Unrequited Infatuations Read online

  Mine was Jack’s Record Shoppe in Red Bank, which had a Music Shoppe on the other side of the street. Getting in early with the British Invasion with that spelling.

  It’s where I’d buy my first guitar a few years later. Still there, incredibly.

  The store was a beautifully constructed place of worship, as ornate and glorious as any European cathedral. I’d go through dozens of bins to find the record I’d heard on the radio, take it to the counter, and give the guy my hard-earned seventy-nine cents. Then, back at home, I’d listen to it over and over again until it became a physical part of me.

  We were the second generation of Rock and Roll kids, which meant that we were only the second generation able to play records in the privacy of our own rooms. The 45 rpm single was invented by RCA in 1949 in retaliation for Columbia inventing the 33⅓ rpm LP the year before. Individual portable record players soon followed. Up until then, the record player was in the living room, in the same piece of furniture that held the TV and radio.

  If it wasn’t for that portable machine, Rock and Roll might never have happened.

  A record player in the living room meant kids needed their parents’ permission, or at least tolerance, to listen to what they wanted. Without the portable player, the first generation of Rock kids would have never gotten Little Richard, Bo Diddley, and Jerry Lee Lewis past their parents.

  The older generation viewed those 1950s pioneers as an odd combination of novelty and threat. Humorous because of their onstage antics, flamboyant looks, and complete lack of talent (as parents defined it), but scary because there was an uncomfortable element of black culture connecting it all. What effect would that have on kids who already had too much time on their hands for their own good?

  Rock could have been snuffed out right there!

  But it went up to the kids’ bedrooms. It isn’t my imagination when I say that back in the ’60s you didn’t just hear records, you felt them. Sound waves entered your body. The needle, dragging through analog impulses miraculously etched into a piece of plastic, somehow had a deeper, more physical level of communication than modern digital music.

  I happened to be in London for the twentieth anniversary of Sgt. Pepper, and EMI, my label at the time, invited a bunch of us to hear the original four-track analog tapes at Abbey Road. I have never heard anything quite like it before or since. I swear to you, I felt stoned for two days afterward. Drug-free.

  There had been great strides breaking through to autistic children with music. They ended when the world went digital.

  I remember reading that it took two hundred plays to wear a record out. The high frequencies would finally give up. Technology was no match for teenage passion and perseverance.

  I passed that limit often. “Twist and Shout” by the Isley Brothers, “Sherry” by the Four Seasons, “Duke of Earl” by Gene Chandler. Had to buy them again.

  So there I was, just getting started on “Pretty Little Angel Eyes,” and even though I can’t remember what I had for breakfast today, I vividly remember looking out my window, seeing a neighbor, Louie Baron, and experiencing a rush of exultation. The music had released my endorphins in a new and unexpected way.

  I wanted to run down the stairs and embrace Louie and tell him he was my friend. And that friendship was everything. And that love and music would save the world. I could see a beautiful future clearly. It was there for all of humankind.

  My first epiphany.

  I didn’t do it, of course. My bliss didn’t make me completely stupid. Men didn’t embrace other men in those days.

  I was always a little slower than most kids, so my ecstasy didn’t immediately trigger what should have been obvious curiosity. Who was making the music? How was it made? Could I make it myself? These thoughts wouldn’t come for another couple of years. But music would soon replace my religious fervor.

  Did I mention I was a very religious kid? I regularly went to Sunday School, accepted Jesus as my personal savior, got baptized at nine or ten. That’s how Protestants did it, as opposed to Catholics, who baptize at birth. They don’t take any chances.

  I was extremely devout there for a couple of years.

  Easter Sunrise Service was the test. You had to get up at 4 a.m. to make it to some mountaintop in Highlands by six. I don’t remember my parents going to this, only the church elders and a few super extremist types. I liked the respect I got. I could see it in people’s eyes. I went two years running, maybe three.

  I’ve always wanted to be the guy who knows. The guy with the inside dope. I was willing to put the work in, to spend the time to find out. At the age of ten, I figured religion was where the answers were hidden.

