Train Tracks Page 3

  I’ll never forget arriving in Fiji in 1969 from Honolulu, when a band played at the dock one of the most stirring British tunes I’ve ever heard—quite an experience for me, a kid from the Bronx, to see that band of Fijians playing to the arrival of the ship. I spent many years in the Fiji Islands, collecting medicinal plants, living in villages, working with folk healers, mainly women, who told me their herbal healing secrets, and the ships brought me to them and brought me back from them to Hawaii where I was living at the time.

  At this time I have my own ship, my own little sixty-foot ship called Sea Talker, and although I do not take it on grand voyages across large open seas, mainly sailing on it in San Francisco Bay, it brings me back to those early days of dreaming the big dreams on the West Side Highway of New York.

  EIGHT

  Slum Dialect

  How I learned to speak is very intriguing, given that I am an immigrant’s son. My father emigrated from Russia when he was seven years old and he had a slight accent but not a very pronounced one. Having grown up in the tenements of the Bronx, I had somewhat of a slum dialect until I went to college. I remember entering Speech 101; I was asked to give a speech. We were told to listen to recordings of Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt as examples of two of the great speakers of the time. I was ashamed to speak publicly. I had a private conference with my speech teacher. He was a very nice man. He said to me, “You have a wonderful speaking voice.”

  I said, “But I say ‘dem’ and ‘doss’ and ‘dis’ and ‘dat.’”

  He said, “Don’t worry about that.” He said, “Just speak and eventually that will be forgotten.”

  And that’s how I learned to dare speak in front of groups, where I got the confidence to speak publicly.

  That is how I learned to give speeches: through the confidence given to me by this wonderful speech teacher at Queens College.

  I always had a good speaking voice. Going back to the first grade, I was made the announcer. Why? I was the only kid in my class with a blue suit. God bless my mother, she bought me a blue suit, white shirt, and tie. So the teacher said, “Because you have a suit, you’re going to be the announcer.” I’ll never forget getting up in front of that audience. I loved the feeling of looking at all those kids staring at me. I guess you might say I was born to lead audiences.

  NINE

  How I Got into Radio

  I can remember the day I recorded my first demo tape and sent it out to more than two hundred stations around America. I went down to Command Productions in the Industrial Center Building in Sausalito. The building in which this production studio is housed, incidentally, was part of the old Kaiser shipyards. They built the Liberty ships for World War II. It’s an area I’ve spent a lot of time in, just musing or walking about the boats, the docks, the gas dock, looking at the boats. Anyway, I was writing books on health, nutrition, herbs, and I was doing corporate consulting, but I knew there was something more, something more that I wanted. In fact, you might say I was desperate. I was fifty years old and I wanted more. Just, things weren’t right.

  All the years I had done book tours, these grueling ten-city tours, I was told by various people of the media, “You really ought to go into the radio business. You have a great voice.”

  I said, “How can I go into the radio business? That’s like telling someone to become an astronaut who can’t fly.”

  Nevertheless, necessity is the mother of invention. And so I created the name Savage Nation and I went to Command Productions. I’ll never forget to this day, I opened the tape like this: “And now, direct from the towers above Manhattan, it’s “The Michael Savage Show.” And then I had my wife, Janet, call in and my old friend Frank call in from this little room that he lived in in San Francisco, during my monologue, which was against Affirmative Action. I had them call in with sort of staged calls. “Frank, you’re next up on the Savage Nation!” That kind of thing.

  Well, I had gotten from a distant friend a list of all the radio stations in America that had talk shows. It was more than two hundred, I think, at the time. I made the tape and sent it out to more than two hundred radio stations in the United States.

  Within a week five stations said, “Hey, you’re pretty good. Give us a call.”

  One, I remember, was in Boston. I don’t remember the others but one was in my own backyard, and that was the largest talk radio station in San Francisco. They said to me, “How would you like to fill in?”

  Well, of course, I wanted to fill in on the most powerful station in San Francisco, 50,000 watts. So I did—a midnight-to-five A.M. shift for a guy who had a show that was devoted to hating white people and pandering to the worst in human nature. I filled in and did a normal show—actually it was quite an interesting show, not inflammatory at all, in my opinion. I talked about the inequality of Affirmative Action and things of that nature.

  Well, I received such hate calls from the left-wing listener base that I was shocked, in the sense that prior to this I had been the good herbalist, the good doctor who everyone liked. I never heard such hatred in my life. For five straight hours I sat there and took it, and answered the best I could. As I drove home at dawn on Highway 101 to our little rental house, I remember looking in my rearview mirror the entire way back, thinking I was being followed. The hatred of the left-wing had literally provoked a semiparanoid reaction in me. When I got home and my family woke up, I said to my wife, “I will never do radio again. It is so filled with hate, I can’t take it.”

  Well, when I woke up, later in the morning, ring, ring, ring. “Hi, this is the program director. You did great, would you like to fill in for him again?”

  I said, “Never. I’ll never do radio again.”

  So she said to me, “Well, uh, would you consider doing another show?”

  I said, “Sure, what other show?”

