2. A Coney Island of the Mind
AS HE LAY in his bunk at Goodfellow, listening to sand scratch the window screens and animals stir in rugged fields, Heller recalled, with what he knew was nostalgia (for hadn’t he just tasted a bleak eastern winter right before going to Grossinger’s?), the breath of surf along the boardwalk. The following afternoon, as his buddies opened their mail, he wondered when, or even if, he would hear about his short story. Then he thought again of Danny Rosoff muttering, “Hemingway … Faulkner.” Proudly, he remembered the grand ambitions of his motley old pals. Nostalgia, yes. His recent glimpse of Coney Island—deserted, dark—had convinced him he could never live there again. We speak of haunted places, but can a place haunt itself? Heller thought Coney was spooky that way. It was past its prime before it ever came into its own. It was a series of fleeting images unattached to any reality and overlaid on one another year after year.
But was he wrong to remember his childhood as pretty damn wonderful—not just his experiences but the place, too? Wasn’t everything better then? Already, as a young man, he was beginning to suspect that, on a public scale at least, every change was for the worse.
* * *
JOSEPH HELLER had been born into the bright carnival that was Coney Island on May 1, 1923, the same year the Riegelmann Boardwalk went up to handle the larger crowds made possible by laws granting greater public access to the beach, and by the completion of the subway line from Manhattan (in forty-five minutes, and for just five cents, a passenger could get from Times Square to the Stillman Avenue stop). The boardwalk was also intended to halt what some saw as Coney’s decline. Many of the old Victorian-style hotels that had once drawn to the shore an opulent clientele had fallen to ruin, failures brought about by antibetting laws and Prohibition or devastating fires. Dreamland, where tourists could visit Africa, Asia, or Hell (garishly painted and elaborately staged) had, perhaps fittingly, burned. Tides had eroded the beach, turning it into a poorly tended narrow strip of sand. But entrepreneurs such as Edward Riegelmann saw opportunities, with inexpensive transportation and new land-use ordinances, to lure different kinds of crowds, poorer but eager for excitement, to the oceanside playground. “At Coney Island … the abiding talent is for the exaggerated and the superlative,” wrote Edo McCullough, nephew of the man who had founded the Pavilion of Fun. Each time crisis spawns a change, the alterations have been “so violent as to obliterate … the memory of what was there before.”
Riegelmann’s boardwalk, eighty feet wide and running half the length of Coney Island, quickly became the area’s new icon. New and cheaper amusement rides cropped up beside it. Contractors were hired to pump in sand, adding 2,500,000 square feet of new beach open free to the public (in the entrepreneurial spirit of the place, the contractors skimped on expenses by sluicing sand from the wrong source, and the “improved” beach looked slightly jaundiced).
“One must go to Coney Island,” remarked Édouard Herriot, France’s prime minister, thrilled after a visit to Riegelmann’s promenade. There, one sees an “inexhaustible human river flow[ing] … past … Italian or Greek rotisseries, which turn out an uninterrupted sausage called hot dogs, past the naïvely pretentious astrologers’ booths, the tattoo artists and hideous four-legged woman. One is carried along into the torrent with all the languages and all the races of the globe.” Coney’s excitement could also be chaos, its marvels mere decadence: the Spanish poet, Federico García Lorca, visiting not long after the French prime minister, noted the boardwalk’s “vomiting multitudes.”
In 1923, 40 percent of Coney Island’s year-round residents were foreign-born. In addition to the Italians and Greeks, thousands of refugees from Scandinavia, Poland, and Russia had settled there. On any given day, along the boardwalk, one witnessed Hasidic Jews strolling in serious conversation, young girls chomping gyros, and old men arguing the merits of socialism. Before the turn of the century, when large sections of Coney Island were given over to gambling, drinking, and other vices, the place was known as “Sodom by the Sea.” Nowadays, as the amusement park king, George C. Tilyou, had once proclaimed, “If France is Paris, then Coney Island … is the world.”
Its identity had always been mired in ambiguity and instability. For instance, it was not really an island. Once a series of small sand spits, constantly reconfigured by the tides, it eventually coalesced and joined the rest of Brooklyn when a creek that separated it from the larger landmass filled in. The Dutch claimed it but seemed to want little to do with it (they gave it the name it goes by now, Conyne, meaning “rabbit”—the creatures were plentiful there). In the early nineteenth century, businessmen began to exploit the beach area for use as a summer resort; the seduce and entertain mentality that would govern subsequent development, at least for the next 140 years or so, locked in. Eventually, sea bathing, horse racing, and the delicacies of clams lured bigger and bigger crowds (among them, the young poet Walt Whitman, who came for the clams, and who said he loved to “race up and down the hard sand and declaim Homer or Shakespeare to the surf and seagulls”).
As early as 1876, George Tilyou, then fourteen years old, embodied Coney Island hucksterism, and was convinced that people were gullible enough to pay good money for worthless items as long as these items displayed price tags touting their value. People proved him right. He sold cigar boxes of “authentic beach sand” to tourists, as well as medicine bottles of “authentic salt water” for a quarter apiece. He earned $13.45 his first day out. Twenty-two years later, with that same boldness, he would lease a plot of land at Coney’s Bowery and West Eighth Street, put up a sign that said, falsely, ON THIS SITE WILL BE ERECTED THE WORLD’S LARGEST FERRIS WHEEL, and open an amusement park. The wheel measured 100 feet in diameter, and his pretty sister Kathryn sat in the ticket booth. She wore their mother’s diamond necklace and was surrounded by two large men, whom Tilyou had hired to pose as bodyguards, protecting the necklace. This effective bit of showmanship was the beginning of Steeplechase Park.
