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I WAS BORN ON OCTOBER 18, 1945, in Jackson Heights, Queens. We lived in an apartment there until I was in the third grade. I had one brother, Edward, three years older than me. My father, Benjamin, and mother, Pauline, were first-generation Americans, the children of immigrants. My mother’s mother, Fanny Frank, lived seven or eight blocks away. She and a lot of her sisters had come over from Poland, and I grew up knowing their large family. My mom’s brother Benny lived with Fanny.

My earliest recollections are of walking from our apartment to my grandmother’s when I was five or six, holding my father’s hand or my uncle Benny’s. Jackson Heights was very Russian and Eastern European Jewish, plus some Italian. Everyone lived in brick apartment buildings like ours, twenty-five units, fifty, a hundred. It was a nice neighborhood, clean and safe, just like in the old TV serials. All the neighbors knew each other and helped each other out. When someone new moved into the building everybody brought them housewarming gifts. It was all people just like us on the street, lots of babies in carriages and kids playing. The older people, my grandmother’s generation, spoke the languages of back home, which I didn’t understand.

In my memory I look up at my dad as we walk through the neighborhood. He’s middle-aged, six feet tall, brown hair going gray and thin on top, wearing thick glasses that made his eyes look a bit squinty. I don’t think he ever looked in a mirror. Clothing meant nothing to him. But he kept himself in good shape, and although he never talked about it, he was athletic. He had some trophies he’d won playing handball, and he was a good golfer. I always felt he was a handsome man. After he passed away, I went through a box of his things and found a card he and a few of his friends had printed up when they were young men in the 1930s. It said, “Bachelors available for parties.” That makes me laugh every time I see it. He and my mother made a striking couple. She was five foot seven and beautiful, with jet-black hair.

He was a bookkeeper all his life. At first he worked at a brewery called Feigenspan’s in Brooklyn, then as the office manager at a place called Herman’s Handkerchiefs and Scarves in midtown Manhattan. He never talked about his work. He didn’t talk much at all. He had a beautiful smile, though, and could laugh himself to tears. I don’t know if timid is the right word to use, but he certainly was not an aggressive man. He never pushed himself forward. He never even drove a car, which was really unusual for a man in those days. I only saw him angry once. He was not a sad man, not depressed in any way, just quiet.

My grandmother’s apartment was on the second floor, at the end of a hallway. It had a metal door with a buzzer and a little round viewer so the person inside could see who was there. When that door opened you could see through her foyer and down a hall straight into her kitchen, which was right out of Happy Days. It was very small, with just barely room for her to turn around. A Formica table with benches stood on the linoleum floor. She had a primitive white icebox with a chrome handle, and a four-burner gas stove. And she had knickknacks all around, snow globes and little porcelain animals.

Every time we opened the door and looked down the hall into the kitchen, she was in there, my little grandmother, maybe four foot eight, always in the kitchen either squeezing oranges or flipping latkes. As long as she was alive, whenever you opened her door the view was the same. When I was in college in Buffalo and drove to New York I always stopped at her place first, and there she was in the kitchen, same as always, squeezing the oranges or flipping the latkes. The first thing I did, every time I visited, from when I was a kid onward, was to sit down at her kitchen table and eat. And then we would say hello. Our relationship was built on an amazing amount of love, but also food.

I always joke when I’m cooking in my house that I’m channeling my grandmother. When people show up here, there’s chicken soup on the stove. It’s her recipe. I changed one thing. I use chicken stock instead of water and cook it down. Chicken, carrot, celery, onion. Dill is the only herb she used, except every once in a while she would put in a piece of garlic. So I do the same.

My grandmother’s apartment was a very nice one-bedroom. Her bedroom was in the back. My uncle Benny slept on a foldout sofa bed in the living room. He never married, and lived with my grandmother until she passed away. He was a short man, maybe five foot eight, bald, with a great big beautiful hooked nose. I was very close to him. I don’t remember this, but I’m told he used to help me with my ingrown toenails, which still bother me. He’d sit for hours and hours pushing the skin back. He was that kind of guy, a beautiful man, very kind and gentle.