  In addition to that, I obviously had some genetic penchant for metaphysical zealotry. A need to be part of something larger. A sense of wanting to belong is built into human nature; the zealotry part is what separates the holy rollers, and holy rock and rollers, from regular, far more sane civilians.

  Looking back, I also could have been trying to impress my new father. I was brought up kind of Catholic, and my mother changed teams when she remarried. Or at least she pretended to. She secretly kept eating fish on Fridays and prayed to Saint Anthony when something got lost.

  When I was eight, the only father I would ever know, William Van Zandt, moved us from Boston, where I was born, to New Jersey so I could get on with fulfilling my destiny.

  He was a funny kind of guy. Short, tough, quiet, stoic to the max. Ex-Marine, Goldwater Republican. He had a flattened, broken nose from boxing, either on the Marines team or maybe Golden Gloves. He had played trumpet as a kid, but I don’t remember him ever playing it. Ironically, or whatever the right word is, trumpet should have been my instrument. But I never had the lungs for it. It’s the most evocative instrument to me, especially for film scores. What’s better than the opening of The Godfather? Or the Miles Davis score of Elevator to the Gallows (Ascenseur pour l’échafaud)?

  The only records I remember my father listening to on the big living room phonograph were by Arthur Prysock. When he was in a particularly good mood, he would occasionally sing along. He had a good voice.

  He spent every Tuesday night with the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America (SPEBSQSA), now wisely reduced to the Barbershop Harmony Society, or BHS. Thinking back now, I see how his singing with a Barbershop quartet, the Bayshore Four, could have stimulated my lifelong love of Doo-Wop and harmony in general. The Mills Brothers, sons of a member of a Barbershop quartet, and the Ink Spots are considered direct links to the roots of Doo-Wop.

  I am deeply embarrassed to admit it, but I don’t remember ever having one single conversation with him about his life. What he did as a kid. Who he liked. What his dreams were.

  My mother never talked about my blood father. It must have been a bad situation, because people didn’t get divorced much in those days. Especially Catholics. And double especially Catholics with kids. I never pictured my mother as particularly rebellious, but that was an extraordinarily rebellious act in those days. He died young is all I know. I should have asked her for more details, but I always felt it would have been disrespectful to my father.

  She was a classic ’30s/’40s woman. With the big exception of uncharacteristically leaving her husband, she accepted life as it was. No ambition. No opinions. No drama. Followed the rules. Great cook. Easy smile. Always in a good mood when I was young. Society didn’t expect much and didn’t allow much. Lived for her kids. And at that point, that meant me.

  We moved in with her parents, Adelaide and Sam Lento, so I had two uncles and two aunts around to help bring me up. It takes a village… of goombahs!

  When we split to Jersey, the family followed. Nana Lento said it was because of me, her first grandchild, which was a big deal in Italian families. Since four of her five children ended up living in Jersey, we gathered at her house every Sunday, a short walk from our church, for the classic Italian supper, a mix of lunch and dinner that
ran from early afternoon until evening. Wives, husbands, kids—had to be fifteen, sometimes twenty of us.

  My father’s father was long gone, and all I know is he had turned down a job pitching for the New York Giants before they moved to San Francisco, because it didn’t pay enough, and had come in second to Bobby Jones in a golf tournament in South Carolina.

  We would visit Nana Van Zandt in Hackensack every month or so, and she was quite a character. She was from one of the Carolinas and looked exactly like Granny from The Beverly Hillbillies. So I grew up with grits. Real grits. Just butter, salt, and pepper, thank you, none of that horrible cheese people like to add.

  One day I found a warped old acoustic guitar in her attic that my father said had belonged to his father.

  My mother’s father, Grampa Sam Lento, also played guitar, and he started teaching me the folk song of his village in Calabria in southern Italy.

  Not songs. Song. Just one short repeating melody. Maybe he thought that was all I could handle.

