Читать книгу No U Turn - Michael Taylor - Страница 8

≈ What is the earliest thing you remember? ≈

“I was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1948, but I don’t really remember that,” said Boogie with an attempt at humor, while trying to briefly stall. “But I do remember being 3 years old, going into the top drawer of my grandfather’s dresser in Philadelphia, and taking pennies. These were Indian Head pennies. These were old pennies. I remember going to the corner store and buying penny-pieces of candy. I was three—, or 4 years old. I remember my younger brother, Jason and I … I was four. I was the old guy at the time. He was three. We did this, and went to the corner, which seemed like another fucking country—excuse my French—but ended up crossing a busy street and got stranded in the median. The police came. And rescued us. Those are my earliest recollections of Philadelphia.

“Wait, I also remember that—not that we had money or anything—but I remember that we had a live-in girl, a black lady that … I’ll try and remember her name … I think her name was Lena. And she took care of us while my parents were working, or doing whatever they did,” he scoffed. She prepared the meals. And how we afforded it back then, I have no idea. But I remember Lena taking care of us.”

≈ What do you remember about that time—about Leonard? ≈

“I remember my brother Lenny, my dad and my mom, but I just don’t have a lot of memories of that time. The earliest memories I have of interaction with Len are when we first moved to Florida in 1952. That was late ‘52, just before I turned five. So it might’ve been in 1953. And we lived in Southwest Florida. So again, I was five, and Lenny would’ve been nine. And Jason would’ve been four. I remember the family used to go on these outings to the beach, the whole family, and we would have fun.

“Dad loved playing with the kids. But Lenny was always kind of like, ‘Oh no! Another brother!’ ” said Boogie condescendingly, whining nasally in an attempt to imitate his older brother.

“Like someone to horn in on his action or something, I guess. He wasn’t too fond of me when I came, and then less fond when Jason came. You could see that he wasn’t thrilled about having brothers at the time, because it took away the attention off of him.”

With an enthusiastic inflection as he expelled the tale faster and faster, Boogie said breathlessly, “But I’ll never forget this, and again, this was when Len was nine, I was five and Jason was four. We were playing with some kind of … almost like a badminton type piece, like a little birdie or something, in the backyard of this duplex we lived in, and Jason accidentally knocked it up on a ledge, basically on the roof, and Lenny climbed up these railings to go rescue Jason’s little birdie and he slipped and fell and knocked out two teeth. I’ll never forget that,” Boogie announced triumphantly, stifling a short laugh with only moderate success. Then he allowed himself a small smile as he added mockingly, “And I’m sure he never forgot it either!

“I remember a lot of blood and stitches in those years, in the early 50s, when we first came to Florida. I remember coming home from the beach, then I slipped on the tiled front steps, and cracked open my head and had six stitches there.

“And the other thing I remember there, whenever any of us got sick with the normal childhood diseases, my mother,” almost spitting the word, “made sure we all got them at the same time! —That we all infected each other, so she wouldn’t have to go through it on separate occasions. So, if one of us got the chickenpox, we all had the chickenpox! If one of us got the mumps, we all had the mumps! One of us got the measles, we all had the measles! And that’s just the way it was in the Geller household in 1953, and —four, and —5.”

≈ How did you wind up in Florida? ≈

“Well that, obviously, was a decision of my father. You talk about a … a trek—I mean a major trek. It was like Magellan circumnavigating the globe here—us moving to Florida. Here we were, our first airplane flight, flying on a DC 6, four and a half hours flying from Philly to Florida—My dad had gone a couple weeks ahead with his partner, Frank Silverman. And they were, basically, going to open up a furniture store. And they just decided that Florida was a great place to live, and wide open for the taking, so to speak—And the family followed suit.

“Jason and I and Lenny and my mother were on the flight together. Everybody got sick except me, until the final minute, when I’m actually deplaning, and then I got nauseous and sick, too! So everybody threw up on that flight!

“It was a real adventure—going from, quote, the safety of our little tiny house in Philadelphia to this whole new experience in Florida.

“After a couple of years, we went from the apartment to my house, albeit a tiny little house, maybe a 1200 square foot house in North Miami Beach. Dad financed it on the G.I. Bill. I think he had a house payment back then of … like $79 a month.

“We were about four—, or 5 miles from the ocean, but we always had a cabana,” said Boogie with much pride. Never stopping after ‘cabana,’ he quickly added in the same breath, “I’ll never forget that. We always had a place to go on the beach. A cabana was kind of like renting out a room around the pool that you could go to for the season. It cost him probably two—, $300 for the season. A place to go change, and come put your bathing suit on and go swimming in one of these little hotels that now are all the South Beach type of rage. They were in the northern part of the Beach.

