I looked up at the TV and watched for a few moments. It was one of those celebrity gossip programs. Oddly engrossing, Benny and I sat silently watching the show and not a soul was in the bar. There was a short segment on my old, old friend, Howie Kessler.
“Hey Benny, turn it up, there’s Howie.”
“And we are getting reports that the postponement of the shooting for Donnie Birken’s new project which was being billed as the next Apocalypse Now is due to a switch in leading men. My sources are telling me that Howard Kessler is no longer on this film and we will report back as soon as more information becomes available on this developing story. This is Rena White in Hollywood. Michelle, back to you.”
“Thank you Rena. Here at the studio our sources are telling us that Howard Kessler hasn’t been seen around town in several weeks, and calls to his manager and agent, Alan Shiner, went unreturned. Darren, what do you think of this? Where is Howard Kessler? And why isn’t he shooting what could be his next big blockbuster with Donnie Birken?”
“Well, Michelle, I don’t think it looks good for Howard to remain absent during this speculation. I don’t know why his team hasn’t come out with a statement about the film or his whereabouts. Frankly, this is all looking quite suspicious. We will continue to follow this story. And now on to other news: The new reality television series—”
“I can turn this shit off now, right?” Benny said.
“Yeah, Jesus, what’s Howie up to these days. Did you see the last thing he was in, last summer?”
“That war movie? Yeah, that was good. He’s good in those movies. Wonder why he never comes back here.”
I hadn’t thought about Howie in ages. It’s been so long since the last time he came out here. We both got into a bit of trouble. I got people who still aren’t talking to me because of the shit we stirred up. I had a friend whose horse was running at Belmont about 25 years ago and Howie and I got a little mixed up in fixing a couple of races. We cleaned up, but a few of the other players around town got wind of it and made some threats. Before we knew it, there was a grand jury investigation, Howie’s big lawyers showed up here and made it all go away. But not without the media and local gangsters all wanting a piece of the action.
“Why don’t you call Howie and get the money from him?” Benny asked.
“You out of your fucking mind?”
“You know he’s got it.”
“First off, I wouldn’t know how in a million years to get in touch with the guy. Hello, Hollywood? Yes, I’m looking for my friend Howie Kessler, I’m just a loser from Brooklyn so please patch me through. Sure, that’ll work.”
“Hey, you asked.”
“No, Benny, I didn’t fucking ask. You always do that. You offer advice when no one asks for it.”
“Hey, I’m a bartender, whaddya want from me? I talk it up around here, you cranky bastard.”
“Just get me another drink.”
It was ridiculous, and never in a million years would I ever do that. Despite the joking with Benny, I couldn’t help but think about Howie—not only the good times we’ve had, but that he could really help me out now. I wondered if he would, even if I did know how to get in touch with him.
Nah, I mean, the guy had severed relationships with just about everyone here. No one I know has spoken to him since the last time was here in New York. And even then, he kept his exposure to the old gang limited—partly, I imagine, because we hadn’t spoken to one another in ages. We’ve got nothing in common anymore. And I’m not even supposed to be in the same room as Frankie, a condition of the plea agreement.
My first real job out of high school was as a court reporter. I had tons of assignments and did them well enough to earn a living once my mother kicked me out of the apartment. I tried to prove to a girl I was with—more accurately, to her parents—that I wasn’t the lowlife hustler they thought I was—that I could keep a straight job. After a few months we broke up. But I kept the job, because I soon realized that the information I had unfettered access to was valuable to certain people. I have a near photographic memory, which helps. But between the people I knew from Brooklyn and the information I transcribed, I was selling information from depositions and testimonies to the mob for quite a bit of money. I was able to keep this up for years, and never got caught. What stopped me was when a guy being deposed in a grand jury investigation was Frank Russo, my Frankie. The prosecutor must have seen our faces when they brought Frankie into the room. I hadn’t seen much of Frank in years. He stopped hanging around our club room shortly after we graduated since he was working for his uncle. But apparently his uncle had him doing more than hoisting bricks. Though I never got caught selling my information, I thought that the world was too small and that was my warning to stop being greedy. I never got out from under the ties to the mob, though, since these guys wouldn’t take no for an answer once I left the court reporting job. Either way, me and Frankie can’t be seen together.
