Notes on a Cowardly Lion (6 page)

When Lahr arrived, he came complete with a pair of pajamas and a dime novel.

“What'ya bring that for?” said Berkowitz.

“I figured I'd read because I don't sleep good.”

“We can't use the lights, dummy. It might attract attention. We'll just have to go to sleep. The cot's yours.”

Finally, the chatter tapered off. Berkowitz was asleep.

Lahr tried to go to sleep, trying his mother's remedy of thinking happy thoughts. He remembered diving into the East River, the curious silence under water, cutting off the city noises, and then surfacing, to a world miraculously fresh. He thought of Frank Merriwell, and horses' hooves, a noise that captivated him on the riding paths of Central Park. He simulated the clip-clop with his tongue against the cavity of his cheek. He usually could lull himself to sleep, but not that night. He began to itch.

“Hey, Sammy—what's on the cot? C'mmon, Sammy, wake up!”

“Shut up, Swedish, I was almost asleep. You're dreamin' or somethin'.”

“No kiddin' Sammy, what's wrong with this cot? I'm gonna scratch myself to death if you don't tell me. Put on the light, will you.”

Sammy got up and reached for matches.

“This'll have to do,” he said, holding the flame above the cot.

“Look at that!” Lahr stood up from the cot. “I told you I wasn't dreaming—bugs.”

“Well, what are we going to do about it?”

“Look at the little things move. They're walking from my cot right over to your bed.”

“So what's your idea?”

“Let's just pull the beds apart, and then the lice will break their necks when they fall between.”

They swept away the lice and returned to bed. Lahr lay awake. He could hear the low whine of a dog. It persisted for several minutes. Berkowitz remembers Lahr yelling, “That's Fanny. That's Fanny. She's calling me.” Lahr ran to the window and pushed it open, thrusting his chest far out of the window and scanning the alley.

“Here Fanny! Here Fanny!”

“Swedish, will you shut up for chrissake, it's nearly two o'clock.”

“It's Fanny. I know it is. Listen. I'm sure it is. She misses me.”

Lahr began to call again. When there was no answer, he grudgingly lay back on his cot.

“I hope you're satisfied, Lahrheim. You just woke up half the neighborhood with your yelling. Go to sleep and forget it.”

“I'm tryin', I'm tryin'.”

He imagined Fanny being left unfed or perhaps being given away for messing up the living room floor as his mother sometimes threatened. Finally, Lahr jumped from the cot and groped for his clothes.

“What'ya doin' now, Swedish?”

“Gettin' dressed.”

“What the hell for?”

“I've got to get some sleep,” he said. “I'm goin' home.”

Besides his father's platitudes about idleness and the intimidation of the city he walked so often, school was the bane of Lahr's early years. He had never been a good student, but at P.S. 40 in the Bronx, he seemed to get worse. His parents were outraged by his curious inaction. He did not work; he would not even try. “I was like a caged animal in school,” he says, remembering his teacher Miss Shea, who found his books tucked back in his desk after class and brought them home to Mrs. Lahrheim with stern admonitions about her son's behavior. Lahr had tacked her attendance book to the table, and had been called
before the principal for throwing a book at her. He could not explain to his parents about the classroom—the anxiety over gray walls and long rows of wooden seats, the sadness of the winter stench of damp clothing and mothballs. In school, Miss Shea and others like her were watching, judging, ready to scold him for his obvious inadequacies. “I didn't feel free at school; it just didn't mean anything—nothing.” The careless instruction in every lesson from mathematics to civics for an adult life in commerce upset him. “What do numbers mean, when you have nothing to count?” The only discipline Lahr enjoyed was penmanship. He had a fluid hand; he practiced writing out his name, spelling it in different styles, and always in dignified arabesques.

The only memorable event in Lahr's academic career was the Eighth Grade class show. It was the first time he had ever participated in a school activity. Although Lahr harmonized on summer evenings with friends on the benches of Crotona Park, he had never performed. The entertainment at P.S. 40 was a Kid Act, modeled on the popular Smith and Dale routines, which spoke not only to the boredom and rebelliousness subdued in school life, but also with the babble of familiar dialects. Lahr remembers the laughs he and his group of friends got on stage, mimicking the deeper, more outrageous accents of their parents, and wearing penciled mustaches like pintsized adults.

