Read Online Funnymen by Ted Heller - Free Book Online

tried calling them at home, but their numbers had been disconnected. I gave up on my job there and started working at Filene's. The next time I heard of Victor Fontana he was Vic Fountain and was performing with Ziggy Bliss.
    Years later in the fifties, I ran into Mr. Flynn in a tavern in South Boston. When he saw me coming toward him, he quickly drained his glass and ran out of the place.

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    ARNIE LATCHKEY: It's funny the way things work out. Murray Katz at WAT [Worldwide American Talent agency] was doing the bookings for the Floyd Lomax Orchestra. The Lomax band had played Camden the week before Ziggy and his tiny parents performed there. If Murray had booked us in one week later— one week! —Vic and I and Zig would have met then and who knows what would've happened? It really does makes you dwell on kismet.
    Entertainment is in my blood.
    This goes back years and years, to the old country, and if you think I mean France, what UFO did you just desaucer from, my friend? My grandparents on one side used to make woodwinds back in Poland or Russia or Moldavia or some-where, and on my father's side my grandparents would take the guts out of cats, sheep, and cows and turn them into strings for violins and cellos. You ever wonder, Hey, who the hell is so desperate for money that they turn animal guts into strings? Well, now you know. That's what they did, when the czar and czarina and their henchmen on horseback weren't too busy taking a Zippo lighter to their hovels, might I add?
    So they came over in a boat and believe me, they weren't playing shuffleboard in beaver coats and drinking brandy out of gold flasks on the poop deck of the Mayflower. They came over on a vermin-infested tub and settled in the Bronx and they didn't miss a beat; it was violin strings again. One thing about a poor neighborhood, no matter where it is: lots of stray cats. Now, when some people look at a stray cat, they see a pet. My family sees one, they hear Brahms.
    My mother sewed costumes for the old Yiddish theater big shots downtown, people like Luther Adler and Robert Weitz, Morris Carnovsky, Lionel Gostin, and the great Zelda Gutterman, the “Sarah Bernhardt ofSecond Avenue.” These were important people, noble, respectable, almost regal people . . . and they spat on her! Never a penny in tips or a kind word, those lousy momzers. And her sister, my Aunt Ruthie, she played the organ at the Orpheum on Gun Hill Road, for the silent pictures. They had it all mechanically rigged up: the lights darken, the organ and Aunt Ruthie slowly rise out of the floor and she starts playing; when the picture is over she slowly sinks back into the floor. Well, one day—it was the day before The Jazz Singer opened—she sank back down into the floor and nobody ever saw her again. It was the end of the Silent Era and the end of Aunt Ruthie too.
    My father, Hyman Latchkey, started a music and record store with his brother-in-law Sy Lowe, and if you think they had enough business savvy to call the store Hy's and Lowe's, then think again. Not even Hy and Sy's they could come up with. No. There was a sign above the door and it said MUSIC STORE. They sold sheet music and 78s and worked seven days a week and had nothing to show for it. Did they ever complain? Did you ever once hear them gripe or curse their fate? Yes. They did. All the time.
    My older brother Marvin was a concierge at Heine's [Resort] in Loch Sheldrake and got me a job as a tummler in the Catskills one summer when I was about sixteen. I was a very klutzy busboy by night and by day I'd run Simon Says games or I was a lobby comedian in a bellhop's suit. An insult comic, like Rickles or Jack E. Leonard. But I didn't have the finesse for it. I'd stop people and say, “May I take your luggage? Your wife has the face of a horse.” I got in trouble when I pinched some fourteen-year-old girl's cheek and said to her father, “She's gonna break a lot of hearts in