Normally at the end of my stand-up performances, I would open the show up for questions from the audience. Sometimes when my response to a question got an enormous laugh I would save that question. One of the questions I saved was: “Mr. Brooks, were you ever arrested?”
My immediate answer was “No!” And then I thought…wait a minute.
“Let me amend that. Was I ever arrested? Well…nearly.”
Here is where the touch of Crazy Uncle Louie in me comes out.
Sometimes on a Sunday afternoon, a couple of us kids would frequent the local Woolworth, which we knew as the five-and-ten because a lot of the items were actually sold for five or ten cents—Hershey bars, little pen-sized flashlights, whistles, yo-yos, etc. We’d often walk up and down the aisles and when the clerks weren’t looking we’d try to snatch something. We never called it stealing; we used to call it “taking.”
“Let’s go taking!”
Normally, when no one was looking I could always get a yo-yo or a whistle and slip it into my jacket with no problems. But one Sunday afternoon I tempted fate. There, in a special display of Roy Rogers hats and T-shirts, was a pearl-handled toy replica of a Roy Rogers six-shooter. It was the most thrilling thing I’d ever seen. But how to slip it into my coat? It wasn’t a whistle or a yo-yo, not easy. When the clerk at the display turned his head to attend to a customer, I took off my sweater, dropped it on the pistol, and picked it up. I was nearly out the door when hands grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and pulled me back in the store.
A great big man announced, “I’m the manager and I’m sick and tired of you kids stealing!”
And I knew, this was one guy I couldn’t con by saying, “just taking.”
As the manager marched me up the aisle he said, “I’m gonna call the police and have you arrested! And then I’m gonna call your parents and let them know everything!”
“Please!” I tearfully shouted. “I don’t have parents! I just have a mother! My father is dead! Please, give me a break.”
The budding actor in me tried his best, but to no avail. The unrelenting manager kept steadfastly marching me toward his office. In a blinding flash an idea popped into my head. I reached into my sweater, pulled out the toy gun, and shouted, “Get back or I’ll blow your head off!”
For a moment, it worked. He saw the gun and jumped back. I ran with all my might and got out of the store. I never went back there again, and hoped that he wouldn’t remember my face. Chances are he didn’t live in our neighborhood but came from Queens or somewhere to work at the store.
I realized then that I could never be half as good as Arsène Lupin, the famous fictional French jewel thief. So right then and there I decided to give up “taking,” for good.
When we weren’t “taking,” my friends and I loved to play stickball. I was a skinny, stringy little kid with endless energy, and I was always running. One day we were playing stickball and I was up at bat. There was a ’36 Chevy parked on our street and I took off my brand-new camel’s hair Passover holiday sweater, folded it very carefully, and tucked it in that nice niche in the front of the fender right underneath one of the headlights. Then I got a scratch single and a bad throw sent me to second. Suddenly I see this beautiful black ’36 Chevy pull away from the curb and take off with my sweater. Whoosh! I went after it. “He’s out!” they were yelling. “He’s out! He left the base!”
But I was gone, the heck with the game. What was that compared with a new holiday sweater? For twenty minutes I chased that car. Somewhere in Flatbush I finally flagged it down and got my sweater back. Jesse Owens could not have made that run any faster, only a ten-year-old boy built like a wire hanger.
When I was about six and my brother Bernie was about ten, we boarded a bus together to go to Camp Sussex. It was a camp in New Jersey that was free for underprivileged children. It was funded by Eddie Cantor, a famous radio, stage, and movie star in those years. It was for kids from ages five to ten, that’s why it was just me and Bernie. It was the first time I had ever left home. It was both wonderful and terrible.
When the bus pulled in, I was amazed to see miles and miles of grass and trees and sky. I asked my counselor, “Where are the tenements? Where are the fire escapes? Where are the stores? Where are the cars?” He explained that this was called “the country,” and that, believe it or not, there was a lot more of it than the city. I didn’t like that a bit. It was pretty hard to swallow. Ever since I was born, all I saw were stoops and streets and stores and buildings. I didn’t know about this thing called “the country.” It was a little alarming.
But pretty soon I got used to it and discovered the free food—little green apples that grew on an apple tree that you could pick and eat and didn’t have to pay for! One afternoon I ate about thirty of them and got the worst bellyache of my life, not to mention the runs. That was about a hundred years ago and I’ve steadfastly stuck to my vow never to eat another little green apple.
The counselors told us to write to our parents, so it was really the beginning of my career as a writer. With my stubby pencil I used to write letters that went something like this:
Dear Mom,
I miss you. Send me gum. I love you.
Your son,
Mel
Rather primitive. It wasn’t much of a letter, and later in life my writing skills improved somewhat. I actually won an Academy Award for writing the original screenplay for The Producers. But it was a beginning, and a beginning is a beginning.
I remember always being funny, but the first time was at Camp Sussex. I was about six years old and whatever the counselors said, I would turn it around.
“Put your plates in the garbage and stack the scraps, boys!”
“Stay at the shallow end of the pool until you learn to drown!”
“Who said that? Kaminsky! Grab him! Hold him!” Slap!
But the other kids laughed and I was a success. I needed a success. I was short. I was scrawny. I was the last one they picked to be on the team. “Oh, all right, we’ll take him. Put him in the outfield.”
I would have liked to have been taller, but as I understood it there are only two ways to be taller. One way was to have very tall parents. That would assure that you wouldn’t be so short, you would certainly be taller. The other way was a difficult process: large men pulled up on your head and your chin while other large men grabbed your ankles and pulled down with all their might for four hours a day. I thought it through and decided no, I’ll stay short. Besides, if they don’t set your ankles back again right you walk like Harry Ritz for the rest of your life. (More about the Ritz Brothers later.)