I Was Better Last Night: A Memoir

1

QUEEN FOR A DAY

1959

Philomena Marano got the role of the Evil Witch and I was cast as the King. The King? Who wants to be the King? Sure, he gets a crown and cape, but the Witch gets green skin, red lips, and long black fingernails. I wanted green skin, red lips, and long black nails! Second grade was not working out the way I’d hoped.

I was given the largest role in Sleeping Beauty because I was generally perceived as having the most theatrical flair in class 2-1 of P.S. 186 in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. In 1959 they called it flair. I have never understood why, but from early childhood, seeking it or not, I’ve stood out in a crowd. I remember years later when I was dead broke and begged director Tom O’Horgan to put me in the chorus of this new show he was doing—Jesus Christ Superstar. He hugged me warmly and said, If I put you in the chorus, I have no chorus.

There’s no denying I blossom whenever I’m the center of attention. My high-school painting class was invited to demonstrate life drawing in Macy’s Herald Square store. Thirty of us set up easels around a platform where a live model posed. I began to sketch with brightly colored pastels on an oversized pad of newsprint paper. Before long I had attracted a crowd. The more they grinned, pointed, and nodded their approval, the faster and more wildly my hands flew. I’d never drawn like that before—or since. I was on fire. People were reaching out to catch my drawings as I tore them from the pad and tossed them aside. Others begged to pose for me. I had no idea where this energy and inspiration was coming from. I was possessed. I can still feel the rush of that explosive creativity. I’d somehow tapped into the positive attention of onlookers and rode their wave of excitement, not unlike when I connect with a theater audience. A rush of electricity shoots up my spine and every cell of my body vibrates with energy. I come alive. The people in the audience are attached to me. I sense my emotions molding theirs. It’s an extraordinary high. Attention is nourishment.

But back in the fairy-tale play of second grade, I begrudgingly recited my lines and waved my royal scepter while never allowing my concentration to drift from Philomena awaiting her entrance in the wings. Old Lady Berlant chided me, I can’t hear you, Harvey F.

I was Harvey F. because there was also a Harvey S. in my class. There were a lot of Harveys in P.S. 186. Three greatest mistakes of the fifties: Formica, thalidomide, and naming children Harvey.

I can’t hear you, Miss Berlant said again. Speak louder or I’ll have to take the role away from you.

Take it, my inner voice spat back. You think I’m dying to wear this stupid Reynolds Wrap crown and drag a chenille bedspread cape behind me? Fuck this goatee my mother drew on with her eyebrow pencil. I’m not in this for the art. Give me lipstick or show me the exit!

My inner voice spoke truth. My outer voice just spoke louder.

The day of the performance I begged for color so insistently that my mother finally painted two hot-pink spheres of rouge on my cheeks. I was not mollified.

When Halloween arrived I rushed home from school and stripped off my clothing. I wrapped a bath towel around my chest, went into my parents’ room, and liberated the stash of makeup from my mother’s vanity. I went at my face with abandon. Eyeliner, mascara, blush, and her brightest shade of red lipstick. I stood back and admired the results in the mirror. I gawked. With this act of defiance something shifted. Something magical had happened. Staring into the mirror, squinting away the imperfections, my outsides at last matched my insides, and I heard the voice in my head ask that most frightening of questions: Are you a girl?

Where did that come from? Why would a child wonder such a thing? My mind was struggling with jigsaw-puzzle pieces that came in an unmarked box. I had no reference for this. I had no language. No experience. Nowhere had I heard another person ask anything like that. I was demanding explanations from my seven-year-old self, to whom this was all new but not unfamiliar.

Clichéd as it sounds, for years I’d been singing along to Original Broadway Cast albums. In the proscenium of my bedroom mirror I was always the leading lady, although I’d accept a featured role if the number was juicy enough. Let’s not kid each other: no one turns down the chance to sing I’m Just A Girl Who Can’t Say No even if it’s not the starring role! Wrapped in a bath-towel dress, a T-shirt wig on my head, the curtain rose on me. Applause. Please note, there was no lip-synching. I sang full-out, leaving Celeste Holm in my dust. All familiar with the dark rasp of my adult voice may be surprised to learn that I once possessed a soaring boy soprano good enough that, for two years, I was a paid soloist in a professional liturgical men’s choir.

