Train Tracks (3 page)

EIGHT

Slum Dialect

H
ow I
learned to speak is very intriguing, given that I am an immigrant's son. My
father emigrated from Russia when he was seven years old and he had a slight
accent but not a very pronounced one. Having grown up in the tenements of the
Bronx, I had somewhat of a slum dialect until I went to college. I remember
entering Speech 101; I was asked to give a speech. We were told to listen to
recordings of Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt as examples of two
of the great speakers of the time. I was ashamed to speak publicly. I had a
private conference with my speech teacher. He was a very nice man. He said to
me, “You have a wonderful speaking voice.”

I said, “But I say ‘dem' and ‘doss' and ‘dis' and
‘dat.'”

He said, “Don't worry about that.” He said, “Just
speak and eventually that will be forgotten.”

And that's how I learned to dare speak in front of
groups, where I got the confidence to speak publicly.

That is how I learned to give speeches: through the
confidence given to me by this wonderful speech teacher at Queens College.

I always had a good speaking voice. Going back to
the first grade, I was made the announcer. Why? I was the only kid in my class
with a blue suit. God bless my mother, she bought me a blue suit, white shirt,
and tie. So the teacher said, “Because you have a suit, you're going to be the
announcer.” I'll never forget getting up in front of that audience. I loved the
feeling of looking at all those kids staring at me. I guess you might say I was
born to lead audiences.

NINE

How I Got into Radio

I
can remember the day I recorded my first demo tape and sent it out to more than two hundred stations around America. I went down to Command Productions in the Industrial Center Building in Sausalito. The building in which this production studio is housed, incidentally, was part of the old Kaiser shipyards. They built the Liberty ships for World War II. It's an area I've spent a lot of time in, just musing or walking about the boats, the docks, the gas dock, looking at the boats. Anyway, I was writing books on health, nutrition, herbs, and I was doing corporate consulting, but I knew there was something more, something more that I wanted. In fact, you might say I was desperate. I was fifty years old and I wanted more. Just, things weren't right.

All the years I had done book tours, these grueling ten-city tours, I was told by various people of the media, “You really ought to go into the radio business. You have a great voice.”

I said, “How can I go into the radio business? That's like telling someone to become an astronaut who can't fly.”

Nevertheless, necessity
is
the mother of invention. And so I created the name Savage Nation and I went to Command Productions. I'll never forget to this day, I opened the tape like this: “And now, direct from the towers above Manhattan, it's “The Michael Savage Show.” And then I had my wife, Janet, call in and my old friend Frank call in from this little room that he lived in in San Francisco, during my monologue, which was against Affirmative Action. I had them call in with sort of staged calls. “Frank, you're next up on the Savage Nation!” That kind of thing.

Well, I had gotten from a distant friend a list of all the radio stations in America that had talk shows. It was more than two hundred, I think, at the time. I made the tape and sent it out to more than two hundred radio stations in the United States.

Within a week five stations said, “Hey, you're pretty good. Give us a call.”

One, I remember, was in Boston. I don't remember the others but one was in my own backyard, and that was the largest talk radio station in San Francisco. They said to me, “How would you like to fill in?”

Well, of course, I wanted to fill in on the most powerful station in San Francisco, 50,000 watts. So I did—a midnight-to-five
A.M.
shift for a guy who had a show that was devoted to hating white people and pandering to the worst in human nature. I filled in and did a normal show—actually it was quite an interesting show, not inflammatory at all, in my opinion. I talked about the inequality of Affirmative Action and things of that nature.

Well, I received such hate calls from the left-wing listener base that I was shocked, in the sense that prior to this I had been the good herbalist, the good doctor who everyone liked. I never heard such hatred in my life. For five straight hours I sat there and took it, and answered the best I could. As I drove home at dawn on Highway 101 to our little rental house, I remember looking in my rearview mirror the entire way back, thinking I was being followed. The hatred of the left-wing had literally provoked a semiparanoid reaction in me. When I got home and my family woke up, I said to my wife, “I will never do radio again. It is so filled with hate, I can't take it.”

Well, when I woke up, later in the morning, ring, ring, ring. “Hi, this is the program director. You did great, would you like to fill in for him again?”

I said, “Never. I'll never do radio again.”

So she said to me, “Well, uh, would you consider doing another show?”

I said, “Sure, what other show?”

Now, remember, the day part radio shows on the 50,000-watt talk flamethrower, heard from Canada to Mexico, were the stars of radio. And so I started filling in for the day part radio shows. I created a storm. I was the first conservative in the media in the psycho left-wing San Francisco area. There was nobody before me, and frankly, there's been no one since me who could shine my shoes. Everybody knows that.

