Читать книгу Ernie: - Ernest Borgnine - Страница 12

It’s a weird thing to look at your father and see a stranger. He seemed vaguely familiar and yet he wasn’t familiar at all. And it wasn’t as if I could see my features in his. I was only seven and my face was that of a boy. This was a man with a hint of red hair and a stern look about him. He obviously recognized me, though, because he came over and hugged me with the big hull of the ship behind me. The smell of brick dust on him kicked the smell of the sea out of my nose. We claimed our big trunk and made our way crosstown to Grand Central Station. The noise and smoke and crowds of the city were startling after years spent on the farm and then on Carpi. But it was also energizing and my eyes darted everywhere, taking it all in. Especially Times Square, which we passed through on the way to the train station. The marquees of the theaters, the bulbs and neon of the signs, the big billboards advertising more movies than I’d seen in my entire life, were hypnotic. That wasn’t when the acting bug bit me, but I sure felt the beating of its little wings.

Except for the clothes on my back and the memories in my head, I hadn’t brought anything of the old country with me. But that was okay. My mother said that this was going to be a new start.

“Another one,” she added wistfully.

We returned to North Haven, where my Dad was true to his word. He had settled down and my parents were very happy together. A year after our return my mother had a daughter, Evelyn June Borgnine, born on April 25th. It was quite an exciting event for me not because I had a sister—that hadn’t hit me yet—but because I had the chance to place telephone calls to my aunts and my grandmother, who lived nearby, to tell them the news. Even the operator sensed the excitement in my voice and wanted to know what was up. I told her. She didn’t know me from General Pershing, but she congratulated me just the same.

My baby sister and I became great friends. She trusted me to look out for her, in the school yard, at picnics, at the movies, wherever we went. And I did. Except for once, which I’ll get to in a bit.

Everything was fine for a while. In fact, the only problem was school. When we first got back, my mother sent me to classes with those Lord Fauntleroy clothes. I walked onto the school grounds and saw these kids rolling down a hill inside a tire hoop and went over to see if I could play, too. They looked at me and, like they had a single brain thinking the same thought, one of the kids said, “Would you like to roll down the hill?”

The other boys all nodded.

I said, “Yes, yes, mio amico, I’d like to go, sure.” I snuggled into the narrow rubber ring, but instead of rolling me the way they had gone, they turned me around and shoved me over the other side. Not only was it a rockier road, which knocked my insides around, but when I reached the bottom the tire fell to its side and I landed in the biggest puddle you ever saw. I never went to school that first day. I went home, filthy and soaked, and my mother let me have three swats across the backside for being such a sap.

The next day I went back to school and acted like nothing happened. Actually, I’m not sure the kids even recognized me. My poufy outfit was all dirty, so I wore overalls and a button-down shirt.

I wouldn’t say I was the best student in the world. Mathematics eluded me. I did not like the regimentation of it, I think. A plus B equals C. There was no room for the imagination. I guess that was why I liked history and geography. I liked thinking about different times and places and picturing myself in them. Not quite the acting bug yet, but another glimpse of those wings batting by! I also liked English, especially spelling. I liked comparing those words to the Italian words I knew. They made me feel richer, somehow.

I had only been in that school two semesters when the Depression hit and we had to move. We relocated to rooms in Hamden where there was more work, and then to New Haven when a house became available for rent. It was located on Cherry Ann Street and was owned by the City or the bank, possibly a foreclosure. All I know is that we paid $15.00 a month for it. Can you imagine: an entire house for the cost of a movie ticket nowadays. Talk about change!

My father, God bless him, was always out hustling and always found work. The lessons of Oscar of the Waldorf were not lost on him. He was always trying harder, pushing, and he always ended up as one of the bosses, whatever job he was on. When the WPA came to town, he really managed to prosper.

WPA stood for Works Progress Administration, which was government money building things to keep people employed. My father was a foreman on various roads and bridges that were built in New Haven. Those structures are still standing, today. Even at the age of thirteen I thought the WPA was a wonderful idea. I don’t understand why we can’t do that today.