But that Halloween’s feature was a dumb show. Hidden behind this mask of makeup, I dared to pull my chubby boy tits up over the tightly tied hem of the towel, pinching the skin together to form cleavage. And when I use the word dared, I mean dared. My boy boobs were my enemy. They were threats to my normalcy. They were my body’s betrayal of my dark, unacceptable truth. There was no hiding them. There was no shirt loose enough, no coat thick enough to camouflage this 3D scarlet letter announcing to any casual observer the gender war raging within. I was a boy with tits. During puberty I took to wrapping my chest with an elastic Ace bandage whenever leaving the house. An Ace bandage covered with a T-shirt and then a sport shirt over that. By the time I’d get home to undress, my poor skin was rubbed raw. Many times, the bandage had folded up during the day, forcing my boobs out over the top and making them twice as obvious. Who was I fooling? I’d cry while applying lotion to soothe the inflamed skin.

Boy boobs. I hated them, and truthfully, still do. But not on that day. On that day, as I squinted before my bedroom mirror, the puzzle pieces began to ease into place, revealing something I could almost put a name to. I was excited and frightened and…

My mother’s voice: Harvey. Come down. Your friends are here.

As quickly as I could I pulled an old housecoat of hers from the laundry hamper and covered my boyish haircut with a kerchief. Reaching up, I smeared the makeup down my face. My mysterious kohl-lined eyes became sunken cavities. The longed-for luscious red lipstick now read as blood trails. I rubbed and blended and manipulated the floral scented creamy filth until I could reasonably claim that I was not trying to be pretty. I was a monster, a zombie. A female zombie, it’s true, but even so, a sociologically acceptable character for trick-or-treating. It wasn’t Sleeping Beauty, but at last my lips were unavoidably painted ruby red. This seven-year-old gender warrior had taken the hill and planted a flag.

Leave it to Philomena to still have this photo of my Halloween experiment, shot in the alley beside my home.

2

BROOKLYN BOUND

Most people know of Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, as home to the Kramdens on The Honeymooners, or the site of the car chase under the elevated trains in The French Connection. Who could forget John Travolta swinging his paint cans down those very streets in Saturday Night Fever, or taking up classroom space in Welcome Back, Kotter?

We lived in a small three-bedroom, one-and-a-half-bath semi-attached house that my folks bought from my grandparents. It stood Jew-centric with the Yeshiva of Bensonhurst down the block to the left and the Jewish Community House occupying the opposite corner. There was a time before my spiritual nullification that I wouldn’t misbehave in my house simply because the rabbi passed by our front door at least six times a day coming and going from prayers. He’d know.

Anyone on the block could recite a recipe for stuffed cabbage, but no one would have heard of jicama, avocado, or chitlins. Ours was an insular world. Entire lives were lived inside a half-mile radius. When families multiplied, they stayed in as close proximity as could be managed. I have childhood friends who only saw Manhattan because our class made the four-mile journey to the Empire State Building. The signs at our subway station offered two directions: Coney Island and The City. There was a social rule that people from Brooklyn could move to Queens or Staten Island. Manhattan, the Bronx, and (heaven forbid!) New Jersey were all a bridge too far.

The men worked, the women tended to the home, and a kid who studied hard enough could grow up to be President. Jews cautiously befriended Italians, who guardedly befriended the Greeks. We all juggled our positions on the social totem pole knowing we had one thing in common: although we thought of ourselves as white, we lived on the edge of a country that did not see us that way.

The only Asian people I saw worked in the Chinese restaurant on Bay Parkway. Blacks and Hispanics traveled into the neighborhood as domestics or other manual laborers. Until high school most of the people of color I knew as a child worked at the handkerchief factory in Brooklyn’s industrial park, Bush Terminal, that my father managed for the Gindi and Mizrahi brothers. (I’d lay odds he won’t remember, but I first met Isaac Mizrahi at his family’s holiday party in 1961. He was two months old.)

