I did not like school. I was crazy about sports, especially football, and liked girls, and being around other kids, but the classrooms, where you had to sit and listen because the teachers were in charge—not for me. Maybe I thought I knew too much, had too clear a picture of the world and its hierarchies and where public school teachers fit into those hierarchies. I sat by the windows in back of class, looking over the rooftops of the Bronx, the chimneys and pipes. Beyond school was the Grand Concourse, beyond the Grand Concourse was Manhattan. I was impatient to see the world, and thus a usual suspect for the truant officer. I would look into the hall before first period, sign the sign-in sheet, then take off. Hurrying across the avenue with my collar pulled high to cover my face, I would run up the steps to the platform of the elevated. The D train was my limousine as it tottered and wheezed its way into the city.
One afternoon, I saw a red jacket in a store window on Mt. Eden Avenue, just around the corner from our apartment. That red jacket changed everything. It was worn by a mannequin, in a casual, hanging-out, street-corner pose. It was an exact replica of the one James Dean wore in Rebel Without a Cause. I imagined myself slouching in it, leaning in doorways in it, speaking bits of tough, cynical dialogue in it. (All the time! I don’t know what gets into me—but I keep looking for trouble and I always—I swear you better lock me up. I’m going to smash somebody—I know it.) I took it off the mannequin and slipped it over my shoulders. It fit like a glove and hummed like a wire. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I had to have it. This was the first time I felt that consumerist urge: need it, need it, need it. I dug in my pockets. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Sadness followed by determination. I went around the corner, got my father, and dragged him back to the store. He watched me take down the jacket, zip it up, and turn around, all the time nodding in approval. “Oh, yes, Jerry, that is a gorgeous coat. It looks great on you, too, like it was made for you.”
“Can I get it?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said, “do you have the money?”
“No,” I told him. “Can’t you buy it for me?”
“Oh, no, that’s not how it works,” he said. “You get a job, save your money, then you buy it. Then you’ll enjoy it. Otherwise, it won’t mean anything. You’ll get tired of it in an hour.”
It was the beginning of my life as a working man. I got the jacket, of course, wore it till I lost it, but, by then, the jobs I had taken to buy the jacket had become more important to me than the jacket itself had ever been. At some point, you forget the object, and the means becomes the end. You work for the joy of the work. My father must have known this would happen.
One of my first jobs was in a movie theater on 170th Street in the Bronx. I was fourteen years old. I had been sneaking into the place since I was a kid. You could swing onto the balcony from a fire escape. It was dangerous and exciting. One night, the manager caught me. His name was Mr. Allen, and he was a good guy. He could have called my parents, or the police, but instead said, “I know you sneak in here every day and see the same movies over and over. Why don’t you just work as an usher?”
When I was thirteen, I got a job at Goldberg’s, a resort in the Catskills. I started as a busboy but was soon promoted to waiter. One day, I was serving a big wheel named Abraham Levitt. This is the guy who built Levittown on Long Island. He invented the modern suburbs. He took an interest in me. He asked about my parents, my plans, my dreams. This has been a theme in my life: Somehow, I have attracted mentors. Again and again, who knows why, older men have taken me under their wing. Maybe they recognized something in me, a vision of their younger selves, before their wife left them, before they were disappointed by their children, whatever. “Why are you working here?” Mr. Levitt asked. “Why aren’t you at the Concord or Grossinger’s? The big places. You’re never going to make any money at Goldberg’s.”
I told him I did not know anybody at the Concord or Grossinger’s.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll take care of you.”
The next morning, he drove me over to the Concord and introduced me to the owner, Arthur Winarick, and to his children. They gave me a job at the pool. At night, I danced with the girls. I went there for years, first as a cabana boy, then as a guest, finally as a talent agent. Relationships are the only thing that really matters, in business and in life. That’s what I learned from Abraham Levitt.
I started my first business around this time. It began with a sudden realization, an insight. There was a dry cleaner’s on the ground floor of our apartment building. It was owned by a man named Angelo Bozanellis. I used to sit on the fire escape of our apartment and watch the men get off the train and rush into the store, then head home with their dry cleaning. I went to Mr. Bozanellis and said, “I can’t stand to watch these men struggle every night. Do us all a favor. Let me deliver the cleaning. That way, a man comes home from work, he goes directly to see his wife and children. Maybe we’ll save a marriage.”
He said yes.
I asked what I would get paid.
“You’ll make money on tips. People will give you nickels and dimes. But you gotta hustle. It’s up to you.”
Fine.
