Martin J. Kleinman's Blog, page 12

My Al Pacino Story

The new Scorsese picture, The Irishman, is coming next week.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHXxVmeGQUc

Real New Yorkers cannot wait for the film to open. It stars Bobby D. and Al Pacino and, helmed by Scorsese, is expected to be a career highlight for the three of them, as well as for Joe Pesci, Bobby Cannavale, and Ray Romano.

On days like today, I feel like Pacino as the aging Don Corleone. It’s autumn, and I imagine sitting in a backyard chair, as he did. Wind-swept leaves cartwheel as he recalls life-episodes long gone.

And I remember one raucous Passover fete at my BIL’s house. Except for him, who hails from Baltimore, we all have family roots in The Bronx. There are many empty bottles of red wine on the table. The talk turns to favorite movies and actors and Pacino’s name came up. I love Pacino, and have since Panic in Needle Park. I remember my AP English teacher at Clinton, Gail Simon, had the Playbill cover from “The Indian Wants the Bronx” — which showed Pacino in the starring role — taped over the blackboard. How proud I felt that “one of ours” made it big.

As we all shouted out our favorite Pacino roles, my wife’s cousin Ellie, who grew up around East 174th Street, near where my granny used to live, off Vyse Avenue, cut everyone off.

“Ya know, I went to school with him,” she said.

Yeah right, was the cleaned-up version of what we pelted her with. Sure, Ellie knew Pacino. Yeah, when pigs fly.

“No really. We went to school together. Herman RIdder Junior High. Only back then, he was Sonny Pacino. He was raised up by his grandparents. He was in school plays and I was in a play with him.”

Herman Riddle Junior High School, Boston Road, Crotona Park

Sure.

“I’ll prove it,” she said. “I’m gonna mail you something and then you’ll believe me.” Remember that this pre-dates email, jpegs, smart phones, and the Interwebs. We actually used snail mail back then.

Fast forward a week. The mail comes, with one letter from cousin Ellie. My wife opens it. “Commear, right now!” she screams. “You gotta see this!”

In her hands is a black and white photo with scalloped edges, of the type taken back when most folks used those old Kodak box cameras. It’s a picture of a school stage, crowded with kids. There, front and center, is a young Ellie and a brash looking kid in a white tee-shirt with a full head of dark hair. We peer closer.

It’s friggin’ fourteen-year old Sonny Pacino, starring in some school play.

Man, I wish I had that photo now. It didn’t survive our many moves, from Chelsea, to Queens, to Brooklyn, and back to the Bronx. But it survives up here, in my noggin.

November 1, I’ll see him again, in The Irishman.

Friggin Pacino, man! ATTICA!!! ATTICA!!!!!

Joy

It would be nice to have some joy in our lives again.

You remember joy, right? A big, toothy, unselfconscious smile. Hands thrown in the air. Eyes wide open. You remember? Like biting into a Gorman’s hot dog on Fordham Road after school on a sunny Friday afternoon in autumn. Like cutting work for a midday showing of “Star Wars” the day it opened? Like seeing your kid pop out in the delivery room and you know your life is now forever changed for the better?

You know? You remember? Joy? As in: “Yayyyyyyyyy?”

There’s no joy in Mudville right now. Only a relentless drumbeat of dyspepsia from social media and mainstream news. Only the Twittersphere’s corrosive bile, flung from our so-called leaders, uncouth liars who should have had their mouths washed out with Lava soap as children back in the day.

Last week, however, I happened to see a television commercial that actually made me smile. A little girl with a winning smile and a lot of energy turns heads at local, regional and national talent contests. Judges beam in appreciation of her enthusiasm. The child’s parents are awash in pride.

The look on the kid’s face is an expression I’d long-forgotten: pure unadultered joy!

Pure joy!

I go online to learn more about the ad. Big mistake. The caustic comments on You Tube caught me off-guard. And that no doubt speaks more to my naivete than the ill-will of the commenters — here are but a few:

“The girl dancing makes me wanna throw up”

“If I see this commercial one more time I’m going to stab my eyes and ears out”

“She rides the short bus for sure”

“Most obnoxious untalented brat kid ever. Not dancing. Just jumping like a clumsy cloying clown and acting like a spoiled attention midget. Parents obviously blind. No talent no grace no rhythm no skill.”