We had a bigger and bigger garden every year because Mom wanted to grow corn and tomatoes and flowers for the table. So every day in springtime, before we went to school and work, my father and I would get outside and spade the ground. I loved that work, not just because it was something my Dad and I did together, but because I could see the results as the garden grew. If you’ve never eaten something you helped to grow, you should try it. Nothing on earth will ever taste better than a carrot you raised from a seed. In fact, many days I’d run home from school to work the soil. You’d never believe it to look at me now, but in those days I got pretty lean from all the running and hoeing. In fact, it was so satisfying that when summertime came around I got work on a local farm owned by wonderful people called Manto-vani. I made some money and stayed out of mischief and learned on my own what my father had always talked about: the work ethic. It made me feel good inside and out. And best of all, there were times when I caught a smell or saw a bag of seed and it whisked me back to the farm in Italy. Yes, people and places are different the world over. But most things, the basics, are the same.

Speaking of the world, we had a kind of mini-world in our own backyard. There were a bunch of kids on Cherry Ann Street. We had Poles, we had blacks, we had Italians, we had Irish, we had just about every nationality there was. We all used to congregate under a big streetlight in front of the Yardleys’. I think they were more afraid of what a bunch of young teens might do than what we did do, which was mostly playing hide-and-seek or thinking of a way to get to the Long Island Sound for a swim. We also liked to race, from corner to corner or around the block. I loved the sound and feel of the wind rushing by my ears. Like tilling the earth, there was something primal about it—like I was a lion or an ancient hunter.

More early acting? You bet!

When enough of us got together we played baseball, we played football, we played everything except basketball. In those days it was considered a rather sissy game because after you sank a basket you walked away from the key and got back in line to do it again. It wasn’t anything like it is today, running around full-court. Besides, girls played it too, standing flat-footed in front of the hoop and throwing the ball from between their knees in an underhand toss.

I never dated in my teenage years. For one thing, I rarely had enough money. I gave everything I earned to my parents. Also, I was too shy. You wouldn’t think so, because I was around my mother and sister and aunts and cousins all the time. But they didn’t look at me the way some of those other girls did. In fact, they didn’t look like some of those girls did! They caused strange stirrings that I didn’t understand. So I hung with the guys at a time when hanging with the guys meant nothing more than they were your buddies.

Holidays in our home were always my favorite time of year. The big ones were the Fourth of July, when we got together with family and neighbors—even the Yardleys—and celebrated our great nation. I also remember Armistice Day—now Veterans Day—which was a little more solemn, when we honored our war heroes. And, of course there were my favorites: Christmas and Easter.

Money was usually pretty tight, so Christmas was a time of homemade gifts. Except one year, when some guy came along with $14.00 that he owed my father. I was lucky enough to be the one who answered the door and pocketed the money. On Christmas morning I got out of bed very early, stole downstairs with two of my socks. I put $7.00 in one sock for my parents and $7.00 in the other for my sister and myself. Then I went upstairs and said to my parents, “Look! Santa Claus came!” My mother and father were crying, they were so happy. I never did find out what happened to that man, though. If my Dad ever found out where the money came from, he never let on to me.

I’ll never forget when I got my first pair of good pants for Easter. I was fifteen or sixteen. When we got back from the clothing store I laid them across the bed and just looked at them, and said, “Boy, that’s a far cry from knickers.” I felt like a real gentleman, like a country squire back in Italy.

It was the first time I felt like a man. And that wasn’t acting!

I also liked Mother’s Day, when I’d bring Mom a great big bunch of flowers. I always told her I’d picked them in the woods. I didn’t dare tell her that I got them from the cemetery. It may not have been kosher, but I felt my mother would enjoy them more than the deceased did.

In those days, my best buddy was a kid named Joey Simone. He was much shorter than me and my mother used to call us Mutt and Jeff, after the newspaper comic strip about two friends, one very tall and one very short.

