Just Kids From the Bronx Read Online Free PDF

than my friends, and I liked them better. My friends were these would-be thugs who I adjusted to because that’s who we were hanging around with. Like every kid, I had an assortment of friends who I thought of as best friends and better friends and first best friend and second best friend, but none of them had my interests. I mean, they all knew that I was going to be a cartoonist or wanted to be a cartoonist. They didn’t read but I did. They weren’t political and I was. The way that gays were closeted in those days as a young man or woman—I was a “closet Jules.” I hid out. I didn’t even know what a Jules was at that time, but I knew that I wasn’t like them. At one point, three or four of us were walking around Parkchester, which was a neighborhood I enjoyed walking in because it was middle class and upper middle class. It was about a fifteen-minute walk from where we lived on Stratford Avenue. There was a beautiful sunset. I commented on the sunset and I was called a fag. I learned what I could say and what I couldn’t say, and I accepted all of that.
    I was also an abject physical coward in every possible way. Therefore most of my real life was lived inward in my imagination. Radio was a close personal friend. Movies were close personal friends. Fred Astaire became a role model, and to this day I follow his lead. He took something that was impossibly hard and made it look effortless. And that’s my goal as an artist. To make it look as if you’re not doing anything. I use that image both as a cartoonist and as a writer. To leave no footprints. About ten years after Carnal Knowledge came out, I saw a screening of it somewhere and halfway through the movie when I saw Jack Nicholson and Art Garfunkel, I thought, they’re making up their lines. They’re improvising. And I was very pleased that that’s how it felt. It didn’t feel as if those lines had been written.
    I used to be able to remember my dreams. I always loved this. I would dream that I was in a movie theater and I would walk in, in the middle of whatever the movie was. I’d see the movie to the end and then it would start again. Then it comes to where I had come in, in the dream I say, “Oh, this is where I came in,” and then I’d wake up.
    I was always terrified of leaving the neighborhood or leaving home because I had then, and have now, no sense of direction. It isn’t as if I have a bad sense of direction. I have none . Even in New York, if I get out of the subway I can walk half a block and not know where I am, right in the middle of Manhattan. So I got lost all the time when I was a kid. And in those days I would be terrified because I didn’t know where I was and would be embarrassed if I had to ask people how to get to Stratford Avenue, where I lived. I wouldn’t go to Manhattan until I was in my late teens because I was terrified of getting lost. To this day I get lost all the time.
    While I was terrified of getting on a subway going to a theater in Manhattan, somehow or other the Bronx seemed safer. So I saw Death of a Salesman at the Windsor Theater near Fordham Road and fell in love with plays. I saw theater for the first time at the Windsor and would take two trolleys to get there, as I recall. And I loved that. I saw Ethel Barrymore at the Windsor. I still remember the actor who played Willy Loman. Duncan Baldwin.
    At school, I essentially wasn’t good at anything except bullshitting. I was the Jewish wiseguy. I was funny! As a “closet Jules,” I understood what I could get away with and what I couldn’t. And what I couldn’t get away with was talking seriously about any serious ideas because that was always suspect. But being funny was great and I was a funny guy. I made people laugh. I amused them. So I knew how to do that. And I knew how to draw cartoons and people liked that. I loved that because it was really where I wanted to be. Al Capp who did Li’l Abner and Milton Caniff who did Terry and the Pirates , I