“So, my dad always spent money, and always tried to take care of the family, and give us some of the better things. And we obviously didn’t have as much as a lot of our wealthier friends, but we never went without. And we always had some good times. Dad did his best, even though working crazy hours, to be a dad! He would play ball with us in the backyard, and take us to the Carnival,” said Boogie. And with a hint in his voice that all of this should be obvious to the listener, “and to the rodeo and stuff like that! Yeah,” he continued, with a touch of nostalgia, “Harry was a good guy.

“But as we got older, obviously, we weren’t so cute and cuddly anymore. We were terrors. As a matter of fact, we would go every Sunday night—this was in the mid-and later 50s, probably ‘56, ‘57, ‘58, in that range … We would go to a Chinese restaurant on the beach, called the Lime House. The boys—we were always fighting over something, always making a commotion, always fighting, always loud, always boisterous. So finally, after six— or 7 times of this, the owner, very gently and with a lot of tact, asked my father if—”

Here Boogie quickly dropped his voice with each word, in imitation of the owner, until the last was barely audible “—he couldn’t ‘not come back anymore’—” before landing the punch-line: “—‘with the kids.’ ”

Chuckling, Boogie concluded, “The restaurant, they just couldn’t take it anymore.

“We were terrors, and Harry would lose his temper and yell and scream and curse at us. And that’s just what starts to evolve when you get ten and 11, becoming teenagers. You become rambunctious and unruly. We certainly were that. We were very undisciplined.

“We were masters at playing our parents against each other. Dad was at work, and this and that. And mom had to be the disciplinarian at home. So dad would come in the door, and right away we were on him with ‘Mommy did this, and Mommy hit me, and Mommy spanked him.’ And dad, who didn’t have a lot of time to spend with us, always tried to pacify and coddle us, which was probably the absolute wrong thing to do. So, instead of sticking up for the ‘other half,’ Mollie was always the ‘meanie,’ and dad was the good guy, at least back in those days. It was kind of a strange situation, but our parents …” said Boogie categorically and with a touch of sadness, “weren’t great parents. They just weren’t good at parenting.

“They were wild and crazy when they were young. So, they just didn’t know how to handle us either. We did not come with an instruction manual. But only when we started to go to Jai Alai, then we had instructions! You know … Bet the 2-3-5 Wheel! Or something like that,” said Boogie with an extended laugh.

≈ Did your mom work? ≈

“Yeah, she worked. And dad worked. As we got a little older she—when Jay and I were in our early teens … obviously Lenny was even older still—she worked at the Americana Hotel as a reservations secretary. So she worked a 40 hour week, and dad worked a 65 hour week. And we were basically latch-key kids. We would come home from school and let ourselves in, do whatever, and go to the school yard and play.

“This brings up … I think Len was, I think, eleven, and I was seven and Jay was six. It was New Year’s Eve, and my parents went out to a party and they left Len in charge, and Len couldn’t handle the pressure. Here he was, an 11-year-old kid, and here it was two o’clock in the morning, 2:30, three! He’s imagining all these bad things that have happened.” Then Boogie said, imitating his brother’s agitation, and frustration and fear, “ ‘I think they got into an accident! How come they’re not home yet?’ So I think, to this day, that had a big effect on Len. That one night! … Jay and I were just giggling. We didn’t know any better! Hey, we could stay up to all hours, and so forth! But here was Len, with all the pressure of having to make sure that we didn’t get into any trouble and stuff.” Then Boogie added wryly, “He probably worked it out in therapy—15 years later. But I know in talking to him in the past, that that night did have an effect on him. That’s for sure.”

~~~~~~~~~~

Whether self-conscious about the facts he was revealing, or worried about consequences, the accuracy of these memories, or his interpretation of them, Boogie said—almost in a whisper, “Let’s take a little break.” His ‘break’ lasted until the next day. After dinner, when asked to continue with his story, he declined because he was “a little tired from all the travel and [was] going to call it a day.”

~~~~~~~~~~

Hannah called Mike from the hospital very early Friday morning. Apparently nurses still wake you while you are in a drug-induced state of unconsciousness—probably in an attempt to get breakfast past your nose before your brain is fully engaged. Hannah was now waiting to be discharged—well rested, but without a clear explanation of her symptoms.

Having slept in the basement, Boogie was not seen in the kitchen by anyone until sometime after 10 a.m. He had been sleeping so soundly—wrapped in a ball of blankets to fight off the added chill of the direct gust from the air conditioner—that Rocket, on his way to the yard through the double French doors for his morning constitutional, hadn’t even given him an examining sniff, as was his custom with new houseguests.

