Counterpoint: The Journey of a Music Man

Prelude

My life has been a counterpoint between the professional and the personal.

Where my music brought harmony and comfort, my relationships brought dissonance and chaos.

Unable to accept or appreciate good things that came my way, I was preoccupied by what I perceived to be bad.

This attitude became the most destructive element in my life—outside of booze.

Most people talk about what fun they had when they drank, but as far as I can recall it was never really fun. When I was fourteen, my two friends and I were the band—a drum, a piano and a trumpet—playing at a small resort in the Catskills. I remember drinking beer until we got giddy and stupid and finally passed out. When one of us woke up to urinate, he peed on the others, which we thought was the funniest thing in the world. Of course, looking at it rationally, it was not really funny.

Thirty-some-odd years later in Philadelphia, I was driving home with no recollection of leaving the bar where I’d been drinking, when I suddenly felt this odd sensation of being up in the air in my big Cadillac. Up in the air! The car had hit a speed bump, taken off and was about three feet above the ground when I came out of the blackout. The car crashed down into the street, breaking all four shocks. I remember laughing at the marvelous sensation I had experienced, but that was not really funny either.

In between those times, it became absolutely imperative that I drink. Not because I enjoyed it—I didn’t—but because it relieved me of the terrible thoughts in my head and the dreadful feelings of shame, guilt and humiliation in my gut. It was almost as if alcohol was my only friend, the only way that I could get any relief and a very good substitute for being dead.

If there was any basis in fact for those feelings, it had to do with my father. I wasn’t close to my father; I felt he didn’t like me very much. Even in later years, when he was getting older and nobody looked after him but me, I got none of the reassurance that he loved me, although he must have in his heart of hearts.

1 Family (1924-1936)

My father’s father, Isaac Hittelman, came from Russia to the United States in the early nineteen hundreds. Like most immigrants, when he arrived here he didn’t know where he was going to go or what he was going to do. One of the immigration officers asked if there were any bakers who would like to have a job, so he raised his hand, got on a train and a week later wound up in a lumberjack camp about two hundred miles north of Sioux City. He was working with a whole lot of Swedes and rooming with the Chinese cook, so his accent was weird. When he had enough money, he moved to New York and sent for his wife and two children.

The family lived in a tenement, downtown on the East Side. When my father, Philip, was four, he was standing on the top of the stoop with David, who was two, on his shoulders. They tumbled down all of the steps. David’s back was broken, his spine such a mess that he became a hunchback. His last years were spent living on skid row. So, my father had his own bag of guilt that he never talked about.

I adored my grandfather—he was fun. We called him Poppy. Asked what he wanted for breakfast, he’d say, Some joost (juice), a piece tuls (toast), a gluz tee (glass of tea), und dots all. Then I bain solisfied (I’m okay.) He often told of his plans to go to Palestine: "First me carry shetsel. (satchel), go on boyt (boat) to Koobee (Cuba), then me take another boyt from Koobee to French.

Then from French me get an asal (donkey) and me go asal to Palestine."

When he taught me how to play casino, he would press his hand against his forehead for a moment, then wrinkle up the skin on the back of his hand, look at it and if it had two wrinkles, he’d say, Me going vin! If it was three wrinkles, it meant I would win, but of course it was never three. He told me stories of his childhood in Russia, and even as I grew older we stayed close. I loved him very much. When he was old and ill, and it seemed as though nobody else cared, I went out of my way to be with him whenever I could. That doesn’t make me a hero. I couldn’t imagine how family members who lived in New York—brothers, cousins and uncles—could stand to see him rot away in a nursing home. It was on Vise Avenue and when you walked in you smelled the stink of the urine. It was just awful.

My mother’s mother, Esther Carnot, a tiny woman with a very thick Yiddish accent and no sense of humor, was born in Russia and brought up in France, where she met and married my grandfather. They immigrated to New Jersey. At a time when it was unusual for a woman to be in business, she was involved in real estate, to such an extent that she did no cooking or housework—there was always a maid in the house. She bore and raised twelve children; my uncle Al, whose name was Abraham, was the first, my mother, Ethylene, the second.