What I do remember about Benny is that he always seemed to be drifting off to sleep. He’d nod at the table, he’d nod watching TV. Many years later I found out why. Benny worked in the vehicle transport business. Giant cargo ships unloaded thousands of cars at the docks in Newark, New Jersey. Transporters picked them up and delivered them to various locations. They might load a dozen cars onto a big truck, or a driver might pick up a single car and drive it somewhere. Benny was one of those. Each driver carried his own license plate, which he put on the car when he picked it up, and removed on delivery.

One day I was sitting in my office with the very successful jazz producer Joel Dorn, who said in passing, “How’s License Plate Benny?”

I said, “Who’s License Plate Benny?”

“Don’t you have an Uncle Benny who delivers cars? Well, he’s a very famous poker player around town. They call him License Plate Benny. Plays every night.”

For the first time I understood why Benny nodded off all the time.

When I was in the third grade we moved out to a new suburb, Oceanside, farther out on Long Island, very near the seaside town of Long Beach. Oceanside was famous for having the second Nathan’s hot dog stand (after the first one, in Coney Island). It’s still there, on Long Beach Road, which runs through Oceanside straight out to the boardwalk. When I was in high school a group of us went to Nathan’s for lunch almost every day. I was caddying at a golf course, two bags at a time for eighteen dollars a round, and spent all the money on Nathan’s hot dogs, fried clams, and clam chowder. My mouth is watering as I’m writing this.

Oceanside grew up about the same time that Levittown did, that 1950s moment when suburbs flourished, and it looked very similar, like Ozzie and Harriet’s neighborhood. On our street, Henrietta Avenue, maybe twenty houses faced each other on a block, all exactly the same split-level design. They were really nice houses, with big yards in front and back, maybe a half or three-quarters of an acre. Through our front door you walked into the living room, which my mother furnished very much of that era, with plastic slipcovers on everything because that furniture was never to be sat on. It was just for show. That led into the dining room, also rarely used, only for formal occasions. We did almost all our eating in the kitchen, which was not unlike my grandmother’s, with a round table and benches and some chairs. Downstairs was the den, where the TV was. The utility room was right off the den, and then there was the garage. One flight up from the kitchen were two bedrooms. I had one, my brother had the other. Our own bedrooms—that was huge! Up another flight was the master bedroom for my parents.

For all of us who had moved out from the city, Oceanside was an entirely new world. For the first time in our lives we had landscape, we had pets, we had trees and grass and air. It was another very nice, very friendly community. Everybody knew everybody else on the block. I took to it right away. I always had little jobs in the neighborhood, like delivering newspapers on my bicycle, and helping the man with the neighborhood dairy route deliver eggs and butter. I’d never go a block without waving to somebody. Very Beaver Cleaver.

But the move to Oceanside came with one major drawback, and its name was Skippy. My brother wanted to be a veterinarian. Not long after we moved to Oceanside my mother let him get a dog, because now we had a backyard. My mother gave my brother anything he wanted. Of the two of us, he was definitely her favorite. (Or at least I thought so until I was sixty-five. That’s when my brother told me he always thought I was her favorite. Maybe she didn’t have a favorite.) Edward was the firstborn, and he was everything a Jewish mother at that time wanted in a son: responsible, focused, very good with money, with a career picked out and a plan of how to get there. Everything about him said he’d be the successful one.

To my mother, I was the irresponsible son. I didn’t have a career plotted out from when I was a kid. And for some reason I was always losing things, which drove her crazy. I’d get a baseball glove for my birthday and lose it the next day. I’ve come to recognize a trait in me, that as soon as I get something I want I don’t much care about it anymore—like that night at the Hall of Fame ceremony. My mother got so fed up with me losing my things, one year when I got ten dollars for my birthday she made me give it to Edward. As cruel and unfair as that sounds, I’ve come to understand it. He was the opposite of me—extremely thrifty. Extremely. She knew that at least he’d use that money, not lose it like I would. He bought a parakeet with it, which really made me crazy. Because of Skippy I hated animals by then.

