late eighties, he began talking aloud to himself even when I was in the room.

  He talked about me: “He had a paper route as a boy. He was smart. He got it before Christmas, heavy papers. So I took the car and took him in the night …”

  “He hurt me and I hurt him. It’s an even score.”

  “He should call me up two or three times to see if I’m dead or alive.

  “He says his life is difficult. How is it difficult? I listen to Phil Donahue to understand.

  “And what about me? His life is a bed of roses. I had several operations by his age. He works in the daytime, goes out to the pictures. It’s idealistic.”

  In 1990, on the coldest day of the year, it was my mother’s turn to go.

  My father was waiting for me in front of the funeral parlor. He smiled. “Well, Michael, at least you’re getting some experience.”

  “Let’s go inside, Dad,” I said.

  “I’ll be an outcast in there. All her relatives.” My parents had been divorced for forty years. “She never showed any appreciation. Didn’t I take her to the hospital twice, and she was even more hostile to me than she was to you!”

  The funeral director was waiting for me inside, along with five mourners. A small freckled man resembling a radish joined us. It was Gus Sharon, my mother’s lawyer and old friend. Gus was wearing a red and green Scottish beret over his bald head, a Hawaiian shirt, and black suspenders for the occasion.

  “Him!” my father said. “What’s he doing here?”

  “Hello, Izzie,” Gus said to my father. “I’m the lawyer.”

  Later my father jabbed me on the shoulder. “What does she need a chapel service for?” he shouted at me.

  “She wanted it, Dad,” I said.

  “Do it at the grave, in the fresh air!” my father said. “It’s a waste of money.”

  “You’ll freeze out there.”

  “Are you crazy?” my father said. “I’m not going out there. I’m an old man.”

  “So what’s the problem?”

  The funeral director asked the group to adjourn to the chapel.

  “What’s the point?” my father said.

  “And what’s he doing here?” He pointed at Gus.

  “It’s not your funeral.”

  “I’m the one who suffered. She threw me out into the world with two suitcases.” He looked at Gus, who was talking to my aunt, and said, “I’ll bet that smoothie made a deal with the undertaker for the coffin too. I hope he breaks his neck.”

  And now, even so, I grow nostalgic. I hear his loving voice when I was young, and when he recalled me as a young child: “Your little hands, Michael, reaching out to me.” And I see Benjamin’s little hands, and my father’s when he was a boy.

  I have my eternal image of him in a social setting, in whatever room he was in, sitting in a chair, all lit up, shriveled up, his head bobbing with feigned interest, feeling, no matter what the situation, resentful and starved for affection: that people were not giving him enough care, enough attention. He would sit there smiling, nodding his head, laughing, never listening.

  What I remember most about him was this loneliness, an infinite loneliness encapsulated in background music. I listened to it with him in the elevators in the 42nd Street business area and in the Chanin Building off Lexington Avenue where he worked. He brought the music into his apartment, where he played Jackie Gleason and Mantovanni records constantly. Homogenized, watered down and soppily sentimental music of unrequited love, silence, empty and airless hotel lobbies where blondes of a certain age glanced at him appraisingly, the Paris Hotel lobby, the singles bars and dances and clubs he went to—isolation and disconnection. Watching the Lawrence Welk Show on his two TV sets side by side, or the Colgate Comedy Hour on Sunday nights.

  XII

  In 1995 he entered the nursing home. He was ninety—still vital, raging and loud. Arriving there, he immediately called all his favorite waitresses in the restaurants he had frequented to say goodbye. There were signs of aging he could no longer deny. He chose the best nursing home on the East Coast: the most expensive, the most like a hotel, since he had always loved living in hotels. And he jumped to the head of the long entry line by enticing his nephew Joe, who worked there, with the prospect of inheriting his shrinking bank account.

  Furious at me when I left New York for Los Angeles in 1990, he’d made Joe executor of his estate, and then removed him two months later.

  I sat with him in his tiny room at the nursing home. He outlined his burial plans.

