(Note: My father, Matthew Ziegler, who died in 2001, was born on October 14, 1920. In honor of his birthday, this piece (from the working draft of Based on True Life: A Memoir in Pieces) recounts a visit we made to the Observation Deck of the Empire State Building in 1989. The dialogue is a composite of several conversations we had during that period.)
My father is claustrophobic. He hardly ever has to be in an enclosed space—except airplanes, but he loves to fly, connecting more to the open sky than to the confinement of the cabin. For a pick-me-up, instead of going to a bar, sometimes he drives to the airport and watches planes take off. He calls it “sniffing the planes.”
Since my mother died, my father occasionally takes the Long Island Railroad and meets me at Penn Station. We have an early lunch at a coffee shop named Andrews on 35th Street, where the waiters and waitresses are nice, even if they rarely get my father’s toast dark the way he asks for it. It’s enough that occasionally one will ask, “Is it dark enough for you?” He got upset with a new waitress because she didn’t seem to care when he pointed out how light the toast was. When we asked for the check, we realized she hardly spoke English. My father left a big tip.
After lunch we walk through Macy’s and look at VCRs. My father has been shopping for a VCR for a year. By the time the one he’s had his eye on goes on sale, a new model with new features has arrived, and he figures he’ll wait until the new one goes on sale. Finally I buy him one for Christmas, and after a few phone calls to me for tech support, he tells me he doesn’t know how he lived without it.
Usually I am the one who buys something at Macy’s: a sweater, or some aftershave with the free gift of a duffel bag or soccer ball. Occasionally I want something more extravagant—a portable CD player or an electronic organizer, anything new on the market—but I don’t purchase it until after I put my father on the train.
From Macy’s we walk the streets, window shopping, father and son flâneurs, and wind up at the food plaza on the top floor of the new A&S. We look out over Father & Son Shoes on Sixth Avenue as we sip coffee for an hour or so, until he catches the last train before the peak rush hour fare kicks in and competition is fiercer for a seat. I can never get much out of him about his past. Mostly we talk about sports and television, and we occasionally spar a few rounds on politics, which sometimes gets out of hand but always ends with a hug before he gets on the train.
One crystallized early spring day, we stop outside of Madison Square Garden to listen to a middle-aged trombone player and his preteen, banjo-playing, tap dancing son. A Suit with a walkie-talkie confers with them and points toward the edge of Madison Square Garden’s property.
“Why is he kicking them out? Doesn’t he have anything better to do?” I say to my father.
I gear up for a contretemps on corporate autonomy versus free expression—with my father taking the corporate side even though he’s worn a blue collar all his life—but he replies “They weren’t hurting anybody” as the father and son pack up their instruments.
Buoyed by our rare solidarity against the system, I suggest something I’ve been wanting to do for months: “Let’s get away from it all and go to the top of the Empire State building.”
“I was there yesterday,” my father says, his stock answer when he doesn’t want something. (“You want to try my calamari?” “Nah, I had some yesterday.”) I am forty-two, as old as my father was when I was eighteen, which was when my father stopped calling my shots. Now it is time for the child to be father to the man. “We’ll be closer to the airplanes,” I persist, and take his arm.
As soon as we enter the elevator, I realize I have made a cruel mistake. I’ve been picturing the living room-size elevator at the World Trade Center, forgetting that the Empire State Building’s elevator is the size of a large closet. Before I can ask my father if he wants to leave, tourists pack in with shopping bags and cameras. The only way not to make physical contact with a stranger is to stand absolutely straight.
My father and I are at attention, pinned to the back, as the doors close. Above the door are lights for each floor up to “20,” with the next light indicating the 86th floor observation deck. A minute after “20” winks at us, my father mutters something; instead of asking him to repeat it, I pretend I didn’t hear him.
When we exit, my father says, “It was a little rough there for a while. I couldn’t tell if we were moving.” Unsaid is that we will soon have to get back into that elevator.
I have been doing biofeedback exercises, aimed at reducing the body’s anxiety arousal by breathing deeply and slowly. I explain this to my father and demonstrate how to breathe from the diaphragm, narrating: “Hold your stomach and feel it move as you breathe in for a count of four; hold your breath for one count, and let it out for another count of four as you feel your diaphragm contract. Hold for a count and repeat.”
“You know,” I add, “when I was in elementary school, a nurse came to teach us how to brush our teeth—‘be sure to spit out, otherwise you just move the germs around’—but no one taught us how to breathe. And wouldn’t you say that’s elementary?”