I was born prematurely, in the Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx. I weighed less than four pounds, and when my mother showed me to my grandmother—who was rather blunt—she said, He looks like a little rat. My mother idolized me—she often held and touched me, something I yearned for in later years.

I can’t recall much else of my early life except moments like the time when a girl hit me with a shovel and almost took my eye out. When I was about six, we were living in New Jersey. One night, I went sleepwalking out into the freezing night, and caught double pneumonia. That was very frightening—without antibiotics and sulfa, it was a life-threatening situation. I remember my pregnant mother sitting by my bed in the hospital but I don’t remember my father even being there. All of a sudden my mother went into labor and they rushed her downstairs so she could deliver this little girl, my sister Bobbie.

When I got home, it was a whole new life; I was no longer the king of the hill. My sister got all the attention, not only because she was an infant, but because she was born with a seriously diseased heart. She was so fragile she never went to school, her nails were purple all the time and it was just ghastly. The public school sent a teacher to the house every day, and that went on for a long time. Sometimes, Bobbie gave me little kicks under the table and if I would finally give her a kick back and say, Stop it! my father would smack me, saying, Don’t you ever put your hands on her. It’s your fault she’s a cripple. When my mother died twenty years later, I assumed that was my fault, too.

My Aunt Leone says my father had such a vicious temper that there were times my mother couldn’t stand it any more, so she would take us to stay with her family in Elizabeth, New Jersey. When Aunt Lee was eleven, she was taking care of Bobbie and me. We went for a walk to a nearby lake where Lee, was distracted for a moment. My recollection was that I pushed the baby carriage into the water because I wanted the baby to disappear from my life, and for years I was consumed with guilt. Recently, I told this story to Leone, who said, No, no, I just left the brake off and the carriage rolled into the water by itself. You went in and pulled it out.

Like my grandfather, my father had been a baker. When my sister was born, he became a truck driver selling yeast to bakeries, mostly around the Bronx, a day-to-day, dreary thing. On Saturdays, he let me come with him to help, even letting me drive occasionally, after I had learned how. I can smell the yeast now. It was in five-pound loaves packed in paper with an oily texture, bearing the National Grain Yeast label. I could carry five at a time on my hand to my forearm, while Dad could carry fifteen.

We ‘d get up at five A.M. on Saturday to drive to Long Island to the yeast company, where we left the car, loaded the truck, drove it to the Bronx and began to deliver the yeast to neighborhood restaurants and bakeries. At some of these places, the owners took a liking to me and often gave me whipped cream cakes and goodies, while my father had a fresh Bronx Danish. I remember the cinnamon horns that were so fresh and warm from the oven. The smell of them and the rye breads and the pumpernickel breads and the wonderful cornbreads was almost more than I could deal with. I wasn’t allowed to drink coffee, but I had milk. For some reason, there were some places where my father asked me to wait in the truck. The windows steamed up because it was so cold outside, and then I would freeze. Sometimes he would stay in for a half, three-quarters of an hour, while I moved the car forward and back, and then practiced parking. I really loved those Saturdays.

Another thing I did on Saturdays with Dad was to go shopping and load up the truck with food. My mother mostly called him Philly, but sometimes she called him Honey Bun. When we unloaded the truck, all the kids yelled, Here comes Honey Bun, picked up boxes of groceries and helped carry them upstairs, where my father would give them a little tip, a penny or two.

Dad changed companies and worked for Anheuser-Busch, the company that makes Budweiser. When he took me to the plant in Newark, New Jersey, he left me there for a couple of hours. The guy that ran the bar and the beer garden let me have his special blend—a really wonderful beer—and I would get loaded.

