Sometime
in the 50’s, probably around the time I failed high school for the 3rd
time, my father said to me, “Son, one of these days you’re going to find
yourself, and, when you do, you’re going to be awfully disappointed.” I think
he was joking. But the facts were it didn’t seem as if I’d ever get through
school, and I was floundering around like a three legged pig in a cess
pool. Eventually I did graduate but not
before doing penance in summer school where I was the only Jew on a gentile campus
in a foreign neighborhood. I took to wearing a pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes folded
into the short sleeve of a white t-shirt in an attempt to pass. This
cigarette/t-shirt mode belonged to gentile guys who went to vocational school,
sported ducktail haircuts, and lived in dangerous neighborhoods, places like
Pig Town, where only a few years earlier pigs still ran through the streets to
the slaughterhouse, or Sparrows Point where the steel mills stood. At that time
in Baltimore, Maryland, a Jewish kid wouldn’t have been caught dead in anything
but an oxford button down shirt, preferably blue but white would do. If I had
worn that get-up to summer school, along with the khaki trousers, weejun
loafers, and argyle socks that defined the rest of the uniform, I might as well
have hung a sign on my back that screamed: “You’re right. I did it. I killed Him.”
The previous paragraph is in darkened italics because I don't know what to do with it. Memoir is much on my mind these days, today especially as it's my birthday, so obviously that's where the paragraph belongs. Beginning? Somewhere in there? Or nowhere at all? More importantly, if you were cruising through a bookstore skimming first paragraphs, would you go on to the second? OK. Try this.
In January of 1963 all things seemed possible.
Kennedy was still alive. So was my father. Civil Rights were simmering, but
Black Power was not yet a battle cry. “We Shall Overcome” was our anthem. Those
of us who sang it did so with our arms around each other and rocked gently. Alcatraz
closed down, and Martin Luther King wrote his letter from a Birmingham jail. Sam
Cooke sang, “A Change Is Gonna Come”. Dylan wrote, “Blowin’ In The Wind”. At
the time, I was a student at Morgan State College in Baltimore, Maryland, an
all Black school, where I was the only white male. I had been born and raised
here in a city as southern as any other, yet Morgan’s student body could not be
classified as radical, nor could I. Those kids were there to get a piece of the
American pie, as was I. The coeds wore pillbox hats a la Jackie Kennedy, kid gloves,
and carried proper purses. The men wore sport coats and ties, wool sweaters,
and carried very professional looking briefcases. I continued to carry my books
tucked under my arm, Hardy Boy’s style. Students spoke of “Martin” and
“Malcolm” as if they were familiars, and early in 1963 came the time Morgan
joined the movement and proper students risked jail time in order to integrate
a whites only movie theatre just off campus, a theatre that was,
coincidentally, owned by the father of a friend of mine, wealthy Jews who lived
in the Golden Ghetto of North West Baltimore. My family lived on the northernmost fringe of that ghetto,
not rich but certainly Jewish.
Which paragraph would coax you into reading more? This is not a trick question. It doesn't need an answer.So, my birthday. If I were an octopus I couldn't wrap my arms around the fact that it's been sixty years since my Bar Mitzvah. Three score years! Do the math. I've already lived more years than I'm going to live. There's the math for you! (I can hear Lewis Black angrily yelling those last four words.) "There's the math for you!" I feel I should have something wise to say at this juncture, something profound, maybe even poetic. Really, I'm just glad to still be here. I'm not yet finished growing into myself.
A story.
Years ago, I mean, years ago, I sold my first screenplay to a man named Jennings Lang, a major great white shark of that era. That script, "The Hunting of Pink Mountain Tinney", never got made but it did get me a three picture deal, and thus began my career in this business. At some point after the deal was made Jennings and I were having lunch ("doing" lunch, I know), and I thought he was complementing me on the action sequences, and the man got me feeling like I was a big time screenwriter. I said something to that effect -- some dumb shit brag about my ability to do action -- something to that effect -- and when I shut up Jennings said to me, "I didn't buy your script for the action sequences. I bought it for the love story."
Some lessons y'gotta keep on learning.