The rest of the world was glimpsed on small oval black-and-white television screens set into great big wooden cabinets or through the pages of the Daily News and the weekend New York Times that my father brought home, along with a dozen bagels, every Sunday morning. My family would rip into those newspapers in a way that would be unrecognizable today. My older brother went straight for the sports sections. It was page one for my father. And I grabbed the colorful comics from the Daily News along with Arts & Leisure from the Times, which I was under strict orders not to cut up before my mother got to read it. But before anything else, I searched for Bloomingdale’s shoe ads. Not that I cared about footwear. But they were drawn by my favorite illustrator, Andy Warhol. It was years until I realized that this same Warhol was breaking into the world of fine art. Back then his pen-and-ink drawings thrilled me. They were raw and still precise. They were cartoons but completely accurate. His lines dissected defined form, using negative space in such an unconscious manner that it was almost a miracle. This little kid could not get enough of them.

This was the postwar world of my childhood. It was down these streets that I, a self-possessed three-year-old, nonchalantly wheeled my baby doll in her carriage. The neighbors chided my mother, "How could you allow such a shonde?"

She brushed them off: One day he will be a terrific father.

Although she longed for more, my mother, Jacqueline, or Jackie to her friends, was a housewife. My father proudly pronounced, No wife of mine is going to have to work, but if she could have, she would have. Her father had suffered lung damage as a result of being gassed in World War I. The older he got, the fewer hours he could manage working as an industrial electrician. Eventually homebound, he forced Jackie to drop out of school after the eighth grade and take a job to support the family. Her younger brother, Irwin, was a brilliant student who dreamed of earning a degree in engineering. All hopes for the future were placed on him. They even changed the family name from the easily identified Ginsburg to a less Semitic-sounding Gilbert to get him into the right school. It worked. With Jackie footing the bill, he became an engineer and helped develop one of the first hypersonic rockets, the X-15, for NASA.

Young, single Jackie buried her dreams in office work. My father was a salesman to, and she a receptionist for, Gordon Novelty in the Flatiron Building. They met and fell in love just as World War II broke out and my father enlisted in the Navy.

Their marriage was idyllic in many ways. As a couple they were devoted to one another. There is a line in Torch Song Trilogy that sums them up: My mother once had to stay overnight in the hospital and my father would not even get into bed without her.

My father never tired of saying, Didn’t I pick the most beautiful girl in the world to be your mother?

Jackie loved education and the arts. Every week when Cue magazine (the predecessor of New York magazine) arrived in the mail, she’d turn to the Broadway section and immediately order tickets for whatever show was opening. We always sat in the center seats of the mezzanine’s first row, which cost under three dollars apiece. Can you imagine? Our family of four saw West Side Story, The Sound of Music, Bye Bye Birdie, Gypsy, Oliver!, and even the Royal Shakespeare Company for ten dollars per show. We missed nothing.

Every Christmas morning, while all of our gentile neighbors were opening gifts, we’d hop the subway to Manhattan and Radio City Music Hall. Back then you not only got the world-famous Christmas show with its real camels in a living Nativity tableau, but afterwards they showed a first-run movie: Cary Grant in Charade or Father Goose—I loved Cary Grant. But it wasn’t just movies and shows that we saw. Museums, botanical gardens, and trip after trip to the 1964 New York World’s Fair. My mother exposed her three guys to it all.

Closer to home her interests were no less varied: she volunteered at our schools and for charities, including Hadassah, the Jewish Defense League, and CancerCare. I loved visiting the ladies who gathered once a month down in our basement to roll donated sheets into bandages for Israel. Toni Cohenan was one of those women. Round-faced and rounder-bodied, she had closely cropped dark hair that framed her even darker eyes, which glowed with the wonder of a child whenever she dared to look up from her work. But mostly she gazed down or inward like a mistreated puppy, hoping you saw that she was no threat.