When Skippy showed up, life radically changed for me. Skippy was a miserable mutt, his fur black and white splotches, and all teeth. During the day he was chained up out back. At night he was moved to the utility room. He barked twenty-four hours a day. He hated me, and I hated him back. But then, Skippy hated everyone except Edward. Skippy’s sole purpose in life was to bite people. He must have nipped at me fifty times. I can still show you the scars. There was a girl in our neighborhood, Robin, who had polio. He attacked her and, as I recall it, she had to have thirty stitches. I may be exaggerating that, but he definitely bit her. Everyone in the neighborhood became aware of Skippy, and stayed away. I couldn’t have friends over because their parents wouldn’t allow it. Even our relatives wouldn’t come over. If Skippy broke free, someone was going to get nipped at.

One of my chores was to get food out of the freezer, which was in the garage. To get to the garage, I had to go through the utility room, where Skippy was locked up. I developed a strategy. I’d open the door just wide enough to toss some food into the room, hoping to distract the dog long enough for me to run through to the garage door. Sometimes it worked, but sometimes it didn’t.

In a bizarre way my life came to revolve around that dog. Because he was in the house, I spent as much time as I possibly could out of the house. I couldn’t wait to get to school. After school I played basketball until I had to go home at dark. When I got home I grabbed my dinner, ran up to my room, and ate alone up there. I stayed in there until morning, a prisoner in my own home. I’m sure I must have eaten some meals with my family down in the kitchen after Skippy arrived, but I swear I don’t remember any.

This went on until I got my driver’s license. I don’t think I realized how strange it all was until other people pointed it out. When a cousin from Israel came to visit, he lasted one day hiding with me in my room before he said, “This is crazy. Come on, we’re getting out of here.” He got me started learning the trombone so at least I’d have something to do in my room.

I can’t say that I was unhappy. I wasn’t angry, either. I was just very confused about it. I’d ask my mom, “What would make you pick this dog over me?”

She wouldn’t say, “It’s because you’re a jerk.” She’d say, “Your brother really loves animals. He really wants to be a veterinarian. This is important to him.”

I asked my dad, “How can you let Mom give the dog freedom in the house and not us?”

He said, “Would you like me to leave and leave you alone with her? What else can I do? She’s not going to change.”

He hated conflict. I suppose that by hiding in my room all the time I was dealing with the issue the way he would, by avoiding it.

The only time I felt safe out of my room was watching TV shows like Sgt. Bilko and old Marx Brothers movies down in the den with my dad. If my father was there I felt safe to come downstairs, even though the dog was behind the door in the utility room barking endlessly through the shows. There were two couches in the den, very fifties, with heavy fabric and thin cushions. The big TV console stood on legs against a wall, and the utility room door with the dog behind it was right beside it, so that when you were watching TV it was always in your view. There was a lamp, and otherwise the room was very spare.

But it didn’t feel barren, because my father was there. I’d put my head on my father’s lap and watch TV with him. Anytime we coughed or laughed—if we were lucky enough to catch a Marx Brothers movie we laughed our heads off—Skippy started barking and scratching at that door, like all he wanted to do was leap out and bite your throat. But I felt so safe with my dad. I loved him so much, and I could feel how much he loved me. His love for me was pure. He never asked me to do anything for him. He was my protector, my haven, and my friend.

One of my favorite times as a kid came maybe once a month, when he and I would go play golf. It started when I was twelve or thirteen and was on the junior high school golf team. I wasn’t good, but I could play well enough to go with him. My father devoted himself entirely to supporting his family. This was the one thing he did for himself. He loved being on the golf course. He just glowed out there.