I made my deliveries every day at four, racing though the neighborhood, up and down stairs, in and out of the little, tomblike elevators, delivering the dry cleaning to housewives an hour before their husbands came home. One afternoon, I saw a regular customer coming out of the Chinese laundry with a sack of clothes, and then it hit me. The same people who were having their cleaning done were also having their clothes washed. So I went in and spoke to the owner, Louie Hong, an old Chinese man with dark, mysterious eyes. I said, “Look, Mr. Hong, as long as I’m delivering the cleaning, I might as well bring the wash, too. It’s going to the same houses.”
Just like that, I had become an entrepreneur.
But I had done a stupid thing. It did not take me long to realize my mistake. No matter how many packages I carried up the stairs, the tip stayed the same. There must be a business-school term for this: I was competing against myself, driving down my own prices. I figured out a solution. I would carry everything up in one trip, but hide the washing under the landing. First I would deliver just the dry cleaning, then loop back later to deliver the laundry. This way, I got two dimes instead of one.
Over time, the neighborhood took on a different aspect for me. I saw it with new eyes. It was no longer just streets and stores: It was needs and opportunities, money to be made. Once you see the world this way, things are never the same. It is like recognizing the pattern in the carpet. You cannot unrecognize it. The grocery, the fruit stand, the newspaper seller—I was making deliveries for all of them. Very quickly, there was too much business to handle on my own. I went to my brother and said, “Melvyn, I have a good thing going, but I need help.” We recruited a half dozen kids from the corner, and I soon had a little army of delivery boys running all over the neighborhood, with a percentage of each tip sent up the chain to me.
I learned lessons from this business that I still follow today: People will pay you to make their lives easier; always take the time to make the pitch; personal service is the name of the game; never get paid once for doing something twice.
When I was fourteen years old, I ran away from home. I don’t mean down the block away, or in the city overnight away, I mean away, away. I was standing on the corner with my friend Stuie Platt when the restlessness took hold of me.
“What do you say we get out of here?” I said.
“Out of here where?” he asked.
“Out of here, out of here,” I said.
My uncle owned part of a hotel in Miami Beach. If we could make it down there, I figured he would give us bellhop jobs. In Miami Beach, being a bellhop is like being an aristocrat—that’s what I told Stuie. We would earn pockets of cash parking Cadillac cars.
“How are we going to get there?” asked Stuie.
“How do you hitchhike to Florida?” he asked.
“What do you mean,” I said, “You stick out your thumb—that’s how.”
We left with four dollars. We were on the road all day, eating in diners, resting on the median, the traffic breaking around us like surf. We had spent all the money by the time we reached Pennsylvania.
“How far to Florida?” asked Stuie.
“A few more days,” I told him.
We got scared when the sun went down. We slept hugging each other in a field, but continued at dawn. Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina. We were starving and broke. You know who fed us? Black people. In those days, the blacks were on one side of the street, the whites were on the other. On the white side, we were shooed away like rats, chased, cursed. On the black side, we were talked to, looked after, given plates piled with food. We would fill up and go on, skirting the wood shacks with dogs barking and the sun beating down.
Two drunk men in a red Oldsmobile convertible stopped for us outside Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. We climbed in back. Here is what I remember: one of the men asking me questions; the squeal of rubber; the things along the road—trees, houses, signs—spinning past us; the car sailing off the pavement; breaking glass; being thrown; being in the air; landing in a bed of soft, black dirt, dazed; something screaming toward me through the sky—HUMPH! It lands at my side. It’s Stuie. We stare at each other, confused. We get up and run. Away from the road, the car and broken glass and the drunk men.
We went through the woods into Myrtle Beach. We were crying, heaving, little-kid sobs, all the way. We asked for the police station. A young cop with white teeth called our parents in the Bronx, then drove us to an airport on the edge of town. There was a big, silver plane on the runway—Capital Airlines. The propellers started with a cough and spun into a void. I sat at the window. We sped down the runway, lifted off—the town and the sea were soon far below us. It was the first time I had been on a plane.
We landed at LaGuardia. There was no terminal then. You parked in a field and walked. My mother and father were waiting. I could see my father’s face. He was angry, pounding his fist into his palm, muttering, “Wait till I get my hands on him.” My mother pushed down his fist, saying, “Don’t you touch him. Don’t you touch my boy.”
Four days—that’s how long we were gone, but those four days changed my life. Because I was scared but kept on going and managed to survive.
When we got home, my father sat me down and asked, “Why did you do it, Jerry?”
“Why? Because I wanted to see the world.”