Wow. Such venom. That’s a lot to unpack, as some say these days. People take the time to go online and spew about a fictional kid in an ad that encourages parents to save for entry fees? Folks, get a life!

it’s no wonder that I’m slinking towards the exit doors to various social media platforms. The thrill is gone. Too much anonymous word-bomb throwing. Not enough kindness. Certainly not enough joy.

Gorman’s is long gone. And I think I’ll pass on the opening of “The Joker.” But maybe tonight I’ll give my son a call. And then practice the piano — headphones most definitely on.

Pompadour Days

Johnny Cash and His Pompadour

I long for pompadour days, especially now, a time when we are being high-pressure hosed with information.

When spied through the mists of time, the days of our youth are idealized. My formative years were fraught. McCarthyism. Korea. Viet Nam. Racism. No era escapes drama.

But what we have now is a defining moment in time, a once-in-a-generation turning point. Is it a wonder that I long for haircuts that seemed to take forever?

There I am, maybe all of seven years old, in a barber chair, on University Avenue off Kingsbridge Road, in a dowdy district of the Bronx. My barber barely speaks. Classical music softly plays on a tube-type table radio. He puts a ribbon of tissue paper around my neck, a futile gesture that will not prevent hair from going down my shirt until I shower.

“A trim,” I say.

“A trim,” he says. And then, he cuts, little scissor snips, interminable. Around the ears. Around the back of my head.

“Just a little off the top?” he asks.

I nod. Sure. Whatever.

He takes a hot white towel from a silver steamer near the radio and daubs dirt from behind my ears. I tense as he takes an ivory handled straight razor from his station and smack smack smack sharpens it against the brown leather strop attached to the side of the chair. With practiced ease, he braces his hand with his pinky against the back of my neck. I shudder at the power he wields, for this milquetoast has my very life in his pink little palm.

One slip, and my ear is on the floor.

Then, the styling: he shakes green glop from an ancient bottle of ODell Hair Trainer into both hands and rubs them together, before shmearing this slime onto my head. With a flourish, he takes a black comb from a blue bottle of Barbicide disinfectant and parts my hair.

Finally, my pompadour. It is the pompadour of Johnny Cash, who my mother loves despite the fact that she says he has a problem with pills. The only pills I know are St. Joseph’s Aspirin For Children, so this confuses me, but I trust the statement, as I trust all adult statements.

In time, that will change. In time, Johnny Cash will become the cultural icon to my generation that attracts me and my best friends to his 1969 concert at the Garden. From high up in the rafters, I hear him sing his “Five Feet High and Rising” and dear reader, I remember the last lyric like it was yesterday:

“Well the rails are washed out north of town
We gotta head for higher ground
We can’t come back till the water goes down,
Five feet high and risin’…Well, it’s five feet high and risin'”

My pompadour is long gone, as is my trust in authority. We gotta head for higher ground. The water is five feet high and risin’.

Life is a Lichtman’s Mocha Cake

Lichtman’s counter

I was a young guy in my late twenties when I worked for a small trade newsletter publisher on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. In the “Ford To City: ‘Drop Dead!'” nineteen seventies, the area was still part of the gritty New York City of yesteryear. There on the Upper West Side were sawdust-floored stores that sold candies and nuts, Kosher meats, dairy, smoked fish, bread, cakes and cookies.

Of the bakeries, my much-older co-workers told me: go to Grossingers on Columbus Avenue for the brownies and go to Lichtman’s on 86th Street and Amsterdam for breads, black-and-whites, and cakes. And they were right.

Louis Lichtman came to New York from Hungary and the word around the neighborhood, for forty-something years, was that his cakes were sublime. So when I wanted to impress my young wife’s fancy-pants Westport aunts and uncles, I ordered a huge mocha cake.

On a hot day in late summer, I picked the cake up and placed it in the back seat of my very used, non-air conditioned Toyota Corona. Back then, what young city-dweller could afford a car, never mind one with a/c? We drove merrily up the Merritt Parkway to Westport, windows open, AM radio blasting. Our hearts swelled with anticipation.