I liked to sit by her and watch her work. I’d lean against her side and study the way the numbers tattooed on her forearm twisted and distorted with the movements of her fingers. Max was her husband’s name. He was a jolly gent who covered a thick Polish accent with an overenunciated English one. He had a silly comb-over held in place by a jaunty beret. He, too, had the stain of inhumanity tattooed on his forearm. My father told me they’d met in a relocation facility after the liberation of the Sobibor death camp.

More than a decade after VE Day the entire neighborhood still lived under the shadow of World War II, whether it was Frances DePrisco grieving her soldier husband, or someone like my father, who survived his Navy assignment relatively unscathed, or that sweet couple Max and Toni Cohenan, who’d witnessed the worst of humankind and now clung to one another to fend off the nightmares. Max was so loving to my brother and me that I couldn’t understand why they’d had no children of their own. As only an innocent would, I asked Max. His eyes darted protectively toward his wife before solemnly mumbling, Bring a child into this world? No.

There is another war story that’s always haunted me. My grandmother had six older brothers for whom she cooked, cleaned, and cared. When word reached America about the Nazi roundup of Jews in Eastern Europe, Moe, Murray, Max, Herman, David, and Joseph Schatzberg took up a collection so one of them could travel overseas to seek out family members and bring them back to safety. Several months later Herman returned alone. No one? the others asked. You found no relatives to save?

He shrugged as he handed back the cash. All I found were women.

It took years until I finally understood why women weren’t worth a ship passage. A woman marries, has children, and propagates her husband’s name. What good does that do for our family?

My mother gently lobbied my father until he allowed her to volunteer at our elementary school. In short order she became their librarian, a position she retained long after my brother and I moved on. Ron attended Stuyvesant, a high school for accelerated academic students, and I entered the High School of Art and Design. Both schools were in Manhattan, so we were rarely home. This was Jackie’s chance to push her love of learning a little farther. Returning to classes, she at last earned her high-school diploma and then a degree in library science. She went as far as getting her master’s but stopped just short of a doctorate. Who needs it? she said. I’ve hit the top of the Board of Ed pay scale, so why kill myself writing a thesis?

By then she was a full-time, fully accredited teacher/librarian at Jackie Robinson Junior High, which had been built on the site of Brooklyn’s famed Ebbets Field. Is there any reason to mention that she earned much better college grades than I did?

My dad, Irving, was raised in a small-town Catskill Mountain orphanage. His mother died in childbirth and his father, the town barber, could not raise a newborn alone. While relatives were willing to adopt his older sister, my father was left at the Jewish orphanage until the age of maturity—thirteen—at which time he went out on his own. His first job was driving a bakery truck in Ellenville, the town where Harry, his father, lived. Although he remained close to Harry and his sister throughout their lives, Irving had no love for the extended family that had abandoned him. Hence, I have few uncles, aunts, or cousins from the Fierstein side of the tree. Harry remarried at some point, but the new wife wanted nothing to do with children. When Harry died, the stepmother cashed in the house and the barber shop and moved to Miami. Jackie loved to tell the story of God’s punishment of this selfish woman. "That chazer went nowhere without her diamonds and mink. A hundred degrees and that woman flounced around in fur. One day, somewhere in Biscayne Bay, she was crossing the street against the light and a delivery truck mowed her down. The people on the street all came running—but not to see if she was alive. They stripped every ring and bracelet from her arms, pulled the blood-soaked mink off her back, and left her there to rot in the gutter like the dog she was."

Jackie had a strong sense of right and wrong. Her tale of the evil stepmother taking all the money was apparently true. The only thing my father inherited was a shaving mug, most likely from his grandfather, with the name Feuerstein emblazoned in gold leaf.

This lack of relations made Dad a fierce defender of his own nuclear family. Out in the world you can do no wrong, he’d tell my brother and me. A family stands by one another no matter what.

Boy, did we test that resolve! Irving teasingly called us the bandeets, which is Yiddish for criminals. He was sure that no matter how hard he tried to drill a work ethic into his sons, neither of us would ever make a living.

