Three-Sewer Home Run

My father told great stories. How when he was in the army, two guys in his squad were killed when lightning hit a tree they had run under during a storm. He was under there with them, but decided he wanted to dance in the rain.

Some of his tales were about going to Ebbets Field to see his beloved Brooklyn Dodgers. This was back in the early 1930s, when they were really bad and he’d go through the names of the players:  Rube Bressler, Sloppy Thurston, Dazzy Vance. “I'd sit in the cheap seats for a Sunday doubleheader and get there early for batting practice. My mother would make me three liverwurst sandwiches and by the time batting practice was over all three sandwiches were gone.” He'd tell that one with a mischievous smile, and even though I didn't like liverwurst I knew the sandwiches were delicious. He told me about making Mickies on the street, which is when you wrap potatoes in foil and throw 'em right in the fire, then then dig ‘em out with your hands. “They were too hot to eat but you do it anyway and burn your tongue and your fingers get all black from the foil and the potatoes have this charred smell, but inside they’re soft and creamy.” He'd get the liverwurst smile when he told that one too.

He also had good stickball stories, tales of three-sewer home runs, hit not by him but his older brother, my uncle Jerry. Jerry was an incredible athlete, a track and field star. At one point he co-held the world record for the forty-yard dash. Me and my brother liked to say he was the fastest Jew in the world.

Jerry did not tell as good a story as my dad, but he did share how he once raced Ralph Metcalfe who ran second to Jesse Owens at the Berlin Olympics in 1936. He told me about his struggles with "the hundred" and that "at seventy yards the black boys ran by me like I was standing still."

Of all my father’s stories, the ones he enjoyed telling most were about the theater. He told me about seeing Laurette Taylor in The Glass Menagerie. “She needed a fifth of bourbon just to go on, but once she was out there no one could touch her.” He was there for opening night of Streetcar and said “Brando knocked me for a loop, made Stanley Kowalski a poet." But his favorite of all was musical theater, and he was there in 1957 on opening night for West Side Story. He’d tell it like it happened yesterday. The anticipation everyone felt, even out on the sidewalk before the show. “After the overture the stage went black and all you heard was fingers snapping in the dark and it sent shivers down your spine,” and the way he told it sent shivers down my spine, and I knew it was once in lifetime and not to be repeated, like seeing Halley's Comet.

In the late ‘60s he got on the other side of the equation, bringing a musical to the audience as opposed to being in it. He was the producer of Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, which ran for over four years at the iconic Village Gate. It was a great show, and he had that gleam as he stood in the back of the house, maybe not all the way to West Side Story but close. A little after that he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, his decline slow, but steady.

A few years before he died my brother’s friend, Michael, found him “frozen” at Zabar’s, staring at a large shelf full of bottles. He said to him, “Stosh, it’s me, Michael, you okay?” My father waited a long beat, still staring at the shelf. “It’s a vinegar museum.”

A few weeks after that I found him on a bench on Central Park West. He was looking kind of lost and holding an empty package of Drake’s Yankee Doodles. I sat down next to him. “Polished off all three, huh?” He nodded. “Most delicious thing I ever ate in my life.”  

As he decreased, it went from him telling stories to us, to us telling stories about him. Like the one my mother told me after he was gone. The two of them were late-night sugar junkies, their love of sweets one of their deepest bonds. The last time my father was in the hospital she brought him a chocolate malted. He smiled and put it on the table. “When he didn’t drink that malted, I knew he was going to die.”

Of all my father’s stories, I think my favorite is about the time he went to the Westbury Music Fair to see Judy Garland. It was near the end of her life and Judy was a mess. She came on an hour late, so stoned on pills and booze she could barely walk. She staggered to the middle of the stage and grabbed onto the microphone with both hands just so she could hold herself up. She hung like that for a minute or two but it seemed like an hour, the audience holding their collective breath. Finally, someone yelled out, "Don't sing Judy! Don’t sing… Just stand there.” His voice would crack as he told it, reliving the love they all had for her. The joy she had given, far outweighing her frailties.