Face the Music: A Life Exposed Read online

  Part I

  No place for hiding, baby, no place to run

  1.

  Home is an interesting concept. For most people it is a place of refuge. My first home was anything but.

  I was born Stanley Bert Eisen on January 20, 1952. The New York apartment my parents took me home to was on West 211th Street and Broadway, at the very northern tip of Manhattan. I was born with an ear deformity called microtia, in which the outer ear cartilage fails to form properly and, to varying degrees of severity, leaves you with just a crumpled mass of cartilage. I had nothing more than a stump on the right side of my head. And my ear canal was also closed, so I was deaf. That left me unable to tell the direction of sound, and more importantly, made it incredibly difficult for me to understand people when there was any kind of background noise or conversation. These problems would lead me to instinctively avoid social situations.

  My earliest memory is being in our darkened living room, with the shades drawn—as if to keep the conversation a secret between only my mother, my father, and myself. “If anyone ever asks you what happened to your ear,” my parents told me, “just tell them you were born that way.”

  In the beginning . . . there was a Starchild.

  My sister, Dad, and me, at Inwood Hill Park near our apartment, Uptown Manhattan, 1952.

  With Mom and Dad in Lake Mohegan, New York.

  If we ignore it, my parents seemed to intimate, it doesn’t exist. That philosophy would rule our house and my life for much of my childhood. I got simple answers for complex situations. And despite the fact that my parents wanted to ignore it, nobody else did.

  Children seemed to detach the person from the deformity—I became an object instead of a little kid. But children weren’t the only ones staring at me. Adults did, too, and that was even worse. One day in a market on 207th Street, just down the road from our place, I realized one of the adults in line was staring at me like I was a thing instead of a person. Oh, God, please stop, I thought. When somebody stares at you, it’s not limited to you and that person. Treatment like that draws attention. And becoming the center of attention was horrific. I found the scrutiny and relentless attention even more excruciating than being taunted.

  Needless to say, I didn’t have a lot of friends.

  On my first day of kindergarten, I wanted my mother to leave as soon as she got me to the door of the class. She was proud. But I didn’t want her to leave for the reason she thought. It wasn’t because I was independent and sure of myself. I just didn’t want her to see me being stared at. I didn’t want her to see me treated differently. I was in new surroundings with new kids, and I didn’t want to go through that in front of her. The fact that she was proud of me told me that she didn’t understand anything about me—my fears went over her head.

  One day I came home crying. “Somebody spat in my face,” I wept. I had come home looking for support and protection from my mom. I assumed she would ask who had done it and then go out and find the kid’s parents and tell them such behavior was unacceptable. But instead she said, “Don’t come crying to me, Stanley. Fight your own battles.”

  Fight my own battles? I’m five!

  I don’t want to hurt anybody. I just want people to leave me alone.

  But I went back out, and about an hour later I found the kid who had spit on me. I punched him in the eye. But he barely seemed to remember the incident and couldn’t figure out what the big deal was.

  One thing was clear after that: home was not a place where I could find help. Whether I was beaten up or taunted or anything else, I had to handle it on my own.

  Doing my baseball player pose in first grade. P.S. 98, 1958.

  We lived practically next door to PS 98, my public elementary school. The school complex had three different yards, each separated from the others by chain-link fences. There was a kid whose name I didn’t know, but who knew mine, who shouted at me from behind the fences between the yards. Whenever he spotted me someplace where I couldn’t get at him, he’d shout: “Stanley the one-eared monster! Stanley the one-eared monster!”

  I had no idea how this kid knew me, and all I could think was, Why are you doing this? You’re hurting me.

  You’re really hurting me.

  He was a normal, nondescript kid about my age, with brown hair, small enough that I thought I could beat him up if I ever caught him. But he was always out of reach, always on the other side of a fence or on the other side of the yard and able to run away into one of the nearby apartment complexes before I could get to him.

  If only I could catch this kid.

  And then one day, I finally did. I heard him shout, “Stanley the one-eared monster,” and as always, the first thing I did was cringe. I heard the voice in my head pleading: Stop doing that! Other people can hear you! Other people are looking at me now!

  And as always, there was no place to go to escape the stares.

  But this time I managed to run him down and grab him. He was suddenly terrified. “Don’t hit me!” he cried, looking like a frightened rabbit.

  “Stop doing that!” I said, grasping him. “Stop doing that to me!”

  I didn’t hit him. Suddenly, facing him like that, I didn’t want to. I hoped not hitting him would be enough to put me in his good graces. So I let him go. He couldn’t have been thirty yards away before he turned back and yelled, “Stanley the one-eared monster!”

  Why?

  Why are you doing this to me?

  Why?

  Although unable to articulate it, I felt incredibly vulnerable and naked, unable to protect myself from the stares, taunts, and scrutiny that seemed everywhere. So I developed an explosive temper as a little boy.

  Rather than recognize my temper as a sign that I needed help and support and guidance, my parents dealt with it by threatening me. “If you don’t get that under control,” they said in a darkly menacing tone, “we’re going to take you to a psychiatrist.” Now, I had no idea what a psychiatrist was, but it sounded ominous. It sounded like a diabolical form of punishment: I pictured going into a hospital room and having somebody torture me.

