Train Tracks Page 2

  Ever since those times, I’ve been infatuated by trains. Although I don’t ride the rails any longer, I remember up until the late 1970s and early ’80s out here in California I would as often as possible, which was probably only three or four times a year, escape from all of my responsibilities and worries and board an Amtrak train over in the East Bay and ride it up to Lake Tahoe, getting off at Truckee, California. It was just as magical in those days as it was back in my childhood days—in this case, in some ways more dramatic because I understood the beauty of the rails. I remember especially the motion of the train, standing between the cars, which you were allowed to do at that time, inhaling the air, watching the countryside zip by. Perhaps most beautiful was when we entered the mountains of the High Sierra, the deep granite mountains, where the railroad tunnels were blasted out a century before. Those were simply amazing, coming out of the tunnel into the snowcapped mountains of the High Sierra Nevada, ending up at Truckee, California, an old mountain railroad town that, to this day, retains its rustic charm.

  TWO

  Boy in the River

  Notice the photo of my father standing in the Neversink River in the Catskill Mountains.* He was a young man then and I was about three or four years old. An incident occurred then that has shaped my life. There was a large waterfall not far from there that we kids were warned to avoid. South Fallsburg, New York, was the location. My dad and I were upriver, me in a large inner tube splashing around, protected by my father, or so I thought. He began to maneuver the tube so I was upriver from him and the waterfall, with the strong current running towards him and down, down, down to the churning white falls. As he pushed me away from him, and away from the direction of the waterfall, he said, “I’m pushing you over the falls.” And with a smile he pushed me. I began to cry. In fact I lost my little head, fearing he was sending me to my death! As the current took me towards him he grabbed on to my tube and said, “Don’t worry, I was just kidding.”

  Since then I have never completely trusted anyone. Maybe he did me a favor, knowing people and the world. Maybe he did this because he wanted to toughen me up. Who really knows? But this was my Abraham-and-Isaac moment. And I don’t think it was God who told him to fake pushing me over the waterfall only to tell him not to at the last moment.

  THREE

  The Porch

  The title of this book is Train Tracks, but it really could have been Wheels. Today, I’m riding on my bicycle and pass a house with a small lawn mower manufactured by Honda. And my mind goes back along the train tracks in my mind, to my boyhood in a little attached house in Queens, New York, where we had a Briggs & Stratton lawn mower. Hey, “the times they are a-changing,” huh? That’s right, an American mower, Briggs & Stratton. How I loved that little lawn mower when I used to pull the cord on it. I had to pull it a few times to get it started, and then when it would choke and spit and cough, then fire up, how great it was to go around our little tiny backyard.

  But I’m reminded of the little porch that my father built, attached to our little brick house. How proud he was of that porch! I have no idea where he learned the skills to do it. Now, it wasn’t exactly a major house that he built, but he did have a concrete foundation poured, he was careful to insert the foundation screws into the cement, and he explained to me how these would be used to attach to the main support beams of the little porch. Everything worked out fine. I remember it was red cement and how it was grooved with intricate designs, and how slowly he built up the sides to about four feet in height, and then above the four-foot sides there were screens all around and, of course, a little sloped roof. I spent many of my adolescent nights, hot summer nights, sleeping on a couch out on that porch, wondering about many things, including where the train tracks of my mind would take me in the future.

  While it’s not unusual for men in the Midwest to know how to build things, it’s quite unusual, in my mind at least, to imagine how an immigrant who was a small shopkeeper knew how to do any of these basic building things. I don’t know where he learned it from. I don’t know how he learned how to use tools. Perhaps men of that generation were more versatile in their abilities. Nevertheless, when he died, the basement was found to be filled with a great old workbench that he had bought from some carpenter, various and sundry brass tools and iron tools, some of which I’ve kept to this day, including pipe wrenches made of brass, right-angle irons made of copper or brass—just beautiful, almost antique instruments by today’s plastic comparison.

  FOUR

  Cars

  “So round. So firm. So fully packed.” Well, if you can believe it, that was the signature ad for a major cigarette brand in the 1950s when I was growing up. Obviously they were describing more than a cigarette. But nevertheless, that slogan seems to have typified cars as well as cigarettes. In fact, the shape of cars in my formative years took on the shape of many of the buxom women on the screens in theaters throughout America. We all know about the Dagmar bumpers of the Cadillacs.

  My first car, which remains my favorite car, was a dark green, 1955 Oldsmobile, two-door “salesman’s coupe.” Naturally, I loved the car, but I wished that it was a two-door hardtop rather than a salesman’s coupe. But beggars can’t be choosers. I remember when my dad drove it home for me, parked it outside our little attached house on Utopia Parkway in Queens, New York. It was a rainy night. I went and sat inside the car without even starting the engine. I must have sat there for hours. I remember that night very vividly. Raindrops beading on the windshield.

