NEW YORK / Robert Klein's Comic Tour of the Neighborhood
If Robert Klein had been fingering a rubber ball as he strolled through his old Bronx neighborhood the other day, there's no doubt what he would have done when he reached the apartment house that squats across the street from Woodlawn Cemetery on the lot where he played baseball as a boy. A sign on the red brick building, next to the beige one in which he grew up, warns "Positively No Ball Playing Allowed." To Mr. Klein, even at age 63, this would have been an invitation to smash his Spaldeen against the wall.
"I got in trouble like my father did and son did," Mr. Klein recalled. "We're perky. We're a tradition."
Strip away the old bishop's crook streetlights and vintage cars from the cover photograph of Mr. Klein's droll new memoir, "The Amorous Busboy of Decatur Avenue" (Touchstone), and his block in the Norwood section would look much like it does today. Imagine the current neighborhood without the lower-floor window bars, the snaking cable-television wires, the occasional satellite dish, and the African hair-braiding salon and Pentecostal church around the corner ("we called it Williamsbridge") and it would look eerily as it did a half century ago.
"Look," Mr. Klein said, pointing excitedly at an elderly woman walking with a cane. "She hasn't changed a bit! My first prom date!" (Just kidding.)
This neighborhood was the bosom from which bittersweet comedy seeped to transform an insecure child of the 50's from the budding physician his parents hoped he would become into a professional actor and comedian chronicling everyman's struggle with society.
"I lived in a show-business kind of home, with three other exhibitionists fighting for time at the dinner table," Mr. Klein recalled, although his father cautioned after a teacher's admonition, "Robert, don't be the class clown; being a comedian doesn't pay." (His father, Mr. Klein says, was a very poor businessman.)
"Our home was rent-controlled; it was sacrosanct," Mr. Klein said. "We were secure, even though we owned nothing."
The outside world was another story. No. 6F, the one-bedroom apartment he shared with his parents and older sister, faced the street - "our access to the world" - which meant that until he left for college most of life's little lessons, especially those inflicted by his parents (like the woman lying in the gutter, her leg mangled after being struck by a car, whose plight was invoked regularly as a mantra to look both ways) could be learned very close to home. (Expanded vistas, including his first sexual encounter, at age 15, with a Manhattan prostitute, would require a visit "downtown.")
"My parents were very careful people," he recalled. "They had a different approach to child rearing than, say, the Flying Wallendas."
If life on Decatur Avenue sometimes seemed uphill, that's because sometimes it was. The 5-degree-or-greater incline toward where the street ends at the cemetery wall was better for sledding than for baseball. Mr. Klein passed the cemetery as he walked to school, but then associated funerals with mounds of flowers and well-dressed families rather than with dying. When he was 9, though, a neighbor across the street committed suicide. The black mortuary truck that intruded on the block and interrupted a stickball game introduced him to death.
"We didn't go back to the game," he said. "We sat around and talked about what it's like to be dead. There was a little obsession there for a year and a half or two, and it has never been fully reconciled to this day. I remember the fear of my father dying. When he took a nap, I used to listen to his chest."
He still associates death with "Tales From the Crypt" comic books in his aunt's candy story in the East Tremont section and the Proustian whiff of putrefying soda from the nearly empty bottles in the back room. He remembers that the screech of the nearby Third Avenue El depressed him. He was mugged at gunpoint by a biology classmate one evening when he took a shortcut through Reservoir Oval. ("The kid said, 'This never happened'; it seemed like a fair deal to me.") Diving under his desk during air raid drills gave him nightmares about atomic attacks. After his sister was old enough to require her own makeshift bedroom, he slept on an ottoman in the living room; "get on your room," he remembers her once ordering. ("I don't mean it in a self-pitying way because I didn't know what I was missing," he says.) He always wanted a horse and longed for the last day of school because it meant going to the country, which is one reason his own son grew up in the suburbs.
By Mr. Klein's account, his was an ordinary upbringing, punctuated by signal encounters with the prostitute, the mugger and the mortuary truck, later enhanced by the time-honored anachronism of retroactively elevating the mundane. He grew up with friends who would become Penny Marshall and Ralph Lauren; he ate at Louie's, later celebrated by a shooting scene in "The Godfather"; his mother was the secretary to a neurosurgeon whom John Gunther immortalized in "Death Be Not Proud"; his father had encouraged Myron Cohen, a fellow garment salesman, to become a comedian.
"Clowning," he writes, "was my longtime ticket out of anonymity."
Last week in the lobby of his old building at 3525 Decatur, where six of the eight bulbs in the ceiling fixture were burned out and 10 of the apartments are reserved for self-sufficient mentally disabled tenants, a woman complained that the building superintendent was nowhere to be found.
"You know, we used to complain about that, too," he told her.
Still, in contrast to the deterioration he witnessed during the 1980's crack epidemic and despite the complaints, he found the streets cleaner, the buildings in good shape. "Why am I being so surprised?" he said. "They don't think so." He remembered the "lack of privacy, you hear people's business, the concentration of a lot of ethnic people who were excitable - there was a beauty to it."
