were about four—, or 5 miles from the ocean, but we always had a cabana,” said Boogie with much pride. Never stopping after ‘cabana,’ he quickly added in the same breath, “I’ll never forget that. We always had a place to go on the beach. A cabana was kind of like renting out a room around the pool that you could go to for the season. It cost him probably two—, $300 for the season. A place to go change, and come put your bathing suit on and go swimming in one of these little hotels that now are all the South Beach type of rage. They were in the northern part of the Beach.
“So, my dad always spent money, and always tried to take care of the family, and give us some of the better things. And we obviously didn’t have as much as a lot of our wealthier friends, but we never went without. And we always had some good times. Dad did his best, even though working crazy hours, to be a dad! He would play ball with us in the backyard, and take us to the Carnival,” said Boogie. And with a hint in his voice that all of this should be obvious to the listener, “and to the rodeo and stuff like that! Yeah,” he continued, with a touch of nostalgia, “Harry was a good guy.
“But as we got older, obviously, we weren’t so cute and cuddly anymore. We were terrors. As a matter of fact, we would go every Sunday night—this was in the mid-and later 50s, probably ‘56, ‘57, ‘58, in that range … We would go to a Chinese restaurant on the beach, called the Lime House. The boys—we were always fighting over something, always making a commotion, always fighting, always loud, always boisterous. So finally, after six— or 7 times of this, the owner, very gently and with a lot of tact, asked my father if—”
Here Boogie quickly dropped his voice with each word, in imitation of the owner, until the last was barely audible “—he couldn’t ‘not come back anymore’—” before landing the punch-line: “—‘with the kids.’ ”
Chuckling, Boogie concluded, “The restaurant, they just couldn’t take it anymore.
“We were terrors, and Harry would lose his temper and yell and scream and curse at us. And that’s just what starts to evolve when you get ten and 11, becoming teenagers. You become rambunctious and unruly. We certainly were that. We were very undisciplined.
“We were masters at playing our parents against each other. Dad was at work, and this and that. And mom had to be the disciplinarian at home. So dad would come in the door, and right away we were on him with ‘Mommy did this, and Mommy hit me, and Mommy spanked him.’ And dad, who didn’t have a lot of time to spend with us, always tried to pacify and coddle us, which was probably the absolute wrong thing to do. So, instead of sticking up for the ‘other half,’ Mollie was always the ‘meanie,’ and dad was the good guy, at least back in those days. It was kind of a strange situation, but our parents …” said Boogie categorically and with a touch of sadness, “weren’t great parents. They just weren’t good at parenting.
“They were wild and crazy when they were young. So, they just didn’t know how to handle us either. We did not come with an instruction manual. But only when we started to go to Jai Alai, then we had instructions! You know … Bet the 2-3-5 Wheel! Or something like that,” said Boogie with an extended laugh.
≈ Did your mom work? ≈
“Yeah, she worked. And dad worked. As we got a little older she—when Jay and I were in our early teens … obviously Lenny was even older still—she worked at the Americana Hotel as a reservations secretary. So she worked a 40 hour week, and dad worked a 65 hour week. And we were basically latch-key kids. We would come home from school and let ourselves in, do whatever, and go to the school yard and play.
“This brings up … I think Len was, I think, eleven, and I was seven and Jay was six. It was New Year’s Eve, and my parents went out to a party and they left Len in charge, and Len couldn’t handle the pressure. Here he was, an 11-year-old kid, and here it was two o’clock in the morning, 2:30, three! He’s imagining all these bad things that have happened.” Then Boogie said, imitating his brother’s agitation, and frustration and fear, “ ‘I think they got into an accident! How come they’re not home yet?’ So I think, to this day, that had a big effect on Len. That one night! … Jay and I were just giggling. We didn’t know any better! Hey, we could stay up to all hours, and so forth! But here was Len, with all the pressure of having to make sure that we didn’t get into any trouble and stuff.” Then Boogie added wryly, “He probably worked it out in therapy—15 years later. But I know in talking to him in the past, that that night did have an effect on him. That’s for sure.”
~~~~~~~~~~
Whether self-conscious about the facts he was revealing, or worried about consequences, the accuracy of these memories, or his interpretation of them, Boogie said—almost in a whisper, “Let’s take a little break.” His ‘break’ lasted until the next day. After dinner, when asked to continue with his story, he declined because he was “a little tired from all the travel and [was] going to call it a day.”
~~~~~~~~~~
Hannah called Mike from the hospital very early Friday morning. Apparently nurses still wake you while you are in a drug-induced state of unconsciousness—probably in an attempt to get breakfast past your nose before your brain is fully engaged. Hannah was now waiting to be discharged—well rested, but without a clear explanation of her symptoms.
Having slept in the basement, Boogie was not seen in the kitchen by anyone until sometime after 10 a.m. He had been sleeping so soundly—wrapped in a ball of blankets to fight off the added chill of the direct gust from the air conditioner—that Rocket, on his way to the yard through the double French doors for his morning constitutional, hadn’t even given him an examining sniff, as was his custom with new houseguests.
Sitting out by the pool after breakfast, Boogie rested for almost 90 minutes—left arm hanging loosely by his side over the chair, with each new cigar held skyward in his right hand, nonchalantly gripped by the first two fingers and thumb, the ring finger splayed out and the pinky pointed high, head tilted back slightly, pursed lips blowing a blue smoke ring upward, wafting over the neighbor’s fence. When he had recovered sufficiently from his ordeal of eating, and after being prodded by me with, “What is this? No swimming for an hour after eating?”—Boogie smiled and let out a small laugh, agreeing to continue the interview … sometime near noon.
Waiting for a return call from Hannah to determine a pick up time, Boogie and I retreated to the basement.
~~~~~~~~~~
≈ Tell me about your driving experiences ≈
“Before I do that, I want to digress back, in a complete circle, back to the original ‘Tell me about Philadelphia’ and this and Miss Harriet and all that. Anyway, to make a long story short, here I was, a romantic 20-year-old taking her to see Romeo and Juliet and all this kind of stuff. Did everything but get laid!
“So, here it comes about 13 years later, 1993, and I’m on my way to visit some of our mattress stores in the New York City area. And I had gotten Harriet’s phone number in New Jersey—I think—from her mother. She was understandably protective of her when she was 16, but now, being a typical Jewish mother, she acts real happy to hear from me and gives me her number.
“So I called Harriet and said, ‘Geez. I’m going to be close, so why don’t I stop by and say hello.’ Harriet was very open to that. So here it was: I stopped by to say hello, and I’m kind of trying to pick up where I left off—13 years ago. Of course she’d been married and divorced and had a kid in the meantime, and I had finally gotten laid by then.
“So here I am basically giving her my A-game, having had all these romantic feelings, and unrequited love, and how we never really finished. And I really gave her my A-stuff. I put on some nice quiet jazz in the background. I opened up a nice bottle of wine. And I’m giving her my best massage, all over