They Call Me Supermensch Read online

  I was free for the first time in my life. I could do whatever I wanted. I think this is when I began to develop a personality. I don’t think I really had one before then. Maybe I did to other people, but not to myself.

  For all of us freshmen, it was the greatest thing in our lives to be so far away from our parents, in our own apartments, on our own for the first time. We could shop for our own food and cook it, which most of us had never done. Or we could get pizzas delivered, which we did a lot. There was a laundromat on the corner where we did our own laundry, another first for me. There were girls there doing their laundry, so we washed our clothes often. I had to manage my money. The scholarship paid for rent and tuition; I think my parents gave me a hundred dollars a month. It was the first time I had to think about how to pay for everything else. More important to me, it was the first time I really had a social group, all of us living in those apartments. I had lived a solitary life until then, except when I was at school.

  The day after we arrived we took the bus to school for the first time. I had never seen anything as beautiful as the University of Buffalo campus. And very cool as well, guys my age driving up in their own cars, girls all around. The bus dropped us off in front of Norton Union, the student union building, which had the look of a small public library. Very wide and impressive steps went up to the entrance level, and lots of kids sat on the steps and watched who was coming and going. Upperclassmen on the steps made wisecracks about the new girls, a lot of whom came with their parents for orientation. One upperclassman was a guy I later became very friendly with, Barry Weinstein, nicknamed the Rat. I would soon learn that everybody had a nickname. (Mine was EZ, because my middle name is Ezra.) This beautiful freshman girl came walking up with her parents that first day, and he ran over and pinched her ass. In front of her parents. And made kissy noises at her and ran off. All the other older guys laughed. I had never seen behavior like that in my life. I was so out of my wheelhouse.

  I stuck with Joe those first days. He always had a mischievous twinkle in his eye, and the girls all loved him. I clung to him. Joe and I and the other new guys we were quickly bonding with got settled in and registered for classes. But I can’t say that going to class was ever a big part of my experience at Buffalo. In fact, it was the smallest part. Buffalo wanted to be the Berkeley of the east. It was all very laid-back and hippie and nontraditional. I remember going to a class on “Everything, Nothing, and Something Else,” taught by Marty Kriegel, who was then a guest lecturer, and who went on to be a professor, and is still a great friend. After we graduated, I would come back to Buffalo and drop in on his then three formal courses with those same names. Marty’s a year younger than I am, and a genius. He became a lawyer, has taught at universities around the world, and has written briefs for the Supreme Court. Along the way he also went to medical school and studied both Western and Eastern medicine. I think he has degrees in a half dozen different areas. There were no desks in Marty’s classroom. In all three courses we sat on the floor around a record player. For “Everything” you brought a record and we all listened to it. For “Something Else” you brought as many records as you wanted. And for “Nothing” you brought nothing and we all just sat there. It may have been a Zen lesson. I think.

  People who weren’t around for the sixties don’t believe me when I describe Marty’s classes. When Supermensch came out, A&E bought the TV rights. I had dinner with Abbe Raven, who was president, CEO, and chairman of A&E. She and her husband told me that when they went to Buffalo they also took Marty’s courses. So at least they believe me.

  No one took school too seriously. I bet I didn’t attend ten classes in four years. There was also a lot of cheating, tests handed around beforehand so you could pass without ever attending.

  For me, what I mostly got out of college wasn’t my education, but the large group of great friends I made there. In fact, when I look back I see it was the last time I really made friends just because I liked them and wanted to be friends with them. Almost every friend I have from after then is someone I had some kind of business relationship with before we became friends. Or we were neighbors first and became friends. Always some bridge, some pretext. In Buffalo it was just a pool of kids from which you picked the ones you liked. You didn’t need or want anything from them. I’ve stayed very close with thirty-five or more friends I made then, fifty-odd years ago.