  Sam was an archetypal traditional Italian shoemaker, and I’d work summers in his shop in Keansburg. He’d have one of our two identical Pop stations, WABC or WMCA, playing loud in the shop. I can still smell the shoe polish and hear the hum of the machines accompanying “Baby, baby, where did our love go?”

  Nobody wanted to talk about Sam’s origins. All we knew was that he had left Calabria suddenly and ended up with a successful shoe business in the Italian section of Boston before moving down to Jersey.

  I’d like to think he got out of the country with some stolen money from the ’Ndrangheta. It would have been totally out of character, but it’s a nice fantasy.

  Nana Lento, always the life of the party, was Napolitano. Picture Marty Scorsese’s mother Catherine in Goodfellas. She was always good for a laugh, usually unintentional. Like the time my sister Kathi brought home a Jewish boyfriend for Thanksgiving and Nana sincerely asked if his people also celebrated the holiday. If there’s any genetic showbiz in me it comes from her. She was always in a good mood with the rest of us, me especially, but she harassed my grandfather mercilessly. Maybe he’d disappointed her by not ending up successful and rich, the fate of most marriages. Or maybe it was what Nana mentioned to me fairly often, revenge for Sam’s mother constantly mocking her accent. Whatever it was, she took it out on him. For forty years.

  He just took it quietly. He was another stoic, Italian-style. More omertà than stoic, I guess. Old-school. He always had a smile behind his eyes that suggested he knew things he was never gonna talk about. Once again, I wish I’d had more conversations with him.

  My blood keeps life interesting.

  The Calabrése part is rock-solid. Simple. Not intelligent enough to do what’s best for money or career or social standing if it means compromising ideals. No ambition whatsoever. He is satisfied with his position as the laborer. The loyal soldier. Work and family are everything. Just don’t fuck with him. He never forgets an insult. It takes a lot to make him mad. But if you do, he will never stop until vengeance is his, no matter what it costs.

  On the other side, the Napolitano exists for action. He thrives on wheeling and dealing, fixing and changing things. He has ambition but no patience. Learns on the job. Makes lots of friends. Achieves a foothold, then parlays. He’s not as sneaky and conniving as the Sicilians can be, but he’s a good actor when necessary.

  It is a constant challenge to call on the appropriate balance of blood in the appropriate circumstance.

  I had a lucky childhood. Played sports in the park three blocks from my house. I was too small but made up for it by being faster and more fearless than most.

  All I really remember is that I couldn’t wait to grow up. I hated being a kid. Nothing too traumatic, just hated it in general. Not enough control, I guess.

  I wanted to be who I was gonna be and get on with it. I wanted to know what was going on and felt the world was full of secrets kept from us kids.

  I did well enough in school. Life was simple and good. The country was as rich as it would ever be. The conversation at the dinner table was about when, not if, the country would go to a four-day workweek. And that was with mostly only one parent working in the middle-class suburbs.

  I was completely oblivious to the nation’s problems in the ’50s and would continue to be when politics exploded in the ’60s. The main contractor for our suburban development, who was black, had a son about my age. He became my first best friend. I didn’t know black and white weren’t supposed to mix, and my mother didn’t say anything.

  Our idea of fun in those days was riding our bikes behind the mosquito man’s truck, its thick chemical toxic fog pouring out the back. I have no idea why I’m still alive. Maybe it was some kind of adolescent vaccine. Maybe the poison made my immune system bulletproof.

  Most of the middle-class families had either a pool in the yard or a membership at the beach clubs, or they sent their kids to summer camp. I went to summer camp. It wasn’t a sleepover camp. I am a relatively rabid environmentalist, but I was never that comfortable with nature.

  A bus picked me up from home at six in the morning and returned me at six in the evening. It’s where I learned to swim and learned practical crafts like weaving Indian bracelets and shooting a bow and arrow. My main memory is a jukebox in the outside eating area. I can still hear “Yakety Yak” by the Coasters echoing throughout the entire camp, probably the first Rock song I ever heard.

