“Wait till you’re thirteen. If you still want to study acting, I’ll take you on.”
When my mother was in pain, the fat heart specialist came to our house. I say “fat” only because Dr. Rosenthal died of a heart attack a few years later, and even though I was very young, I instinctively associated his death with how many Cokes he drank whenever he came to our house. One day he came because my mother felt a terrible pressure in her chest. Dr. Rosenthal told me to go around the corner, where they were putting up a new house, steal a heavy brick, and then wrap the brick in a washcloth and place it on top of my mother’s chest, over her heart. It sounded crazy. I waited until all the workers had left the new house, at the end of the day, and then I picked up a good-sized brick, tucked it under my sweater, and walked home as fast as I could. I wrapped the brick in a washcloth and placed it on top of my mother’s chest.
“Oh, honey, that feels so good.”
In the months that followed I would substitute my head for the brick. I’d push my head down with both hands as hard as I could, and she liked that even more than the brick.
One Sunday afternoon my dad dropped me off at the Uptown movie theater, so I could see a Sunday matinée. I didn’t tell him that I’d taken his flashlight out of the utility closet and hidden it in my jacket.
After I paid the cashier and bought my popcorn and Milk Duds, I went into the theater, which was almost full. The picture had already started, but in those days most people were used to coming in after a movie started – they would stay until they saw a familiar scene in the next showing and then leave. This Sunday the movie was Double Indemnity, with Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray. It was in black and white.
I watched for about twenty minutes, but when it started getting mushy (kissing), I took the flashlight out of my jacket and began shining it onto the screen. When people looked around to see which punk was doing this, I shut the flashlight off, fast. When the audience settled down again, I switched the flashlight back on. I started making circles on the screen – my beam of light competing with the beam from the projector. I got such a feeling of joy from doing this, until the manager came down the aisle with a horrible look on his face and told me to come with him. I followed him into his office.
“What’s your name?”
“Jerry Silberman. Please don’t tell my father.”
“Give me the flashlight.”
He took my father’s flashlight and kicked me out of the theater.
It was drizzling outside. I felt ashamed, standing under the overhang in front of the theater, wondering whether or not to tell my dad about his flashlight and about the manager kicking me out. I decided it would be safer if I waited till my dad noticed the missing flashlight himself … and that might not happen for months. He was born in Russia but came to Milwaukee with his family when he was eleven. He wasn’t dumb, but he was very innocent, and I knew what I could get by with if I wanted to evade a situation.
After I waited in the rain for an hour and ten minutes, my father drove up. I jumped into the car.
“So – how was the movie?” he asked.
“It was great, Daddy. It was really good.”
I started taking acting lessons with Herman Gottlieb the day after my thirteenth birthday.
I was eleven when I learned about sex – from my cousin Buddy, naturally. We were both in a co-ed summer camp. I couldn’t believe what he was saying.
“Oh, Buddy, what’re you talking about?”
“It’s the truth! You put your poopy into her thing – honest to God.”
“Well, how could that ever make babies?”
“Because you’ve got to put your germs into her germs. That’s how you do it.”
“… Well, what if you’re embarrassed? I’m not going to take it out in front of a girl.”
“Are you telling me you wouldn’t like to show it to her if she showed you her whatcha-call-it?”
“… Well …”
Then Cousin Buddy told this crazy idea to Alan Pinkus, another one of our friends. Alan was more shocked than I was.
“You’re nuts.”
“Well, how do you think you get babies, Alan? Do you think the stork brings them?”
Buddy tried his best to make Alan feel like a baby. Alan was embarrassed.
“No, of course not…. I just thought it came from … putting your saliva in with her saliva.”
“You mean spitting at each other?” Buddy laughed so hard that I started laughing too. That was when I figured that Buddy must be right. He was an expert about these kinds of things.
We never talked about sex in my family when I was growing up. The only time I came close to asking about it was when I was in second grade and I was walking home from school with two other boys. We saw a naked lady through her living room window, lying on a sofa, scratching her tush while she read a book. When she saw three little boys staring at her, she jumped up and closed the curtains. We ran away, and I heard one of the boys use the word “fuck.” When I got home, I didn’t tell my mother about the naked lady, but I did ask her what “fuck” meant.
“You want to know what ‘fuck’ means?” she asked, as she pulled me into the bathroom and turned on the faucet. She ran a bar of Ivory Soap under the water and stuck it in my mouth. “There! Now you know what fuck means.”
I started crying, and then, as was her habit until she died, she started crying and begging me to forgive her. Begging and begging, until I finally went into her arms and she hugged me and kissed my tears and kept repeating, “I’m sorry, honey. I was wrong. Can you ever forgive me?”
My mother had a distant cousin who lived in Los Angeles and whose thirteen-year-old son was going to a place called Black/Foxe Military Institute, run by retired Colonel Black and retired Colonel Foxe. My mother’s cousin said she thought it was a wonderful place, and it was in Hollywood, California. What she didn’t mention was that her son was going to Black/Foxe as a day student, so he went home each afternoon after school.
Since my mother was ill and felt that she and my father couldn’t give me the kind of training that I needed, now that I was thirteen – she thought I still didn’t know how babies were made, and I didn’t have the guts to tell her that I did – she got it into her head that Black/Foxe Military Institute might be the perfect answer. I think she was influenced by a movie called Diplomatic Courier, starring Tyrone Power. She thought that if I went to Black/Foxe, I would not only learn how to dance, play bridge and play the piano, but also how to be at ease with girls and learn everything there is to know about sex. So off I went to Hollywood. Something else my mother didn’t know was that almost every boy who lived at Black/Foxe came from a broken home – mostly they were sons of parents who wanted to get rid of their kids.
On my first night at Black/Foxe, I was assigned to a room on the second floor of the dormitory. When I walked in I was greeted by a short, tough-looking boy with acne all over his face.
“Hi, I’m Jonesy,” he said. “We’re going to be roommates for a long time so I’m taking this bed and you take that one.”
When I got into my brand-new pajamas that first night, Jonesy started smiling at me and said, “Lemme corn-hole ya.” I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. Then he told me to just lie down on my bed, facedown. He got on top of me and put his penis between my thighs and started pumping away until he had an orgasm. His “jizz” went onto my new pajamas, not into me. After he saw how upset I was, he never tried to do that again. He just jerked off in the closet.
This was 1946. When word got out that I was Jewish, some of the bigger boys started coming into my room and pounding me on the chest