My father seems distracted as I talk to him, probably thinking about the return elevator trip. He is not one to go for faddish solutions, so I mention that the Chinese knew about breathing thousands of years ago, but I don’t press the issue. For now, we are at the top. “See, it’s like being in a plane,” I say, “circling the city.”
We walk around the deck, and as we pass the elevator, I try to distract him by pointing to the Upper West Side and saying, “Hey, look, you can see my house from here.” We circle again.
As the time gets closer to the last off-peak train, neither of us makes a move to leave. He points toward Brooklyn and says, “There’s the Brooklyn Bridge. Your mother and I drove over that bridge on our first date.”
My father and I have talked about my mother’s illness and his loneliness, and even a little about their marriage, but never about their courtship. He continues:
Yeah, we were going to the Strand to hear Eddie Duchen. Your mother had this big straw hat, which she never put on. I remember it next to her on the seat as we went over the bridge, she held on to the brim. Bridges scared the hell out of her. I didn’t know it then. Turned out her sister forced that silly hat on her, which she couldn’t bring herself to wear and would be stuck carrying all night.
My poor mother: feeling her chest constrict as they drove over the Brooklyn Bridge, unable to share her panic on a first date, knowing that the bridge would have to be crossed again. Then I remember my mother telling me about the time my father and she were driving home from Manhattan and they got caught in a traffic gridlock as they were about to enter the Midtown Tunnel. My father had a panic attack (though he didn’t know what to call it) and left the car. He scurried through the stalled traffic and my mother drove home alone. An hour after she got home, he showed up, having taken the Long Island Railroad.
She was also going out with my friend Sam Hoffman, and she couldn’t choose so she stopped seeing both of us. One day I saw her on the street and she looks at me and says, “I made a mistake.”
That was it. That was the rest of my life.
I realize I couldn’t have planned a better way to get my father to talk to me; silence is the path to the elevator. I ply him with questions about his bank-robber father, the club he belonged to as a teenager, his cross-country trip on the cusp of World War II, the bar he owned. My head overloads with material I want to remember.
Your grandfather was in Sing Sing when I was little, but when I went to visit they told me it was the “hospital.” Later it was “college.” By the time I was ten, I knew where he was. By that time I was taking care of myself and your grandmother.
The dog—Scrappy—got into some chicken bones and we took him to the vet, who pronounced him fine. When I came home from school the next day, the dog was dead. I carried him seven blocks and buried him in the park so your grandmother wouldn’t have to see him.
Yeah, visiting your father in prison—it wasn’t your norm. I was always ashamed of the whole bit. But remember now, even though they did have weapons on them, it was the gentleman’s part of the industry. They were the clean men of the business: You never robbed anybody personally. It was not a home; it was businesses that were covered by insurance. You didn’t stick anybody up. They had a regular crew, then they’d pick up other guys as they needed them. You must see Asphalt Jungle—that will show you how it was.
The time they put in—it took a lot of surveillance and time, months could go into it before they did something. If they’d put all that planning and scheming and brains into something legit, they probably could have made more money.
One of your grandfather’s scams involved a midget named Boots. He and Boots would go to a fancy bar in Manhattan and argue about the details of a race they were fixing, exactly how the midget would engineer his fellow jockeys. When someone got curious, they offered to share the fix in exchange for a few bucks.
He knew them all. Introduced me to Lepke once at Detention, just said, “Lepke, I want you to meet my son.”
Once we’re walking and he points out a nice looking woman: “You see her, one of the best pickpockets in the business.” The payoff is, he comes home one day, he was riding the train, and he says, “You wouldn’t believe it I had my wallet picked. I never knew it. I got taken.” He couldn’t get over it. “They got it and I don’t know how.” It always bothered him.
My father will want to stay up here for hours, filibustering with his life story. Looking down at the distant oval of Madison Square Garden (where once I got dizzy climbing up to seats in the top row), I feel a surge of panic. What if an overwhelming urge to jump comes over me? I’ve never been tempted before, but people have been known to “snap,” and that sounds sudden and unexpected.
Breathe. I put my hand on my stomach and start counting to myself. I feel better, almost giddy with my newfound skill, though embarrassed at my silly fear of snapping. Now that I think about it—I would have to snap badly enough to climb the spiked fence without coming to my senses. I confront Madison Square Garden below as if staring down a bully.
“Tell me about East New York when you were growing up.”