By the time Joseph Heller was born, the area’s self-image had spun up and down like a bumptious Ferris wheel car. It is a “glorified city of flame,” wrote the esteemed critic James Gibbons Huneker, where “every angle reveals some new horror.” On the other hand, the painter Reginald Marsh lovingly described the beach crowds as “moving like [the] compositions of Michelangelo and Rubens.”
Once, after a visit to Dreamland, Sigmund Freud reportedly remarked, “The only thing about America that interests me is Coney Island.” If so, it’s not hard to see why: In the space of a few feet, one could fly to the moon, witness cities burn or see the destruction of Pompeii, watch automated blowholes spread women’s skirts, study premature human babies displayed in an incubator, and laugh at a pin-headed man or “the” Wild Man from Borneo. People lined up for rides that would slam them against walls or turn them upside down (“Centrifugal force never fails,” boasted a boardwalk carney). Hero-pilot Charles Lindbergh remarked that a Coney Island roller coaster was “scarier than flying.” Most of the rides “succeeded because they combined socially acceptable thrills with undertones of sexual intimacy,” a Landmarks Preservation Commission report once said. And if, full of surging life, you felt like completing the journey, you could be buried alive in a coffin-shaped room with a glass ceiling, or you could descend into the Inferno to see demons drag away the wicked (Hell, it turned out, was adorned by statuary made by French sculptor Maurice Goudard—Americans always suspected the French had something to do with eternal torment).
Time seemed to have no meaning in Coney Island, or only as much meaning as delirium might have. Year after year, the place died and was reborn. It was resplendent; it was doomed. It was Now; it was Then. And something of the otherworldly, if not the Divine, appeared to govern its cycles. Again and again, sections of the city were destroyed by fire, most recently, in the years before Heller was born, in 1907, when the Cave of the Winds suddenly ignited, and in 1911.
Fires, mostly pleasant ones, were among Heller’s earliest memories: the “barnfires” fueled by broken fruit crates, over which his family ate charred marshmallows and smoky, sandy “mickeys”—roasted potatoes—on the shore, along with hundreds of other summertime revelers; and fireworks, every Tuesday night during summer, shot from a boat anchored at the Steeplechase pier. “It brent a fire in street,” his mother, Lena, warned him gutturally whenever he ran barefoot from the apartment onto scalding pavement. Lena could barely speak English. Her uneasiness with the language often embarrassed the family. Early on, her insistence on speaking Yiddish and sometimes a little Russian struck young Joey as a refusal—of anything, everything—and the bitter humor of the Yiddish was unmistakable even to a child: If not the sentiments, he understood the weary, mocking tone. It was a language of longing and displacement, qualities made even more palpable by his mother’s stubborn use of it, even though it clearly isolated her from her greater surroundings. “I was not aware of coldness or warmth [from my mother],” Heller told an interviewer years later. Just intransigence and nay-saying—as well as noisy silence, for though she talked often, she generally did not attempt to communicate, at least not directly.
Isaac Daniel Heller, Joey’s father, emigrated from Russia to New York in 1913. His four-year-old boy, Hillel Elias, known as Lee in America, arrived with his mother shortly before or after Isaac. Briefly, the family lived in Manhattan, then in Spring Valley, New York. After that, they moved to Coney Island. As an adult, Joseph admitted his father’s past had always been murky to him. “I … never grappled much with the idea of trying to find out more about him,” he wrote in Now and Then. He understood only that his father had come to America “from somewhere in western Russia.” He wrote, “I prefer not to [know more].” [K]nowing more would make no difference.… I know him by his absence.” That the figurative lack of a father would soon enough become literal only added to the older man’s mystery.
Ambiguity clouds the family name. The German word heller means “lighter” or “brighter.” Ashkenazi Jews were said to apply the word to someone with a light complexion. Some historians trace the name to the sixteenth century and the city of Halle, Germany, where it was linked to a coin, the Heller, in use there; others say a rabbi and scholar named Yom-Tov Lipmann is the source of the family’s lineage. At one point, he lived in Halle, and a bastardized form of the city’s name came to be associated with him. From the sixteenth to the early twentieth century, thousands of families called Heller migrated east from Austria and Germany. Records indicate that many Hellers arriving in the United States at around the time Isaac did came from the old Lithuanian frontier, once part of Poland, now belonging to the Ukraine. A sheet from the fourteenth census of the United States, dated January 8, 1920, lists Isaac Heller’s place of origin as Russia and his native language as Yiddish. No further details. However, a ship manifest dated September 29, 1913, indicates that Elias Heller, age four, traveled on the Lapland, a nearly nineteen-ton steamship sailing from Antwerp. Elias came from Tschschonovitz, Russia (his last residence). He was born in Gulanowie, Russia. These towns are difficult to pinpoint: Linguistic, cultural, and political barriers led to many mistakes and alternate spellings on ship manifests and immigration records; names and national borders were exceptionally fluid in that part of the world. The likely possibilities suggest Elias was born west of Moscow, within a couple hundred miles of the city, and that just before coming to the United States, the Hellers were living in the Lithuanian/Polish/Russian frontier. If so, they came from an area with a centuries-long Jewish history, and with many Hasidic sects. At the beginning of the twentieth century, oppression from the Russian czar, as well as violence perpetrated by Cossack soldiers and Polish gangs, forced many Jewish families to leave. In the United States, Isaac declared himself a Jewish agnostic, in flight from Czar Nicholas II, and a strong supporter of socialism.
The 1920 census lists him as a “chandler” (though his primary occupation was driving a delivery truck for Messinger’s Bakery), and it gave his age as thirty-five.
In 1913, the year he arrived in Coney Island, socialism was a topic du jour in New York’s Jewish communities (and a subject of fear in America’s mainstream press; in September of that year, the New York Times charged Teddy Roosevelt with “redistributing [America’s] wealth,” under the headline ROOSEVELT’S SUPER-SOCIALISM). Abraham Cahan’s popular newspaper, the Jewish Daily Forward, undoubtedly a staple in the Heller household, as it was in every Jewish neighborhood, spread the socialist gospel, as well as labor unionism, in straightforward Yiddish accessible to working-class readers (“Not to take [the] paper was to confess you were [a] barbarian,” Irving Howe once wrote).