It’s been a long time; we’ve all been through a lot. And we weren’t exactly tight as a rope consistently as teenagers. We had our routs with each other and our own friends. I couldn’t stand how Howie stood up for two of the dumbest guys we knew, Eddie “Slip” and Louis “Bean.” If I could remember whatever dumb-fuck story it was that they earned those nicknames I would love to tell it. They were always getting into trouble because they were just so stupid—and Howie would risk a lot to defend them. His association with those guys almost landed him in jail—shortly after our senior year in high school, Slip and Bean got jobs as drivers for a new Oldsmobile car dealership that opened up on 86th Street in Bensonhurst. Not two months into the job did they try to steal a car. You don’t understand—no one stole cars back then. It was unheard of. But these two idiots somehow thought they would get away with it. And where did they go with their brand-new, shiny Oldsmobile? Howie’s mother’s house.
We got sick of it and just stopped hanging around Howie because of this and other dead-end reasons.
So as I was saying, you just don’t resurrect ties after 50 years. You just can’t do it.
Chapter 10
The Road Home
Howard left Hollywood. With no ceremonious departure party, no warm embraces, he got on the road at about 6:30am after a short run on the beach, a quick shower, and a last look around his house. He left the keys on the granite counter, picked up two duffel bags, put on his Ray-Bans, and stepped out the front door.
Long distance is not something Howard is used to driving. In fact, he rarely even drives himself any more, accompanied by an entourage usually composed of any combination of publicist, agent, manager, and hangers-on wherever he goes. No simple ventures to a diner for a quick bite; no stops at the grocery store. Howard’s public life has been choreographed, planned, and protected. The underside of that public life, however, has been a constant battle to maintain his own independence—the self-dependence that he cultivated as far back as early childhood, in a tenement full of older relatives with little temperament to mind a troublesome kid. Howard’s mischief as a kid seeped into adolescent and adult life and took the form of booze, drugs, gambling, and hookers—since he couldn’t maintain a solid relationship with a woman for any fixed period of time.
Over the years he worked hard to alienate his brother, Sammy, and his sister, Judith. Sammy moved out to L.A. to be with Howie and escape his gambling debts on the east coast, but soon life caught up with him. Howie couldn’t get him a job that he could keep, and he couldn’t escape his gambling addiction. Compounded with Howie’s own substance addictions, Sammy’s life was a thread away from total self-destruction and nearly brought Howie’s down with him. He returned to New York in the late 1980s and had been living in the East Village with a heroin-addicted performance artist who later painted herself red and threw herself in front of a bus on First Avenue. Judith moved to Israel with her husband in 1979. Howard visited once, for Judith’s kid’s bat mitzvah in 1988. He felt humbled by Judith’s abundance of faith in
her and her family’s life and the hardships they endured as Kibbutzim in a country rattled with mortar. He was relieved to return to L.A., slightly jealous of his sister’s life in a way that he couldn’t articulate. They didn’t speak often; they probably just don’t have much to say to one another.
Rarely alone, Howard never really came face to face the ugly facts of his life. Exiling himself to a car and a lonely road for more than 3,000 miles was a reckoning with himself that he hadn’t faced since he was in rehab in the 1980s—and even then he never truly thought about what made him who he is and why. He questioned why he was leaving. He questioned what he was searching for. He questioned if going back to Brooklyn and finding his old friends was in his best interest. Most meaningful of all was his question of what he thought he could get out of seeing guys he knew as a kid, when they knew nothing about one another today.
Wait, what the hell was he doing?
