I was still in grade school when my life took two dramatic turns for the better. The first involved my Uncle Carl. Carl had been a confirmed bachelor, but in the Jewish tradition, he began courting my mother a few years after my father—Carl’s brother—had died. When I was ten, they married, and my uncle became my second father.
Carl was a junk dealer. Junk was a family calling back then, and a far from glamorous or lucrative way to earn a living, but Carl was still able to buy us a home, at 182 Saranac Avenue in North Buffalo, and the home made all the difference. It had a yard, a true living room, and even a television set. The home sang with respectability; it was not a mansion, nor did it need to be. The kitchen had an eastern exposure from which we could see the sun rise. We could see the sun set, too, through the picture window in the den. I contentedly observed that shift many times in that modest house—my house, our house. I also watched it in the nearby park with my little brother, Joel, while playing basketball, as the day would wear on into evening. After our half decade of borderline survival in dark apartments, it was as if we had emerged from a tunnel into daylight. Three years into this new marriage, my baby sister Brenda came along to share the bounty with us.
In Carl Greenberg, I also found the strong male role model that my father’s early death had denied me. Carl was powerful and quiet in equal measure. The quiet side of him meant that I got only sketchy details of the Greenberg family’s flight from Europe.
In 1934, I learned, the family moved from Poland to Cologne, Germany, believing it would be a place of enlightenment and culture. Two years later, Carl and a handful of friends and family left in the middle of the night, crossed the Rhine, and eventually went on to England and the United States. From there he worked to save the rest of his family. My birth father, Albert, and others had endured a harrowing months-long journey in 1939, walking from place to place, knocking on doors, looking for shelter, before reaching Paris and finally migrating to the States before the Nazi invasion.
Other than that, I have only imagination to fill in the empty spaces. Carl gave out those details like a miser spends dimes. But it was enough to understand why my first father never lost the habit of looking over his shoulder and why stress finally caught up to him that day inside the pharmacy in Buffalo.
Carl’s powerful physique—on a relatively short frame—was both a result of and a necessary asset in Buffalo’s rough-and-tumble scrap metal and junk business. One day, for example, a disgruntled employee hurled a brick at him, catching him in one eye. As with my grandmother’s eye, it, too, was replaced by a prosthetic.
As I grew into my teenage years, I began working summers for Carl in his junkyard. Handling scrap was man’s work. I was not yet there, so I spent much of my time winding metal wire around several-hundred-pound bales of rags and locking it in place so the bales could be weighed and transported. The rags stank like wet dust. The metal would scrape and infect my arms, and the locking mechanisms would pinch my fingers and knuckles. We had to use a mechanical lift to get the bales onto the scale and then push them into the bed of the truck. The bales would sit on the truck bed like giant eggs in a carton. The junk shop collected and sold various metals as well as rags. Sometimes we would collect brass bed frames. Using an old hammer and a screwdriver, we would split and peel the relatively valuable brass off the supports in order to sell it. We sold the other metals, too, although for a lot less money.
Carl kept a pile of receipts on a thin metal spindle. His script was European-style—blunt and thick, as if his hands were unsuited for the act of writing. In fact, his handwriting was nearly illegible. Black ink was dug like canals into the paper. Carl did not talk much at his shop; he gave orders in quick bursts. He would tell me where to go or what to do. There was no discussion. No consideration. There were no meetings. No memos. No strategic-planning retreats.
In summer, the scrap yard was roasting hot and foul smelling; the only shade came from a large corrugated sheet-metal roof that stood over one end of the yard. The rest was open. The smell of copper and corrosive metal would get in your nose and your lungs and sting your eyes. And the heat in summertime was vicious. The sun’s reflection off the metal was like a laser. I had to be careful or the sharp edges would split the skin of my shins like paper.