He remembers how nervous he was waiting for that first cue and wondering if he could growl the broad “Dutch” dialect with the panting “h” and the rolled “r” like his father. But on stage, the words seemed to speak themselves. Gestures happened smoothly, impelled by a laughing audience. Lahr liked other people laughing at him. He was amazed at the effect of even the ordinary words he spoke. These same words which had seemed so matter-of-fact when he had memorized them now moved people to laughter. He found himself making up new movements that had nothing to do with the script. When the boys rushed off the stage after their final gag, the audience applauded until they had to hurry back for a bow. Lahr recalls how the experience filled him with a satisfaction. He felt completely in control on stage, proud and curiously powerful. He had enjoyed it all—the make-up, the clowning, the noisy laughter. As he left for home after the performance, his teacher stopped him at the door. “Well, Mr. Lahrheim,” she said, “if you don't go on the stage, you'll probably go to jail.” Lahr was astonished that Miss Shea talked to him about anything except his laziness. “All I could think to say was—‘thank you.'”

The weeks that followed his performance were more exciting than
he had ever known. His friends and even vague acquaintances greeted him with the “Dutch” dialect he had bellowed. Sometimes they threw up their arms in the same wild rhythm. They knew him and showed they understood more about him. They challenged his reticence; and he basked in this new recognition. “He was such a success,” recalls his sister, “that Gus Edwards heard about him and wanted to put him in a school act. Mother and Dad wouldn't hear of it. But after that performance I remember a teacher said he was the clown of the class and they couldn't do anything with him.”

Lahr himself never quite feared the life of delinquency his parents kept predicting for him. Yet, when he failed his eighth-grade year and was ordered to repeat it, the question that plagued him was hammered into his mind by Jacob. “What's going to become of you?” Jacob wanted his son to have an education; but Lahr was not interested. If he did not attempt anything, he could not fail. The upholstery business was the alternative. His hands were not those of an upholsterer but long for their size and, like a woman's, thin and brittle. They were, as he said himself, clumsy and groping, unable to master the intricate maneuvers of tools and thread. He tried those things to please his father. The results had been disastrous because he could never concentrate. Without a trade and without an education, his possibilities seemed as bleak as the streets he was born to. There was never an answer to the question he asked himself: “What's going to become of you?” He was only conscious of his immobility and a vague, undirected energy.

Although Lahr would become P.S. 40's most famous alumnus, he never graduated. The idea of repeating the eighth grade was oppressive, and Lahr had a scheme for avoiding that humiliation. The plan lay in the very hands he looked upon with such ironic bewilderment. At fourteen, he could get a working permit, so each day he read the papers and the list of available jobs. He would write a letter to his teacher explaining that it was necessary for him to leave school to work in his father's shop, not an unusual request; many of his friends had been taken from school by a poor parent. It took him two minutes to compose the note and another minute to copy Jacob's signature. He hesitated a week before handing it in; but when he did, the teacher excused him without further questions.

For a week following his withdrawal, he did not tell his parents, preferring to rise with his family and set off as if he were heading up Prospect Hill to P.S. 40, two blocks away. In fact, he had composed
letters of application in his finest script and was awaiting the results. “I was certain that with my good penmanship, I could get a job.”

“On my first letter, I got a job with Wetzel the Tailor. I was a lazy kid, I didn't know where I was going. Now, here's a complete metamorphosis. Wetzel paid me $4.50 a week, and this year [1966] my agent gave me a Christmas present from Wetzel the Tailor—just a sports coat cost $250. I worked in the vest department, delivering vests up and down. I don't know how I lost that job, but after that I worked in Rogers Peet, downstairs, on Thirteenth Street. I tried to install the Wetzel System. I was a stock clerk and delivery boy. It was all wrong. They had charts of how things should be done. I loused that up too. Once I had to deliver a suit way up on Broadway. You could get a transfer and travel all over the city for a nickel in those days. It was a long way uptown and getting dark. When I got to the address, I realized it was a cemetery. The caretaker evidently bought a suit and he lived right in the middle of the grounds. Brother, this was really something, because when I was a kid I used to be afraid to sleep alone. I remember running back, running through those graves. I didn't quit that job, I must have been fired. But there was this fellow in the stock room who belonged to the Boys' Club on Tenth Street and Avenue A. They spawned a lot of fighters like Knockout Brown, who was cross-eyed and his opponents didn't know which way he was going to punch. My friends and I used to fool around boxing behind the clothes rack. We were always knocking down the coats.”