We arrived, proudly offered the Lichtman’s cake box to our hosts, and stood back for an anointment of high-praise. This was, after all, a special order mocha cake from Lichtman’s!

My wife’s aunt opened the box, to reveal a very melted, very crooked, special order cake. It was still tasty, but it was aesthetically compromised. “Oh….” she said with disapproval that stings even as I write this so many decades later. “I can’t serve THAT!”

The dinner party survived, I survived, my wife survived and Lichtman’s certainly survived, for another ten years. But, in the late spring of 1987, Louis Lichtman’s landlord jacked the man’s rent 500 percent. The Hungarian immigrant cried as an auctioneer sold off the baker’s equipment and fixtures to a room full of his competition. They, too, would soon fail, as gentrification smothered the city’s commercial oxygen supply like cultural kudzu.

Today, the southwest corner of 86th Street and Amsterdam Avenue shelters an architectural hardware store, a dry cleaning shop, and a custom shade store. Back in ’87, Lichtman’s rent increased five-fold, from $1300 a month to $6,500. I wonder what these storekeepers are paying now?

I suppose all that is beside the point. Here’s the real story: only three years after the auctioneer’s gavel signaled the last sale of his store’s baking equipment, Louis Lichtman, the man who crafted my melted mocha cake, died of cardiac arrest, at the age of 78.

In three years, he was done.

That was almost thirty years ago. My career has carried me a long way and I am no longer the young guy with a beat-up Toyota, so eager to impress supercilious suburban relatives. And yet, when I think of Mr. Lichtman’s story arc I cannot help but to compare it with my own.

For our tales are more alike than one might think. We both came a long way. We both learned, honed and loved our respective crafts. We both cherished our city and stayed with it, even as we were ground down by it. And finally, he faced the road’s end, a fate no man escapes.

As for me, do I dare ever to retire?

We Won’t Always Have Paris

The imminent closing of the wondrous Paris theater caused me to post this remembrance of movie days past, republished today by Gary Axelbank. Check it out — it’s a nice beach read

Happy Father’s Day

Much love to Thomas Beller and Jacob Margolies for giving my Father’s Day remembrance a home in Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood. I hope you memories are fond ones.

Here’s my tale, published today:
https://mrbellersneighborhood.com/2019/06/happy-fathers-day?fbclid=IwAR3ShwwmZln8GwSHIOUoxVy02hShaUqb1bFJs2li4wLcyH0sNU1NIoIICJs

Big Mort, Camp Van Dorn, Mississippi, age 18

My Latest Story

You mean you missed it? Well, here it is:

Who Will Be Humbled

I Want to Go Out Like Leonard Cohen

I Want to Go Out Like Leonard Cohen.

I was just a post-punchball street kid from The Bronx when I started college at CUNY. Steps from the Number Four el train, I signed up for classes with a creative writing professor named Jerome Charyn. He came from The Bronx too, and he made it, in the world of letters.

I wanted to learn from him and expand my life, which until then was a tightly proscribed four-mile wide radius, from Inwood to the Southern Boulevard, from the derelict Yonkers pier to the big ballpark on River Avenue.

“Just
a crazy kid with a dream.” That was me. 
I wanted to make a life with words. 
Audacious. At sixteen I had no idea what that really meant, except that
for some reason it made everyone I knew fume, then spit: “Where do you come shinin’ off?”

Charyn introduced me to new friends, in print, and to that, I said “bring it on!”:  Roethke, Rexroth, Kees, Ginsberg, Kinnell, Plath.  John Hawkes, Kesey, Bellow, Borowski, Cleaver, Baraka, Claude Brown, Ellison, Baldwin, Elkin, Burroughs.

And
then he assigned Leonard Cohen.

Leonard Cohen? I knew Cohen from his songs, free-form FM favorites such as “Suzanne”, “So Long Marianne”, “Sisters of Mercy.” But books?

“Unexpurgated!” Zowee!