My father was always planning to get rich with inventions. One of these days I’m going to invent a place where you take your car to get it washed, and it’s all going to be mechanical, and it’s going to take twenty minutes and it’s going to be perfect and clean. Another one was, I’m going to open up a pizza place where they do nothing but pizza and I’m going to make a fortune.

When others eventually brought these things into being, he complained, Those bastards always steal my best ideas. He was so narrow-minded he thought that anyone who spoke with an accent was a Nazi. The list of people he denounced as Nazis included Ingrid Bergman, David Niven and even Katharine Hepburn.

We lived in 10A on the third floor of a tenement at 2119 Hughes Avenue, a railroad flat, with tiny, tiny rooms—a kitchen, a living room and two bedrooms. My parents slept in one, Bobbie and I in the other, overlooking the backyard that was about thirty feet wide and a hundred feet long, with telephone poles and the wash on the lines. When I was nine or ten years old we had a maypole out there for a party my mother gave for the neighborhood children. Bobbie and I were dressed as King and Queen of the May.

We had an icebox. An Italian fellow with a horse and wagon delivered the ice, putting the block of ice on a burlap mat on his shoulder, schlepping it up the steps as we raided the truck for chips and pieces. We could get a big cup of lemon or cherry ices for three cents. Like every other family, we had to remember to empty the pan under the icebox as the ice melted.

My mother was a great cook. At breakfast on Sunday, she made the whole number—roasted potatoes with onions, bacon or ham, and beautiful-looking eggs with a lot of salt and pepper, but I wasn’t allowed to eat that yet because I was too young. Since my sister had to drink a lot of it, I always had Walker Gordon milk, which came in a glass bottle with the cream floating on top. Because we were poor and didn’t have a lot, Mom always insisted we eat everything on our plates. It’s a sin to waste food, and you’re not going to make me throw it in the garbage.

Once, when twelve or fourteen people were going to be in our little apartment for Thanksgiving dinner, my mother kept trying to light the oven, but it wouldn’t catch. It was necessary to turn on the gas first and then light it with a match. After she struck several matches it finally lit and there was a huge explosion, burning her face and her eyebrows—not seriously, but it scared the life out of her and everybody else. As always, my mother said, Don’t worry about it. It’s going to be all right. She turned to my father, Everything is going to be all right. Isn’t it Philly?

In the hot, sticky summer, we slept on pillows on the fire escape at night and opened fire hydrants during the day—the Bronx version of a swimming pool. In winter, we roasted mickeys, potatoes cooked in a blazing fire in a trash can. Dad brought home a huge box from a Davega store, containing a Brunswick console radio, about four feet high, with legs and a big speaker. It was mahogany to match our furniture. He proudly turned it around to show that it had a little jack that said Plug in for Television. We listened to The Lorn Ranger Sgt. Preston, Myrt and Marge and Grand Central Station. When Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave his fireside chats, it was as if we were listening to God.

I was a good athlete when I was a kid. We played games like touch football, and one Christmas, when I was seven or eight years old, I got a leather helmet as a gift. None of the guys had a helmet, so they all admired the ear covers and the thick felt inside. To prove to them that I could never get hurt with this helmet on my head, I backed across the street, took a running leap onto the sidewalk and ran headfirst into the building. My helmet was scarred and I almost broke my head open, but I laughed and said, See, I’m fine. I didn’t even feel it. Actually, I was seeing stars. When Mom saw me doing things like this, she’d yell, You better be careful! You’ll fall down and break your legs, and then don’t come running to me.

I lived in terror of wetting my bed. I can’t begin to imagine how it began, but I do remember the smell of urine, the discomfort of lying on a rubber sheet, and the terrible embarrassment of having my mother hang the yellow-stained sheets on the line that ran from one tenement to another. It was a sign that Jojo—as my friends called me—wet the bed again, which always led to teasing. Even before I understood intellectually that what goes in has to come out, I wouldn’t drink any water once it got past four in the afternoon. I continued to wet the bed as I got into my early teens, a humiliating memory, and one of the shameful secrets that became a major cause of my drinking.

