Our neighborhood was kids and more kids. The Jewish families had one or two kids. The Protestant families had two and three kids. The Catholic families averaged around five kids. This was an era when working-class parents still had large families built on faith, believing that Providence would see them through. Sports and games were the glue that held our neighborhood together. Nearly all of our neighboring families brought talent, if not greatness, to whatever games they were drafted to play. At least that’s what we told ourselves. With names like Fat Tony, Buff, and Steiner Forty-Niner, the kids could throw, run, hit, and tackle. They could drive, pitch, and putt. They were fast, tough, and had good hands. They would stand in T-shirts in forty-degree weather, ignoring the cries of their siblings or mothers. With a never-say-die glint in their eyes, they were focused only on the current, last-ditch effort to score another touchdown. Day after day, sunset after sunset, we never, ever wanted to go home.
Our Winter Games were limited by topography. With no hills to speak of, our sledding runs lasted for only seconds down modest inclines. Snow meant snowballs as missiles, used in games that involved the risk we sought more as we got older. One winter you are building a snowman, the next you’re crouched down behind a fence inside the sanctuary of Hole-in-the-Wall, flinging snowballs at cars as they slowly curved around the Unqua Circle, the snowball thrower’s Dealey Plaza. The game was simple. Hit the car with a snowball, ten points; hit the windshield, twenty points; put the snowball into any open window, fifty points; hit the driver of the vehicle who has leapt from the car in order to scream at or threaten you, one hundred points. The Hall of Famer, the legend, the Sandy Koufax of this contest, was my brother Daniel. Many adult men, unwilling to leave their cars stopped in the relatively busy traffic circle, were gunned down by Daniel. Some were hit more than once. Imagine a car drives by and you hit it with a snowball. The driver gets out and BANG! You hit him. The driver spots you through the fence and he charges after you. But like Namath in the pocket, waiting that extra second for Maynard or Sauer to gain another step, you hang in. You go at them like the Pittsburgh defense, and BANG, you fire again. In the Winter Games, in our contests in every season, Daniel was the champion.
Another even more frowned-upon activity was “skitching.” This involved waiting behind a parked car, a tree, or some other blind that was adjacent to a stop sign. Cars usually came to a full stop on those icy roads. The skitcher would get down low and scurry in behind the car, grab onto the bumper, and get pulled along streets that had yet to be plowed, salted, or sanded. You didn’t want to be spotted by other drivers, so our block, with the golf course lined with hedges and its stop sign, was prime. Few people went out for a drive right after a big snowfall, so there wasn’t a lot of traffic coming up behind you. If you grew up near a lake, in winter, I suppose, you ice fished. In the mountains out West, you skied. In Nassau Shores we threw snowballs at cars or grabbed onto their bumpers for a few minutes of thrills. This was our calling.
2
Squirrels
Perhaps the most consistent bond I had with my dad was watching movies on TV at night. At around 10 p.m., just before she went to sleep, my mother would turn down the heat in our home to fifty-five degrees to save on fuel oil. Some nights, I actually thought I could see my own breath. I had devised some lame excuse that enabled me to end up in front of the TV most nights after 11 p.m. “I’m gonna wait up for dad,” I’d tell her, as if he had to be let into his own house, like it was some military base. My mother would moan some reply, lacking the energy to question me. Around 10 or 10:30, my father would walk in. Even when I was ten or eleven, still a young child, he showed me little affection. He had few kind words or gestures. But I persisted, asking him about his day. Tired and distracted as always, he went to the refrigerator to eat whatever was left over, and then lay on the couch with his newspapers and watched the 11 o’clock news.
At 11:30 the local CBS station aired the Late Show, a movie broadcast that ran until around one. At 1 a.m., they showed the Late, Late Show, playing another classic movie. Some nights, they actually had the Late, Late, Late Show at around 3 a.m. Network movie programming at that time relied entirely on old studio libraries. Weekdays brought the 4:30 Movie on the local ABC station, which, for a period of time, showed the same film the entire week. A precursor of the VCR, this was for viewers who could not watch a movie in one sitting. (While home sick one week, I watched Inherit the Wind five times and memorized every line.) CBS had Picture for a Sunday Afternoon. There was Chiller Theatre, showing horror. On our TV, the Late Show broadcast movies like How Green Was My Valley, Five Graves to Cairo, or Passage to Marseille. At night, the pattern was always the same. My dad would say, “You’d better get up to bed.” Then he would read the old capsule movie reviews from the New York Times TV section. These were pithy, often funny one-liners that described the film. (Example: “Ball of Fire: Barbara Stanwyck tells Gary Cooper where he can go.”) My father would let out a low whistle; then he would say, “Witness for the Prosecution. Now that’s a good one.” I’d ask if I could watch some of it, and he would say, “OK, but just a few minutes.” He’d smile at the opening credits, and within fifteen minutes, he was out. The first film I ever stayed up to watch with him was Sorry, Wrong Number with Barbara Stanwyck and Burt Lancaster. It made me a die-hard fan of both stars, and I would go on to watch that movie again perhaps twenty or thirty times. That film and A Christmas Carol with Alastair Sim are movies I still watch regularly, and although my dad has been gone for many years, when I put them on, I feel as if he is in the room with me again.
I watched hundreds of movies on TV. Before VCRs and DVDs, you had to pay attention. There was no rewind button. I learned every line. “That’ll get you in real good with your boss,” Bogart intones to Elisha Cook Jr. “Whaddya hear, whaddya say,” Cagney chirps in his signature style. “Fasten your seat belts, it’s gonna be a bumpy night,” Bette Davis sneers at her dinner guests. “Whatever you do, don’t leave him lyin’ here like this,” Brando implores Eva Marie Saint. I watched every movie I could and memorized as many lines as I could, which was actually easier than you’d think because actors back then had a style you don’t often see anymore. To watch Kirk Douglas or Elizabeth Taylor or Gregory Peck is to see film acting at its apex, because it was newer then. It was more important and mysterious. Even a battalion of stars who were not necessarily leading men and women but rather pure and wonderful supporting actors could enter your consciousness and never leave. From Franklin Pangborn to Thelma Ritter, from Slim Pickens to Maureen Stapleton, from Lou Costello to Hermione Gingold, I ate them up. My first acting lessons were in that room, with my dad, and they were the best I’d ever have. Gable taught me how to act. Peter O’Toole taught me. William Holden taught me as much, if not more, than any other. Orson Welles, Teresa Wright, Vera Miles, Jerry Lewis, Rock Hudson. There are more acting lessons, real lessons, in watching To Kill a Mockingbird than in an entire year in most drama school classrooms. When Brando shouts to Lee J. Cobb, “I’m glad what I done to you,” a lump comes up inside me every time. These films are treasures to me. And every emotion I could not express passed through me whenever I watched them.