Just One Catch (7 page)

Lena was immensely relieved when Joey became old enough for kindergarten and sleepaway camp in the summers. Anything to keep him off the beach. She sent him once to Surprise Lake in Cold Spring, sixty miles north of New York City. Surprise Lake was a Jewish camp catering mostly to underprivileged families from Manhattan's Lower East Side (in time, alumni from the camp would include Eddie Cantor, Walter Matthau, Neil Simon, Larry King, and Neil Diamond). Probably, Lena learned about the camp from Lee, who was more conscious than she was of the world beyond Coney Island. Lee filled out the paperwork, making sure Joey qualified for financial aid. Lena helped Joey pack his suitcase. Two weeks later, when he returned, she discovered that none of the clothes had been touched. He had used his toothbrush and comb but never once changed his shirt or pants. When Lena asked him why, he replied that no one had told him to unpack. Plus, he'd found it easier just to leave the bag alone.

In 1930, he entered first grade at Coney Island's PS 188. He was a bundle of anxiety. Family members had always told him he was handsome, and now he studied his face obsessively in the bathroom mirror to make sure none of his features had deteriorated overnight. He feared he was already going bald because his forehead was so much higher than his ears. He tried different parts in his hair, worried about his height. Mostly, he checked the mirror each morning just to make sure he was still Joey Heller.

He fantasized constantly. His imagination, along with his already well-developed reading skills, distinguished him from his classmates during his early school years. Teachers praised his writing and read it aloud in class. At one point, his cousin Nat Siegel gave him a prose translation of the
Iliad
: the first work of literature to make a “real impression” on him, he said. “I read that and reread it almost without stop.” Afterward, he loved doing book reports. In one paper, he assumed the persona of Tom Sawyer. For another assignment, much later, he wrote from the point of view of the metal in the gun that killed Abraham Lincoln. It pleased him to get good grades, and to hear his works read aloud as models of excellent writing. Some of his classmates began to resent the favor he earned from teachers, and his nervous maladies worsened. Warts sprouted on his hands and arms, as many as seventeen during one stretch.

Like the amusement park rides, whose thrills paled quickly, the teachers' praise came to be routine, and Joey grew restless in class. Many years later, Sylvia recalled an incident. “Joe brought home a note from his teacher, asking my mother to come to school and talk to her,” she said. “We were all terrified. My mother didn't trust her English, so I went.… The teacher told me Joe never listened in class and always looked bored. She said she kept trying to catch him, but he always knew the answer. She admitted he was too bright for the class, but he was demoralizing the other kids and frustrating her. All we could do was tell Joe to try to look as though he was paying attention.”

So he masked himself: sometimes studious and polite, at other times, to hide his uncertainties and fears of physical afflictions, preening and loud. “He was brighter than all of us. He was a needler, a big mouth,” Beansy Winkler told Barbara Gelb. “Joe,” he said, became a “pain in the neck.”

*   *   *

JOSEPH HELLER
was bright enough as a child to absorb the knowledge that he inhabited a wildly contradictory world; the way to negotiate its seams was to split himself—on the one hand, acting boldly, and on the other, withdrawing to replenish and nourish his imagination. Force and avoidance: modes of existence oddly consistent with the surge and lull of Coney Island. At summer's peak, the force of bodies yearning for physical release overwhelmed the boardwalk, the beach, and the residential neighborhoods. In the off-season, during the gray winter months, visitors' avoidance of the area was so total, the silence was eerie. The surf, with its hidden undertow, appeared to reclaim what primitive appetites had chewed up and distorted only weeks before.

The question remained: What
was
Coney Island? A big top or a family enclave? For that matter, was it America or Russia—or Italy, Armenia, or Germany? A petri dish for socialism, as Isaac Heller believed—where the working class could bask in leisure and freedom—or a fountain of capitalism, as George Tilyou, Edward Riegelmann, and Nathan Handwerker set out to prove?