Oh, I can picture them all:
There was Lenny – he’d sit on the stoop all evening and late into the night during the summer because his hay fever was so bad and his wheezing and sneezing drove everyone nuts. He could sing, and finally got in with the crowd by singing tenor on the street corner. One of the other kids rode on the handlebar of Lenny’s bicycle and a car ran into them. Lenny just got banged up but the other kid was killed. Word got around that Lenny had a sneezing attack. From then on, whenever anyone from the dead kid’s family saw Lenny, they’d spit on the ground near his feet.
And Tommy. He was eight pounds overweight for the Navy, which was the safest service to join during the war. He went on a diet to lose the weight so he could enlist with the other guys, but they wouldn’t take him. He tied one on and they went looking for him. He was sitting out on the curb in front of his old pool room, he was just sitting in front of the pool room at two a.m. He was drafted into the Army three or four months later. The first time he went out on a mission….he never made it.
We started the club on Bradford Street, Fraternal Fellows. We had about sixteen kinds of cards made up. Joe was in the club; my friend Nicky from Glenmore Avenue days; Sam Hoffman— the one who used to go with Mommy. We had this guy we called Big Boy. And there was a guy we called “Mr. Tops— he used to stand out in the middle of the street and just start to spin around. Mishegas. Like one guy who collected keys, he was always asking for your old keys. Then he’d go to a dance or something and give them to the bandleader—“Hey, I found these.” The bandleader would hold them up and ask who lost them. We’d all laugh at everyone checking their pockets.
Hesh was a short little rotund guy who found it very difficult to get girls to go out with him—not that he didn’t love to go out with the girls—so one time they pulled a cruel trick on him. He hears all this moaning from the back room and they told him they had a girl in there and he’s next. When he goes in, there are two of the guys simulating. If he had a gun he would have killed everybody. One time there was a girl in the crowd that put out. Everybody else knew her as this sweet little thing but she would go with a crowd of guys, no money, she just did it for the love of doing it. She said, “There’s only one guy I won’t put out for. Hesh.”
Right around the corner, belonging to another club, was this fighter called Bummy Davis—you could look him up. They also had a guy who went to Hollywood and became a big shot producer. He used to play poker with us. One night, he had four of a kind and the pot kept getting bigger. I had a straight flush. I don’t care how much money he’s made in Hollywood, I bet you he still remembers that hand.
In 1940, my father and a friend from the club bought a car and drove cross country. He was nineteen. I ask him how it happened.
Just talking, kid-talk, you sat around and did a lot of dreaming: one day we’re gonna go. And we did it. We took off. We had a big eighty or ninety dollars. We paid about thirty-five dollars for the car. The very first night we got to Blairsville, Pennsylvania, and slept in the car along the side of the road.
We stayed with relatives in Chicago, and the “Y” in Reno, Salt Lake City, Hollywood. We got lots of autographs: Mary Astor, George Raft, Rosalind Russell, Greer Garson, Robert Young, Eddie Albert, Freddie Bartholomew.
One of the gang back home made this giant map of the U.S. and put it on the wall at Jack’s bicycle shop. They pinned our postcards on the places we sent them from, and everyone came by and checked on our progress. Forty years later I run into a guy at the track who recognized me from the old neighborhood. He remembered the map. We were gears back then.
It is getting cold, and my father says, “Let’s go inside.” A guy has a machine that flattens pennies into Empire State Building souvenirs. It costs a dollar, and, despite the price, my father lets me buy one for each of us without saying, “Nah, I got one yesterday.” He insists on supplying the pennies. The guy punches holes in them, and we add them to our key chains. I ask about the bar he owned right after he got married.
The Montauk Tavern. My partner was Bright Eyes, we got the money from my father. Bright Eyes was always taking his pulse while looking at his watch, feeling his chest. Hypochondriac, always thought he was going to die.
“What happened to him?”
He died of a heart attack.
We both laugh.
We had a free lunch counter on the horseshoe bar. Ferranti was a drunken chef with a handlebar moustache who couldn’t hold a job but made the best sauce you ever tasted. We let him sleep in the back and threw him three pennies each day to buy “Il Progresso.” This Irish guy Brady was always the first customer on Saturday morning. Never saw him any other time.
One New Years Eve we wanted to stay open past three a.m., and your grandfather told me I had to go to the precinct, give the captain an envelope with a Christmas present. I get in to see the Captain, tell him the name of the bar, and put the envelope on the table: “A little something for your family.” He stares at me, cold, and says, “Son, if that’s what I think it is you better just pick it up and walk away.” I could have crawled out.