  President Kennedy was assassinated that fall. It was so shocking. Everybody in Allenhurst met in the middle of the street, held each other in a big circle, and cried. It was a transformative moment. I think that’s when most of us got radicalized. I don’t think any of us had thought of anything other than our dicks up until then. For a lot of us, that was a moment when we realized we were living in a world where actions mattered, thoughts mattered, and holy shit they’re going to leave this planet to us. We’d better do something. It was the first step of a journey that led to burning our draft cards, demonstrating against the war, protesting the screwed-up world of our parents. It also sent us on a path toward pot and psychedelics and all the ways we explored alternatives to the mindset that we felt had created that fucked-up world.

  Before then, I had not done any drugs, unless you count sniffing that glue once under the boardwalk. I did drink, but I didn’t like to get really drunk and hungover. Luckily, I inherited my dad’s capacity to hold his liquor. He could drink a bottle of cognac and stay in control, and I found I was like him. I could drink a bottle of vodka, two bottles even, and get a buzz, but not get blind drunk. So I was always the designated driver, even though we didn’t use that term then. It would be the same when we were all taking LSD; I was always the one who was able to drive.

  The first time I smoked pot, Joey and I were in an apartment shared by guys named Jerry Singer and Alan Stein; Alan, Jerry, and I are good friends to this day. We shared a joint, and I remember thinking, This isn’t doing anything. Then, out of nowhere, the sound of an approaching train filled the room. I was terrified. It sounded like it was going to crash straight through a wall. There was in fact a train going by somewhere outside, and the pot made it sound much louder and closer than it was. Once the other guys calmed me down, I realized I was really enjoying this experience, this heightened sense of my surroundings. Joey and I smoked again a week or so later, and I liked it even more.

  After my freshman year I was a regular, lifelong pot smoker. When we were home that year for summer vacation, Jerry pulled up at my house on a motorcycle with his pot dealer. We went to the Oceanside Nathan’s, where everybody hung out, and I bought some grass from the guy.

  It struck me as a good way to make some money, so I started dealing in my sophomore year. Dealing pot led to some pretty amazing and scary adventures. Like the two times I personally smuggled pot across the border from Mexico. I drove down to Laredo, Texas, in my Mustang convertible, my first really good and cool car. I had bought it with my life savings, going all the way back to bar mitzvah money. Laredo is right on the MexicoU.S. border, the Rio Grande River. I parked the Mustang there and went into a bar, where I met my connection. I don’t remember his name now—I had met him when he was passing through Buffalo, and we set the deal up. He introduced me to his Mexican counterpart. Then the Mexican guy and I went through the border checkpoint on foot, separately, and walked over the bridge that crossed the river to the Mexican side, which is the city of Nuevo Laredo. We met up again at some little bar over on that side. I’m a Jewish college kid from Long Island, and I’m in a bar in Mexico, alone with strangers, about to become a drug trafficker. I was scared to death. We met another guy in the bar. He gave me a big bag of pot, and I gave him the cash I had brought.

  We left the bar, got into a pickup truck, and drove out of town. There were big ranches on the banks of the river just outside Nuevo Laredo. We drove to one of them, where we met the rancher. Then they brought out a horse, and explained to me that once it got dark I was going to ride this horse across the Rio Grande back into the States with my bag
of weed. I had never been on a horse in my life. They said, “That’s all right. The horse knows what to do. He’s done this plenty of times.”

  When night fell they got me up on it, strapped the bag of pot to it, slapped the horse on the rump, and waved good-bye. The Rio Grande was very narrow and very shallow. The horse never had to swim, he just walked across. When we got to the other side I got down and took the pot. The horse turned and headed back across the river.

  That was that. I walked back to the Mustang and drove home.

  Since it had all gone so smoothly, I went back the following year. This time I took a guy with me named Bruce. (Bruce, if you read this, aloha and I’m sorry!). I had told him how easy it was, and he needed cash, so he came along. It all went the way it had the first time. We walked over to Nuevo Laredo, bought the pot, and rode horses back that night into Texas. Then, as we were walking toward the Mustang, we saw that it was surrounded by police. Every cell in my body rang alarm bells. We hung back, trying to act normal, and watched them mill around for two, maybe three hours. Finally they left. They’d been there on some other mission, nothing to do with us and our car.