Before he knew it, he was in Kansas City and it was time to stop and reconsider the whole trip, since he was spending more time in the car reconsidering the choices he’s made than looking forward to seeing the gang. He remembered a movie he was in where the mafia set up shop in Kansas City in the 1940’s and then continued to move west to Las Vegas. There was no shooting in Kansas City itself, though, so Howard spent a couple of hours that evening walking around the downtown areas making mental notes of how different the sets and the location shooting which was in Vancouver, Canada.
He got back on the road and called Punch letting him know he’d be at his house in a couple of days, maybe less. Punch sounded surprised or caught off-guard. Howard sets an objective and doesn’t let anything deter him from reaching it as quickly as possible, regardless of who gets knocked down en route. His decisions are made promptly and assertively. This one, though, he started to question, and he was disconcerted that he was questioning his own decision. He wanted to get back to the state of mind he was in when he decided to track down the guys and come back—it was a settling feeling. Sitting in a busy steakhouse at a table alone in the corner was not a settling feeling, knowing that his objectives for trip weren’t clear enough to warrant the plan he set for action. Maybe Alan was right, he just needed a month or two in Maui or Monte Carlo. Now he’s in Kansas City en route to Brooklyn via suburban New Jersey to see guys he doesn’t even know, or like.
He started to think about Punch, Art, even Frankie and Mo. There had to be reasons why he hadn’t kept in closer touch—he just had to recall why. He couldn’t even remember the last time they were all together in the same room. In fact, when he did, it was an awful rift that began what may have been the split-up of the group that he had initially forgotten about. He couldn’t even remember what the incident was to start it, other than he and a couple of other friends had tried to gain access to Art’s club room—a room at the back of a candy store that he and some others rented to hang out in. When Art got wind of it, he chased down Howie’s friends and with the help of Frankie and some other grunts, shaved the intruders’ heads. Though they didn’t touch Howie, he was mortified. He thought Art was his friend and he could just go hang out in the club room with his own guys. In 1957, shaving a teenage boy’s head was the ultimate humiliation. They would spend hours slicking their hair into perfect greaser styles.
Howard got in the car early the next morning. He knew definitively that returning to Los Angeles was not going to provide him with the resolve he sought. Not knowing where he was headed—or why—as he sat in the cold seat, he watched the steam of the hot coffee sitting on the dashboard cloud up a little oval on the window. Though he wasn’t rushed to make a decision, he needed more clarity so he turned off the motor and thought about the reasons why he was so intent on leaving Los Angeles:
I have no career any longer because I have little desire to act, not to mention the paucity of significant roles for me.
I have no attachments to people—women—and can’t seem to forge any. Except Alan, my friends in L.A. are not reliable, lifelong, trusted friends the way he thinks friends should be.
I really do hate a lot about L.A. It’s desperate and shallow and reeks of anxiety and despair.
Without close connections and a real desire to continue living there, Howard’s feelings were at best, apathetic. He thought that life is too short and challenge, passion, learning and new experiences ought to lie ahead—not repetitious tedium.
But none of this was good enough to justify returning to Brooklyn. Many years ago he was resolute in cutting many close ties, since he—and Alan—knew that destruction only breeds destruction. Though he was uncertain of what lie ahead, he was resolute that he needed to make a change. He wouldn’t get roles, even if he wanted them. He wouldn’t form meaningful attachments with women unless he changed his underlying desire to do so. He wouldn’t hate L.A. so much if he wasn’t so desperate, shallow, and full of anxiety and despair. So with that, Howard’s fundamental pursuit of change was the reason for heading to Brooklyn, not to return there for sentimentality which—so many years later—would not provide enduring satisfaction.
He turned on the car again, pulled out of the hotel lot in Kansas City, and continued to drive east.