Our journey there was beautiful, although strange. It started when he woke me up at three in the morning. He’d wake me very gently, with a big smile on his face. “Come on, let’s go.” And I’d moan and complain, although after the first few years I really was looking forward to it. I’d get dressed in my room, he’d get dressed in his. Even in summer it was a little chilly out at three in the morning, so I’d put on layers of clothes. I’d hear him coming down the stairs and follow him. Down in the kitchen we’d have some hot chocolate or something. Never a real breakfast. We’d eat later. Then we would walk a quarter of a mile, with our clubs, on the dark and quiet streets, to the bus stop.

The golf course was at Bethpage State Park, maybe an hour’s bus ride farther out on Long Island. The bus was usually fairly empty at that hour. For me those are some of the greatest moments of my life, because I got to share them with my dad, knowing that he was going to be happy. We were going to a place where no one—not the dog, not my mother—was going to bother us.

We’d reach the golf course just before light, sign up, and then go out to the benches there. We’d each find a bench to stretch out on and nap for an hour or two until tee time. Or I’d nap in his arms. And then we’d go out and play eighteen holes. We were always paired with two other golfers to make a foursome. We had the greatest time. We’d have lunch out there and then ride a bus home before dark. Golf has remained a very big part of my life ever since. I have a box of my dad’s handkerchiefs. Whenever I play golf, or do anything exciting or fun, I carry one of those handkerchiefs with me. I feel like he’s with me, and that makes me feel really good.

Looking back on it, I wonder why I never asked my dad why my mother didn’t drive us or pick us up. Not once. I mean, he paid for the car, he paid for the gas, he paid for the house. I never asked him, “How could she let you take the bus?”

Another regular journey we made was into Manhattan, to Herman’s Handkerchiefs and Scarves. They made linen handkerchiefs and scarves for women. It was a fairly big operation. I’d say my father had eight people in his accounting department. Every other Saturday or so, though the office was closed, he took the Long Island Rail Road into the city to get some work done. If I didn’t have something I had to do for school, I went with him.

We’d leave the house around 8 A.M. Sometimes my mother even took us to the Oceanside LIRR station, about a ten-minute drive. Just being on a train with my dad was a huge deal to me. The cars were pretty new, with wide plastic seats, and there was a cafe car where you could get an egg sandwich. My dad always bought a New York Post for the trip in. So happy to be with him, I just sat next to him as he read. And I could feel how proud he was that he had his boy with him.

The train took us into Penn Station, and from there we walked a few blocks to Herman’s. While my dad worked I’d do homework or read a book. The office was pretty dreary, a big room with no windows, eight or so desks piled with paperwork, under fluorescent lighting. No air moving, no natural light, a real shmata operation. I had never experienced anything like it. It felt like a jail to me. I was sorry that my dad had to go there every day. I could see that nothing about the work excited him. He was working to support us, not because he liked it. It was my first inkling of how the adult work world could be imprisoning. He never talked about it. Never once in our whole lives did he ever say one word about his work.

These trips were my first look at a real job, as opposed to delivering papers. I have great respect for my dad for going into that cheerless, windowless office every day, and for anyone else who works any kind of nine-to-five job. But the sad way that place made me feel gave me, I think, my first inklings that maybe I wasn’t going to be suited for that kind of regular work. So I’m grateful to my dad for taking me there. My life might not have been the fantastic journey it has been without this early exposure to the real work world.

The moment I waited for was when he said it was time to break for lunch. It was a high point of my life until I went to college, when we walked out of that drab place onto the streets of midtown Manhattan on a Saturday afternoon and went to a delicatessen for lunch. We sometimes went to famous ones like the Stage Deli and the Carnegie Deli, but for the most part we went to one whose name I can’t remember. I do remember that it was very narrow, with a row of maybe eight tables. In the middle of the room was a big wooden barrel of pickles. “A pickle for a nickel.” They had new and old pickles in there, but all you could see on the surface was the brine, with seeds floating in it. You reached in there with tongs, picked a pickle, and dropped it in a plastic bag.