Sitting out by the pool after breakfast, Boogie rested for almost 90 minutes—left arm hanging loosely by his side over the chair, with each new cigar held skyward in his right hand, nonchalantly gripped by the first two fingers and thumb, the ring finger splayed out and the pinky pointed high, head tilted back slightly, pursed lips blowing a blue smoke ring upward, wafting over the neighbor’s fence. When he had recovered sufficiently from his ordeal of eating, and after being prodded by me with, “What is this? No swimming for an hour after eating?”—Boogie smiled and let out a small laugh, agreeing to continue the interview … sometime near noon.

Waiting for a return call from Hannah to determine a pick up time, Boogie and I retreated to the basement.

~~~~~~~~~~

≈ Tell me about your driving experiences ≈

“Before I do that, I want to digress back, in a complete circle, back to the original ‘Tell me about Philadelphia’ and this and Miss Harriet and all that. Anyway, to make a long story short, here I was, a romantic 20-year-old taking her to see Romeo and Juliet and all this kind of stuff. Did everything but get laid!

“So, here it comes about 13 years later, 1993, and I’m on my way to visit some of our mattress stores in the New York City area. And I had gotten Harriet’s phone number in New Jersey—I think—from her mother. She was understandably protective of her when she was 16, but now, being a typical Jewish mother, she acts real happy to hear from me and gives me her number.

“So I called Harriet and said, ‘Geez. I’m going to be close, so why don’t I stop by and say hello.’ Harriet was very open to that. So here it was: I stopped by to say hello, and I’m kind of trying to pick up where I left off—13 years ago. Of course she’d been married and divorced and had a kid in the meantime, and I had finally gotten laid by then.

“So here I am basically giving her my A-game, having had all these romantic feelings, and unrequited love, and how we never really finished. And I really gave her my A-stuff. I put on some nice quiet jazz in the background. I opened up a nice bottle of wine. And I’m giving her my best massage, all over the body, sort of speak, and really had her primed. So we go to the bedroom, and proceed to continue to make out, and so forth. And one thing led to another. Here I am, after 13 years of anticipation, thinking this is going to be sooo sweet and nice.”

Chuckling, Boogie continued, “Then I go ahead and slip it in, so to speak, and I have never been inside a woman that has been larger and wetter and sloppier and needless to say—”

≈ But he’ll say it anyway! ≈

“—I mean, here I had all this thing, and I’m not sure, but maybe she was just overexcited or something, but it was a big letdown anyway. So that was my 13 years of anticipation, all blown out in one inglorious moment. And Harriet and I have never seen each other again. So I just wanted to complete that whole story of how what we sometimes think in anticipation—that it sometimes doesn’t work out as nice as we had hoped. So, there we go! Philadelphia.”

≈ Let’s try this again: Tell me about your driving experiences ≈

“Basically, we all taught ourselves how to drive. I started driving when I was 12 years old, obviously, illegally. We had a 1956 Buick Special; a big ol’ car back then. And here this was 1960 or so. I was 12 years old. In the middle of the night, one—, or 2 o’clock in the morning, with my younger brother Jay, we would go outside. Back then, we didn’t have carports or garages. They just had a driveway, a gravel driveway. So we would push the car out into the street without any engine going; then start the engine and go off. And then drive down to Miami Beach, or wherever, with some friends.

“And here we were 12 years old, and I had an accident in which I had injured my right eye, and I was blind in my right eye, so my friends used to cover my left eye—my good eye—and have me try and drive basically blind,” recalled Boogie, amused, “which was a little bit crazy. Thank Goodness—”

≈ Trying to thank God again? So say it! ≈

“—I had never had an accident or anything like that, but those were the earliest recollections about being twelve—, and 13 years old and sneaking out the old car. I’m sure everyone has done it.”

≈ Nooo, everyone has NOT done it! ≈

“My brother Len … I learned behavior from him. And he had actually had an accident, one time, and it created a big hoopla. Back then, that was the worst thing you could do, have a car accident, and you know, and ‘My God!’ ‘The whole family will never be the same again!’ and ‘Lawyers,’ and so forth. So those were my earliest driving experiences.

“A couple of years later, we were 14 and doing basically the same thing except now, here I was a big man, I had two years of driving experience, and so we were going down mostly to the Miami Beach area because: A. Those friends of ours had more money and were more fun to be around, and B. There were some great-looking chicks at Beach High.

“And here we were 14, telling them we were 17 and trying to make dates and stuff with the girls and little do they know, I didn’t even have a legal driver’s license. Those were the earliest driving times—I mean, driving experiences … You can cover all kinds of crazy stuff if you want to.

“Now, that kind of conjures up, here I am fourteen—, 15 years later in California, 1974, driving my 1967 Cadillac Deville convertible. And I don’t know if anybody’s familiar with the design—”