The next night he stopped the car was in Indianapolis. Howard was tired and there was nothing to do in the city. It was totally barren and the hotel desk didn’t even recognize him. Howard isn’t so much an egotistical movie star as keen on his surroundings: If people don’t recognize who he is, they are most likely devoid of any culture, in his mind. All the better, he could use the rest and quietude. He pulled the curtains open in his hotel room overlooking Union Station and the main plaza in the city. It was lit up nicely. Because Indianapolis and its surrounding area are so flat, the clear night enabled Howard to see the lines of suburban light for miles. He pulled up the desk chair to the window, sat back and perched his feet up on the sill. What the fuck am I doing in Indianapolis? he thought.
Finally, after months of struggling with where he was in his career and his life, Howard finally took a few moments to think about where he had decided to go. Brooklyn. The dead-end, death-spiral, meatball-mentality, Brooklyn. From the moment he could pinpoint his self-awareness and presence in Brooklyn, Howard bristled and couldn’t wait to get out of there. The projects, the stupid, provincial mindset, the fake attitude, the ethnocentrism, the xenophobia, the melting pot, the smells, the pizza, the El Train, the beach. It was home; he hated everything about himself that was Brooklyn. But he wouldn’t have his career if it weren’t for the Brooklyn in him—nearly every successful role he played was based upon a character he could have known in Brooklyn. The wise-guy, the gangster, the poor immigrant, the Russian mobster, the working-class aspirant, the thug, the victim, the killer, the lover, the chef. He couldn’t have done them without Brooklyn; and Hollywood and the world loved him for it.
He wondered who he would see when he was back. He wondered if they could find Frankie and Mo, and whether he even wanted to see those guys—if they were even alive. Howard was aware that he turned his back on the gang once he left for L.A. years earlier. He realized when he was in the Navy that there was nothing really tying the group together. He could be his own person without them.
One question he pondered was whether any feelings they may have had of betrayal would linger if he came back. How does he justify turning his back on them after all they had been through? As a tight group, they were about 16 years old at the time, their club room was their home base and Art rented it from the owner of the candy store owner, a former boxer, Joey Klein. The guys pooled some money to give to Art so they could all call it their own, though Art managed the place and the relationship with the landlord—even by the time he was 14, Art was doing deals. The landlord was a middleweight champion contender, but lost his hearing after getting too banged up and retired. He was a monster, though. Income from a candy store in those days wasn’t enough to support a drunken ex-boxer and a family with three kids. So his young wife—had to be no older than 21—wor
ked numerous jobs to keep the family afloat. Joey used to beat her up, but no one had evidence enough to really do anything about it. One late night, the guys were in their club room playing cards when they heard Joey beating on his wife upstairs. Without hesitation or discussion, the five busted open the door and ran up the stairs. They beat this former champ with the kitchen chairs and threw him out the second-floor window onto the fire escape. They then packed up the family’s things and put them on a bus back to the wife’s family’s home in Allentown, Pennsylvania. This was one of the few times the five agreed and needed no negotiations or compromises to accomplish something. This was also one of many painful memories—there was nothing bittersweet about it.
But it still hung in Howard’s mind that his leaving without any contact with the group wouldn’t go over well.
Frankie idolized Howard before he was an actor. Frankie followed Howard around when they were in grade-school together. They were inseparable. Frankie always looked out for Howard—more so when they were in the gang together because Frankie felt responsible for Howard. He never picked a fight. He never went after his girl. He never challenged Howie. Because of that, Howard was loyal to Frankie. But once he left, he was gone.
Howie figured Frankie was still in Brooklyn. He got up from his chair in the hotel and called the operator to help him find the Frank Russo he grew up with.
Minutes later, the phone rang in Howard’s hotel room and he hesitated to pick it up—what would he say to Frank, he hadn’t even thought about it.
It was the operator. There are 17 Frank Russos in Brooklyn.
Howard’s first instinct was to call Alan, who would be able to arrange an answer or solution to any of Howard’s questions over the past 20 years. Alan would have a minion do the research or make the calls. But he was on his own now and had to make a decision.