My dad let me order any sandwich I wanted. That was a big deal. When we went out to dinner as a family, you couldn’t order what you wanted. My mother made us order what was cheap. The sandwich I loved the most was brisket, chopped liver, and Swiss cheese with Russian dressing on rye bread. Oh my God was that good. I treasured every bite. I can still taste it. My grandmother’s cooking I had never really thought of as food in some strange way. It was just part of the fabric of my life. The Saturdays at the deli were the first time I got really excited about going to have a meal.

My dad and I would sit at a table by ourselves. It was the closest he ever came to talking about himself, but it wasn’t much. I’d ask him a question like, “Did your dad take you for sandwiches when you were a kid?” And he’d say, “Well, not really.” I couldn’t get anything out of him about his family. I never met his dad. We were not allowed to talk about his dad. The name was never brought up in the house. My dad’s parents had a very ugly divorce, and I believe his father remarried, though to this day I truly don’t know much. I think my father went behind his mother’s back once to speak to him.

My father’s mother, Rebecca Gordon, was the opposite of my mother’s mother. She was a large lady, maybe five foot nine, and broad. She had come over from a place on the Russian-Polish border. She was very refined, read and wrote well, and she never cooked. She had two sons, my father and his younger brother Al. She and I had a special relationship, and I love her very much. She’s buried in the same cemetery in New Jersey as my mom, dad, Uncle Benny, my other grandmother, and my grandfather. I go there once a year and give her and the whole family as much love as I can.

Where my father never spoke about his family, my mother couldn’t stop talking about them. She had a real attitude against them from as early as I can remember. They were never invited or included in our family affairs. My mother told me that because my father was the older brother, he had to support the family after the divorce. He worked in the daytime and went to night school at the Community College of New York to get his accounting degree. He wrote for and I think edited the school newspaper, while sending his brother through school and supporting his mother. He went right to work after getting his degree, and never had the money or the opportunity to get a CPA. So he remained a bookkeeper instead of an accountant, which meant he never made more than ten thousand dollars a year in his life.

His brother Al went on to open a dress factory and become a multimillionaire. Yet he never, according to my mother, gave my father a dime—never paid him back for his education, never helped him out. It would have been so easy for him to say, “Go back and get your CPA.” Or, “Come work for me.” He never did, and that’s why my mother disliked him. According to my mother, the last straw, the event that got Al and his family banned from our home, occurred one night when I was really sick—so sick that I was in my parents’ bed rather than my own. I have no memory of this. My mother said that Al and his wife, Mildred, came over and brought me one of those Chinese magic boxes where you put a penny in, shut it, and when you open it the penny has disappeared. Supposedly they gave it to me, then came back upstairs and took the penny out. That’s how cheap they were, my mother said. And from that night on they didn’t come back, whether by their choice or her request I’ll never know.

In fairness to them, my mother had a story like that for everybody. I never felt comfortable asking my father about it. It’s something he would never, ever discuss. I’ve never felt comfortable asking Al’s kids about it, either, because why would I at this point? Why would I want them to think badly of their dad? So I never learned the facts, but that’s the cloud I was raised under, made up of my mother’s anger, greed, and envy. Not a pretty picture. My father never showed the slightest anger or envy toward his brother. He just sat there quietly. But the fact that we weren’t rich like Al and his family rankled my mother fiercely.

I had such a strange childhood that by my mid-fifties I was convinced I had made it all up. A few years ago I reconnected with my cousin Patti. Cousin Patti was one of the few relatives on my father’s side I got to know. She lived not too far from us on Long Island. Patti is the cutest thing you have ever seen, under five feet tall with the happiest face, like a little girl. She surfed and boogie-boarded into her eighties. She’s a pistol. She’s about twenty years older than me. Her daughter and I were born around the same time, and Patti remembers us as infants being wheeled around together in our baby carriages. Once a year all the cousins would get together at a hotel in the Catskills, which is where I got friendly with her. When I was in the eighth or ninth grade Patti had a summer job at a waterskiing school not far from Oceanside. She started coming by the house in the mornings to pick me up and take me there for the day. Not to learn to ski, just to get away from my mother and Skippy. I had lunch with her, sat in the boat, read a book. It was just great to be out of the house for a day.