  Bruce and I were ecstatic with relief. We collected the car and drove off. Bruce was in the backseat with the bags of pot, maybe four pounds of it. He had just opened one bag to inspect the goods when blinding headlights lit us up. All my alarms clanged again. I was absolutely sure we were going to prison. But it was some sort of border patrol, on the watch for illegal immigrants. They had no interest in a couple of American college boys and waved us through. Bruce and I drove on, laughing hysterically. Twice we had thought we were goners, and twice we’d skated.

  We drove back to Buffalo without any more incidents. At this point I lived on Main Street in Buffalo, behind an optometrist and a Kentucky Fried Chicken. We carried the bags in and examined our booty, and found that the pot bricks were stuck together with sugar water to add weight. It was something unscrupulous dealers sometimes did. I put the bricks in the oven to bake the sugar water out, and the apartment filled up with a nice smell of warm pot. It was cozy.

  Then there was a knock on the door. A cop was standing there. For the third time this trip I almost passed out with fright. But he only wanted me to move the Mustang because I’d parked it illegally. So for the third time I evaded catastrophe. Somebody up there was looking out for me for sure. I never made that trip again.

  We also ran a weekly poker game to make money, and because it was a hell of a lot of fun. This had started before the second pot trip, when Joey and I were living with roommates in a big four-bedroom place on Beard Avenue, which runs parallel to Main Street. It was a typical upstate New York brick house, solid, old, wood floors, a fireplace in the family room, on a block of similar houses, all private homes. The poker game had a 5 percent rake. The rake is the commission the house takes out of the winner’s earnings. For that we provided a safe place where we wouldn’t get raided or robbed; food and drink; and sometimes a woman. At first the players were mostly college kids, then some people from the city started showing up. We started to make serious money, which, after paying the rent and bills, we took to the track and lost. Our day became pot and gambling 24/7. Forget school and classes.

  After a few months we got a message that the local Hells Angels were going to bust our game. We never learned why. We were rushing for a fraternity, Sigma Alpha Mu, called “Sammy,” and we got all the Sammy members to come to the house with baseball bats and such. The Angels never came, but it scared us enough to stop the game. Then a couple of townies who had played with us convinced us to start it up again. One was named Wally Jagoda, nicknamed “Walloon,” and the other was Arthur Corrigan, aka “Black Arthur” Corrigan, aka “Kargoon.” Arthur’s family was well known and well connected in Buffalo, so he became our protection. With Arthur in the game we’d be left alone.

  Arthur had a wooden leg. If a new player showed up and started winning big, at some point Arthur would unstrap the leg, slap it on the table, and say, “I raise you one leg.” The guy wouldn’t win another hand all night, he was so rattled.

  One night a guy named Burr Vogel showed up and started winning hand after hand. He was a great poker player. So at some point Arthur put his leg on the table.

  “I raise you one leg.”

  Cool as anything, Burr says, “I call, and raise you one eye.”

  He had a glass eye!

  Fifty-odd years later, those two are still playing poker. Black Arthur lives in Vegas now. They all meet there once a year. A guy we called Coffee Boy, because he was the kid who got coffee and sandwiches for the players, became an executive at Coca-Cola Enterprises. He has his own plane and flies everybody to Vegas for three or four days of gambling.

  A stunt we pulled in Buffalo gave me my first insights into how easy it is to create publicity and press out of nothing, although at the time I just thought of it as a hilarious joke. When we were all still living in the Allenhurst Apartments, we were studying for the Botany 101 final exam. We crammed for the exam by staying up all night on Black Beauties, which were big, black, really strong Dexedrine pills. After being up a few days and nights in a row we were pretty delirious. At one point my friend Artie Schein started laughing at something in the textbook about the reproductive organ of Marchantia polymorpha, also known as the common liverwort. Its sex organ was called a thallus. For some reason that struck us as very funny, and we began riffing on the Thallus of Marchantia, like Marchantia was a country and the Thallus was its ruler.