  Not that I felt safe at home, anyway. My parents frequently went out at night and left me and my sister, Julia, who was only two years older than I was, home alone. “Don’t open the door for anybody,” was all they’d say, leaving a six-year-old and an eight-year-old all on their own. We were so scared we slept with knives and hammers under our pillows. We would wake up early the next day to sneak the weapons back to where they belonged so our parents wouldn’t yell at us.

  I shared the one small bedroom of our apartment with Julia; my parents slept on a pullout sofa in the living room. Julia started to have mental problems at a very early age. My mother said she’d always been “different,” even as a baby. She was wild and prone to violence. My sister scared me. And as my own problems intensified, I spent a good deal of time worrying I might end up like her.

  My parents may not have been very supportive of me, but then again they were not very supportive of each other, either. My mom, Eva, was domineering, and my dad, William, resented it. My mom portrayed herself as strong and my dad as meek. She considered herself the smart one. In actuality my dad was very bright and well-read. He had graduated from high school at age sixteen. Had circumstances been different, he would have gone to college. But his family insisted he start working to help pay the bills, and he did. By the time I came along, my dad worked nine-to-five as an office furniture salesman. Taken out of necessity, the job was one that with time he came to accept, but never to embrace.

  My mother was a stay-at-home mom when I was little, but she had previously worked as a nurse and as a teacher’s aide at a school for children with special needs. Eventually she started back to work at a redemption center where people went to collect merchandise after filling books of stamps accumulated through various customer loyalty programs offered by supermarkets in the 1950s.

  My mother’s family had fled from Berlin to Amsterdam with the rise
of the Nazis. They’d left everything behind, and my mom’s mother had divorced, which was rare at the time. After my grandmother had remarried, they’d moved to New York. Members of my mother’s family were condescending toward other people, and they weren’t beyond ridiculing me about my hair and clothes. I slowly came to realize there was no foundation for the arrogance and sense of self-righteousness shared by my mother’s side of the family. They weren’t successful, they were just dismissive. If you didn’t agree with my mother, you frequently heard a derisive “Oh, please,” delivered with a contempt that made it clear your opinion carried no merit at all.

  My dad’s parents were from Poland, and he was the youngest of four children. My dad told me his oldest brother, Jack, was a bookie and an alcoholic; his other brother, Joe, suffered from uncontrollable manic mood swings that crippled him throughout his life; and my father’s sister, Monica, apparently surrendered to pressure from their mother not to leave the nest, and never married. Even as a child I couldn’t help but see that expectation as manipulative and selfish on my grandmother’s part. My dad spoke of a very difficult and unhappy childhood; he despised his father, who died before I was born.

  My parents were not happy people. I don’t know what the basis for their marriage was beyond what later became known as codependency. They didn’t provide anything positive for each other. There was no warmth or affection in the house. Fridays were often the worst day of the week. My dad would be agitated, and the outcome was inevitable: my parents would get into a fight, and then my dad wouldn’t talk to my mom for the entire weekend. It’s childish to act like that for an hour. It’s insane to see your own parents acting like that for days on end.

  In addition to whatever issues they had between themselves, my parents were also consumed with my sister, who got into a lot of trouble and eventually spent many years in and out of mental institutions. Since I was always viewed as the good kid, I got progressively less attention at home. In my case, being the good kid didn’t mean I was praised; it meant I was ignored. As a result, I pretty much had free license to do anything. I did not find this a very secure feeling. Security comes from having boundaries and limitations, and without any, I felt lost and unprotected, exposed and vulnerable. I didn’t want or relish the freedom. In fact, it was almost the opposite: I was nearly paralyzed by fear because nobody was there to tell me I was safe.

  I was alone a lot. I approached every day with a sense of foreboding, as I faced the unknown without any safety net. Every new day was uncertain, every new day was unprotected, every new day meant dealing with a world I wasn’t equipped to deal with and trying to decipher the unspoken messages at home.

  I found refuge in music.

  Music was one of the few great gifts my parents gave me, and I will be forever grateful to them for it. They may have left me feeling completely adrift, but they unknowingly provided me a lifeline. I’ll never forget hearing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no. 5 in E-flat major—the Emperor Concerto—for the first time. I was five, and I was completely blown away.

  My parents made culture and the arts seem a natural part of life. Their appreciation of classical music was palpable. They had a big wooden Harman Kardon radio-phonograph console and listened to Sibelius and Schumann and Mozart. But it was Beethoven that left me dumbfounded.

  On the weekends I listened to Live from the Met on WQXR with my mom, a tradition I continued even as I got older. Once I started listening to the radio, I also discovered rock and roll. Whether it was Eddie Cochran, Little Richard, or Dion & the Belmonts, it was pure magic—they sang about a glorified life of teenagers that I quickly came to dream of. All that singing about an idyllic concept of youth touched me emotionally. It filled me with the wonder of being a teen and transported me to a wonderful place, a place where life’s angst concerned relationships and love. Man, what perfect lives these young people lived!