Two men worked for Carl at the junk shop. Arthur was a giant, though his size seemed to transcend height or weight. He could lift the shells of metal furniture all by himself and launch them into the dumpster. I thought him capable of terrible things. He wasn’t violent, that I saw, but I always kept my distance. Years later, rushing through O’Hare Airport, I accidentally knocked, straight-on, into Muhammad Ali. And that is what Arthur was like—a block of a man.
The other man, Donald, was much smaller, wiry and muscular. He was really the only source of conversation I had in the junkyard. He told me once that he lived in a poor section of Buffalo, for which he paid twenty-five cents a night. At lunch break, we would sit outside the junkyard on the sidewalk curb, his glasses low on his nose, a floppy brown hat on his head. The street would be quiet in the heat. He would drink sweet muscatel wine but eat nothing. I would eat the tuna-fish sandwich that my mother usually packed for me. It was embarrassing. What must he have thought of someone whose mommy packed his lunch? I would offer him half of my sandwich, though he always declined. I suspected he was afraid it would dull the effects of the muscatel, which he needed.
For a treat, Carl would give me a nickel to go across the street to the small convenience store and buy a grape soda. It was a very big deal for me. The man who worked there, Joe Hill, knew how big a deal it was and was always happy to see me. Perhaps just happy that I was so happy.
Our move to the middle-class respectability of Saranac Avenue also meant that Joel, Ruth, and I changed schools as well, and that, too, was an upgrade on many levels: teachers were better and resources more plentiful. Even as a sixth grader, I could tell the students were more eager to learn—myself among them. What’s more, one of my classmates was as beautiful as a vision.
I had never seen anyone in my life as graceful as Sue. I was mesmerized by her features and her voice. I just stared. I watched Sue in class. I watched her walk down the hallway with her friends. I watched her on her bike, following her from behind. Her very existence was as if she had waved a hand in front of me, causing every one of my confusions to fall away. Like the Lady of the Lake of Arthurian legend, she rose up out of the water on a day when I was lost in the forest and said, “Now, listen.”
Sue, however, wanted nothing to do with me. She was tall and had brown hair, a sloped back, and a double-jointed thumb, which fascinated me. She would not say hello to me in class or in the hallways. I would think, “Please say hello to me. I can’t be the first to do it. I’m scared. But if you do it, then I can say hello back, and maybe by then I’ll have thought of a question: Where do you live? What sports do you like? Do you even like sports?” But she said nothing to me, which was the most reasonable thing in the world because I never said anything to her.
Just the mere mention of her name—Sue—enchanted me, but that paled before the image of her walking to the front of the class to give a report on Lord knows what. Who cared? All I could remember, and it would haunt me later, was the swoop of the small of her back, her shoulders, the sweater she was wearing, as if she were a woman emerging from the body of a young girl, and though I was tall, and myself becoming a young man, I could not believe it was happening. I could not get the thought of her out of my mind. Or maybe that’s why I seemed to be doing everything at once: so I wouldn’t have any time left to moon over a girl who didn’t seem to know I existed.
At school, I joined club after club. I can’t remember anymore what the activities were, but I plunged into them with all the vigor and interest I could muster. After school, I played ice hockey, baseball, and basketball. Later, in high school, I would add cross-country and track to the sports roster. I also had to find time to rehearse with the school orchestra.
Outside school, I took trumpet lessons because I thought playing the trumpet was cool. In time, the instrument became something noble to me, like a sword at the center of a legend. I also liked the fact that it was loud—maybe too loud for my family when I practiced—but for me the sheer volume of the noise helped drown out the memory of the terrible silence of our previous life. Mostly, though, I just felt good playing it. Making music is like a prescription for a disease that cannot be cured but whose symptoms can be alleviated. Music did that for me back then, and still does.
In time, I even took a small step toward getting to know Sue. In eighth grade, we were the two finalists in the school spelling bee sponsored by the Buffalo Evening News, one of the two leading local newspapers. Sue, up first, was asked to spell “silhouette.” She misspelled it!