As a young man, I put a little alarm clock, set for four o’clock in the morning, under my pillow. I began to be conditioned, and often woke up before four o’clock. I suppose that’s the way the bed wetting abated and finally stopped, although I continued to keep my alarm clock in bed with me as insurance, even when I was in the service.

My mother’s best friend, Claire Iskowitz, lived in 10B. My mother said, with great affection, that she was a good-natured slob. Her husband, Robbie, was a house painter. Like us, they were not practicing Jews, and their two sons, Philip and Jack were my good friends. Other than the Iskowitz family there were only Italians in the building on Hughes Avenue.

Mrs. Delabate, from the second floor, taught my mother the ins and outs of home cooking Italian style, so Mom became an exceptionally great Italian cook—not just spaghetti and meatballs but authentic fancy things. She also learned to make down-home, peasant food, like cutting a chicken into chunks, on the bone, roasted with green and red peppers, Italian sausage and bits of pork and veal. I learned that the chicken’s ears were the best part. The chicken’s ears was the stomach; in Jewish they call it a pupik. Even today, the dark meat of the chicken is much more fun and interesting to me. You could always smell the olive oil and the garlic in our kitchen, just as you could from Mrs. Delabate’s.

Mr. Delabate had a little tailor shop down a couple of steps in the building directly across the street. Their son, Julius, and I were best buddies so, when I returned from the army years later, the first thing I did was go back to the Bronx to see him. His father had died; Julie was running the shop, where I found him behind the pressing machine. He hadn’t changed at all, but I had. We couldn’t talk about anything but our childhood memories, like the games we had played: ringalevio and Johnnie-on-the-pony and stickball and triangle and punch ball. It brought on a certain deep sadness, because my life had been so much more fun then.

I became friends with Charles Zeilof, a young man about my age who we called Junior. He had a BB gun and he liked to hunt and go fishing—things I had never done, as I was finicky about getting my hands dirty. Occasionally, we went to the Bronx Park, where there were real trees and giant rocks and the sounds that the river made and the smell of the soil. We climbed the rocks to hunt snakes, and one day we came across a two-foot-long garter snake. Junior, with the accuracy of a Frank Buck, shot its head off—from a distance of about seven inches. He skinned the snake, while I had to keep from vomiting. After he hammered the snake-skin onto a piece of wood with about six nails on either side, he presented it to me and I hung it on the wall of my room like a trophy.

When he let me borrow his BB gun I practiced firing it at a can out in the field. One evening, I had the gun in the house and I saw a rat in the basement—a five-inch-long rat standing on his hind legs, staring at me. It was obviously sick because it didn’t move. I shot it and it just about disintegrated. I couldn’t clean up the terrible mess; I couldn’t go near it. Mom, bless her heart, came down and said, Don’t tell your father, don’t tell your father, he’ll kill you—I’ll clean it up—it’ll be all right.

Very soon after my sister was born I started learning the piano. I had to practice at least twenty minutes every day or my father would punish me. I fooled around with the clock and advanced it, until after a while I discovered that I really liked to practice.

Dad had a natural love of music. He played the accordion and the fiddle, but not very well. When he was young, he had been in vaudeville for a short time as part of a barbershop quartet. Once he worked with Jimmy Durante. Many years later, when Durante was on a show with me, I told him about my father being such a fan, so Durante sent him a picture and telephoned him in the hospital. It made Dad’s day.

Mother’s world revolved around Philly and his music. She was totally devoted to him, bailing him out of sticky situations time and time again. On one occasion, he got fired and she had to grovel to the boss to get him another chance. He used to drink with Uncle Neal—Aunt Lil’s husband—who had been in the Navy for years; Eugene Franklin, my piano teacher; Johnny Ferracca, a butcher; and Eagle Eye Gus, a New York cop who was famous for spotting stolen cars. They got loaded in our house, drinking beer and cheap booze. I was embarrassed when they acted like idiots, putting lampshades on their heads, jumping around and dancing like women. The women got hysterical and almost wet their pants. I didn’t think it was so funny.

