Chapter Nine
They say if you want a career in theater, you gotta really want it. I must have really wanted it because when the opportunity presented itself to audition for Performing Arts a second time, I took it, and that time I was accepted.
I had been pulled so strongly to music in the intervening year that I was tempted to ask the judges to give my place to someone else so I could go to high school in Brooklyn with my friends. But several things kept me from doing that: first, I was confident that I could continue to be inspired by rock and roll and rhythm and blues while studying acting, with no loss of proficiency in either endeavor. Second, after failing the first time and then achieving admission, I was reluctant to turn my back on such an extraordinary opportunity. But perhaps the most compelling reason was that I knew that my studying drama at Performing Arts would make my mother happy.
I was thirteen in the summer of 1955 and already primed to enjoy the long vacation days. Knowing that I would start tenth grade with new classmates, I relished every bit of time I could spend with my friends from Shell Bank. Every morning we congregated at the Avenue X playground across the street from my house. In order to get in or out of the playground I had to pass the omnipresent Butler and Bursch on their park bench. I had to be extra careful that they didn’t see me doing anything questionable or they would immediately report it to my mother. Really, my only such activity was smoking cigarettes, a habit I acquired to fit in and happily gave up fourteen years later. To earn money for cigarettes, movies, and other indulgences, my friends and I either did odd jobs for our parents, worked part-time in offices or stores, or babysat. When we weren’t working, sometimes we took a bus to Brighton Beach, rubbed each other with suntan lotion, and displayed our budding bodies in the noonday sun. This was before we learned about the perils of exposure to the sun without an SPF number.
Hormones and pheromones mingled in the heat as we walked up and down such thoroughfares as the Coney Island Boardwalk, Sheepshead Bay Road, or Kings Highway. We did what teenagers typically do: the boys swaggered while the girls whispered and giggled. We also visualized ourselves wearing the fall clothes already on display in the store windows, but with barely enough money to share a banana split between us and still have bus fare home, we couldn’t afford to buy any of the cute outfits. Instead I settled for a box of handkerchiefs with the initial “C” embroidered on each handkerchief alternately in pink, blue, or yellow.
The summer of ’55 was a succession of salad days—a sweet, simple, peaceful time of golden youth and green innocence. There was nothing but the vine-ripe fruit of each delicious day and honeysuckle night. I thought, If every child on earth could experience just one such summer, it would be a much better world.
But as every school-age child learns, summers end.