Joey was a young Italian boy whose family was from Sicily. They always spoke with a wonderful, thick Italian accent, a dialect of the Bareza region that had been their home. The mother and dad always used to work on a farm and you’d often see them in the fields hauling around these big bundles of grass they used to feed the animals. They worked hard, but they were always smiling. They seemed genuinely happy to be working together.

Mrs. Simone was amazing. When she came home each night, around 6:30, she would not only prepare dinner but also do the wash—by hand. You always knew when she was doing that because you’d hear her singing. In fact, when I think back, my youth was filled with the sounds of community. Her folk songs, the mixture of different languages on the street corners, the sounds of chickens some of the residents kept in pens. Kids growing up today don’t have those sounds. They shut them out with cell phones and iPods. I think they’re missing something, a sense of roots and heritage, warm memories they would treasure in their older years. It’s too bad, really.

Mrs. Simone made a lot of pizza. That’s how pizza got started: with moms who had dough left over from making bread. They’d roll it out and spread some tomato sauce on top with some salami and mushrooms or whatever they had there, and heat it for dinner. Today, people like Mrs. Simone, making homemade pies, would be wealthy! Maybe she should have gone to New York and worked with Oscar.

My favorite activity was hiking on Pine Rock Mountain. Joey and I felt like explorers, picking among the boulders and thistles. You didn’t worry about Lyme disease back then. If a tick bit you, you burned it off with a cigarette or hot match. If you got poison ivy, you washed and scratched.

We used to go everywhere together. We’d go swimming, always bare, at Martha’s Hole and Ear Hole and all kinds of places. Back then nobody thought anything of boys skinny-dipping. We didn’t go in the lake—which was actually some kind of quarry that had filled with water—because too many people had drowned there. If you threw something in you couldn’t see it hit bottom. It was that deep.

We also used to go to Farnham’s Farm to steal apples and vegetables we couldn’t grow. We didn’t do it to be mean but to help our folks. The more we ate there, the less we had to eat at home. I’d always tell my mother “I ate at Joey’s,” and he’d tell his Mom he ate at my place. Fortunately, Mr. Farnham never caught us. I don’t know what story we would have told him. He was always busy with a big stone crusher he owned. It kept grinding rock that was hauled from Pine Rock Mountain. The stone was used to make roadbeds and such. Maybe it was Mr. Farnham, or maybe I just got bigger, but when I went back to my old home Pine Lock seemed more like a hill than a mountain.

One night, we went looking for celery because we wanted something to munch on. We were crossing the Beaverdale Cemetery when we came to a big hedge that separated the graveyard from a large garden. As we started to go through it, up popped several heads. We ran like the dickens.

“Hey, where you going?” hissed a voice.

It was three of our buddies who had just finished searching for potatoes in the same garden. It was crook meeting crook. Since they were already over there, they grabbed a few stalks for us. They weren’t just being nice; they liked the danger.

Joey and I also knew a spot where bakery trucks would drop off cartons of two-day-old bread they couldn’t sell anymore. They left it outside the bakery where, I suppose, it was going to be ground into bread crumbs or croutons or some such. We always took as many of those boxes as we could carry. Sometimes more, hiding some of them and then going back. The first time I brought it home, my mother asked, “Where did you get all this stuff?”

I told her and she worked some wonders with it to freshen it up—putting it in the oven with water, remoisturizing it—and it tasted just fine.

I started seeing less and less of Joey as we grew older, since he had to work with his mother and father so they could save money and buy a house. Occasionally, when I had the time, I would help them out. My buddy Joey Simone had gone into business selling fish and chips. He had a little store of his own and also brought his products to factories to sell. I remember one day Joey and I were rattling along in his truck. You could hear every bolt and piston and spring in that thing—boom, bidda boom, ping, bang.

I said, “My God, doesn’t this thing drive you crazy?”

Joey said, “No, I just turn up the radio a little louder.”

Now that I think of it, maybe Joey was the forefather of the iPod generation!