That same year in Coney Island, a prime example of American capitalism came to pass. Nathan Handwerker, a dishwasher at Charles Feltman’s hot dog stand, decided to undercut his boss by selling the morsel Feltman claimed to have invented—the charcoal-cooked frankfurter—for five cents instead of the usual ten. Initially, the plan backfired. The public, long accustomed to rumors that hot dogs were made of horse meat or some other unsavory material, distrusted the inexpensive dog. To counter these fears, and lure more eaters, Handwerker hired transients from the beach to crowd the tables in front of his stand. The men’s disheveled appearance did not encourage anyone to approach. According to some stories, Handwerker then dressed the transients in rented lab coats; other accounts say he offered free hot dogs to interns from Coney Island Hospital. In any case, he advertised his stand as a place “where the doctors eat”—what could be safer than that? From then on, Nathan’s hot dogs became a famous Coney Island product (and a favorite food of Joseph Heller, in childhood and beyond).
Coney was a confusing place for an immigrant to land, its basic nature as hard to grasp as one’s image in a house of tilted mirrors. The clearest picture we have of the perplexities facing the generation that shaped Joseph Heller is found in the Jewish Daily Forward’s “Bintel Brief” (literally, a “Bundle of Letters”), an advice column for immigrants befuddled by modern America. “People often need the opportunity to pour out their heavy-laden hearts. Among our immigrant masses this need was very marked,” Abraham Cahan wrote in his memoirs. Problems between parents and children (kids quickly becoming accustomed to New World freedoms and abandoning old values), ambivalence about integration, ethnic tensions (“I am a girl from Galicia and in the shop where I work I sit near a Russian Jew.… [Once] he stated that all Galicians were no good.… Why should one worker resent another?”), and fears and temptations about intermarriage filled the daily column. Many letters addressed domestic tensions caused by new opportunities discovered in the United States.
More striking than the confusions battering these uprooted souls was the series of mixed signals offered by the column’s wise men (sometimes Cahan himself, but more often S. Kornbluth, one of the paper’s editors). For example, some replies encouraged intermarriage as a way of becoming more Americanized; on different occasions, the editors suggested intermarriage was a curse, certain to cause isolation.
The immigrant self was perpetually unsettled. As “The Bintel Brief” made clear, many people preferred to air their emotional struggles anonymously, not only because the pain was so great but also because the very nature of their problems, not to say the solutions, were hard to identify, and always shifting. The strongest impression one gets from these columns is that the wave of immigrants that included Joseph Heller’s father led double lives. They were never fully comfortable in their adopted world, but they were unable to return to their pasts (you will be “strangers to [your] own neighbors” in your old homelands, the editors warned). Of necessity, men and women of this generation were largely reserved, for their old languages lacked the vocabularies to define the conundrums they encountered.
* * *
IT WAS A WORLD of silence, but not a silent world. On summer mornings, the cries of Italian fruit peddlers drifted up from the streets through the open windows of the Hellers’ four-room apartment: “If you got money, come down and buy. If you got no money, stay home and cry.” Gull calls and the distant screams of roller-coaster riders droned just beneath soaring Puccini arias from the Kent radio in the living room, which Heller’s mother kept on all day while she hunched above her Singer sewing machine, its whirring and tapping an accompaniment to the music. Though the 1920 census indicates she was unemployed, she worked as a seamstress, making and mending clothes for many of her neighbors, as well as converting old bedsheets into curtains. At night, she withdrew into her bedroom to read Tolstoy in Yiddish, especially Anna Karenina over and over. She had always loved to read. In Russia, members of her family worked as bookbinders (many years later, her brother Sam would land a job repairing books for the Brandeis University library).
The Hellers occupied an upper floor in a small yellow-brick building on West Thirty-first Street, between Mermaid and Surf avenues. Lee was fourteen now. A daughter, Sylvia, had been born in 1914. Everyone in the family called the youngest boy Joey. They shared the building with a family named Winkler, and little Joey shared a baby carriage with the Winkler infant, Marvin. “He used to wet my carriage, and he was ten months older,” Marvin told Barbara Gelb for a New York Times Magazine profile of Heller in 1979. When Heller was older, his mother swore to him that whenever he’d nursed, she’d have to snatch him away from her breast, for he would never stop. Among the first smells he recalled were the duskiness of walnuts, the sweet softness of old apples, saved from going to waste by his mother, who would fold them into noodle puddings, and the floury flatness of day-old cakes, rescued from the bakery by his father. His father sat at the kitchen table at night, eating slice after slice of dry, hard cake.
Joey’s first memory of his father’s voice was a sharp command: One day, Joey wandered close to an open window, curious about the fire escape, and his father called him back. Sometimes at night, strange noises from the street or from the beach a few blocks away woke Joey in fright, and he’d crawl into bed with his parents, warm and content in the space between their bodies. On some afternoons, his father took him riding in the delivery van, letting him press the automatic starter and pretend he was driving. Slowly, they passed through a bewildering mélange of voices—the census reveals an immediate neighborhood teeming with Russians, Germans, Armenians, and Italians. Though Joey’s parents rarely took him to synagogue (occasionally, they made exceptions for High Holiday services), he was surrounded by Jews and Jewish culture. Lists of the area’s religious institutions at the time (the Young Men’s Hebrew Association of Coney Island, Adath Israel, the Jewish Communal Center, and the Coney Island Talmud Torah) indicate large and active memberships.
