Read Online American Prince by Tony Curtis - Free Book Online Page B

stickball. Or we’d climb into tenement houses that had been condemned. We played war on abandoned lots, using bricks as hand grenades. I was always fearless as a kid. I guess I just didn’t feel like I had anything to lose.
    As a teen I didn’t eat much food at all. Once in a while we’d steal an apple off a pushcart, but on some level I knew that food wasn’t what I needed. I needed to come to grips with who I was: with being a Jew, with being poor, with being raised in a household where the only feelings I could get in touch with were tension, anger, sadness, and humiliation.

    N ot long after we moved to the Bronx, my father got a job with Shapiro and Sons, an important clothier in Manhattan’s garment district. Soon after my father started they made him a supervisor and put twenty other tailors to work under him. He didn’t want the job, even though it paid him a better salary, but they gave him no choice.
    Given my mother’s focus on success, my father’s ascent to management tipped the balance of power, at least for a while. Now he was the boss at home, demanding his dinner, telling my mother what to do and where to get off. I often wonder: if he had gotten this job earlier, would he have left my mother? That was the only time I remember my father acting with confidence, even a little swagger.
    Unfortunately, his new job didn’t last long. He wasn’t really suited to being a supervisor. He tried to take a humane approach to the workers, but they mistook his kindness for weakness and took advantage of him. And when they stopped producing clothes in the quantities the company demanded, my father was fired. He went back to working for himself—and to making very little money.
    I’m not sure my father would agree with this assessment, but I thought that he was happiest when he worked for himself. Maybe not quite so proud of himself, but happier. He didn’t have to service the sewing machines. He didn’t have to worry about other employees. He only had to do his job. He made thirty or forty bucks a week, enough to take care of the basics, and somewhere deep inside, I think he was satisfied. If only my mother had felt the same way.
    To pass the hours I spent alone each day, I started to draw. My first drawings were made on the brown paper my father used to wrap his customers’ clothes. He would pull off a three-foot length and give it to me, and I’d cut it into three pieces and draw on them using my father’s tailor’s chalk or pencils or crayons. I also drew on the sidewalk with different-colored chalk.
    I found myself able to accurately copy things I saw, and then I found I could add things, and all of a sudden my artwork wasn’t just copying anymore. It was something else again. In the movies I could fence with Errol Flynn, but with my art I could go even further. I liked drawing what I was thinking or seeing. It became a driving force in my life.
    Art was also an antidote for the deep depressions that I suffered as a child. They would strike without warning, and all of a sudden I would just lose interest in everything around me. I loved playing stickball, but if depression hit, I’d just sit there in my bedroom, and I wouldn’t move. I’d hear my friends calling me: “Bernie, come on, we’re going to play ball.” But I wouldn’t go out. I wouldn’t do anything. I would sit there like a zombie. Eventually something would snap me out of it, then I’d look around and realize that I was sitting in the bedroom, or on the floor, or lying under the bed, hiding.
    I had had these spells while Julie was alive, but they got worse and came more frequently after he died. I was never sure when they‘d strike. I’d be looking out the window, and I’d turn my head, and all of a sudden I would be overwhelmed by the feeling that I had to hide.
    Now in my ninth decade of life, I still get overwhelmed by these deep depressions, this sense that despite how fortunate I’ve been, perhaps I haven’t done as