THE NIGHT I YANKED TONY'S RUG (A true story)

[sd gross]

This really is (I swear!) a true story.


THE NIGHT I YANKED TONY'S RUG
by Stephen D. Gross

It was the night of Francine's big party, her thirteenth, and I'd never been in an apartment like that in my life. Riverdale, the Bronx, icicles hanging from the snow-encrusted sign - Kingsbridge Terrace, it said, in white letters against dark blue. All the kids from 7 SP1 ("SP" stood for Special Progress) were there, kids I'd seen almost every weekday for the last seven years. Loren Schechter was there, Peter Leepson, Johnny Johnides, and of course the three totally dissimilar Davids: Green, Del Rio and Herzog. Dorothy Brodkin was there, Melissa, sweaty blonde and big, Margo Margolies - and we weren't in one of JHS 52's Civil War-era classrooms, either. We were up at Francine's - It was great!

Francine's dad, Chauncey, sent a limousine around to pick us up at our homes - the wind-chill was about minus 10 and he wanted to make sure we all got there. This was Francine's thirteenth and it was a very big deal. Chauncey, it turned out was an "agent" and he had connections. A theatrical agent is what he was, and he had some important people under contract, one of whom was coming tonight in honor of Francine's all-important thirteenth.

What made it so important I guess, Is that some Jewish girls, upon reaching the age of thirteen, celebrate a Bas-Mitzvah. The Olmans, not being very religious, probably felt uncomfortable about throwing Francine a Bas Mitzvah - it would have involved her reading passages in Hebrew and some religious ceremony at a synagogue, none of which sat too well with any of the Olmans, especially Francine. Not that Bradley, aged 6, or DemiTasse the poodle had much of an opinion about it. But the Olmans must of felt compelled to stage an "event" in order to mark Francine's passage from childhood to noisy adolescence. Francine had always been loud for her age in a brassy, smoky way, and now it seemed her body was rapidly growing around her stentorian voice (sort of like healthy tissue encapsulating a foreign body). She was outspoken and cocky and her parents had four TVs and a poodle which received bi-monthly permanents at a doggie salon and some big deal hotshot performer was coming to her party tonight.

Her father was a manager, she said, not an agent but a theatrical manager. Yeah, I recognized their names, even knew things about them. I've always been into music. Billy Daniels, I'd heard, had just put in some jail time. "That Old Black Magic" was a song we all knew so well. I watched "The Hit Parade" every Saturday night with mom, and in the adjacent apartment house, my cousin Carole (Uncle Sam and Aunt Rose's kid) was always playing records - Jo Stafford, Frankie Laine, Kitty Kallen. (I was sure she knew what was behind the Green Door but I couldn't get her to tell me!) Pearl Bailey was another of Chauncey's clients, as was the great Ethel Waters. But none of these household names, these national icons, would be up at the Olmans to thrill us.

Word got around the school a few days before the party that there was a good chance this young, reedy-voiced Italian guy was coming to Francine's to "make an appearance". He sang a song I'd heard on Martin Block's "Make Believe Ballroom" and "Your Hit Parade" and I liked it a lot. It was called "Rags to Riches" and the guy's name was Tony Bennett. "Benedetto", I thought. The Benedettos who lived across from our apartment house on upper Broadway had what was probably the last commercial vegetable garden in Inwood. The three Benedetto boys weren't too fond of the Irish kids who went to Good Shepherd. They never bothered me because I was small - didn't have an attitude and I didn't pose a threat. I wondered if Tony was related to them.