My brother, Ron, is eighteen months my senior. Smart and logical, with a brain for learning, he excelled at schoolwork. I know you can’t measure someone’s insides by their outsides, but Ron always seemed able to balance his challenges with his talents to keep himself on track. He played piano and guitar, composed his own songs, and had lots of friends with whom he played every boy sport with abandon. He was a born leader, and everyone knew he would grow up to be a credit to the family. They dubbed him the Doctor and he got as far as pre-med before realizing that he’d been subconsciously launched in the wrong lane. He rebelled and followed his passion for music, becoming a rock-and-roll bandleader. His group, Arbuckle, even released an album with a song about the California earthquakes that hit the charts in 1972. Eventually he realized that his brain power could be put to better use on the producing side of show biz. He returned to school, earning a law degree, with which he could engage in multiple careers.

I, on the other hand, was dubbed the Shyster—the crooked lawyer. They figured even if I passed the bar, I would come out on the wrong side of the law. It was an accepted fact that my mouth would get me in a lot of trouble. I could not have been an easy child, presenting my parents with more than my weight in challenges. I was born with enlarged tonsils, and eating was a problem until I was of age to have them removed. The result was a great love of gorging until overfilled. I remember doing Weight Watchers with my mother at around ten years old, and I’ve been dieting on and off since. But tonsils and weight were the least of my challenges.

My IQ tested through the roof, and so I was always placed in advanced classes. I even skipped two grades of elementary school. The problem was that I suffered from dyslexia at a time when no one knew what the hell that was. My teachers thought I wasn’t doing well in class because I was beyond the curriculum and therefor bored. The truth was that I was struggling with the most elementary reading tasks. My brain simply did not function the way others’ did. I saw letters and numbers switching places. I had little ability to distinguish right from left, east from west. I could not trust my brain to decipher words. To this day I read slowly, sounding the words in my head.

The result was that I drifted into the picture-book section of the library long after I should have been cruising adult selections. And then I discovered play scripts. Here were books with all of that wordy description crap excised beyond a few necessary stage directions. Instead of my reading aloud being a distraction, it was now an added attraction. I could act out the characters and experience the full performance. The world of reading opened for me. From plays I graduated to novelizations of movies I’d seen, and from there to the original novels from which those movies had been adapted.

My first big fat look-at-me-reading book was Of Human Bondage. I’d seen two movie versions on TV, but the book was so much better. In school while other kids were asking why the Hardy Boys always got into trouble, I had questions about clubfeet and syphilis. From there it was on to The Egyptian and the Brontë sisters, all the way to Exodus.

Just as I was hitting my reading stride, Hebrew school was sprung on me. Hell, if I couldn’t read left to right, did they really expect I’d do better backwards? For five years I struggled to speak, let alone read, this language of my people that no one I knew spoke. I could have used Yiddish classes to decipher the secrets my parents told whenever we kids were around. But Hebrew? I did my Jewish duty and remained in class until the day of my bar mitzvah and then it was adios, yeladim! And none too soon: I was almost expelled at least twice—once for cutting three whole weeks of classes, hiding out at my friend Joseph’s house, where we’d watch Superman and Soupy Sales reruns on TV. The other time was when I took a Magic Marker and scrawled the word fuck in Hebrew letters down the wall of the Hebrew school’s stairwell. My mother was apoplectic, but my father saw it as a sign that his son might be a real boy after all. I was just mad at Michael Greenberg for ratting me out as the before-his-time obscenity tagger. As I scrubbed the writing off the wall I wondered, Don’t I get credit for spelling it right?

Anyone curious to know which is stronger, nurture or nature, will find compelling evidence studying my brother and me. Less than two years apart, raised in the same family with the same influences, rules, and expectations, we could not be more different. Ron had fantasy baseball teams and I had fantasy musicals. He had a gang of boys that he ran as a pack. My friends were mostly girls, and the boys I did spend time with all grew up to be gay—not everyone, but more than a few.

What was with you boys? Jackie once asked.

Maybe the water? I answered.