More to the point, perhaps, Morris Lapidus, a Russian immigrant, and an architect both revered and derided for his dramatic decorative styles, once wrote that his first “emotional surge” about architecture came from a visit he made as a child to Luna Park. “I was standing on [an] elevated platform just as dusk was falling [over Coney Island,]” he wrote, “and the lights went on. To me it was the most beautiful sight I'd [ever] seen. Of course, I knew it was hanky-pank, a circus and showmanship. But to a child of six it was all the wonders of the world. I never outgrew it.”

In the 1930s, little Joey Heller could articulate none of these perspectives, but he had taken them all in, including Lapidus's secret for grasping Coney Island's wooly mix, which was that no secret existed. Coney contained multitudes, to paraphrase an old visitor to its shores. To judge it one way or the other was to miss too many things of importance. Its beauty lay in its wastes, its wholeness in fragments plucked from ruin. These things, Joey knew instinctively.

Six decades later, reflecting on his literary career, he told an audience at Michigan State University that he didn't know if the combination of “morbid[ity]” and “comedy” in his writing had come from the “garishness [and] … gaudiness” of his Coney Island childhood, but once, when a critic suggested this possibility, he “like[d] the thought”—that is, it felt right to him.

In his memoir, he recalled his youth with fondness and nostalgia. It is striking, though, that one of the most visceral passages in the book concerned the end of each day, “when the ticket booths close[d] and the lights [went] out.” Then, he wrote, “Coney Island [was] … rather unclean”:

The aromatic foods that had been fried and grilled turned greasy. In the early hours of the next day the odors in the street already signaled decay. Even the fresh breezes from the sea, which had awakened keen appetites earlier and stimulated the other senses, could no longer bear away those repellent effluvia of garbage. [I] had already realized that in winter Coney Island was in the main a lonely, dark and windy place for people grown too old for homework, roller-skating, or playing tag.

In detail and tone, the passage resembles Isaac Babel's descriptions of a Russian city street following a pogrom (“My world was small and horrible … the earth smelt of … the grave and of flowers … [and I] wept more bitterly, completely and happily than I ever wept again in all my life,” Babel wrote in “The Story of My Dovecot”). As a child, Heller did not know about the world his father had fled, but he may have sensed in his mother's bitterness, in the mockery and mourning of her Yiddish, that the world his father found was, in fundamental, spirit-crushing ways, not awfully different from the one he'd sought to escape. What
was
clear to the child was that he could not make his way in the world without a hustle or a scam, or at least the knowledge that what people
said
was going on really wasn't going on.

*   *   *

“I DIDN'T REALIZE
then how traumatized I was. As a boy in school I used to say my father was ‘deceased.' I was aware without being aware,” Heller told Barbara Gelb in 1979. (“As always, when talking of his parents, he stutters very slightly,” Gelb noted.)

“Joe was a nervous wreck,” George Mandel told Gelb for her magazine profile. Years later, when reminded of this comment, Mandel expressed surprise he'd ever said such a thing, but he added, “I do recall … [his friends] were careful not to shout his name from behind for fear he might jump off the sidewalk in traffic.” Heller had met Mandel around the neighborhood and they became pals, sharing quick wits and rich imaginations.

In his memoir, Heller recalled “suffering headaches” as he grew into his teens. He continued to bite his nails and study his image in the mirror. He tended to avoid the amusement parks now. Instead, he and his friends transferred to the beach lessons they had learned in the parks—that
everything
is a game designed to sucker somebody, and most people can be conned into wanting what they don't really want. The boys bought ice cream and soda pop, then turned around and sold them at a higher price to younger kids. Or they'd resell the jelly apples they'd bought from a neighbor woman, Mrs. Gelber; some of the apples were rotten and had worms in the center. Sometimes, a member of the group would steal costume jewelry from his parents' bedroom and peddle it. The gang could always spot plainclothes cops: The men wore shirts outside their trousers to conceal weapons and badges. Besides, they were all Gentiles.

Seeking more gainful employment, Heller—still Joey to his friends—took an evening newspaper route, delivering the reactionary Hearst paper, the
New York American,
which attracted few readers among the Jewish and Italian families in his neighborhood. After school each day, he walked down to the Stillwell Avenue subway station, grabbed a Nathan's dog, and picked up his bundle of papers, paying a penny and a half for each. Then he hawked the things for two cents. One night, at an Irish bar along the boardwalk, a man seated at a table just inside the doorway called Joey in, snatched a paper, read the racing results on the back page, and returned the paper. Then he gave Joey a dime. “I was in heaven, strolling on air as I went back outside,” he wrote in his memoir. “I was in love with a world that had such humans in it.”