Then it was my turn. I might have flubbed it on purpose, in tribute to my still well-concealed adoration of her, but I spelled it correctly and won. That potentially costly triumph amounted to a momentous breakthrough: I had come directly and forcefully to her notice as someone to be respected. The next fall, when we transferred to Bennett High School, we would have at least some sort of relationship, but it wasn’t until our sophomore year that Sue began to respond as I had been hoping for so long. Encouraged, I dared to invite her to the annual Cancer Charity Ball. Almost miraculously, she said yes.
The evening of the ball, I drove to her house to pick her up, knocked nervously on the turquoise front door (my heart pounding), and was greeted by a stunning young woman. I froze. This vivacious, radiant person did not seem to be the same serious girl I knew in the classroom. Although my eyes were fixed on her, she appeared not to notice that I was staring. Instead, she took my hand and welcomed me into her home, introducing me to her parents, Helma and Marty Roseno, who greeted me warmly.
It was the beginning. Sue and I sometimes went out to an apple orchard in the countryside on fall weekends. Some of the apples would have fallen to the ground, but most were still clinging to the branches. We were both terribly innocent in those days. Walking between the trees, knowing that in the evening we would be busy on a date with another couple (double-dating was common in the fifties), we occasionally stopped to sit and sometimes make out a little. On date nights, we would mostly talk…and talk. I usually had a great deal to say; things needed to be sorted out, ordered—a symptom of youth, perhaps, to want to explain who belonged to what group, to understand where and how you fit in.
One warm spring evening, Sue and I went out to a small amusement park in a Buffalo suburb, the Glen Park Casino. I was in thrall to rock and roll, and we wanted to see a new duo called the Everly Brothers. They had rocketed to the top of the charts with “Bye Bye Love.” We arrived early, in time to see two teenagers dressed in tightly fitted black pants, black shirts with white buttons loosely covering thin bodies, rehearsing at the front of the small stage. Recognizing the brothers immediately, I invited them to join us later for a drink. Sue was a bit taken aback when they accepted.
After the show, they came over to our table and sat down awkwardly. Phil, sitting to our left, his right leg jutting out, was more intense than his brother Don, who seemed happy to have Phil lead their side of the conversation. We talked about Elvis, James Dean (I thought Phil resembled him), and rock and roll. I was ecstatic; Sue, with her preference for 1940s rhythms, perhaps less so. Still, it was a memorable evening for two young Buffalonians.
The crowning moment of my growing up in Buffalo, the one etched most clearly in my memory, was my high-school graduation. When the musical introduction, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” concluded, the audience buzzed with anticipation. I stood just outside the auditorium, nervous, my black graduation gown almost touching the floor, my mortarboard tilted slightly. My seventeen years of life seemed to culminate in that one instant. As their president, I entered the auditorium at the head of my classmates. After a few steps, I stopped. The eyes of the audience were on me. I waited, looked around the room, and smiled, catching my mother’s eye. I sensed her enormous pride and knew at that moment that I had it all.
The entry for Sanford D. Greenberg in the 1958 yearbook of Bennett High School, Buffalo, New York:
President of the senior class; president of the student council; president of the Buffalo Inter-High School Student Council; representative of the Empire Boy’s State; associate editor of the school yearbook; chief consul of the senior class; member of the Bennett High School Hall of Fame; member of the Legion of Honor, Key Club, French Honorary Society, cross-country team, and track team. Prom king.
My past seven years had been filled with sunlight, love, friendships, vibrancy, and (to my mind) enormous accomplishments. Those years seemed to have driven away the anxieties of the preceding years of want. I was about to enter Columbia University, and, after that, even more exciting possibilities would without a doubt open for me.
Before I left home for my freshman year at college, Sue and I agreed that to prove the strength of our relationship we should see other people, at least while I was away in the city and she was at college in Buffalo. This was supposedly to allow us to see whether our love would stand the test of time. As it would turn out, our love had to stand a much rougher test than the passage of time and a distance of four hundred miles.