The Olman's living room was what they called sunken - you actually walked down two steps to get there, which was amazing - unheard of in my life. They had white wall plaques four feet high, nymphs and syrinx-toting, leering fauns. A long table laden with cold cuts and chips, M&Ms, brownies, cocktail dogs and sodas, candies and punch and stringy dark things I couldn't identify stretched from one side of an anteroom to another. In one corner stood a rolling bar made of cheap-looking blonde wood with gold metal in a diamond pattern covering its twin doors. The clear, plastic shrink-wrap, like the skin of a Nathan's hot dog, had been peeled off the cream-colored upholstery it kept perenially spotless. Aunt Sylvia had the same stuff on her sofa, I thought. I wondered briefly if Sylvia knew the Olmans Twelve stories below, the brittle, crystallized lights of Riverdale twinkled frostily in the bitter-cold January night .

Jack Assenheimer, who was fourteen going on twenty, had a pint of something cheap and sweet (it had a gold spur on the label) in his brown jacket pocket - he always wore brown because he had red hair and hornrimmed glasses - which he poured into the bowl of fruity punch. The only ones who saw him were Richard Kinstler, whose grin told Jack he didn't give a shit, and little Leona Krebs who was by far the shyest, mousiest kid in the seventh grade. I had a crush on her because she and Anne Rooney were the only ones in the class as short as me, and Anne's mom dressed her with giant bows and combed her hair in bangs straight down over her eyes, so you never knew if she was looking at you.

We made ugly noises and horsed around, eating copious amounts of pretzels and tiny hotdogs and washing them down with Yoo-Hoos and punch, we jostled each other playfully and made smart-ass remarks to remind one another just how hip and witty we all were, and we ran around the house turning on all of the tvs and giggling a lot. It was during the days when Bill Bendix' "Life of Reilly" and Phil Silvers' "You'll Never Get Rich" were the happening sitcoms, and I'd never seen Sgt. Bilko on four different screens before. We got overheated and to cool off, we drank more punch. It was delicious - sweet and icy going down, and we all worked up a sweat and began to taste what we thought it was like to be an adult. Yes, we were feeling good.
About 9 or 9:30 the downstairs door buzzed and Sybil, after a brief word or two, told the doorman in the lobby to let the guy up. We didn't have security like this in my apartment house. Anybody who wanted to could come into our lobby and head up to any floor with impunity - and steal all the seltzer they wanted. All the scraggly alleycats in the neighborhood hung out in our lobby - they liked the feedback they got from the steam radiator. This buzzing-to-be-let-in stuff was an introduction to a new and exciting world for me.

A few minutes later the front door chimed angelically and framed by the halo from the hallway light, a tanned face appeared, radiantly healthy, straight from two weeks in Miami Beach, I thought. Beaming under carefully touselled curly black hair, the walnutty face glided through the room saying Hi to people, hugging Chauncey and Sybil the way my Aunts hugged mom and each other, and planting big birthday kisses on Francine's chubby apple dumpling cheeks. Tony Bennett - goddam! He looked just like his pictures - exactly like the Tony Bennett I once saw on the Perry Como show and on a late-night telethon for little kids'hosted by Dennis James. It was like his image had stepped cleanly off the magazine pages or right out of our Philco's ten-inch screen. Tony Fucking Bennett, himself! It bent my sense of reality.

We were awed, shocked into silence - but only momentarily. The kids from 7 SP 1 seldom were at a loss for words. Also, despite our frequent trips to the punchbowl most of us had failed to establish a correlation between the intensity of our giggling and our consumption of punch before it was too late.

David Green, a snide asshole and a little jerk of an elitist, was the first to notice, and after he mentioned it, Steve Marcus and David Herzog were quick to confirm it. Green was the first to spot Tony's rug. Hairpieces seemed ridiculous to me at the time. It was sort of like walking around with a banana in your pants or elevator shoes. Real people didn't do it. Marcus and Herzog were closing in on six feet tall and their eyes were closer to Tony's roof than the rest of ours. After David Green's snotty declaration of fraudulence they moved in for a good, close look - and assured the rest of us it was true. Herzog's elongated, angular jaw started popping hysterically and Marcus began to sweat and fool around with his glasses, adjusting and readjusting them nervously. Steve Marcus, like the rest of us 7 SP 1-ers was brilliant, but when something set him off, like a test in school, all he could do was perspire and writhe around miserably and play with his metal-rimmed glasses. A few of us formed rude pockets of puckishness, snickering and snarfling and making caustic remarks about the benevolent Tony's skypiece, but always out of range of any adult's hearing.