So I did fill in for a few months and then they came to me again and said, “Look, we're starting another station and it's going to be more conservative. How would you like to be the key player?”

“Sure, let's do it.”

And so I did and the rest is history. That's how I got into radio.

The moral of the story is, just do what you do best and try the best you can until the day you die, and eventually the train that you are riding will lead you where you belong.

TEN

Achievements

O
ne of the stories in this book tells about a man on an island in Majorca who had threatened my life when I was young. The gangster. Well, if you remember that story as you read, you'll see that, as I looked through his scrapbook, there he was with his two new Jaguars and a blonde on his arm, showing off his possessions. That was then. This is now. Today we are not allowed to show our possessions; we have to hide them. In those days a man worked as hard as he could to gain as much as he could. Sometimes doing good, sometimes doing bad, but he didn't hide what he had achieved. At this stage of my life I have many things I cannot talk about: cars, planes, boats; but you don't want to hear about it because no longer does success matter. Failure seems to be extolled. Poverty is extolled, not the honestly earned riches. It's a world turned upside down.

I began by thinking I would be a scientist. In fact, I still have the little antiquated brass microscope that I purchased when I was a high school teacher. Little did I know then that I would wind up behind the microphone.

ELEVEN

Boy in the
Basement

I
t was a
market, see, and I apprenticed in there to the leader of them all, my little
father, Ben. From about the age of four or five until my seventeenth birthday,
that's where I received my major training.

I knew each one of the men in the market. It was
laid out just like a ship. A long corridor down the center with five or six
stalls on each side. Here we have Murray, and next to him was Fartser—Charlie
was right next to Murray. That was the stand I later occupied when I began to
sell antiques.

I remember Charlie from his heyday of screwing
women downstairs in the basement—(all the rag dresses he'd given them) those
poor women he'd invite downstairs—and I'd be watching through a slit while I was
cleaning bronzes down there.

See, I used to work down in the basement at the
sink. My father gave me cyanide solution to clear the patina off bronzes. They
used to kill men in San Quentin with cyanide solution, right? So my father's
friends would come down and see this Dickensian little boy in the basement, me,
cleaning bronzes with a toothbrush. Scraping it off with the acrid, deadly,
cyanide solution, my eyes getting all irritated. They'd say, “Benny,” to my
father, “how can you do that? It's your own son.” And he'd say, “Never mind,
it's good for him, it's good for his soul, it's good for his character.”

In a sense, he was right. My other world in later
years, the good suburban world of green-carpeted security, gave me little to
think about. But there, in that cold, dark, unheated basement of the market, I
had time to think, to develop the introspection of a prisoner. Basements still
do that to me; they encourage clear thinking. It must be the closeness to earth,
to origins, the security of walls without windows, the exposed supporting beams,
the ancestral memories of refuge in these elemental places.

I remember my father's story about czarist Russia,
where a basement saved the life of Uncle Philip. Invading troops came through
the village seeking pillage, food, and general mischief. The women clutched
their children and hovered near the small dwellings. As the leader passed my
grandmother on a large white stallion, he reached down and grabbed my father,
then a boy of three or four, from his mother's arms. She began to shriek, but
the officer had a lighter end in mind. He simply pranced his horse around the
village for the delight of the startled boy. When it came to the menfolk,
though, the invaders had different thoughts.

They entered the little house, demanding the women
reveal the whereabouts of the men and boys, who they hoped to conscript into the
Polish army. As Uncle Philip, then fourteen or fifteen, hid in the root cellar,
which was entered through some floorboards hidden beneath a piece of furniture,
the soldiers pounded their rifle butts on the floor, one smashing my
grandmother's foot as he left in disgust.

So, as a young kid, I'd be down in the basement of
the market cleaning bronzes with cyanide solution, lost in my boyhood thoughts.
Every once in a while I'd see Charlie waltz by with some beat-up woman, and she
would say in the dark, “Well, where are the dresses?” And he'd say, “Oh, they're
in here.” As he always had hundreds of rag dresses, he'd lead them into his
cold, damp basement and say, “Go over and pick out what you want.” They took a
few rag dresses and Charlie took them.

Anyway, once I was down there cleaning, and Charlie
came out from giving rags to this woman, and he was wiping off his pants with a
handkerchief. At the time I didn't know what had gone on in there. So my father
walked by, and he looked at Charlie, and Charlie looked at him, and he said to
Charlie, “Whatsa matter, Charlie, you spit on yourself?” And Charlie, he just
laughed, wiping off his pants.