The incident cemented a certainty in him that would drive him all his life: “[F]ew pleasures are so thoroughly reinforcing to the spirit as the arrival of unexpected money,” he decided. Years later, recalling the aunt who had given him a dollar at his father's funeral, he wrote, “I associate money with life, and an absence of money with death. I can't help it.”

Because the newspapers didn't move well in his area, he riffed on the headlines, or tried to spice them up, to attract more readers. “Extra! Hitler dies … his mustache!” he would shout. He had only the vaguest idea who Hitler was. After finishing his route, giving away the remaining papers to his favorite families, he ran home, did his homework, and challenged his imagination more thoroughly than when falsifying the news. Inspired in part by Danny the Count's talk of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, he tried penciling a few short stories, using as models the “short shorts” he found in the copies of
Collier's
or
Liberty
that Lee or Sylvia brought home occasionally (the short shorts were a thousand words or less, and usually ended with a big surprise). Many of his efforts echoed the
Iliad,
with facts and details smuggled in from whatever he was studying in school.

Walking to his classes in the mornings wasn't the cinch it used to be. As the neighborhood boys got older, they split into factions, divided by personalities, interests, and cultural backgrounds. The Italian boys threatened to beat up the Jews, and vice versa. Occasionally, gangs of boys threw small rocks at one another. Joey never encountered serious trouble, but he had to be more careful now. The place was rougher than before, money was scarcer (the Depression was deepening), and local neighborhoods were constantly unsettled by rumblings of change. A familiar joke was, “First this was Coney Island, now it's Cohen's Island, soon it will be Coon's Island.”

In the afternoons, after school, some of Joey's friends gathered outside Sammy the Pig's pool room, near Happy's Luncheonette on Mermaid Avenue, to smoke marijuana and listen to the older boys talk about gambling and girls. Generally, Joey craved food more than weed, and he'd spend all his newspaper money on Happy's pork chops.

Lena worried about the coarsening effects of the Depression on her family, but her hopes that politicians or community leaders could clean things up weakened by the year. Joey recalled the last surge of political excitement in his neighborhood—it erupted the year he turned nine. Norman Thomas brought his socialist message to Coney Island; standing next to hot dog stands and merry-go-rounds, he promised to “repeal unemployment,” while crowds cheered and munched on pickle sandwiches. Joey, Sylvia, and Lee taught Lena enough English to qualify her to vote. On the eve of the 1932 election, Joey joined a torchlight parade, chanting with a group, “Hoover, Hoover, rah, rah rah! Put him in the trash can, ha, ha, ha!”

In truth, he had already understood—and learned to distrust—the dynamic behind most American politics. By watching the shill games along the boardwalk, he grasped that the barker, the person with power, always offered more than he could deliver (therefore, he could never really lose), but his constituency walked away generally satisfied at having participated in something, with the occasional illusion of winning.

Nineteen thirty-two came and went. Coney's trash cans overflowed. Lena felt it was too late in life to convince her family to turn to religion for steadiness and solace; she herself had never been so inclined, but some part of her suffered guilt at being nonobservant. She worried that if the kids didn't dress nicely on High Holidays and appear to be off to services, other families would suspect they were Communists. One by one, many of Joey's friends celebrated bar mitzvahs. He did not.

He was more likely to grapple with spiritual matters—thoughts of mortality or the meaning of existence—on the beach or in the sea. He and his friends liked to do the dead man's float in the ocean, letting the tide carry them far from shore, then beelining to a bell buoy about a quarter of a mile out. It was an exhausting adventure, and they alternated dog-paddling with intensive arm strokes, or they gave in to the tide as it carried them toward their goal. One day, one of the boys announced he was too tired to make it back to land. Joey and the others gathered around and got him safely to shore. Only afterward did it occur to Joey how powerful the tide was, and how close they had come to being washed away by it.