When Mike was working on Supermensch, they got in touch with Patti to interview her. She was around ninety and still a dynamo.

“I think I made my whole childhood up,” I said to her. “Did you ever come to the house?”

She said, “I couldn’t come to the house. You had that dog. Don’t you remember, I tried to adopt you. Your mother never spoke to me after that.”

I had never heard that before. She actually spoke to my mother about adopting me, which of course meant my mother banished her from our home.

So I didn’t make it up. My childhood really was strange enough that Cousin Patti tried to adopt me to rescue me from it. Patti earned a giant coupon from me for doing this, which I keep paying back happily. In the summer of 2015 I lectured at the University of Hawaii School of Law about ethics in the music business (an oxymoron?) to get three VIP passes to a Grateful Dead concert in Chicago for Patti’s granddaughter, a Deadhead. The Dead’s lawyer and manager was on the panel. Patti’s grandson Mikey, whom I love so much, lived with me in Maui for a year and recently got married at my house. Patti still has lots of coupons with me.

I didn’t brood about my life as a kid. That’s not how I am. It’s only been fairly recently that I’ve looked back and recognized ways that my childhood and family had an impact on the adult I became. For one thing, spending all that time in my room meant that I learned how to be alone, and how to think. I didn’t have a TV in there, or a telephone. We didn’t have computer games in those days. I had my thoughts, my books, and my imagination. I learned solitude. I can get lonely, same as anyone, but my ability to sit alone quietly for hours at a time, thinking, visualizing, would play a huge role in my successes as an adult. I also think that my mother’s attitude toward me as the son who was not destined for success must have in some way driven me to be successful. I think in some ways I tried to prove her wrong, or prove myself to her.

I think that because my father was so quiet and reserved, and allowed my mother to so dominate our lives, I spent a number of years instinctively seeking out mentors and surrogate father figures to fill some void I must have felt. But as it turned out, my two greatest and most influential mentors would be men who reminded me of him. My father spent his whole life in service to others—first his mother and brother, then his wife and kids. He never had money or power, but he was happy, proud to be a provider. In their own ways, my later mentors did the same. And in my own way, imitating them all, so would I.

Thank you, thank you.

When I got to be fourteen or fifteen, Long Beach became my main escape. My parents gave me permission to hitchhike. In those days you could still hitchhike fairly safely. Our street, Henrietta Avenue, ran right to Long Beach Road, which ran straight to the boardwalk, about fifteen minutes away. It was a very easy hitch, because it was a very high-traffic road. It usually took two rides. The first ride was generally up to this big intersection with a stoplight. They’d turn off there, and I’d thumb a second ride the rest of the way to the beach. The drivers were almost always strangers, which made it my first time out alone in the world, meeting strangers, without a safety net, without my dad by my side. It was a little scary. A car would stop, there’d be some stranger behind the wheel. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred I’d get in. Every once in a while I’d get a weird vibe and say, “Oh sorry, I left something at home,” and not get in. The road to Long Beach ran straight through the neighborhood of Island Park, which was very Italian and full of mobsters and gangsters. Every now and again there’d be a mafia killing or a big arrest in Island Park, and my mom wouldn’t let me hitchhike for a couple of weeks.

Long Beach is a narrow barrier island, reached by a couple of bridges across a channel just off the south shore of Long Island. It was a mix of residential and resorts. I started getting summer jobs at the beach clubs there. One was Malibu Beach Club, another the Colony Beach Club, another El Patio, but they were all very much the same, all strung along a road running down the center of the island called Lido Boulevard. They all had the same basic footprint. An impressive driveway and entrance, where young, good-looking guys took your car and put it in the large parking lot. You’d go into a lobby that was fairly fancy, with gin games going on everywhere, old Jewish guys with pinkie rings, and elderly blondes in high heels. Lots of young, beautiful girls, too. There’d always be a snack bar or a restaurant, always a pool with a lot of cabanas around it, and then a beach with beach chairs and striped umbrellas.