  My only other memory is one of the other kids telling me that he lived behind a drive-in theater so he could watch movies from his room and would see naked women sometimes. I remember being quite impressed and envious at his remarkable good fortune.

  I got so tan at camp that a local real estate agent asked my mother to keep me inside because she had lost several sales from people thinking I was black.

  My mother told her to get lost. I overheard, so she had to try and explain it to me. “Some people don’t like black people,” she said.

  “Why?” I said.

  She didn’t know.

  I didn’t get it then. And I don’t get it now.

  A few years later, must have been ’63 or ’64, my neighborhood friends Tom Boesch, Louie Baron, I think Louie’s brother Robert, and Ernie Heath, from the only black family in the whole area, went with me to the Keansburg public pool one summer day. We had just gotten there and suddenly Tom says, “Come on, we’re leaving.” I was like, What happened? He said they wouldn’t let Ernie in the pool. That freaked me out completely.

  I do remember my father, who was a construction engineer inspector, coming home angry one day. There was the new thing called affirmative action that meant he had to fire a few white guys and hire some black guys at the construction firm. He was as pissed as I’d ever seen him.

  Goldwater Republicans were different. They were more like today’s Libertarians. The term “Conservative” in those days meant Mind your own business. There was no interest in what happened in the privacy of adults’ bedrooms, for instance.

  That would all change with Ronald Reagan, who was the first to invite religious extremists into the Republican Party and into the political process, technically a violation of the separation of Church and State. Religious extremism is the reason half of America doesn’t believe in equality for women or LGBTQ.

  Real Conservatives would have legalized drugs, abortion, you name it, but they didn’t believe in federally mandated civil rights. Or federally mandated anything. They believed in states’ rights. That’s about the only thing that remains in common between the new so-called Conservative Republicans and the true Conservative Republicans of my father’s day. If states’ rights could override federal laws, we’d still have slavery. So it was a mixed bag.

  My father was a hunter, though he didn’t go very often.

  I went once but I couldn’t do it. I don’t understand killing defenseless animals and calling it sport. I even think fishing is sickening. Putting a hook in a creature’s mouth and pulling it as it st
ruggles to escape? Why is that OK? I am a natural-born vegan, but I hypocritically go off and on it.

  Can you imagine me and my father in the same house? We were the Generation Gap.

  My political ignorance extended all the way to President Kennedy’s assassination, which happened on my thirteenth birthday. All it meant to me was wondering if my party would be canceled.

  There was one more defining moment I’ll mention before we leave the subject of my father. He was a tough, no-nonsense type of guy, and one day I made a wisecrack to my mother and out of instinct he smacked me hard right across the face.

  We were all shocked there for a minute, each for our own reasons.

  We were never quite the same after that.

  My favorite TV show was Zorro. Did that influence my look with the bandana? Probably. I was drawn to heroes, not just Zorro but Tarzan, Conan, John Carter of Mars, Errol Flynn as Robin Hood and Captain Blood, James Cagney as Rocky Sullivan and Eddie Bartlett (heroes!), Paul Newman as Rocky Graziano and Billy the Kid, Marlon Brando as Johnny Strabler in The Wild One (my Uncle Sal got me a motorcycle jacket like Johnny’s), and James Bond (the only time my father and I ever went to the drive-in together was to see Dr. No).

  And then there were my more educational mentors: Moe, Larry, and Curly. Abbott and Costello. Maynard G. Krebs. The Bowery Boys. Kookie, Toody, and Muldoon. Soupy Sales. Sgt. Bilko. Sid Caesar. The Marx Brothers. Professor Kelp and Buddy Love. It’s a wonder any of us survived.

  When West Side Story came out in 1961, I went to see it in Red Bank at the Carlton Theater (now the Count Basie Theatre), five or six blocks from Jack’s Record Shoppe.

  The movie had a profound impact on me in two ways.

  First there was the gang thing. It was so cool to us suburban fifth graders that we formed our own gangs and attacked each other with pens during recess. Whoever got written on the most lost.