PART 1: AIR RAID ON WEST 77th STREET

PART 1: AIR RAID ON WEST 77TH

320 West 77th Street, as it looks today

Not all Upper West Side row houses are really “brownstones,” but 320 West 77th Street was and is, as the photo illustrates -- faced with what is probably Jersey Freestone, giving it the chocolate hue that Edith Wharton famously despised but that I don’t find so bad. Our apartment was fairly cramped: a four-floor walk-up containing two bedrooms, a small bath, a living room and a kitchen with a dining nook, shoehorned into a building about 20 feet wide and perhaps 40 feet deep, if that. My bedroom was at the back, next to my parents’, and that posed a grave difficulty: Dad was a world-class snorer, and the wall separating the bedrooms was thin and cheesy. The snores were loud enough to wake me from the deepest sleep, and no doubt contributed to my life-long insomnia; there was no possibility of getting back to sleep unless or until something awakened him. That something was sometimes my mother, but often, she took refuge on the sofa in the living room, where I spied her huddled form in the middle of the night when I got up to go to the bathroom.

I think she was ready to call it quits, and to save his marriage, Dad taught himself to stop snoring. He approached it like the engineer he had trained to be, investigating the responsible organs – the tongue, the soft palate and particularly the uvula – and he devised a series of exercises, both physical and psychological, that enabled him to gain control of the “snore chamber,” as he called it, even when he was unconscious, awakening himself just enough to stop snoring, turn over, and go back to sleep. He wrote a book, titled How to Stop Snoring, that was published by Exposition Press, in 1947, and it gained a small following.  A judge in Chicago was convinced that the only reason that marriages fell apart was that one of the parties snored, and that adultery, abuse and incompatibility were merely excuses, and he refused to grant any divorces until the supplicants had had time to read Dad’s book and learn their lesson from it. It’s still in print, in paperback. It’s the only thing my father ever had published commercially. That is sad, in that all he ever wanted to be was a writer, and spent most of his adult life at the Smith-Corona, cranking out over thirty full-length plays, none of which was ever produced. 

However, he did manage to produce a TV show and a radio program. During the late 40s and early 50s, polo was played inside the Armory at Park Avenue and 94th – the site is now Hunter Elementary and High School – and Dad put it on the air. It ran only for about a year, despite the presence of the legendary Al Parcells, rated as a “10-goal player,” or just about as good as they come. Dad and I used to attend the matches, which I loved – the crack of the mallet against the ball, the drumming of the hooves and the shouts of the players as they raced up and down the length of what was, in truth, a much more confined space than the genuine outdoor version of the sport. For me, it was like going to the rodeo, though without the calf-roping.

Dad’s radio show was truly brilliant. It was called Can You Top This, and it featured three second-tier (and now forgotten) comedians of the day: Senator Ford, who actually conceived the idea for the show; Harry Hirschfield; and Joe Laurie, Jr. The idea was that listeners would send in jokes – any kind of joke would do, a Jewish joke, a mother-in-law joke, a two-guys-walk-into-a-bar joke – and the host, Peter Donald, would tell one of them on the air. A machine called the “Laugh Meter” would measure the volume of the studio audience’s risibility, and then each of the three comics would have to come up with his own joke on the same topic – and try to score higher and louder. I never doubted that their vast repertoires were equal to this task, but maybe they were fed the audience’s jokes in advance; anyway, they were funny guys, and it really didn’t matter whether they did or did not score high; the stakes were tiny (if you sent in a joke that got used, they sent you $5). When one of my students in an NYU lecture course asked me if I’d ever done stand-up comedy (a compliment I treasure), I give Can You Top This? a lot of credit for forming my delivery style.

Despite the fact that the gang violence depicted in West Side Story was not entirely a fiction, everybody we knew seemed to be middle-class and Jewish. My parents had some old friends in the neighborhood, many of whom lived in the grand apartments on West End or Riverside or Central Park West -- those classic sixes (or eights) with views of the river or the park, some of which, before rent stabilization, were occupied by people paying absurdly low rents because they had gotten in on the ground floor, so to speak. In the apartment below ours lived the Jaffes, a nice family with a daughter just my age, and on Saturday nights, Janie Jaffe and I were allowed to stay up late to watch Your Show of Shows on her parents’ black and white TV  -- two nine-year-olds in their pajamas cracking up at Sid Caesar’s routines with Imogene Coca and Carl Reiner.

Every Sunday morning, my mother would give me two dollars, and I would walk to Zabar’s on Broadway and 80th Street and come home with three bagels, a quarter-pound of nova (sliced to order into translucent strips, often by Saul Zabar himself), a small tub of cream cheese -- and a half-sour pickle, which was on the house. Total cost: a little more than two bucks.  On my way home, I’d buy a Sunday New York Times (I think it cost a dime; the daily edition was 3 cents) at the newsstand by the subway at 79th. Sometimes, after school, I would go grocery shopping with my mother to help her carry the bags down the long hill to our apartment. There were no supermarkets back then, but plenty of little specialty stores like Citarella, on 75^th  and Broadway, which is now a good-sized chain but which then was one tiny shop that sold only fish. Most kids my age probably wouldn’t have eaten poached salmon with hollandaise sauce, but from the start, my palate was as advanced as my mother’s culinary skills, and I cheerfully ate everything she put on the table except borscht, which my father loved, with a dollop of sour cream and half a boiled potato in it. I hated beets and still do.