Yes: “Beautiful
Losers,” a book that made my provincial puppy head explode, as I knew it would,
as soon as I picked up the Bantam paperback in the college bookstore.  The jacket read: “The most daring new
novelist on the scene today! Unexpurgated!” For me, it was “Naked Lunch” to the
third power.

The
years passed.  The world took its
toll.  And Cohen was proved right, again
and again.

“The
ponies run.  The girls are young.  The odds are there beat.  You win awhile, and then it’s done.  Your little winning streak. You live your
life as if it’s real, a thousand kisses deep.”

And: “Everybody
knows that the dice are loaded. 
Everybody knows the fight is fixed…the poor stay poor, the rich get
rich.  That’s how it goes; everybody
knows.”

He kept at it and so did I. 
https://www.amazon.com/Home-Front-Martin-Kleinman/dp/098250411X I always had my day job, and I always kept making stories.  Cohen kept making songs and, then, got back to touring; for him, the fight was fixed: he was cheated out of royalties and needed the dough.

Some
celebrities become an “oldies act.” They trade on past glory, befouling their
legacy.  They go for the easy applause,
or the cheap laugh, or the familiar movie character — the bit they know will
work.  Not Leonard Cohen.  I saw the Cohen exhibit recently at the
Jewish Museum, in Manhattan.  You should
go. This was a man, a real mensch.  He
kept pushing and plugging, never complacent. In the exhibit’s startling video
of Cohen’s life-work, the seventy-four year old teases about an earlier time in
his life: “I was sixty then, just a crazy kid with a dream.”

The
decades passed. He never stopped challenging us, or himself.  I saw him at Barclay’s in 2012, a spry
seventy-eight. “I promise you
we’ll give you everything we got,” he said early on, and he sure did.

To the very end, his lyrics rendered the harsh illumination that makes the cockroaches dance crazy on the late night kitchen counter of life. His secret chord still holds pan-generational appeal, as evidenced by the mixed crowd at the Museum.

His
truths are eternal: “There’s a crack in everything.  That’s how the light gets in.” So, when at
last I see the dealer, and I’m out of the game, I hope it’s like Leonard Cohen,
who gave it everything until it was time to relent and sing, with pride, honor
and grace: “Heneni, heneni – I’m ready, my Lord.”

I’ve Been Remiss

I’ve been away from my own blog since last September. But I’m coming back. A new collection of stories will be published later this year and there are lots of things on our mind here at The Real New Yorkers.

Congestion Pricing?

Specialized School Admissions?

MTA Performance?

Commercial Rent Catastrophe?

We’ll get to all of them. Hang tight. Meantime, read my latest story, just published at Typishly.com.

Who Will Be Humbled

Jimi’s Gone 48 Years Today

On this date in 1970, Jimi Hendrix died.

But he’s been with me for the last 48 years.  Frank sang “My Way” yet, for me, Jimi’s life spoke more powerfully to the notion of living on your own terms.  Screw the naysayers.  Just go for it.

Did I ever tell you my Jimi Hendrix story for Real New Yorkers?  I thought not. Once upon a time, in the late 60s, my friends Larry and Billy decided to head down to Manny’s on music row in Manhattan, to buy some strings and drum sticks and, in the process, drool over gold top Les Pauls and sunburst Strats.

They asked me to come with them, but I was lazy, and said “nah, not this time.” I’d gone with them before, and we ended up spending most of our time standing on the sidewalk and ogling the go-go girls from behind the velvet rope of the Metropole, which was around the corner from Manny’s.

This time was different.

They walked to the Grand Concourse and took the IND downtown.  Later that Saturday, they accosted me — in a fevered state — while I sat on the stoop.

Billy took a sales slip from Manny’s from his shirt pocket.  “You really blew it, Kleinman!!!” they shouted.

They shoved the slip in front of my face.  On it, in rococo ballpoint script, were these words:

Billy —

Be groovy

Jimi

I could not believe it.  But they saw him. They spoke to him. And I missed the chance of a lifetime.

I tried to stay “groovy” — in my own way — all these years.  I tried to “do it my way.” I really tried. And I’m going to keep trying, no matter what.

Thanks Jimi. Really, man.  Thanks so much.

Alev Hasholem.