If my brother misbehaved, my parents sent him to his room, where he’d sit and think about what he did wrong. After a time, he’d return to the kitchen and apologize for his misdeed. Me, they never bothered punishing. They knew I’d just put on my records or take out my drawing things or watch television, never giving my misdeed another thought. I watched a lot of TV. A local station programmed old films under the banner Million Dollar Movie, showing the same one three times a day. It was there that I discovered my goddesses; Mae West, Marlene Dietrich, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Betty Hutton, Katharine Hepburn, and Maria Montez. I checked TV Guide every day to see what the Million Dollar Movie would be and if it was a favorite like The Women or Stage Door, All About Eve, She Done Him Wrong, or A Letter to Three Wives, I would plan on awakening with a fever so I could stay home all day to watch the same movie over and over and over again. Heaven.

I loved sitcoms, old and new, like I Married Joan, My Little Margie, Hazel, and The Dick Van Dyke Show. I was especially taken with the latter, having seen Mr. Van Dyke live on Broadway in Bye Bye Birdie. I adored that show but was haunted by the Shriner’s Ballet, in which Chita Rivera’s innocent flirting was answered by a full-on dance attack by a group of Shriners. Or so it seemed to me. When I told Chita this story years later, she looked askance and said, And your parents didn’t know about you?

I think I learned a lot of life’s rules from television. Perhaps too many, as my own sitcom-wisecracking mouth could get me into trouble. One positive lesson came when I was around five or six. My brother was pummeling me as older brothers are apt to do. I looked up at him from my prone position on the floor and said, "Y’know, this is not the way Wally treats the Beaver." Ron looked down at me, considered my assertion, and never hit me again.

In fact, that was the turning point in our relationship: we have been close ever since. Over our lifetimes he has been a collaborator, advisor, protector, defender, attorney, estate manager, and, I daresay, the person most responsible for allowing my life to be. He’s also my most nitpicking, judgmental, pain-in-the-butt critic. Like I said, we couldn’t be more different—or more alike.

That’s me on the left with my brother and our collie, Penny, waiting for the Day Camp bus.

3

ARTISTIC IS ONE WAY TO PUT IT

Whenever I had the chance, I’d put my legs together, feet flexed outward, take a deep breath, and dive into the deepest section of the swimming pool, where I’d shimmy and slither about in my finest mermaid fantasy. Yes: I wanted to be a mermaid. Underwater I floated free from the fat that weighed me down on land. I was lithe and graceful, my hands expressively guiding my way, my tail powering me soundlessly through my underwater wonderland.

My poor parents. It wasn’t enough that they had to put up with my terrestrial eccentricities. Now they had to sit by the hotel swimming pool helplessly watching their little boy twirling about in full view of family and friends.

Look, look, look! my mother would say, feigning pride. Like a fish in the water!

What was to be done with me? They tried sleepaway camp, but I became incredibly homesick. It wasn’t the separation from my parents. I missed my solitude. I was only truly happy shut in my room, in my own world. Even today, although I have traveled a nice piece of the globe, I still long to be left to my own devices, with my dogs, in the lair I’ve created for myself. My folks prayed for a sign from on high. The answer came in a phone call.

I spent hours reading comic books. Not the superhero ones; I preferred Richie Rich and Casper the Friendly Ghost. I’d even make my own strips, copying my favorite characters and inventing stories for them. In the back of most comics, among the ads for X-ray-vision glasses and boutonnieres that sprayed water, were advertisements that challenged Draw me! along with an illustrated face. Try for a FREE $280 Art Course. You’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain. Mail yours in today!

Mom, Dad, and me at the beach

I don’t know how many times I copied those faces and tossed them aside, but one time I did not. I carefully drew the faces, filled out the form, and mailed it in. Why not? As the ad said, I had nothing to lose.

Just before dinner one evening the telephone rang. It was the art school calling to say that Harvey Fierstein had won a scholarship to take their art course. My mother said that the salesperson exploded in ecstasy when she explained that the drawing was by her eight-year-old son. Your son has a natural talent that cries out to be nurtured is how she relayed the story to family, neighbors, and friends. At last, she had a plan for what to do with this puzzling child. He’ll be an artist.