  Now, remember, the day part radio shows on the 50,000-watt talk flamethrower, heard from Canada to Mexico, were the stars of radio. And so I started filling in for the day part radio shows. I created a storm. I was the first conservative in the media in the psycho left-wing San Francisco area. There was nobody before me, and frankly, there’s been no one since me who could shine my shoes. Everybody knows that.

  So I did fill in for a few months and then they came to me again and said, “Look, we’re starting another station and it’s going to be more conservative. How would you like to be the key player?”

  “Sure, let’s do it.”

  And so I did and the rest is history. That’s how I got into radio.

  The moral of the story is, just do what you do best and try the best you can until the day you die, and eventually the train that you are riding will lead you where you belong.

  TEN

  Achievements

  One of the stories in this book tells about a man on an island in Majorca who had threatened my life when I was young. The gangster. Well, if you remember that story as you read, you’ll see that, as I looked through his scrapbook, there he was with his two new Jaguars and a blonde on his arm, showing off his possessions. That was then. This is now. Today we are not allowed to show our possessions; we have to hide them. In those days a man worked as hard as he could to gain as much as he could. Sometimes doing good, sometimes doing bad, but he didn’t hide what he had achieved. At this stage of my life I have many things I cannot talk about: cars, planes, boats; but you don’t want to hear about it because no longer does success matter. Failure seems to be extolled. Poverty is extolled, not the honestly earned riches. It’s a world turned upside down.

  I began by thinking I would be a scientist. In fact, I still have the little antiquated brass microscope that I purchased when I was a high school teacher. Little did I know then that I would wind up behind the microphone.

  ELEVEN

  Boy in the
Basement

  It was a market, see, and I apprenticed in there to the leader of them all, my little father, Ben. From about the age of four or five until my seventeenth birthday, that’s where I received my major training.

  I knew each one of the men in the market. It was laid out just like a ship. A long corridor down the center with five or six stalls on each side. Here we have Murray, and next to him was Fartser—Charlie was right next to Murray. That was the stand I later occupied when I began to sell antiques.

  I remember Charlie from his heyday of screwing women downstairs in the basement—(all the rag dresses he’d given them) those poor women he’d invite downstairs—and I’d be watching through a slit while I was cleaning bronzes down there.

  See, I used to work down in the basement at the sink. My father gave me cyanide solution to clear the patina off bronzes. They used to kill men in San Quentin with cyanide solution, right? So my father’s friends would come down and see this Dickensian little boy in the basement, me, cleaning bronzes with a toothbrush. Scraping it off with the acrid, deadly, cyanide solution, my eyes getting all irritated. They’d say, “Benny,” to my father, “how can you do that? It’s your own son.” And he’d say, “Never mind, it’s good for him, it’s good for his soul, it’s good for his character.”

  In a sense, he was right. My other world in later years, the good suburban world of green-carpeted security, gave me little to think about. But there, in that cold, dark, unheated basement of the market, I had time to think, to develop the introspection of a prisoner. Basements still do that to me; they encourage clear thinking. It must be the closeness to earth, to origins, the security of walls without windows, the exposed supporting beams, the ancestral memories of refuge in these elemental places.

  I remember my father’s story about czarist Russia, where a basement saved the life of Uncle Philip. Invading troops came through the village seeking pillage, food, and general mischief. The women clutched their children and hovered near the small dwellings. As the leader passed my grandmother on a large white stallion, he reached down and grabbed my father, then a boy of three or four, from his mother’s arms. She began to shriek, but the officer had a lighter end in mind. He simply pranced his horse around the village for the delight of the startled boy. When it came to the menfolk, though, the invaders had different thoughts.

  They entered the little house, demanding the women reveal the whereabouts of the men and boys, who they hoped to conscript into the Polish army. As Uncle Philip, then fourteen or fifteen, hid in the root cellar, which was entered through some floorboards hidden beneath a piece of furniture, the soldiers pounded their rifle butts on the floor, one smashing my grandmother’s foot as he left in disgust.

  So, as a young kid, I’d be down in the basement of the market cleaning bronzes with cyanide solution, lost in my boyhood thoughts. Every once in a while I’d see Charlie waltz by with some beat-up woman, and she would say in the dark, “Well, where are the dresses?” And he’d say, “Oh, they’re in here.” As he always had hundreds of rag dresses, he’d lead them into his cold, damp basement and say, “Go over and pick out what you want.” They took a few rag dresses and Charlie took them.

  Anyway, once I was down there cleaning, and Charlie came out from giving rags to this woman, and he was wiping off his pants with a handkerchief. At the time I didn’t know what had gone on in there. So my father walked by, and he looked at Charlie, and Charlie looked at him, and he said to Charlie, “Whatsa matter, Charlie, you spit on yourself?” And Charlie, he just laughed, wiping off his pants.

  I mean this was the kind of subterfuge that was going on underneath the floorboards of the market. So I knew Charlie from those days, when he was at the height of his womanizing, when he was chasing the dead wye over the rags in the basement, right up to when he was dying of cancer, fifteen, twenty years later, in those hot summer days, while he still held out.