I mean this was the kind of subterfuge that was
going on underneath the floorboards of the market. So I knew Charlie from those
days, when he was at the height of his womanizing, when he was chasing the dead
wye over the rags in the basement, right up to when he was dying of cancer,
fifteen, twenty years later, in those hot summer days, while he still held
out.

The market was right next to Neiberg's Funeral
Home; that was where I saw my first corpse. It was a hot summer, and I learned
from the undertakers who used to hang around in my father's market that there
were seasons for death, that when people had terminal illnesses they would
rarely die in the spring, and hardly ever in the summer. People with terminal
illnesses would wait out the summer and die in the fall. My father eventually
died in the fall; he knew the folklore. He was expected to die at any time, and
he chose October.

But I remember Charlie as a dying man. It was his
last season at bat. There he'd be, in his little gray suit. He always dressed
neatly because, after all, he was a woman's man, even if it was those poor,
beat-up women. In his mind, he was still a woman's man. And he always used to
talk to me about women, from the time when I was a little kid. He always used to
say, “Hey Mickey, look at her
fartsa
. Oh Mickey,
look at her
fartsa
.” This went on for years. Anyway,
this was his last season in the dugout. He was sitting back in his booth with
his wife and her cheeks made up, big red lipstick, a real dummy. So he was
sitting there, Charlie, in his last season, with a little gray suit and a tie,
sitting there on a chair. He had terminal cancer and he was moaning, low, but I
could hear it even as he spoke to me. The pain must have been frightening. There
he is with his eyes closed and all of a sudden, he's looking through the slits
to stare at a young Puerto Rican woman prancing through the market. “Oh,
Mickey,” he said. I followed, “What, Charlie?” He said, “I'd like to
schtup
her once more.” So, you know, I fell for it. I
said, “Oh, you mean you made it with her before, huh, Charlie?” And he said,
“No, once more I'd like to
schtup
HER.”

As we move down the line, we come to Monk. Monk was
a bohemian whose old lady was Frances; she was the woman that I really fixated
on through my early years. Frances, she was the beatnik. They were the two old
beatniks.

I mean, they were commie beatnik bastards. Monk
wore a rope for a belt. And where the other men put giant padlocks on their
wooden booths when they swung the boards up at night, Monk would tie a rope
around, a little string around his stall, as if to laugh at everybody. Years
afterwards, I learned that during the Sabbath a string was tied around the
shtetl, or villages, of the Carpathian Mountains. Mere strings to keep intruders
from violating the day of rest. So Monk would tie up his merchandise with
string.

Monk was a drinker. He was the strongest one in the
market, and he was totally nonviolent, totally against war. He was the only guy
to talk to me realistically. Where he'd get mad at me, the other guys would play
with me at this and that. What did I know? I'd say things like, “Monk, you got
any guns?” I was six and into guns. You know, being around antiques and used
things I never knew what was coming in next, and that's what made that life
interesting. There was always hope that the next lot of junk might contain
something that I wanted. So I'd say, “Hey, Monk, do you got any guns, any
pistols, or anything like that? Rifles, you know—” “What do you need guns for,”
he'd ask. “Guns are for one thing only—killing. Don't be a monster! Go away!
Don't talk to me about guns!” he'd say, his broad face scowling.

Anyway, I liked Monk. Now, Monk had reputedly been
a very, very powerful man in his youth. Once in a while he'd get very drunk.
Sometimes he'd drink an entire bottle in a day; he was one of those guys. He
always kept a quart of whiskey under his stand, and he'd lift it up by its neck,
straight up to the ceiling, and he'd go “Glug, glug, glug,” you know, and then
put it down, wipe his mouth, and then go “ahh,” and everyone would move
back.

You've got to picture him: He was broad more than
tall, he wore an undershirt in winter—he dressed like a clown, he looked like
Chaplin but broad and wide with a severe, fierce, Carpathian Mountains face.