  If you look at the pictures in this book, you’ll see my dad standing next to a dark green, ’54 or ’55 Cadillac Sedan Deville, his car at that time. Naturally, both his car and mine were used cars, in that we couldn’t afford a new one; and he refused to buy anything “on time.” That’s right, he thought that buying something on credit was cheating and faking it for your neighbors and friends. He said if you couldn’t afford to pay cash for a car, it meant that you were living way beyond your means.

  I don’t know if cars still have the same power or meaning for people today. I certainly am still somewhat of a car nut. I have several different ones, including a 1965 red Cadillac convertible, which still has very low mileage, about 55,000 miles. In fact, I bought it soon after starting in radio in 1994 and have hardly driven it since then. It sits in the garage, taking up nineteen feet and six inches of space for no good reason.

  FIVE

  Food

  I don’t think I ate a grain of rice in my childhood. It was all pasta and potatoes. Oh, how much rice I’ve eaten since then! Rice, rice, rice. Chinese, Chinese, Japanese, Japanese, Thai, Thai, Chinese, Japanese. Oh, how times have changed.

  Food is certainly a big part of anyone’s life. In my case, it’s a bigger part of my life than I’d like to admit. I knew a man once, a very fine man, an art dealer and historian from London, who helped fund my research to the Fiji Islands when the government wouldn’t do so because I was thirty years ahead of my time. I was doing ethnobotanical research. The government said, “Nyet, no, we don’t fund such craziness.”

  Of course, today it’s all en vogue.

  So I funded it myself, and when I needed extra help I would go to this gentleman. I remember as I got to know him over the years, he said to me, “You know, when I was a young man all I thought about was women. As I got older,” he said, “I would drive across London or Paris for a new restaurant I heard about.”

  Well, that about summarizes it.

  My mother, God bless her, spent her last years in an assisted living facility in Boca Raton, Florida. Well, all I heard about was food, food, food—how bad the food was. I’ll never forget, when I arranged to have food delivered for her from local Chinese or Italian restaurants, I had to hire a taxicab. After her complaining to me for over a year about how bad the food w
as at the facility, I remember looking up a taxi company, arranging with the taxi driver, and he drove her Chinese food and then he drove her Italian food, and all she would say was, it was not too good. It wasn’t good this way or that way, compared to New York.

  About six months later I found out that both that Chinese restaurant and the Italian restaurant that I bothered to find a cabdriver to deliver for, delivered directly for no charge whatsoever! I guess that’s mothers and sons for you, and that’s why I say, food has always played a bigger role in my life than I’d like to admit.

  SIX

  “Nite Club”

  The bar was dark, like a scene out of The Godfather. We sat next to the long, dark mahogany bar at a small table. The steak was served. I had never eaten steak that was this soft. In fact, I didn’t know that steak was supposed to be soft. The only steaks I had ever eaten before were hard, rubbery, difficult to cut. This one cut like butter. The tough man served us without a smile. We were the only ones in there on a Saturday afternoon. It was on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in what was known as Yorktown, a German neighborhood. It was owned by my friend’s father, Jackie Hart, who was the toughest guy in the neighborhood. He was a professional gambler and a club owner, long before anyone knew what that meant. All the other men were either small businessmen with tiny little stores, or they worked in the trades or in the garment center. Jackie was a guy out of The Godfather. He was quiet. He hardly ever spoke. Everyone respected him and everyone feared him. We had gotten downtown not by train tracks, but one of the hard men from the bar had come to get us by car, to eat in Jackie’s bar. There are many stories about Jackie; this was one of them, the one about the soft steak served by the hard man.

  Another story about Jackie that comes to mind occurred around the same period when I was seven, eight, nine years old, in the Catskill Mountains, where most of the families from our apartment building retreated to what were known as bungalow colonies, in essence small villages that were rented for the summer. Each family rented a small cottage. This was paradise lost. One summer, my family, Jackie’s family, probably ten others, all rented individual cottages or bungalows at the same place. It was on a long, sloping, grassy hill with a swimming pool. This summer a huge fight had broken out between the owners of the bungalow colony and this group from the Bronx. It was very unusual for these men to engage in a fight, but fight they did. It started over an insult thrown at one of our neighboring women by the owner in the little grocery store that belonged to and was run by the bungalow colony owner. Who knows what it was over, but it was a huge fight that went on for most of the day and it ended up with Fat Pat the Bookie dragging one of the brothers around the property by his collar, pulling him until he gave up, but he wouldn’t give up. Fat Pat kept pulling him around, telling him, “It’s time you gave up,” but the guy wouldn’t give up. Jackie Hart, on the other hand, got into a fistfight with one of them and bashed the guy’s head in. The guy bit him in the forearm and as you may know, human bites are far more deadly than dog bites. It took him months for that wound to heal.