  One afternoon I went for a walk with my grandmother. We crossed the 207th Street bridge into the Bronx, heading toward Fordham Road. On the far side of the bridge was a record shop. We went inside and my grandmother let me pick out my first-ever record: a 78 RPM shellac single of “All I Have to Do Is Dream,” by the Everly Brothers.

  When I want you to hold me tight . . .

  If only.

  While most of the other kids in the neighborhood were out playing cowboys and Indians, I sat indoors and listened obsessively to things like “A Teenager in Love” and “Why Do Fools Fall in Love.” For a time, a lot of standards were also turned into doo-wop tunes, and I used to get irritated with my mom when she sang the original versions around the house. “That’s not how it goes, Mom. It goes like this . . .” Then I would sing, say, the “dip da dip dip dip” part from the Marcels’ version of the 1930s classic “Blue Moon.” Sometimes she was dismissive about the modern stuff, but for the most part she just seemed to find it funny.

  And then I saw some of the singers and bands I liked.

  The famous rock and roll DJ Alan Freed started appearing on TV around the same time as the national debut of Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. The wildness and danger of somebody like Jerry Lee Lewis wasn’t lost on me as he kicked his piano stool away and flung his hair around. What was lost on me was the sexuality of the music—not surprisingly, given what I saw at home. The romantic fantasy I envisioned was clean and sterile, and even as I got older, that’s how I continued to view life. It would be many, many years before I realized what a song like the Shirelles’ “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow” was really about.

  Still, there was no argument these people were cool. They were cool because they were singing. They were cool because people were watching them and screaming for them. In that audience these musicians had everything I craved as a young kid. Adulation. Wow!

  A few Jewish immigrant families, like ours, lived in the part of upper Manhattan where I lived, but it was predominantly Irish. Our next-door neighbors were two lovely old Catholic sisters, Mary and Helen Hunt, who had never married. They became something like aunts or grandmothers to me. As my compulsion to perform like my new heroes increased, I frequently went over to their apartment and sang and danced for them. As soon as I could master any song, I knocked on their door and sang it for them while doing a little choreographed two-step, hopping from one foot to the other.

  When I sang, it momentarily tempered some of my doubt and pain.

  Everything just felt right.

  2.

  When I was eight, just before I started third grade, my family moved from upper Manhattan to a working-class Jewish neighborhood in a distant section of Queens. I had never seen anything like it—trees lined the block, coming right up out of the pavement, and across the street from us was a plant nursery that took up an entire block. I kept looking for forest rangers. Or Lassie.

  Most of the adults in the area went into Manhattan for work, but the neighborhood functioned like a small town in the middle of nowhere. Within a few tree-lined blocks were a library, a post office, a butcher, a baker, a shoe store, an A&P grocery, a toy store, a hardware store, a pizza parlor, and an ice cream shop. I noticed one thing missing, though: a record shop.

  Most of the buildings were two-story houses. Some were divided in half to form adjoining row houses; others, like ours, were divided into four apartments, two upstairs and two downstairs, with a yard in the front. I still shared a bedroom with my sister, Julia, but my parents had a room of their own now. There were lots of kids in the area.

  My new school was PS 164. Instead of individual chairs and desks, the classrooms had two-person desks. I prayed the teachers would put me on the right-hand side so the kid I shared a desk with would see my left ear—the good one. I didn’t want anyone looking at what I considered my bad side. Not to mention that I couldn’t hear people if they were speaking into my deaf side all the time.

  At some point on the first day, a teacher named Mrs. Sondike called me up to her desk. I walked to the front of the class. She was looking at my ear.

&nbs
p; Oh, God, please don’t do this.

  “Let me look at your ear,” she said.

  No, no, no!

  She started examining me like a scientific specimen. This was my worst nightmare. I was petrified. I was shattered.

  What should I do?

  I desperately wanted to open my mouth and say, “Don’t do that.” But I remained silent. I took a deep breath and waited for it to be over.

  If I ignore it, it doesn’t exist.

  Don’t show your pain!

  Not long after that incident, I was taking a walk with my father. “Dad, am I good looking?” He seemed taken aback. He stopped in his tracks and looked down at the ground. “Well,” he said, “you’re not bad looking.”

  Thanks.

  Ten points for my dad. It was just the perfect sort of encouragement that an isolated, hopelessly self-conscious young boy needed. Unfortunately, it would become a familiar pattern with my parents.

  I started to build a wall around myself. My way of dealing with other kids became to preemptively push them away. I started to act like a smart-ass or a clown, putting myself in a position where nobody wanted to be around me. I wished I weren’t alone all the time, but at the same time, I did things to keep people away from me. The conflict inside could be excruciating. I was helpless.

  A lot of the other kids in the neighborhood went to Hebrew school together, which reinforced their friendships from PS 164 and created others beyond school. My family lit candles and observed Jewish holidays in some vague ways, but we weren’t very observant. I was never bar mitzvahed. But the reason I didn’t go to Hebrew school had nothing to do with any of that. I simply told my parents I didn’t want to go. What I didn’t say was why: sure, I felt Jewish, but I didn’t want to subject myself to being around any more people. Life was bleak enough without putting myself into even more situations where I would be paralyzed by the fear of humiliation.