Sometime before his fourth birthday, Joey had to have his tonsils removed. As he remembered the experience, his father drove him to Coney Island Hospital and left him alone, with a parched throat and little understanding of what was happening. Figures in white moved along the corridors, silent and remote. Where was his father? Why had he gone? How could he have gone?
Lee distrusted Isaac even more than Joey did. He recalled riding with the older man in a horse-drawn delivery wagon in Manhattan upon first arriving in the United States. On steep, icy streets, Isaac whipped the horse so brutally, passersby berated him for cruelty. Though Lee claimed his father was never mean to him, he would grudgingly admit, in later years, with tears in his eyes, that the two of them did not have an easy relationship. “There were lots of Jewish criminals around and he didn’t want me to turn out bad,” he once explained to his little brother. Isaac’s pressure on Lee to work hard and obey him was so intense that, one summer soon after Joey’s birth, Lee ran away from home. One morning, he traveled to New Jersey to apply for a job, realized he wouldn’t get hired, and, rather than go back to face his father’s disappointment, decided on the spur of the moment to board a train west. He was gone for nearly three months, traveling with hoboes, working odd jobs with farmers and ranchers in Arizona and California, sending postcards to Lena to assure her he was all right. Joey remembered the day Lee returned. Isaac was playing with Joey in the street, showing him how to wind the rubber-band propeller on a model plane, when Lee sauntered up to them from a nearby trolley stop. As soon as Lena saw him, she said something like “When you come from California, you’ve got to take a bath,” and took him inside the apartment. Joey glanced up at his father, who was gripping the model high in his hand: a trembling airplane silhouetted against the sun.
* * *
FOR SOME TIME, Isaac had complained of stomach pains, and Lena noticed his stools were black as coal. Later, she believed the prodigious amount of cake he ate every night led to his bleeding ulcers.
One day, not long after Joey turned four, his family held a party. He hadn’t seen his father for days, and Isaac was not around that afternoon. Joey’s mother dressed him in a nice suit and pointed to a line of cars parked outside the apartment. The cars’ interiors were hot. He didn’t want to take a ride. Older boys from the neighborhood, also wearing suits, approached him to try to nudge him into a backseat, but he ran from them, thinking it was a game. Finally, he was forced to make the trip. Everyone got out of the cars in a large garden that had a stone bench and a rail fence. The day was brilliantly sunny. Adults, many of them strangers, fussed over Joey. An aunt he barely knew gave him a dollar. If he heard the word funeral, he didn’t know what it meant.
Years later, he would learn from his sister that their father had gone into Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan for an operation on a stomach ulcer. Apparently, the surgeons stitched him poorly and he died of internal bleeding. He was forty-two years old. Sylvia, not quite thirteen, accompanied Lena on the subway into Manhattan when they received news of Isaac’s death; Lena could not read the subway maps. Sylvia got them to Times Square, but she became confused at that point, misidentified a train, and led them astray, deep into the Bronx. The day, and their grief, seemed endless.
Possibly, Lena sent Joey to relatives the week before the burial so he would not be upset by the mourning and the ritual of sitting shivah. Later, he could never recover any memory of this period. In the week following the funeral, Sylvia wore heavy black dresses every day, though the late afternoons were broiling. Finally, one evening, Lena told her, in a gentler tone than usual, to put on something lighter and go down in the street to cool off.
The 1930 census lists Lena as “head” of the household, still without outside employment. Lee (Elias) is recorded as a “bookkeeper.” Lena and the children moved across the street to a slightly cheaper, though similarly sized, apartment (with the first month’s rent included free), next to a sandy trench dug for a trolley line, that all the neighbors called Railroad Avenue. The building was owned by an Italian family named Provenzano. Once the Hellers’ belongings were out of the old place, Lee handed Joey a broom, picked up another broom, and told his little brother they were going to sweep out the empty rooms they had left behind. When Joey asked why, Lee replied he didn’t want the new tenants to think the Hellers were slobs. Shortly after settling into the new place, Lee saved some money and bought Lena a brand-new radio.
What followed was a period of relative calm, at least on the surface; for Joey, it was a cozy, peaceful time. Lee was out of the house, working most days, returning in the early evenings. Lena shopped for, and cooked, dinner every night: smoked whitefish, kasha, and potato knishes deep-fried in vegetable oil. Lena bought these from a neighbor woman who sold homemade foods on the street—the knishes were a nickel apiece. The woman carried them from block to block in a kettle covered with black oilcloth. Sometimes, while cooking, Lena had to pause to break up a spat between Sylvia and Lee; the apartment was small and hot, especially in summer, and tempers grew short. Lena refused to let brother and sister go to bed angry with each other. After dinner, she would often say, half in Yiddish, half in English, that she could use a little ice cream. She’d give Joey a dime and send him off to a nearby soda fountain, with instructions to return with a pint of Golden Glow. The family gathered around the carton and ate all the ice cream on the spot, because they had no refrigerator. These moments were immensely satisfying to Joey. As an adult, he would look back and realize that, on some level, he had already learned not to want more than he could reasonably hope to have. What he had was blessing enough: the Jewish concept of dayenu. A pint of ice cream was plenty.
When fall came, Sylvia would sit near an open window in the evenings and do her homework by the light of a streetlamp outside, to save electricity. In the spring and summer, the family rented space to a succession of boarders. The children had to squeeze together in a single room; sometimes, one of them slept in the kitchen. One summer, one of these boarders played classical music every night on the family radio. Joey discerned familiar melodies in some of the performances. With a shock, he understood that playful echoes of Tchaikovsky popped up in big-band tunes such as “My Blue Heaven” and “April Showers”—songs he had heard in the afternoons on “Your Hit Parade.” Without his full awareness, his keen ear had revealed to him some of the secrets of art: the richness of tradition and the impulse to play against it—variation, improvisation, and parody.