The owner of our building was a man of Germanic extraction and temperament named Emery Deutsch. He lived on the ground floor, and he spent much time outside on his concrete patio during the warm months, tending to his shrubs and other plantings. He was the building’s super as well as our landlord, and my father had several run-ins with him about one thing or another: there was no heat, there was too much heat, there was no hot water, the water was too hot, and on and on. I have to admit, though, that Mr. Deutsch ran a tight ship: the stairs and hallways were always spotless. He detested anything that made noise or created a nuisance or attracted dirt or clutter -- like pets, or, in truth, like me; he would probably have forbidden children in the building if he could have. None of the tenants liked him. This was only a few years after the Holocaust, after all.

I had never had a pet, and I desperately wanted a puppy. One day when I was home in bed for the flu, my parents felt so sorry for me that my father went downstairs to ask Mr. Deutsch if he’d make an exception. He came back and did his best Sid Caesar imitation of the answer: “Nein, no! No dogz! Zay piss und shit everyvare!” I was devastated. The next day, attempting damage control, Dad come home with a hamster in a cage. It was not what I’d had in mind. I was picturing a cocker spaniel puppy that curled up in bed with me; the hamster had no ability to relate to humans at all, and watching it run around its little wheel got old fast To my mother, whom Dad had not consulted in advance, the hamster was just a rat without a tail, and when I came home from school a few months later and she told me that it had disappeared, I was sure that she had flushed it down the toilet. She was always getting rid of things she didn’t like that belonged to me. When I was about ten, someone gave me a used, falling-apart but complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica, the famous 11^th edition, all 29 volumes. I felt very important owning such a scholarly tome, and I read widely in it, but it took up half my bedroom and collected dust. As soon as I went off to boarding school, Mom admitted to me much later, she threw it out -- but, she also confessed, she had stuck a wad of cash in the “M” section for safekeeping and forgotten about it. Who says there’s no justice in the world?

And justice was what I wanted – justice for Mr. Deutsch and his ban on puppies. But obviously, I would have to take matters into my own hands. "Revenge is a kind of wild justice,” wrote Francis Bacon in the 17^th century, and though I was twenty years away from being a Renaissance scholar, I intuited the wisdom of that maxim, and also that of the Italian proverb from the same period that states, "Revenge is a dish that the man of taste prefers to eat cold." Accordingly, I waited several months before taking action, passing the time by thinking up and rejecting various torments. Strew garbage on the stairs? Too messy, even for me. Sneak into the basement and steal fuses from the electrical box, plunging his apartment into darkness? But what if I blacked out the whole building, or electrocuted myself? Set the building on fire? Too extreme, rivaling the sabotage of the Normandy but . . . something along those lines on a smaller scale?  I had been told, by some kid at school, that if you dropped a wooden match from any height onto a hard surface, it would fall head-down and explode on contact. My bedroom was four stories above Mr. Deutsch’s spotless patio. What if I drove him crazy by bombarding him, one or two missiles at a time, while he was inside? He’d rush out, but I’d duck back inside my window and he’d be baffled. Perfect! Or so it seemed.

 My mother had a full box of Diamond kitchen matches next to the stove. It was late in the afternoon, sometime around October or November; I remember that the leaves on the trees in all the back yards were turning brown. I was home alone. Mr. Deutsch was nowhere to be seen. I decided to drop a single match, as a test; I wasn’t certain the kid at school was right. I opened the box and, holding it in my left hand, pushed up on the window with my right. But it had been painted over so many times that it wouldn’t budge. I put the matchbox down on the sill, and with both hands yanked up as hard as I could on the handholds at the bottom. The window lurched open, and I lurched with it, nudging the box of matches into space.

The kid at school wasn’t lying. Two hundred matches went tumbling down, as in the air-raids that the newsreels had shown during the war. It was my own miniature version of the fire-bombing of Dresden. The whole patio seemed to ignite at once, accompanied by a devastating crackle. I was awestruck, and didn’t retreat as planned from my perch when Mr. Deutsch burst out into his yard. The matches went out as soon as they flamed, thank God, but the patio was blanketed with little smoldering sticks. Mr. Deutsch tipped his head back and there I was, staring down at him. With determined strides, he went back inside; in a minute, I could hear him pounding up the stairs. Our apartment door was locked, but I knew he had a passkey, and – thinking clearly, for the first time that day -- I threw the deadbolt on the front door and cowered in my bedroom. Mr. Deutsch hammered on our front door for a while and then, sure enough, I heard his key slip into the lock, but the deadbolt defeated him. Eventually I heard his retreating footsteps and I started to breathe again.  

When my father got home, Mr. Deutsch was waiting for him. Dad later told us that there were threats of eviction and even criminal action for what was certainly an act of vandalism. I don’t know how Dad talked him down; Maybe he reminded Mr. Deutsch that being a German in a predominantly Jewish New York neighborhood worked against him. I don’t even remember whether I was punished. I do remember how proud I was of myself for engineering a Resistance attack that was spectacular while it was going on and left no collateral damage behind.