  The market was right next to Neiberg’s Funeral Home; that was where I saw my first corpse. It was a hot summer, and I learned from the undertakers who used to hang around in my father’s market that there were seasons for death, that when people had terminal illnesses they would rarely die in the spring, and hardly ever in the summer. People with terminal illnesses would wait out the summer and die in the fall. My father eventually died in the fall; he knew the folklore. He was expected to die at any time, and he chose October.

  But I remember Charlie as a dying man. It was his last season at bat. There he’d be, in his little gray suit. He always dressed neatly because, after all, he was a woman’s man, even if it was those poor, beat-up women. In his mind, he was still a woman’s man. And he always used to talk to me about women, from the time when I was a little kid. He always used to say, “Hey Mickey, look at her fartsa. Oh Mickey, look at her fartsa.” This went on for years. Anyway, this was his last season in the dugout. He was sitting back in his booth with his wife and her cheeks made up, big red lipstick, a real dummy. So he was sitting there, Charlie, in his last season, with a little gray suit and a tie, sitting there on a chair. He had terminal cancer and he was moaning, low, but I could hear it even as he spoke to me. The pain must have been frightening. There he is with his eyes closed and all of a sudden, he’s looking through the slits to stare at a young Puerto Rican woman prancing through the market. “Oh, Mickey,” he said. I followed, “What, Charlie?” He said, “I’d like to schtup her once more.” So, you know, I fell for it. I said, “Oh, you mean you made it with her before, huh, Charlie?” And he said, “No, once more I’d like to schtup HER.”

  As we move down the line, we come to Monk. Monk was a bohemian whose old lady was Frances; she was the woman that I really fixated on through my early years. Frances, she was the beatnik. They were the two old beatniks.

  I mean, they were commie beatnik bastards. Monk wore a rope for a belt. And where the other men put giant padlocks on their wooden booths when they swung the boards up at night, Monk would tie a rope around, a little string around his stall, as if to laugh at everybody. Years afterwards, I learned that during the Sabbath a string was tied around the shtetl, or villages, of the Carpathian Mountains. Mere strings to keep intruders from violating the day of rest. So Monk would tie up his merchandise with string.

  Monk was a drinker. He was the strongest one in the market, and he was totally nonviolent, totally against war. He was the only guy to talk to me realistically. Where he’d get mad at me, the other guys would play with me at this and that. What did I know? I’d say things like, “Monk, you got any guns?” I was six and into guns. You know, being around antiques and used things I never knew what was coming in next, and that’s what made that life interesting. There was always hope that the next lot of junk might contain something that I wanted. So I’d say, “Hey, Monk, do you got any guns, any pistols, or anything like that? Rifles, you know—” “What do you need guns for,” he’d ask. “Guns are for one thing only—killing. Don’t be a monster! Go away! Don’t talk to me about guns!” he’d say, his broad face scowling.

  Anyway, I liked Monk. Now, Monk had reputedly been a very, very powerful man in his youth. Once in a while he’d get very drunk. Sometimes he’d drink an entire bottle in a day; he was one of those guys. He always kept a quart of whiskey under his stand, and he’d lift it up by its neck, straight up to the ceiling, and he’d go “Glug, glug, glug,” you know, and then put it down, wipe his mouth, and then go “ahh,” and everyone would move back.

  You’ve got to picture him: He w
as broad more than tall, he wore an undershirt in winter—he dressed like a clown, he looked like Chaplin but broad and wide with a severe, fierce, Carpathian Mountains face.

  And what did he sell? Now, Monk looked like he was selling garbage. See, my father, in the stand, had his merchandise built up, with bronze figures on the near shelves and large candelabra towards the rear reaching to the plaster-cracked ceiling, like a stairway to heaven. At the top were the most expensive things, as in Coney Island booths. My father sold on an old principle: cheap things up front and expensive things in the rear. See, that way he could get you for lunch money, at least. But Monk had his merchandise on a one-tier stand, and it was all mixed up. There was no order to it. He didn’t even try to lay it out. He would take a box of goods and spill it out on the table. Now, who would buy from Monk? A surprisingly large number of doctors, really; some important men. One of them happened to be the head of a major hospital. Years later, I learned that he was the chief of staff. The old chiseler would come down to the market on Saturdays, on his day off, and he would bargain with Monk, because Monk would play games with the world. He would take gold and silver and mix it in with tin just to watch the chiselers go through it for hours, through the small pieces of jewelry, like rats scratching at the earth, waiting to pull the gold from the midst of the junk. If Monk was in a bad mood, he might do anything. His customers might ask, “Hey, Monk—how much is this?” He’d look at the guy, knowing that the piece might be gold or silver, and if he was in the mood he might say, “Ten cents,” just to see their reaction, just to see them shake. As they paid the dime for gold, Monk would draw his true payment—derision. On the other hand, an inexpensive piece of jewelry might be priced out of all proportions. “How much is this?”—“You can’t buy it.” Or, if a woman wanted a tin bracelet: “It’s not for sale.” He would do just crazy things. He didn’t do this all the time; he did it selectively. Monk would break people’s balls, just to show them the irrelevancy of what they were doing. He made a living at it; he didn’t have to work very hard.