He was a precocious reader. Often, after dinner, every member of the family opened a book. Early on, Joey read the Rover Boy series and the tales of Tom Swift. An older cousin on his father’s side, a man named Nat Siegel, who worked as an accountant in the city, brought him books.
For a while after Isaac’s death, family drop-ins were regular. Many of Isaac’s relatives lived in the city, and Lena remained close to them. She welcomed their care and concern, and Sylvia seemed to enjoy their visits, but Lee usually withdrew whenever his father’s people came around. His aloofness embarrassed Lena. Though normally courteous and polite, he had inherited his father’s reserve. His transition to his new country had been difficult. Years later, in a letter to his little brother, he would recall how the “goyim-Irish” in Coney Island used to call him “Jew-boy.” “I was told [by my playmates] to lie on the ground, open my fly[,] and reveal [my] penis and then all the goyim kids would spit on it,” he wrote. “I raised no objection—that said I was a good kid and then I would be allowed to play with them.”
These experiences, as well as his naturally gentle temperament, pushed Lee beyond self-effacement, toward self-contradiction. At the end of a long day, he would simultaneously affirm and deny he was beat. He would complain about his tasks yet insist they weren’t so bad. In these small ways, he implied nothing was what it seemed, and no one really knew him.
His behavior intrigued Joey as much as the laughter and speech of the big, loud people (strangers, though family) who came to see his mother. He would linger in the living room doorway, listening to the group tell affectionate stories about someone called “Itchy.” It didn’t occur to him until he was an adult that Itchy was a nickname for his father—a variation of Yitzak, Yiddish for Isaac (the name means “he who laughs”).
Did he miss his father? He wasn’t sure. Had he known the man? No one asked him what he felt. Lee was now largely in charge of him, correcting his behavior in company, seeking his help with errands, but Lee was not someone he could talk to, even if he knew what to say. Though Lee had assumed a mantle of responsibility, he was still a boy. One day, flirting with a group of girls, he abandoned Joey near Steeplechase (“the Funny Place”). A policeman found the child wandering alone and took him to the station, where Sylvia picked him up.
In Now and Then, Heller observed that around this time, he began to bite his nails, a nervous habit, which he implied was associated with the effect his father’s absence, or his silence about it, had on him.
During summers, Lena, busy with her sewing, lost track of Joey as he ran to play on the beach with neighborhood friends: his old pal Marvin Winkler, whom everyone called “Beansy,” for reasons no one could later remember; a boy named Murray Rabinowitz, known as “Rup”; Tony Provenzano, son of the Hellers’ landlord; Lou Berkman; and Danny Rosoff, called the “Count,” perhaps because of his fondness for swashbuckling tales in adventure books. The kids would fly past Moses’ Candy Store (Mr. Moses, always scowling and hitching up his trousers), skitter by a Catholic orphanage located between Surf Avenue and the boardwalk, and stare at the pale, freckled boys behind the gate. Joey and his gang spent afternoons playing punchball or throwing confetti in the faces of girls, hearing them scream in delight and irritation (the boys especially liked to torment two neighborhood gals known to some of the older guys as “Squeezy” and “Frenchy”), or pooling the nickels their parents gave them for chocolates, jelly doughnuts, potato chips, or pretzels. Then they’d sprint, shouting and laughing, toward crowds sunbathing on the sand or lining up like obedient soldiers, wearing backpacks and carrying provisions, waiting to ride the Wonder Wheel, Shoot-the-Chutes, the Mile Sky Chaser, the Tornado, the Thunderbolt, or the brand-new Cyclone. Ride by ride, Joey built his courage for the next teeth-rattling challenge. He once said, “I approached [the Chaser] … in the same frame of mind with which I suppose I will eventually face death itself—with the conviction that if other people could go through it … I could too.” (The Mile Sky Chaser featured a sudden eighty-foot drop.)
The boys discovered that elderly visitors to Luna Park or Steeplechase, becoming fatigued, did not use all their ride tickets. Joey and his friends would sneak inside the parks and ask the oldsters if they could take the unused tickets. Joey gathered enough passes to go many times on any ride he wanted—to the point that soon he was so blasé, he never wanted to ride anything again. Thrills! Spills! Excitement! Nothing lived up to its billing for long. “[Eventually,] I could anticipate accurately every dive and turn of the Mile Sky Chaser with my eyes closed better than, years later, I was ever able to read an aerial map in the air corps,” he wrote in his memoir.
Walking home each dusk, passing fashionably dressed couples being pushed along the boardwalk in rolling wicker chairs, Joey loved the raucous patter of Yiddish rising from porch stoops as women, fresh from doing the day’s laundry or washing dishes, sought company and cool air. His mother was not so enamored of the neighborhood. The crowds were growing bigger on the boardwalk—louder, more vulgar, she thought. This was no place for a kid. Coney was a “chozzer mart,” she hissed: a pig market.
Since the completion of the subway line from Manhattan, the number of daily visitors to Coney Island at summer’s peak had almost doubled from half a million just a few years before. There was more noise and trash. Known as “the Nickel Empire” now, because of the five-cent train fares and the cheaper entertainments on display to draw bigger and bigger throngs, the place was pure frenzy. Sometimes there wasn’t enough space on the beach for a person to drop a towel. At the Municipal Bath House, where families changed from street clothes into beach wear or bathing suits, only twelve thousand lockers were available. Some Coney Island residents, seizing a chance to make a dime, erected changing tents out of bedsheets and lured people to the sidewalks in front of their apartment buildings or bungalows. Families took to undressing in the open or under the boardwalk. It disgusted Lena to catch from her window flashes of naked bodies, skinny, fat, disintegrating. On side streets, people ate pungent fried foods from sloppy tubs brought from home. Lena hated the way Joey and his pals hung around beach gymnasts, loudmouthed oafs, barely dressed, flexing their muscles, standing on their heads or balancing awkwardly on the exposed torsos of their girlfriends. Food wrappers and paper cups amassed like sediment in the Railroad Avenue trench, and on windy afternoons they blew up into the street against your legs.