  “You’ll be coming into town with a corpse waiting to be shipped,” he said. “That’s no good, Michael. Please write the funeral home in New York now that I am here and they should expect my body when I die. And I hope that will be soon. Tell them I’m to be buried in the Mannheim Gardens and give them the exact location of the burial spot. You’ve got it in the deed. I’m always trying to make things easier for you.”

  My father lay on the bed, his legs like sticks. He had pneumonia, had lost his hearing and needed a cataract operation. When I had called to say I was flying to see him, he had shouted, “Do not come! Do not come! You must not come!” On the following day, he left a message on my answering machine: “Come.”

  “I didn’t want you to see me like this,” he said when I arrived. “You know I’m on drugs now. I’m not eating. I want to die. They won’t let me. I see no reason for living. You shouldn’t be here. I don’t want to antagonize the big shots. I want to remain on good terms with them. They got very angry when I called the police and the fire department. They could send me up to the pit with all the queers. I should be dead. I want to be dead, but I can’t. They won’t let me.” He looked at me. “Don’t be angry for my wanting to die, Michael. It would give me the peace I don’t have.”

  My father could not hear me at all now, so I wrote notes in response to his questions, or questions for him to answer. He told me to tear up every note in little pieces and to flush it down the toilet.

  A nurse came in to give him his pills. “Thank you, dear,” he said. As she went out, he said in his very loud voice, “She’s no good.”

  “I was so mad at you about your mother’s funeral,” he said. “I still get upset thinking about it. I was very hurt that you didn’t side with me. You’re my son! People go to prison, Michael, and their families stick with them. I detested that Gus because I looked him in the eye and said, ‘Did Minnie pick that expensive coffin?’ And he said yes. I didn’t even like her coffin. I think mine is far superior. That man lied to me, he said he never picked that coffin for Minnie. She thought about dying as much as the man in the moon! When did she pick it?”

  The next morning, my father began eating solid food again for the first time in ten days.

  I wrote him dozens of notes; that I would come back to be with him for the cataract operation, why he must eat, must live, that he was too suspicious of people.

  “You’re right,” he said to this, and made me tear up the note.

  We walked down the hallway, my father with his cane. The men and women stared into space, some with misshapen mouths, some holding on to their pocketbooks. My father was animated and purposeful, a dynamo beside them. “Look at all these poor people,” he said.

  His voice bounced off the walls. “They sent a big colored man to look you over when you were in my room. See that big black Negro over there?” I saw the guard’s shoulders stiffen as he walked in front of us. A blank-faced, stooped young
man paced from one end of the hallway to the other. My father said, “See that poor idiot? He’s a rabbi’s son.” The young man turned and said to me, “Grandson.”

  We sat down in the hallway. “My roommate Bob moved out. He was a spy. A nice man. I liked him. He took me out, wheeled me around when I couldn’t walk. But now he’s left and he mailed me thirty Bic pens. So you see?” He looked at me. “You must think I’m crazy. But there are things about your cousin Joe I can’t tell you yet. Michael, he tried to rob me blind. I thought at first the staff was in league with him. That’s when I called the police. But they weren’t.”

  XIII

  My father had begged my cousin to help get him into the home. He felt abandoned and had entered into one of his cyclical rages against me. Joe and his wife drove to New York, helped him pack and transported him to the home.

  As a boy visiting Roxbury with my father, I had slept in Joe’s bedroom, listened to Jack Benny with him, played games, told stories and dived beneath the blankets, hoping the night would go on and on.

  Now, forty years later, the unctuous voice on the phone was Joe, speaking with deep sighs, coping with the burden of my father and his money. “Dad is doing well, he’s getting his pills, we all get old …” More sighs, no mention of cash. But after all, he was there and I wasn’t. He deserved the $5,000 my father gave him. I thought his suspicion had turned on Joe as it had turned on me.

  Then the phone call from my father’s social worker. “Your father’s mail was found opened in Joe’s office. Something funny. We have severed all contact between them.”

  On my next visit to Roxbury, I waited for my father in his room after the cataract operation.

  When my father came into the room with dark glasses, he laughed with pleasure that I was there. His hearing had returned. He had gained thirteen pounds, was eating regularly and was working out in the gym again.