A week later he comes into the bar, I’m afraid to even offer him a free drink. He says he’s been thinking, that it’s not fair to his children if I want to do something for them, and asks if the envelope still has his name on it. I never even opened it. I give it to him and he wishes me a Merry Christmas, adjusts his hat, and leaves. Your grandfather comes in a couple of minutes later and says, “What was the old captain doing here?” “What do you mean old captain?” “He got transferred someplace up in the Bronx.”
Always through the years, there were your grandfather’s cronies come to the house and hung around. Charlie Irish, Blackie (a ladies man, I don’t know who passed him up, an enforcer, very deadly—you’ve got to have persuaders in every business, that was the game and when you got into the game you knew that was the price you had to pay); Dummy Taylor (I remember him cleaning fish), Big Joe the Pollock, Georgie Kalivas had a pushed-in nose. Pete Koback— he did a lot of jobs with your grandfather. He might have even been your godfather—who held you that day, who held you? There was Abe from the Garment District, if you had a problem he’d say, “Okay, I’ll take care of it.” Quiet, nattily dressed, heavyset man, not fat, big in stature, very impressive, spoke very softly. We had lunch at one of those side restaurants, and the red carpet was dragged out for him.
I tell him how exciting all this is to me.
There were some rough times. Your grandfather was away once and he left money behind. Your grandmother was seeing one of his cronies. When he got out he found out about it and the money was gone. He went into a rage and the result was she tried to kill herself. Took some pills. I got worried about her and went to the apartment but it was locked and I didn’t have the key. I just started trying every key I had and one of them fit and I got her to the hospital. I still don’t know how that happened, how I had a key that fit.
I used to see him do something that I never knew what he was doing. Maybe at that time it was a form of a drug. He used a little burner. I don’t know what you do when you burn something. He used to do that in the bedroom. He did drink more than your average. He could hold it. He always had a bottle. He was always taking a shot.
The FBI came by after we got married—you know the kind, government men, business types with the shirts and ties like they just got out of college. They showed me pictures. I knew every picture. But I was very vague with my answers. When I had the milk route they came to the place and the boss says, “Hey, Matt, they were asking questions about you.”
I remember one horrible snowstorm when he had the milk route and he didn’t come home till late the next night.
It might have been '58. They predicted a big storm so I left the house at eleven p.m. It took me until seven in the morning to get to the place, load a truck, and get near the route. Nothing is plowed, everything is knee high. Cars and trucks stuck. I stop at a little restaurant—a diner type place—the Phoenix. What am I gonna do now? Kid sits next to me and he’s having coffee. “You wanna make ten bucks,” I ask and he says, “Yeah, doing what?” “Help me out delivering milk.” “Okay, c’mon let’s go.”
I had to work out of sequence of what I would normally do. This kid was good. We split up on each block. I rang the customers’ bells so they’ll know the milk is out there. They said, “What the hell are you doing here, are you crazy?” We got three quarters of the way through, and it’s seven o’clock at night. We stopped for doughnuts and coffee and ate in the truck. I told him, “Take as much milk as you can carry.”
I walked in the house it was eleven p.m.—twenty-four hours straight, and I’m talking work, walking knee deep in snow with a case of milk, running up flights of stairs palming two bottles in each hand. I had to pay for all the milk, so I probably didn’t make anything.
“Why did you do it?
Why did I do it? Why do you climb the mountain?
Rush hour has come and gone. Through the dark, amidst the glitter, are the places my father has been talking about.
I guess I’ve been yapping a lot.
I remind him that when I used to come home for the weekend from college he'd hardly say a word to me.
I have a confession. I used to wish you wouldn’t come home because I’d feel so empty when you left. On Sunday, I’d sit in the living room, by the window, as the sun went down and you got farther away. Your mother would say, “Why don’t you put the light on?”
We finally enter the elevator. Again we get pressed to the back. We stare at the “20,” waiting for it to glow as if searching for a beacon. It feels like the elevator really has stalled this time. “Uh oh,” a Japanese tourist says, and his companions laugh.
I avoid my father’s eyes, not wanting to witness his moment of panic, but I panic, unable to flee, afraid I will faint (though I have never fainted). I start doing my deep breathing but can’t break the cycle. I imagine myself screaming and my father screaming and the tourists laughing.
Out of the corner of my eye I see my father’s hand on his stomach, moving slowly up and down, his lips moving slightly with the count.
The light for the twentieth floor comes on. We’ve been moving all along.
As we get out of the elevator, my father says:
That kid from the snowstorm – he’s probably still telling that story.
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