Lena was immensely relieved when Joey became old enough for kindergarten and sleepaway camp in the summers. Anything to keep him off the beach. She sent him once to Surprise Lake in Cold Spring, sixty miles north of New York City. Surprise Lake was a Jewish camp catering mostly to underprivileged families from Manhattan’s Lower East Side (in time, alumni from the camp would include Eddie Cantor, Walter Matthau, Neil Simon, Larry King, and Neil Diamond). Probably, Lena learned about the camp from Lee, who was more conscious than she was of the world beyond Coney Island. Lee filled out the paperwork, making sure Joey qualified for financial aid. Lena helped Joey pack his suitcase. Two weeks later, when he returned, she discovered that none of the clothes had been touched. He had used his toothbrush and comb but never once changed his shirt or pants. When Lena asked him why, he replied that no one had told him to unpack. Plus, he’d found it easier just to leave the bag alone.
In 1930, he entered first grade at Coney Island’s PS 188. He was a bundle of anxiety. Family members had always told him he was handsome, and now he studied his face obsessively in the bathroom mirror to make sure none of his features had deteriorated overnight. He feared he was already going bald because his forehead was so much higher than his ears. He tried different parts in his hair, worried about his height. Mostly, he checked the mirror each morning just to make sure he was still Joey Heller.
He fantasized constantly. His imagination, along with his already well-developed reading skills, distinguished him from his classmates during his early school years. Teachers praised his writing and read it aloud in class. At one point, his cousin Nat Siegel gave him a prose translation of the Iliad: the first work of literature to make a “real impression” on him, he said. “I read that and reread it almost without stop.” Afterward, he loved doing book reports. In one paper, he assumed the persona of Tom Sawyer. For another assignment, much later, he wrote from the point of view of the metal in the gun that killed Abraham Lincoln. It pleased him to get good grades, and to hear his works read aloud as models of excellent writing. Some of his classmates began to resent the favor he earned from teachers, and his nervous maladies worsened. Warts sprouted on his hands and arms, as many as seventeen during one stretch.
Like the amusement park rides, whose thrills paled quickly, the teachers’ praise came to be routine, and Joey grew restless in class. Many years later, Sylvia recalled an incident. “Joe brought home a note from his teacher, asking my mother to come to school and talk to her,” she said. “We were all terrified. My mother didn’t trust her English, so I went.… The teacher told me Joe never listened in class and always looked bored. She said she kept trying to catch him, but he always knew the answer. She admitted he was too bright for the class, but he was demoralizing the other kids and frustrating her. All we could do was tell Joe to try to look as though he was paying attention.”
So he masked himself: sometimes studious and polite, at other times, to hide his uncertainties and fears of physical afflictions, preening and loud. “He was brighter than all of us. He was a needler, a big mouth,” Beansy Winkler told Barbara Gelb. “Joe,” he said, became a “pain in the neck.”
* * *
JOSEPH HELLER was bright enough as a child to absorb the knowledge that he inhabited a wildly contradictory world; the way to negotiate its seams was to split himself—on the one hand, acting boldly, and on the other, withdrawing to replenish and nourish his imagination. Force and avoidance: modes of existence oddly consistent with the surge and lull of Coney Island. At summer’s peak, the force of bodies yearning for physical release overwhelmed the boardwalk, the beach, and the residential neighborhoods. In the off-season, during the gray winter months, visitors’ avoidance of the area was so total, the silence was eerie. The surf, with its hidden undertow, appeared to reclaim what primitive appetites had chewed up and distorted only weeks before.
The question remained: What was Coney Island? A big top or a family enclave? For that matter, was it America or Russia—or Italy, Armenia, or Germany? A petri dish for socialism, as Isaac Heller believed—where the working class could bask in leisure and freedom—or a fountain of capitalism, as George Tilyou, Edward Riegelmann, and Nathan Handwerker set out to prove?
More to the point, perhaps, Morris Lapidus, a Russian immigrant, and an architect both revered and derided for his dramatic decorative styles, once wrote that his first “emotional surge” about architecture came from a visit he made as a child to Luna Park. “I was standing on [an] elevated platform just as dusk was falling [over Coney Island,]” he wrote, “and the lights went on. To me it was the most beautiful sight I’d [ever] seen. Of course, I knew it was hanky-pank, a circus and showmanship. But to a child of six it was all the wonders of the world. I never outgrew it.”
In the 1930s, little Joey Heller could articulate none of these perspectives, but he had taken them all in, including Lapidus’s secret for grasping Coney Island’s wooly mix, which was that no secret existed. Coney contained multitudes, to paraphrase an old visitor to its shores. To judge it one way or the other was to miss too many things of importance. Its beauty lay in its wastes, its wholeness in fragments plucked from ruin. These things, Joey knew instinctively.
Six decades later, reflecting on his literary career, he told an audience at Michigan State University that he didn’t know if the combination of “morbid[ity]” and “comedy” in his writing had come from the “garishness [and] … gaudiness” of his Coney Island childhood, but once, when a critic suggested this possibility, he “like[d] the thought”—that is, it felt right to him.
In his memoir, he recalled his youth with fondness and nostalgia. It is striking, though, that one of the most visceral passages in the book concerned the end of each day, “when the ticket booths close[d] and the lights [went] out.” Then, he wrote, “Coney Island [was] … rather unclean”:
The aromatic foods that had been fried and grilled turned greasy. In the early hours of the next day the odors in the street already signaled decay. Even the fresh breezes from the sea, which had awakened keen appetites earlier and stimulated the other senses, could no longer bear away those repellent effluvia of garbage. [I] had already realized that in winter Coney Island was in the main a lonely, dark and windy place for people grown too old for homework, roller-skating, or playing tag.