And what did he sell? Now, Monk looked like he was
selling garbage. See, my father, in the stand, had his merchandise built up,
with bronze figures on the near shelves and large candelabra towards the rear
reaching to the plaster-cracked ceiling, like a stairway to heaven. At the top
were the most expensive things, as in Coney Island booths. My father sold on an
old principle: cheap things up front and expensive things in the rear. See, that
way he could get you for lunch money, at least. But Monk had his merchandise on
a one-tier stand, and it was all mixed up. There was no order to it. He didn't
even try to lay it out. He would take a box of goods and spill it out on the
table. Now, who would buy from Monk? A surprisingly large number of doctors,
really; some important men. One of them happened to be the head of a major
hospital. Years later, I learned that he was the chief of staff. The old
chiseler would come down to the market on Saturdays, on his day off, and he
would bargain with Monk, because Monk would play games with the world. He would
take gold and silver and mix it in with tin just to watch the chiselers go
through it for hours, through the small pieces of jewelry, like rats scratching
at the earth, waiting to pull the gold from the midst of the junk. If Monk was
in a bad mood, he might do anything. His customers might ask, “Hey, Monk—how
much is this?” He'd look at the guy, knowing that the piece might be gold or
silver, and if he was in the mood he might say, “Ten cents,” just to see their
reaction, just to see them shake. As they paid the dime for gold, Monk would
draw his true payment—derision. On the other hand, an inexpensive piece of
jewelry might be priced out of all proportions. “How much is this?”—“You can't
buy it.” Or, if a woman wanted a tin bracelet: “It's not for sale.” He would do
just crazy things. He didn't do this all the time; he did it selectively. Monk
would break people's balls, just to show them the irrelevancy of what they were
doing. He made a living at it; he didn't have to work very hard.

Monk's old lady was Frances, and she was beautiful.
She was a beautiful English beatnik—tan, long hair down to her waist; and she
was so different from the women that I grew up with that, naturally, I fell in
love with her. She was gorgeous. She wore dungarees. I used to hear Charlie
Fartser talk about Frances once in a while. The other men couldn't admit they
liked her, right? Because socially, who was she? She wore pants, dirty pants.
But they loved her. I mean, they were hot for her. She was the only real woman
around. Charlie would say, “I bet you can smell those pants up here.” You know,
they'd talk about how dirty her pants were. But they really loved her; you could
see it in their eyes.

Years later, when I was a young merchant myself,
Monk got sick. After a heart attack, he shrank in size. It was frightening; he
went to Bellevue and came out looking one-third the size—a skinny man with no
power, in a wheelchair. He told Benny he wished he was dead.

Frances was always friendly with homosexual types
who would work in the stand with her. And this is where I really got a feeling
for music, by watching them across the center gangway, where the market was open
on both sides. I'd sit behind my father's stand and watch these men listen to
music, and enjoy it. They'd play classical music, and they would move to it
while they were cleaning something, polishing some metal. You'd see the men
genuinely moved by the music. No one was watching them, so they were really
relating to it as though they were in their own house. That's where I was first
able to see a man, or a human, moved by music.

The only other Frances tale occurred in the
basement when I was about thirteen and wearing my hair combed back in the
semi-ducktail. She came downstairs; I was very shy, and I was there cleaning the
bronzes, and she says to me, “How come you want to look like a teddy boy? Why do
you want to look like a teddy boy?” Now, I was also insecure, and I had been
ridiculed by my father so much that I thought she meant a fag, by her “teddy
boy.” But she meant a hitter. She was actually telling me, “Why are you trying
to look so masculine?” while I thought she was saying, “Why do you look so
feminine?” That's how distorted I had gotten by that point. It took me five
years to figure out what “teddy boy” meant. Five years to figure out that
Frances wasn't calling me a fag.

Now we get to Ethel, white-haired Ethel with the
big breasts or, as they called them, bosoms. In her case they were not really
sex glands. They served one purpose only: to say, I am a maternal, warm woman.
So anyhow, she had these huge breasts, which were worn under a drape, a green
velvet drape. She had white hair, cute little woman. Everyone thought she was
nice. My father knew otherwise. They'd fall for her nice act. She'd cry, she'd
give you a little candy or cake that she'd made. She was always crying about her
sick husband. She always had rum cake which appeared to have been just baked in
the back of her small booth. And she always told you about her sick husband and
leaned on you, as if to say, “My sick husband is who I work for.” My father used
to say, “Ethel, please, stop weepin' for Christ sakes.” So she would try to
bullshit my father, like if a customer would come in to see my father, she'd get
jealous. She was the only one who dared to carry the same merchandise as my
father. She'd buy from the same guy and carry a small stock of the same things.
She was right next to him in the back part of the market. So they'd come in to
see my father's chandeliers, and there was a board running across the top
between his stand and hers; and she had the nerve to hang a few chandeliers
across this joint beam. To a big buyer from South Carolina he might say, “Well,
the last one's not mine, it's Ethel's. Ask Ethel.” So in a sense there wasn't
that much open begrudging; it was a market and communal in a sense. You couldn't
say, “Don't shop.”