  Jackie was a street fighter long before he was a bar owner, growing up in the Yorktown area of New York. He told a story years later to us young kids about the period during World War II when there was an actual Nazi party in New York City and other places, sympathetic to Hitler. Jackie was on a subway car when one of the American Nazis jumped up and started to scream, “Kill the Jews! Kill the Jews! Kill the Jews!” Jackie was not a man given to words. He didn’t react with words. He said he waited until the subway car stopped at a train station. He grabbed the man and smashed his head between the car and the platform until he was a bloody pulp, and then he left without a word. That was Jackie Hart.

  There was a fight he talked about from his childhood that landed him in the hospital for over six months. He’d gotten into a fight with a guy he called the toughest man he ever met in his life. Who knows what it was over. Who knows what people fight over to begin with? I don’t remember the man’s name, but I met him years later and he was absolutely intimidating and frightening, another man of few words. In fact, this other man spoke no words whatsoever. But when you shook this man’s hand, even as a little kid, it was like holding a catcher’s mitt. It was all calluses. He wouldn’t even close his hand for fear he would crush your hand. All he did was smile. He was very devoted to his wife who was very homely. Nevertheless, this man who had beaten Jackie when he was a boy—and they had gotten into a fight over something, and it landed Jackie in the hospital for several months—this guy came to the hospital every day during his recovery and sat with him even though they hadn’t known each other, and then they became lifetime friends.

  Years later, as it would turn out, Jackie had a son, my best friend, Davy, who was actually my protector because he was a tough kid, really tough; he wouldn’t let anyone do anything to any of his friends. He also had a daughter named Darlene. His daughter went into the arts and she wound up dead from an overdose in a Manhattan hotel. Jackie’s wife went to pieces. Not only could she not take care of herself, she couldn’t talk, couldn’t eat, couldn’t cook. There were no psychiatrists in those days, not for poor people. There was no closure in those days, not for poor people. There was just grief and friends, and that’s where my saintly mother came in. For weeks and months my mother would go to her apartment, cook for her, bathe her, take care of her, as she slowly got over the death of her daughter.

  SEVEN

  Propellers

  At some point in my life the train tracks became propellers—ships’ propellers, you see. The fact of the matter is that when I was a young man, driving my old little Volkswagen, a little green Bug, on the West Side Highway, the great ships of the time were lined up on their piers on the Hudson River. Oh, how excited I used to get! I remember thinking, one day I’m going to be on those ships and I’m going to go to Europe and I’m going to join the greats of the world. I’m going to join all of the heroes, all of my literary heroes, with grand adventures and great love affairs, nights at sea under the stars. Oh, those ships used to excite me as I saw them on the piers with their high prows, facing the West Side Highway.

  Well, as the years went on, I did sail on many ships. The first one was the MV Waterman, the Motor Vessel Waterman. I was still in college and I did my big trip to Europe with a friend of mine. It was a converted troop carrier from World War II, and it was quite a tub. It took ten days to go from New York City to Southampton. It was all college kids and, my god, what a time we had. We slept all day and partied all night. One thing I remember most vividly from that voyage was the old Dutchman who shared a cabin with three of us young guys, deep below in the belly of the beast. He was blind, in his eighties. One night I was sick and tired of the partying and I went down into the cabin to talk to the old Dutchman. I remember asking him, “Old man, what’s the meaning of life?”

  You see, I was one of those kinds of kids. The Sorrows of Young Werther comes to mind.

  “Oh, old man, what’s the meaning of life?”

  He stared up at me with his unseeing blue eyes and he repeated my question, “What’s the meaning of life? What’s the meaning of life?” And as he stared at me with his unblinking eyes, he said, “Well, I guess the meaning of life is you’re born holding it and you die holding it.”

  I’ve never forgotten that because that’s about as close as anyone’s ever come to explaining the meaning of life, meaning nobody knows. Nobody knows.

  I saw the angel of death . . .

  That’s right. Not all of my trips at sea were delightful. On one of my trips from Majorca, Spain, to Barcelona, I took a small passenger vessel that held about a hu
ndred and fifty people. Apparently we got caught in a mistral, a small hurricane. The ship was bucking violently and I became violently ill. In fact, I had to go to the deck and lean over the side, I was so sick. I’ll never forget, one of the deckhands, a burly guy with a mean face, held me as I leaned over the side, relieving myself of that day’s breakfast. As I looked up at the sea, on the bucking rail I saw looming above me a large, winged angel of death. To this day I insist I saw the angel of death. Or was it just plain seasickness, who knows? I just never want to repeat the experience.

  Well, since that time I’ve been on many ships. Some of the names come back to me: the Royal Viking Sea, the Maasdam, the Statendam.

  Years later as I traveled from Hawaii, where I was living and studying, to the islands of the South Pacific to do my ethnobotanical research in Fiji, Tonga, Samoa, the Marquesas, I would often travel on the P&O liners. Remember, in those days they were not cruise ships. They were called passenger liners and they were primarily used to carry people from point to point. They were not used simply as floating casinos. I remember the Oriana, the Arcadia, the Canberra, the great P&O passenger liners of that time.