  This gave us the idea for the prank, which we put in motion over the next few days. Somebody got hold of some United Nations stationery and typed a letter from His Majesty the Thallus of Marchantia to the president of the university saying that he wanted to come visit the campus. We followed it up with a telegram sent from a Western Union office in New York City. The university took it seriously. Somebody at the school contacted local radio stations and the Buffalo Evening News, who contacted the mayor’s office. No one checked us on our facts—including the part where we’d said that Marchantia was “an island in Arabia.” Those words actually appeared in the News. The paper also said that the mayor of Buffalo would greet his majesty on the tarmac when his flight arrived.

  We pooled our cash to send Artie to New York, where he’d change into an “Arabian” outfit and fly back to Buffalo. Then I got the brilliant idea of contacting the local B’nai B’rith. Were they aware that the city of Buffalo was rolling out the red carpet for the Thallus of Marchantia, well known for his anti-Semitic beliefs? Shouldn’t somebody protest?

  It worked like a charm. In the mid-1960s, protests happened every day. The afternoon that the Thallus’s American Airlines flight from New York landed at Greater Buffalo International Airport, a crowd the News estimated at between six hundred and two thousand protesters—mostly our fellow students, who had no idea it was all a hoax—was running riot through the place. They broke a plate glass window, overturned the furniture in the waiting areas, then spilled out onto the tarmac, where the mayor and a detachment of police waited for the Thallus to step down out of the plane. One student brought a bugle. He played a cavalry charge, and the whole crowd went stampeding toward the plane. A contingent of maybe one hundred people from B’nai B’rith was there to protest as well.

  Finally, Artie stepped out of the plane and waved to the crowd from the top of the mobile stairway. He was tripping on acid, and wearing a winter coat, a white bedsheet, and a towel wrapped around his head in a makeshift kaffiyeh. It was not terribly convincing—especially when you saw that the towel had HOTEL SAINT GEORGE printed on it. It was from the pool at a Brooklyn Heights hotel. But the crowd was too worked up by this point to notice. They went berserk, surrounding the plane, shouting, chanting, waving placards. “THALLUS GO HOME. PEOPLE ARE STARVING IN MARCHANTIA.” “THALLUS GO BACK TO YOUR PALACE.” “MALICE FOR THE THALLUS.”

  Artie wobbled down the stairs. Cops led him through the mob—but not into the mayor’s waiting limo. They shoved
him into the back of a patrol car, and sped away.

  That was the first sign that we’d been found out. Driving away from the airport, we heard local radio news declaring the whole thing a college prank. The cops drove Artie straight to jail. He was charged with disorderly conduct and fined fifty dollars. The dean of students suspended Artie indefinitely, but only after posting his bail and putting him up for the night. Artie was convicted but later got it overturned, and the student body coughed up six hundred dollars for the airport damages.

  I didn’t know it then, but I had learned an invaluable lesson that I’d apply many times in my show business career: how to create history, not just wait for it to happen.

  My mother and father moved out of Oceanside while I was at Buffalo. Before I left, my father had had a heart attack or two; now they were coming more often. In those days doctors didn’t know much of anything to do for heart attacks except to give you nitroglycerin capsules; when you suffered chest pains you placed one under your tongue and supposedly it relieved the symptoms.

  If you were an old Jew from New York, the other thing you could do for it was retire and get away from the cold weather by moving to Florida, which they did, selling the Oceanside house. I think they got eighteen thousand dollars for it.

  At first they lived in a hotel on Collins Avenue at the north end of Miami Beach. It had a name like the Seaview or the Seacrest, maybe four stories tall, right across from the water. They had a little studio apartment with a kitchenette. It wasn’t a lot, but it got my dad away from the cold winters, which were hard on his heart. At one point I took a psychological leave of absence from school—it was the easiest way to get out of the draft, I thought—and drove down to stay with them. The place was so small I slept in a closet. But that was fine, and I got to spend some real quality time with my dad.