In detail and tone, the passage resembles Isaac Babel’s descriptions of a Russian city street following a pogrom (“My world was small and horrible … the earth smelt of … the grave and of flowers … [and I] wept more bitterly, completely and happily than I ever wept again in all my life,” Babel wrote in “The Story of My Dovecot”). As a child, Heller did not know about the world his father had fled, but he may have sensed in his mother’s bitterness, in the mockery and mourning of her Yiddish, that the world his father found was, in fundamental, spirit-crushing ways, not awfully different from the one he’d sought to escape. What was clear to the child was that he could not make his way in the world without a hustle or a scam, or at least the knowledge that what people said was going on really wasn’t going on.
* * *
“I DIDN’T REALIZE then how traumatized I was. As a boy in school I used to say my father was ‘deceased.’ I was aware without being aware,” Heller told Barbara Gelb in 1979. (“As always, when talking of his parents, he stutters very slightly,” Gelb noted.)
“Joe was a nervous wreck,” George Mandel told Gelb for her magazine profile. Years later, when reminded of this comment, Mandel expressed surprise he’d ever said such a thing, but he added, “I do recall … [his friends] were careful not to shout his name from behind for fear he might jump off the sidewalk in traffic.” Heller had met Mandel around the neighborhood and they became pals, sharing quick wits and rich imaginations.
In his memoir, Heller recalled “suffering headaches” as he grew into his teens. He continued to bite his nails and study his image in the mirror. He tended to avoid the amusement parks now. Instead, he and his friends transferred to the beach lessons they had learned in the parks—that everything is a game designed to sucker somebody, and most people can be conned into wanting what they don’t really want. The boys bought ice cream and soda pop, then turned around and sold them at a higher price to younger kids. Or they’d resell the jelly apples they’d bought from a neighbor woman, Mrs. Gelber; some of the apples were rotten and had worms in the center. Sometimes, a member of the group would steal costume jewelry from his parents’ bedroom and peddle it. The gang could always spot plainclothes cops: The men wore shirts outside their trousers to conceal weapons and badges. Besides, they were all Gentiles.
Seeking more gainful employment, Heller—still Joey to his friends—took an evening newspaper route, delivering the reactionary Hearst paper, the New York American, which attracted few readers among the Jewish and Italian families in his neighborhood. After school each day, he walked down to the Stillwell Avenue subway station, grabbed a Nathan’s dog, and picked up his bundle of papers, paying a penny and a half for each. Then he hawked the things for two cents. One night, at an Irish bar along the boardwalk, a man seated at a table just inside the doorway called Joey in, snatched a paper, read the racing results on the back page, and returned the paper. Then he gave Joey a dime. “I was in heaven, strolling on air as I went back outside,” he wrote in his memoir. “I was in love with a world that had such humans in it.”
The incident cemented a certainty in him that would drive him all his life: “[F]ew pleasures are so thoroughly reinforcing to the spirit as the arrival of unexpected money,” he decided. Years later, recalling the aunt who had given him a dollar at his father’s funeral, he wrote, “I associate money with life, and an absence of money with death. I can’t help it.”
Because the newspapers didn’t move well in his area, he riffed on the headlines, or tried to spice them up, to attract more readers. “Extra! Hitler dies … his mustache!” he would shout. He had only the vaguest idea who Hitler was. After finishing his route, giving away the remaining papers to his favorite families, he ran home, did his homework, and challenged his imagination more thoroughly than when falsifying the news. Inspired in part by Danny the Count’s talk of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, he tried penciling a few short stories, using as models the “short shorts” he found in the copies of Collier’s or Liberty that Lee or Sylvia brought home occasionally (the short shorts were a thousand words or less, and usually ended with a big surprise). Many of his efforts echoed the Iliad, with facts and details smuggled in from whatever he was studying in school.
Walking to his classes in the mornings wasn’t the cinch it used to be. As the neighborhood boys got older, they split into factions, divided by personalities, interests, and cultural backgrounds. The Italian boys threatened to beat up the Jews, and vice versa. Occasionally, gangs of boys threw small rocks at one another. Joey never encountered serious trouble, but he had to be more careful now. The place was rougher than before, money was scarcer (the Depression was deepening), and local neighborhoods were constantly unsettled by rumblings of change. A familiar joke was, “First this was Coney Island, now it’s Cohen’s Island, soon it will be Coon’s Island.”
In the afternoons, after school, some of Joey’s friends gathered outside Sammy the Pig’s pool room, near Happy’s Luncheonette on Mermaid Avenue, to smoke marijuana and listen to the older boys talk about gambling and girls. Generally, Joey craved food more than weed, and he’d spend all his newspaper money on Happy’s pork chops.
Lena worried about the coarsening effects of the Depression on her family, but her hopes that politicians or community leaders could clean things up weakened by the year. Joey recalled the last surge of political excitement in his neighborhood—it erupted the year he turned nine. Norman Thomas brought his socialist message to Coney Island; standing next to hot dog stands and merry-go-rounds, he promised to “repeal unemployment,” while crowds cheered and munched on pickle sandwiches. Joey, Sylvia, and Lee taught Lena enough English to qualify her to vote. On the eve of the 1932 election, Joey joined a torchlight parade, chanting with a group, “Hoover, Hoover, rah, rah rah! Put him in the trash can, ha, ha, ha!”
In truth, he had already understood—and learned to distrust—the dynamic behind most American politics. By watching the shill games along the boardwalk, he grasped that the barker, the person with power, always offered more than he could deliver (therefore, he could never really lose), but his constituency walked away generally satisfied at having participated in something, with the occasional illusion of winning.