While I did love to draw and paint, truthfully, I never thought I had much talent. I did have an aptitude for copying, but that makes you a technician, not an artist. But Jackie, with her fingers crossed, was on a mission. She sent me off to art school. And no kiddie class for this genius: I was enrolled in an after-school program at the Brooklyn Museum. Several weeks later she assessed my less-than-stellar output and shook her head.

Is this what you did?

Uh-huh.

What does the teacher think?

I guess he thinks it’s okay.

She did not concur. She looked for another school to support my growth. She found an adult painting class where hobbyists were taught to copy established artists’ work. You’d choose a piece of art from the file drawers and the instructor would mark the outlines onto a blank canvas. You then sat down to paint in the colors. I was better at this than at creating my own masterpieces, but I had my limits. Whenever I thought I had finished the assignment, the teacher would repair my work into something almost acceptable. My family walls were soon filling with these third-rate paintings. But the mishpuchah was impressed, which was all the proof Jackie needed to keep me on that path. Staring at a freshly framed Parisian street scene now hung in place of pride over the living-room sofa, Jackie mumbled to herself, So, that’s what it is. He’s an artist.

I was in eighth grade and just about to turn thirteen when the Board of Education decided to reorder the public school system. No longer would middle school have a ninth grade. My class would be shuffled off to high school in September. For me that meant attending the school that later would inspire Welcome Back, Kotter. Lafayette High had a rough reputation. I was not looking forward to spending the next four years of my life ditching gym class there. Happily, with my new identity as an artist, my mother made a push for me to get into a special school in Manhattan, the High School of Art and Design. It was a vocational school that required the presentation of an art portfolio and an interview. Somehow, in the rush of reorganizing the school system, I passed and was accepted. I moved toward eighth-grade graduation with relief and excitement. My only obstacle was surviving my bar mitzvah. Yes, it was time for that greatest moment in a Jewish boy’s life, when the fistful of checks given to him by relatives and family friends are snatched away to pay for the chopped liver and cha-cha band. L’chaim!

My grandma, Bertie, whom I called Granny Goose, simply could not stand attending any family gathering without being the center of attention. My mother warned her to behave or there would be consequences; but as soon as I was called to the altar to sing my portion of the Torah, she threw up her arms, cried out, and fell back fainting into her pew. Without pause Jackie ordered some men to carry Granny out to the lobby while Mom used a payphone to call 911. Obviously, there is no applause in temple, but take my word, I killed it! Still, when I looked out at the assembly for any kind of recognition, there was no one even facing my way. All attention was on my mother as she returned to her seat, having sent Granny Goose off in an ambulance after telling the EMT: And don’t bring her back. We’ll pick her up tomorrow.

The reception was more of an Altman movie than an Irwin Allen disaster flick. While us newly minted teens showed our prowess dancing the Monkey and the Jerk, Margie Nudleman, a zaftig woman of seventy, scandalized the room by drunkenly climbing up on top of a dining table, rubbing her hands suggestively over her sequined-emerald-green-sheathed body and performing the hootchy-kootchy. She, too, killed it. I overheard the temple president’s wife say, Nice for Harvey.

This last summer before high school I attended the JCH day camp. It was a simple summer spent with kids my age. I even had a girlfriend named Harriet. She was skinny and freckled and giggled nonstop whenever we were together. We sometimes made out on the bus on our way to outings. She even let me feel her tits. I’d put my arm around her neck and reach into her peasant blouse, pushing my way into her polyester lace training bra to find a nipple. No great thrill: mine were bigger. I was no clearer about sex at this point than I was about gender. I just rolled with the punches, hoping shit would shake out eventually.

Although I couldn’t put words to it, I was unmistakably attracted to boys. Not only boys but men, too. If I watched a romantic movie I identified with the female lead; the matinee idol he-man was who I fantasized kissing. My major crushes were on Sean Connery, the original James Bond; TV’s Tarzan, Ron Ely, with his steely blue eyes and