Charlie Chaplin said that life is tragedy when viewed close up but comedy in a long shot. Life on Decatur Avenue seems funnier from afar. After all, Mr. Klein cried when he was 7 because his father was pressuring him to perform on television's "Children's Hour." He deliberately blew the entrance exam for Bronx Science because, having skipped the eighth grade, he had gone from "the head of the class in sixth grade to the middle among geniuses in the ninth." Yet readers can smile because they know how the story ends. Mr. Klein never became a doctor, but he makes a decent living. (By SAM ROBERTS/THE NEW YORK TIMES)
"I got in trouble like my father did and son did," Mr. Klein recalled. "We're perky. We're a tradition."
Strip away the old bishop's crook streetlights and vintage cars from the cover photograph of Mr. Klein's droll new memoir, "The Amorous Busboy of Decatur Avenue" (Touchstone), and his block in the Norwood section would look much like it does today. Imagine the current neighborhood without the lower-floor window bars, the snaking cable-television wires, the occasional satellite dish, and the African hair-braiding salon and Pentecostal church around the corner ("we called it Williamsbridge") and it would look eerily as it did a half century ago.
"Look," Mr. Klein said, pointing excitedly at an elderly woman walking with a cane. "She hasn't changed a bit! My first prom date!" (Just kidding.)
This neighborhood was the bosom from which bittersweet comedy seeped to transform an insecure child of the 50's from the budding physician his parents hoped he would become into a professional actor and comedian chronicling everyman's struggle with society.
"I lived in a show-business kind of home, with three other exhibitionists fighting for time at the dinner table," Mr. Klein recalled, although his father cautioned after a teacher's admonition, "Robert, don't be the class clown; being a comedian doesn't pay." (His father, Mr. Klein says, was a very poor businessman.)
"Our home was rent-controlled; it was sacrosanct," Mr. Klein said. "We were secure, even though we owned nothing."
The outside world was another story. No. 6F, the one-bedroom apartment he shared with his parents and older sister, faced the street - "our access to the world" - which meant that until he left for college most of life's little lessons, especially those inflicted by his parents (like the woman lying in the gutter, her leg mangled after being struck by a car, whose plight was invoked regularly as a mantra to look both ways) could be learned very close to home. (Expanded vistas, including his first sexual encounter, at age 15, with a Manhattan prostitute, would require a visit "downtown.")
"My parents were very careful people," he recalled. "They had a different approach to child rearing than, say, the Flying Wallendas."
If life on Decatur Avenue sometimes seemed uphill, that's because sometimes it was. The 5-degree-or-greater incline toward where the street ends at the cemetery wall was better for sledding than for baseball. Mr. Klein passed the cemetery as he walked to school, but then associated funerals with mounds of flowers and well-dressed families rather than with dying. When he was 9, though, a neighbor across the street committed suicide. The black mortuary truck that intruded on the block and interrupted a stickball game introduced him to death.
"We didn't go back to the game," he said. "We sat around and talked about what it's like to be dead. There was a little obsession there for a year and a half or two, and it has never been fully reconciled to this day. I remember the fear of my father dying. When he took a nap, I used to listen to his chest."
He still associates death with "Tales From the Crypt" comic books in his aunt's candy story in the East Tremont section and the Proustian whiff of putrefying soda from the nearly empty bottles in the back room. He remembers that the screech of the nearby Third Avenue El depressed him. He was mugged at gunpoint by a biology classmate one evening when he took a shortcut through Reservoir Oval. ("The kid said, 'This never happened'; it seemed like a fair deal to me.") Diving under his desk during air raid drills gave him nightmares about atomic attacks. After his sister was old enough to require her own makeshift bedroom, he slept on an ottoman in the living room; "get on your room," he remembers her once ordering. ("I don't mean it in a self-pitying way because I didn't know what I was missing," he says.) He always wanted a horse and longed for the last day of school because it meant going to the country, which is one reason his own son grew up in the suburbs.
By Mr. Klein's account, his was an ordinary upbringing, punctuated by signal encounters with the prostitute, the mugger and the mortuary truck, later enhanced by the time-honored anachronism of retroactively elevating the mundane. He grew up with friends who would become Penny Marshall and Ralph Lauren; he ate at Louie's, later celebrated by a shooting scene in "The Godfather"; his mother was the secretary to a neurosurgeon whom John Gunther immortalized in "Death Be Not Proud"; his father had encouraged Myron Cohen, a fellow garment salesman, to become a comedian.
"Clowning," he writes, "was my longtime ticket out of anonymity."
Last week in the lobby of his old building at 3525 Decatur, where six of the eight bulbs in the ceiling fixture were burned out and 10 of the apartments are reserved for self-sufficient mentally disabled tenants, a woman complained that the building superintendent was nowhere to be found.
"You know, we used to complain about that, too," he told her.
Still, in contrast to the deterioration he witnessed during the 1980's crack epidemic and despite the complaints, he found the streets cleaner, the buildings in good shape. "Why am I being so surprised?" he said. "They don't think so." He remembered the "lack of privacy, you hear people's business, the concentration of a lot of ethnic people who were excitable - there was a beauty to it."
Charlie Chaplin said that life is tragedy when viewed close up but comedy in a long shot. Life on Decatur Avenue seems funnier from afar. After all, Mr. Klein cried when he was 7 because his father was pressuring him to perform on television's "Children's Hour." He deliberately blew the entrance exam for Bronx Science because, having skipped the eighth grade, he had gone from "the head of the class in sixth grade to the middle among geniuses in the ninth." Yet readers can smile because they know how the story ends. Mr. Klein never became a doctor, but he makes a decent living. (By SAM ROBERTS/THE NEW YORK TIMES)
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