This lightheadedness and unbridled gaiety was new to most of us, and we were feeling grown up and powerful and invulnerable. We were smart asses and had a good sense of what we could get away with and when. To this day I'm not really positive about what happened next - everything from that point on is obscured by some kind of mental haze - a vaseline gel smeared over my consciousness - but many of those who were there swear it happened and it's hard for me not to believe them. But on the other hand...

Richard Kinstler - I never liked the bucktoothed, straw-headed bastard because of his unjustifiable successes with the girls - dared me to pull Tony Bennett's wig off his head! David Green (the gesture was exactly like Paul Winchell's wooden pal, Jerry Mahoney) moved his head up and down once in agreement. My good buddy Johnny Johnides (I heard he graduated from Yale and he's now a wealthy lawyer) elbowed me in comradely encouragement. Melissa, cleavage opening and closing like the mouth of a gourami, smiled heavily and rubbed a couple of pints of her aromatic, nubile sweat off on me. The punch further addled my barely-formed, malleable brain. My resistance was wearing thin. I looked over at Tony and saw him smiling good-naturedly, jawing with a few of the kids. He looked very much at ease - as if nothing on Earth could rattle him. Chauncey was in the kitchen fixing Sybil a drink. Sybil was making DemiTasse leap high in pursuit of a Swedish meatball. Somebody was snoring in a corner of the cream-colored sofa. I sidled up to Tony from below him from about four o'clock. I remember there was a lot of yelling, hooting, hysteria and admonition but I don't recall it being directed, specifically at me. Tony was not a bad looking guy even without his hairpiece, I remember thinking, but I don't really have a clear memory of yanking it off. I was (regrettably) short, and I'm not even sure I could reach it without some help. In my mind's eye, I don't see it in my hand, but I remember the fluorescence reflecting off Mr. Bennett's shiny pate, and I recall being pounded by the congratulatory fists of some of my dearest friends. There was a period that followed when all the adults seemed to disappear from view, and we could hear conversation spiked with excitement bubbling out of the Olman's kitchen.

I remember sleeping late the next morning and finding a scrap of paper on my night table with Tony Bennett's autograph on it. "To Pete and Steve" it says - my brother was not quite two at the time but I figured he'd want to be included anyway - "The Best - Tony Bennett". I couldn't figure out if he was wishing us "The Best" or if he was just writing about himself. I still have the precious scrap in my J.H.S. 52 autograph book.

One of these days, I keep promising myself, I'm going to write Anthony Dominick Benedetto a letter and ask him if his memory of the event is any better than mine. I've wondered for years now if it all really happened. And if it did, has the great man remembered it over the years? Did Tony see who it was who did it, and how did he so beautifully maintain his cool? Or maybe it didn't really happen that way it all. Maybe I'm confusing Francine's party with a dream I had, getting lost in some landscape by De Chirico or Paul Delvaux. One of these days I'll screw up the nerve to write Tony B. and ask him. Hopefully, he'll straighten me out.

:mandancer::mandancer::mandancer:

[jeddi]

Dear Steve, I stumbled on your story and couldn't have been more surprised to find that party remembered as you did and to find you as its author. I wonder if you remember me - Stephen Kurtz. I remember that party very well, though not some of the most striking details you recall. It certainly wasn't surreal. Chauncy drove a bunch of us home in his Daimler the size of a tank. Rumor was that it was the car used by Queen Elizabeth on her Canadian tour - plausible enough. I'm not sure of how to communicate this way, but if you feel like reminiscing, please get in touch. All the best, Steve

[Lily S.]

HAHAHA...that was great, much better than the "disgusting" one.