≈ Who is he talking to? Does he think this is a Late Night TV show? ≈

“—but the headlights are headlight-over-headlight. And it looks like a shark coming at you. Well, it’s really more like a can opener. When you hit parked cars along the side of the road, you just rip’em right open! And, unfortunately, back in ’74 I was doing a lot of that,” Boogie admitted, “because I was driving under the influence of Quaaludes.” The latter said with a rising falsetto quality and a tinge of embarrassment.

“So we did all kinds of stuff. I’ll never forget … one night we were … I’m going down this alley … in Hermosa Beach. And the beach area in California is different than everywhere else. It’s very tiny streets and alleys, with the houses all on top of the other and you could barely fit one car through. And then there’s cars parked on either side of the alley, so you had maybe four inches of clearance on each side. It’s tough enough to be able to do that when you’re sober, let alone when you’re not. So here it is one night about three o’clock in the morning and I’m NOT sober! And I’m bouncing off of cars coming down, and then I hit this one car and then basically couldn’t go any further. Then the lights come on in this apartment. I see some guy coming down the steps, and he tackles me out of the car and throws me on the ground. And to make a long story short, he was a cop! And basically arrested me that night.

“And a good thing too, because I certainly would’ve destroyed more cars. So a lot of the driving experiences, unfortunately, hearken back to not so great memories and basically doing some pretty stupid things. Not too smart to drive when you’re …” was purposely left unfinished by Boogie, leaving others to accurately fill in the blank.

≈ When you’re Loaded? Or …

When you’re High? ≈

“The police in California had this pretty simple test for deciding whether you’re sober or not sober. They would ask for your license and registration, and when you were not able to produce your license out of your wallet—because you were so stoned that you couldn’t handle that simple task—they arrested you. I’ll never forget, when I read one of the police reports a day or so later, it said, ‘Failed to issue Field Sobriety Tests. Feared for subject’s safety.’ ”

Boogie then summarized what he recalled by uttering words he may not have been capable of hearing at the time, let alone either understanding or accurately remembering all these years later.

“So they just said,” Boogie went on in a gruff voice, attempting to imitate one of the cops, and finishing with a loud, infectious, good-natured laugh, “ ‘No, we’re not giving him any of the tests, just throw him in the backseat!’

“I was arrested 11 times in Southern California, in the space of sixteen—, or 18 months. All DUIs. All under the influence of Quaaludes. And I ended up doing 90 days for—basically for driving stoned. But it was really for a violation of one of my probations and I was sentenced to 90 days, and then I dealt the 90 days to all the other 10 judges. They all agreed to sentence me to 90 days—to run concurrently with my 90-day sentence; so I could use this 90-days to wipe everything clean. At this point I was in the mode of trying to clean up and doing that. But then I had this one hard-ass Judge who said to my attorney, ‘No. Your client puts other people at risk!’

“Now just prior to my case, there was a drug addict’s case, where he was charged with possession of narcotics and so forth. And the judge said, ‘That guy hurts himself. Your client’—meaning me—and he was 100% right—‘puts other people at risk!’ So he said, ‘I’m going to give your client a year.’ ”

Boogie recalled solemnly, “Here I was like thinking, ‘Oy, yuh-yoy, yuh-yoy. A year! This Jewish boy can’t do a year.’ ” Boogie ended with a light, nervous laugh.

“So luckily, my lawyer was smart enough to be able to postpone. And then he got my case, because he had a number of different cases that day in different Courts. So he had my case, what you call, ‘trailed’ to another Court, and another judge—which he was already seeing. And that Judge just rubberstamped the 90 days, like everybody else had done. So it just shows you that there are some judges that, rightly so, want to get people off the streets that are putting other people in jeopardy. And I certainly was doing that,” said Boogie too casually, trying to disguise a serious but truthful tone.

“I mean, one night in Hollywood, I was arrested three times within a 12-hour period! Back then, I had a mustache and curly hair and was pretty thin and I kind of looked like Gabe Kaplan from the TV series. So the second time I was arrested, when the intake police officer, a sergeant, saw me again—he’d seen me four hours earlier—he said, ‘Welcome back, Kotter!’ ” guffawed Boogie. “I thought that was kind of apropos.

“Bringing up these things now—they seemed kind of funny at the time—but, in retrospect, they’re not funny. They were serious and, Thank God, I didn’t hurt anybody else.”

≈ Finally! And you’re welcome! ≈

“And didn’t kill myself, and somehow got through that time period. I guess we all learn from life’s experiences, and that certainly was a learning process for me.”

Boogie ended this last story with, “Let’s not get too serious here,” while exhaling a small laugh. He followed this brief delay with a drawn out, “Neeexxt” using a mock-demanding tone to imply: Next question. I’m done with that topic and don’t want to talk about it anymore.