If you’ve seen the Matt Dillon movie The Flamingo Kid, you know exactly what my life was like then. It was even shot at Long Beach. When I got to whichever club I was working at I went straight to a locker room and changed into whatever outfit the job required. In one job I worked as a beach boy. I ran out to set up chairs, fetched people drinks, took the chairs back inside when they left. I worked at a snack bar, which was interesting because it was my first experience with peer pressure to do something I didn’t agree with. Some of the guys working there were older, heavily tattooed, dangerous characters. When we made hamburger patties, they’d laugh and press them in their armpits, or do other disgusting things. Just to be cool. I couldn’t rat on them, because they’d beat the hell out of me. I knew I should give them up, but I didn’t. I think it was the first real moral dilemma I ever confronted. Wow, how am I going to conduct my life? Am I really going to stand by and watch this happen? Which I did. I cooked those hamburgers and served them to people. It wasn’t so much that what these guys did was unsanitary, because these snack bars were so dirty anyway. What confused and upset me was that one human being would want to do this to another, just for a laugh. It still gets me to this day. When I see a TV show where they’re laughing because someone fell down the steps, I still can’t figure what it is in human nature that can make that funny.

The most interesting job of all was as a cabana boy. The cabana boy opens up the cabana for the customers, sets them up with towels, brings them their food and drink orders, and cleans up afterward. You’re basically their house servant for the afternoon, only it’s a cabana. Observing those people was a real education for me. There was always one hot gin or poker game going on in one of the cabanas, and there was always an alpha male who was the leader, and everyone knew he was the guy. He had the biggest pinkie ring, and the darkest tan, and the hottest wife, and won the most hands. I’d never been exposed to that sort of social behavior before, how hierarchies work, how society chooses its leaders.

It was a very good time for me. I had all the things I couldn’t get at home. I finally had my own individual, independent life, away from all the neighbors who knew everything about me, away from my mother and always being compared unfavorably to my brother. I was free to come and go, and I had a social life at the clubs. I could be whoever I wanted to be. I didn’t have to be Shep Gordon from Oceanside living in a house where I couldn’t leave my room. I started experimenting. There was a doo-wop group called Shep and the Limelites at the time, who had a big hit with the song “Daddy’s Home.” For a while, to the girls at the clubs I was Shep of the Limelites. I never actually said I was. I’d just go around humming the song, and my name was Shep, so they leaped to that conclusion. I didn’t dissuade them. I even signed autographs. Until they found out the Limelites were black.

But it was great while it lasted, and maybe it was necessary. Because I was very, very interested in all those pretty girls, but at fourteen and fifteen I was also very, very shy and totally inexperienced. It wasn’t the last time I’d use a ruse or a pretext to be with girls. Because I’ve been with many gorgeous women as an adult, with movie stars and fashion models, I have this reputation as a world-class ladies’ man. You can see it in the documentary, my male friends talking about me and all my beautiful women. The truth is I don’t think of myself that way at all. I have never felt that I was good-looking. I have always felt shy and self-conscious around pretty women. Their beauty overwhelms me. Certainly this was true when I was young. I was still a virgin when I went to college.

But I always had eyes for pretty girls. There was this one cute little blonde at one of the clubs where I worked, Leslie Feldstein. Her dad was the alpha male at that club. I really wanted to be with her, and the other guys all said, “Ask her out on a date.” I didn’t have a car and had never been on a date before. But I asked if her she wanted to go on one, and she said yes.

“What do you want to do?” I asked, hoping she’d have some idea, because I didn’t.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“Well,” I said, “my high school is playing a basketball game I want to go to.”

“Okay,” she said. “How are we going to get there?”