In six months after leaving school, Lahr held and lost fourteen jobs. His optimism was gone, his sense of failure multiplied by his parents' disgust at his aimlessness. The routine of finding work was as habitual as ways of coping. “You'd earn $4.50 a week and you'd bring it home to your mother. I used to get twenty-five cents a day, a nickel on the subway and fifteen cents for lunch. One time all I ate for four days was banana sandwiches. I broke out in the damndest rash and had stomach aches. I remember that.”

His fifteenth job was his last ordinary employment and his shortest tenure. Jacob had arranged a job for his son as a delivery boy with L. &M. Friedlander on Wilkins Avenue, who ran a prospering hardware store. His duties were easy enough—to deliver merchandise and help around the store. It was the first time, however, that he had been invested with the responsibility of buying merchandise for the store. The proprietor gave him five dollars to buy brooms at a local warehouse. On the way back from the assignment, Lahr erased the wholesale
prices, marking higher ones in their place. He pocketed the difference. His sleight of hand was uncovered that same afternoon. He was fired immediately, and Mr. Friedlander sent a note to Jacob about his son's actions.

The family was mortified. This was the first either Jacob or Augusta knew of his thefts. Lahr found himself being judged suddenly as an adult. There had been no respite after childhood, no bridge to responsibility. “I never stole a thing after I got caught at the hardware store. I made up my mind—voom, just like that, when I saw Mom crying in her apron. It was over. Finished.”

Lahr never dreamed of becoming a professional performer or regarded the theater as more than a convenient, gaudy escape. While he was floundering from job to job, many of his friends were trying to forge careers in show business. This took a conviction, an optimism that he lacked. Convinced of his own worthlessness, driven between the demands of his parents and his own intense dissatisfactions, he was stymied. The family's growing hostility and his own list of failures, too long for a boy of fifteen, cowed him. But it also made choices easier. So, when Charlie Berado, the older brother of his boxing friend, asked him to be part of a school act for a professional tryout, he did not hesitate, disregarding his parents' disdain for other children who had gone, against their family's wishes, into the theater world's frivolous good times and make-believe. The tryout at Loew's 145th Street was held once a week, as a service to both an eager public that craved new entertainment and the plethora of young performers who would work for nothing in the hope of getting bookings on the Loew's circuit. Lahr was buoyed up by the memory of his eighth-grade performance; but now he faced a more disparate audience.

Some of the same friends who had seen him on the school stage were there to watch him on a “real” one. They were tougher now, more cynical toward Lahr's aspirations.

Lahr cannot remember their act or the preceding scenes that he watched eagerly from the wings. The song, however, never left him. In the middle of the school act, he turned to the audience and sang:

My parents always tell me I'm the apple of their eye

But my friends just look at me and joke.

I gaze into the mirror and then I start to cry

Am I descended from an apple tree or just a poison oak.

“You said it—Swedish!” yelled one of Lahr's friends sitting with a block of Wilkins Avenue cronies. Lahr was bewildered: the laughter was not the same affectionate kind he had known at P.S. 40. He tried to relax and continued.

They say my face is like a mangy dog's.

They don't let monkeys into synagogues.

“I would've been your father,” came a faceless voice from the stalls, “but a bulldog beat me down the alley.”

So what's a guy to do?

Join the circus or the zoo.

When the song ended, the neighborhood kids exploded with applause and cheers for Lahr. He didn't hear it. “We were pretty bad; the act wasn't too good, and nothing came of the Loew's tryout.”