I didn’t know what Jew meant, except when my friends said, Let’s throw rocks at the Jews’ house, which was a newer, fancier apartment building than the ones on our block. We’d all get excited, store up a bunch of rocks, go north on Hughes Avenue, throw the rocks and run away. It didn’t occur to me that I was a Jew, since all I knew about Jewishness was that on occasion my parents lit candles. My loyalty was to my pals, Gino, Horsy (short for Horace), Sylvio, Angelo and Carmela (Julius’ sister).

I was curious about an elderly man who sat in front of the Jews’ house, wagging his finger and screaming at us. One day, he didn’t recognize me when I went by there, so I started a conversation with him. He asked if I would like to come upstairs for a cold soda. In his apartment, he began groping me and saying he wanted to see my private parts. I ran away, scared to death of that little man.

It came as a big surprise when Dad said, "You are going to have to go to Hebrew school and you are going to be Bar

Mitzvahed." I think it was my mother’s idea. I tried hard to be a good boy to make up for whatever the hell I had done, so, with some other Jewish kids, I went to get basic instruction from an old Orthodox Jew. The miserable place where we met was on the ground floor of what had been a store and some of the kids had been going there for two or three years. I remember the musty, sweaty smell and the distaste I had. I even resented wearing a yarmulke, as I hated hats and still do. I felt out of place, but I was able to muddle my way through and apparently fool people into thinking that I knew what I was doing.

We moved from Hughes Avenue to a row of connected houses in the East Bronx. There was a big field across from where we lived that we made into a baseball diamond. On the fringes of the field were small plots of land used by the Italian neighbors to plant vegetables. When I was ten or eleven years old, we took salt shakers, raided the farmers’ gardens and bit into tomatoes that were bursting with sunshine and flavor. Of course, they tasted even better because we stole them

2 Music (1936-1938)

There were times my father and I played music together. Part of his repertory was Bei Mir Bis Du Schoene. At one point I said, You know, Dad, it would be great if you played that G-Minor chord adding a fourth note—an E. It would make it a G minor 6 chord and sound very modern. Let me show you. I heard that chord in every possible inversion and I was dying to share it with him but he was not impressed. He said, You don’t tell me how to play my music.

That really hurt my feelings because I meant to help, that’s all. When I got a little older, I thought I might get him interested in some of the things I’d learned about scales and harmony, but he said, Leave me alone. You think that you are a big shot. I have too much fun with it the way I play it.

By the time I was thirteen, I played quite frequently with Dad’s non-union klezmer band. It wasn’t very good, but we got paid a little for playing weddings, Bar Mitzvahs and private parties. I learned how to keep time, learned the society tunes that my father knew, and learned about the business. I was also exposed to the traditional Jewish repertoire, which was vital when playing at Jewish functions—music that included Polish mazurkas and Russian waltzes, shers and kazatskis. It was available in the Kammen books, compiled by the Kammen brothers. We used their books that featured Italian music for Italian gigs.

Depending on the size of the party, there were three, four, five or six players, all friends of Dad, who drank and had fun at these affairs. Once in a while, my father said, Do you want to hear something guys? Then he tapped me on the shoulder with his bow and said, Play a little ‘Dizzy Fingers’ for the boys. It’s one of those showy piano solos like Nola or Kitten on the Keys. I liked basking in the admiration of the others in the band, who were all older men. They thought I was special and he took some pleasure in that.

There was a retired accordion player, Harry Buchbaum, who gave me his union card, saying, Here, you can now go and do union jobs. It didn’t occur to me that it was against the rules. Usually, the agents from the union didn’t check, but when anyone did come around the job I showed them the card and identified myself as Harry Buchbaum.

At two o’clock in the morning,