Nineteen thirty-two came and went. Coney’s trash cans overflowed. Lena felt it was too late in life to convince her family to turn to religion for steadiness and solace; she herself had never been so inclined, but some part of her suffered guilt at being nonobservant. She worried that if the kids didn’t dress nicely on High Holidays and appear to be off to services, other families would suspect they were Communists. One by one, many of Joey’s friends celebrated bar mitzvahs. He did not.
He was more likely to grapple with spiritual matters—thoughts of mortality or the meaning of existence—on the beach or in the sea. He and his friends liked to do the dead man’s float in the ocean, letting the tide carry them far from shore, then beelining to a bell buoy about a quarter of a mile out. It was an exhausting adventure, and they alternated dog-paddling with intensive arm strokes, or they gave in to the tide as it carried them toward their goal. One day, one of the boys announced he was too tired to make it back to land. Joey and the others gathered around and got him safely to shore. Only afterward did it occur to Joey how powerful the tide was, and how close they had come to being washed away by it.
What struck him most, out by the buoy, was the roaring quiet, the way it swamped Coney’s clamor. Everything that loomed so large on the beach—the roller coasters, carousels, and Ferris wheels—became, at this distance, thimbles, needles, pins. In these moments, bobbing on the waves, tugged by the tide, Joey began to think he had a “haunted imagination,” a contemplative streak with an undertow of sadness and resignation.
On another “haunted” occasion, he observed a batch of kites break loose from its anchor on the beach. He ran up alleys and streets, keeping the kites in view; eventually, the string binding them snagged on a radio aerial on a rooftop next to his apartment. He scurried up the stairs to the top of his building, crawled onto the brick parapet, and reached for the nearest kite, which flopped just out of reach. He swayed, straightened, then leaned forward a little over a row of trash cans far below, until it occurred to him that any moment now he might plunge from the sky.
He discovered a different kind of spiritual mystery—the aesthetic—in the early evenings, in the apartments of the families with whom the Hellers shared the building. The Provenzanos had a player piano, whose mechanical proficiency fascinated Joey. Tony Provenzano owned a collection of finely painted lead soldiers, less engaging for the fantasies of war they provoked than for their beauty when lined up symmetrically. The Kaisers, on the second floor, across the hall from the Provenzanos, owned a phonograph. They played Enrico Caruso over and over, as well as a comedy record called Cohen on the Telephone, delivered by a man with a thick Yiddish accent, and detailing, with painful hilarity, an immigrant’s inability to properly place a call. The Kaisers also owned a complete set of The Book of Knowledge, and Joey sat for hours in the apartment with his friend Irving, reading through entries on insects, ancient lands, and do-it-yourself projects.
Also in the evenings, groups of boys, filthy with beach sand, went to the movies, walking to the RKO Tilyou or the Loew’s Coney Island. The Marx Brothers were Joey’s favorites. Harpo had first teamed up with Groucho and Gummo in 1907, at Henderson’s Music Hall in Coney Island. In their physical antics and verbal swiftness, the brothers seemed to embody the chaos of the place, and Coney Island served as a backdrop in several early film comedies, including those of Fatty Arbuckle, Harold Lloyd, and Buster Keaton. One evening, a new movie theater opened up, the Surf, just a block away from the Hellers’ apartment, and Joey took his mother. The film was One Night of Love, which featured a Puccini aria and melodies that echoed his music. Joey fell for the lead actress, an opera singer named Grace Moore, who would die in a plane crash some years later.
The movie was a pleasant shared moment with his mother. He didn’t have many like it. He fought with her as he got a little older, more independent, less inclined to stay home—though usually these were struggles of silence or tense avoidance. “You’ve got a twisted brain,” she told him one day when he frightened her by climbing a telephone pole just outside the kitchen window and asking nonchalantly as he peered at her, “Ma, can I have a glass of milk?”
Another time, angry at her demands on him, he called her a bastard, believing she wouldn’t know the meaning of the word. “At once I saw with terror that I was mistaken,” he wrote in Now and Then. “She gasped with incredulity, and staggered back a step. And I knew in an instant … that I never wanted to see her again with such an expression of deep hurt. I prayed she would never tell anyone.”
More than his mother, he turned to Lee for guidance and support, which is not to say he obeyed his brother unconditionally. One night when Joey was down on the street, Lee called to him, saying it was late. Time for him to come up, take a bath, go to bed. Joey refused. Lee came after him. Joey ran. Suddenly, a car turned a corner, blinded Joey with its headlights, and screeched to a stop just as it nudged the boy and sent him sprawling against its bumper. Shaken, he let Lee lead him upstairs.
On another night, Lee caught him smoking a cigarette in a storefront on Surf Avenue, about a block away from home. “How long have you been doing that?” he asked. Joey didn’t answer. He crushed the butt with his foot. “As long as you’re doing it, you might as well do it at home,” Lee told him. “You should try not to do anything outside the house that you wouldn’t want us to know about.” He pulled a pack of smokes from his pocket. “Here, have one of mine,” he said.
After their father’s death, Lee had abandoned his dreams of going to college. He knew his family depended on him, and he took seriously his role as Joey’s mentor. He wouldn’t talk about Isaac. The closest he’d come was to recall the wonder of discovering oranges in the galley of the ship when he was four years old, sailing from Russia.
When Lee was twenty-nine, he married a sweet woman named Perle, and prepared to move to Crown Heights, where he hoped work would be more plentiful. On the day of the wedding, Joey was fifteen. He sat in the synagogue, hot in his suit, his attention drifting until his mother walked up the aisle as part of the procession. The rabbi praised her for the love and generosity she had shown the groom as she raised him, though he was not her biological son. Joey sat up straight. The rabbi went on, honoring Lee’s and Sylvia’s “stepmom.” All around the room, guests smiled and wept with happiness. Joey could not speak.