“Um, do you hitchhike?”

“No. Let me ask my dad if he’ll take us.”

He agreed. So now the big alpha male is going to chauffeur me on my first date. I gave her my address. On the night of the game, this enormous, shiny car with big tail fins, a DeSoto or Chrysler, one of those types, pulled up outside my house on Henrietta Avenue. I got in the back with Leslie; her dad sat up front, chauffeuring. The seats of the car were covered in clear plastic, just like the furniture in my living room, only under the plastic was all covers of MAD magazine. I loved MAD. I think I said something stupid like, “Wow, do you collect MAD magazines? So do I!”

Leslie said, “My dad is the editor.”

And he was. Al Feldstein, editor of MAD for nearly thirty years, drove me on my first date. He was really nice about it, too. After the game he took us to a Jahn’s ice cream parlor. Jahn’s was a local chain famous for its huge Kitchen Sink Sundae, an actual tub of dozens of scoops of ice cream in all the flavors, which served eight. He ordered one of those for the three of us. That was the only time I ever had one.

That was also the only time I ever went on a date with Leslie. Guess I didn’t do so well.

I loved those summers at Long Beach. I played a lot of Fascination on the boardwalk, where you rolled a rubber ball into holes and tried to set off a pattern of lights, sort of like in bingo, to win a prize. I got very good at it. I ate a lot of Izzy’s knishes. I got high for the first time at Long Beach, too, sniffing glue out of a paper bag under the boardwalk. I can still smell and taste it. Disgusting. But that’s what we did then. We thought it was cool. We observed those high-rolling gamblers with their gold watches and dark, dark tans and wanted to be like them. During senior year my friend Dennis Greenstein and I used to sneak off to the racetrack at night. I used pillows and blankets to make it look like I was in bed, then slipped out of the house around nine o’clock and walked thirty minutes to his house, which was in an area identical to mine. He met me outside. We would roll his mother’s black Valiant down their driveway and then down the quiet street until we felt we were far enough away, then he’d start it up and drive us to Roosevelt or Yonkers Raceway. They’d let you in free for the last race, around ten thirty. We rarely had any money to bet. We just watched and felt like big shots.

Thirty years later I went to Dennis’s parents’ house for the holidays. I said to his mother, “Mrs. Greenstein, I have to make a confession.”

She said, “Really? What about?”

I said, “Well, there were nights when you thought Dennis was sleeping—”

And she said, “Oh, you mean the nights you rolled the car out of the driveway?”

Jewish moms. You had to be awfully slick to put one over on them.

While I was developing a life of my own, Edward was living his, and we barely interacted at all. Our bedrooms were right next to each other, but my door was always shut. He had his friends over all the time, usually in his room, and I was not allowed to go in there. We had no real interests in common. I liked sports, and he couldn’t have cared less about that. He loved animals, and because of Skippy I hated animals. I was growing into a big kid, and he was always slight and skinny.

Edward was very, very close to my mother and my mother’s mother. Very close. It was probably my grandmother who influenced him to be so thrifty. She’d grown up poor in the old country, and she never got over squeezing every penny. Edward became obsessed with thrift, saving every penny, never wasting an opportunity to make another penny. He had us all cutting out coupons every weekend. When I was out playing basketball, he was out collecting bottles for the deposit. It’s the way he is to this day. He has never veered an inch from who he is. It took me a long time, but I have come to respect that about him. There’s certainly nothing phony about him. He makes no excuses. He is who he is.

When we were kids Edward was on his path, laser-focused on becoming a veterinarian, which he did. After we left our parents’ home, he went off in his direction and I went in mine. We barely saw each other for the next twenty, thirty, forty years. Our lives were just so different. He was very successful, made a lot of money, and raised a loving family. And he still collects bottles and clips coupons.

I haven’t clipped a coupon since I left home. I have completely the opposite relationship to money. But I must have absorbed something from Edward, because the idea of the coupon is very important to the way I live and do business.