I Only Know Who I Am When I Am Somebody Else Page 6

  I was a hands-on parent all the way. Maybe, because of my experience with an absent father, I was overcompensating with my own children. I signed my sons Rick and Danny up for Little League baseball. I attended their games religiously. I volunteered as a football coach when they started playing the game at school.

  Somehow, I had turned into a sports version of what they call today a helicopter parent. “Mom, does he have to come to every single game?” Rick complained to Sandy. I was thunderstruck when my wife related his comment to me. I had been a real presence in the athletic lives of my sons, cheering loudly from the stands. I thought I was supporting them, but it turned out I was only embarrassing them. I immediately dialed back my participation.

  They did all right without me. My son Rick was a big kid. I had known from the outset that he was going to be an athlete. He turned into a very good one. He was an All-City football player for DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, playing both defense and offense.

  Never once did I lift my hand to any of my children. But I did administer discipline. I was a yeller. There are several scenes in my movies when the audience can witness me in a state of anger. Seeing it from the outside, I can understand how frightening I could be to a kid when I’m fuming mad.

  But underneath all that bluster, I nursed a secret fear. What if I failed as a father? I was a working-class man. What if the jobs disappeared? What if I was a protector who could not save those I loved? What if I was a guide who got himself lost?

  What if, what if, what if? On the surface, I was happy. I loved my wife and children. I never confessed the insecurities that were plaguing me. What I didn’t realize was that at the dawn of the 1960s, when I hit the labor market, the blue-collar way of life was changing. Manufacturing jobs were vanishing.

  I first learned this lesson in 1955, when I landed a job on the assembly line at the Curtiss-Wright aircraft plants in Garfield and Wood-Ridge, New Jersey. I worked at Curtiss-Wright for three years, carpooling from the Bronx. It felt good to have steady employment. Then, suddenly, the rug got pulled out from under me and I was laid off. My anxieties came roaring back worse than ever.

  Sandy saved me. Well, actually it was her uncle. Through his contacts, I landed a job as a baggage handler at the Greyhound station in Manhattan. I was starting out at the bottom there, but it was solid work and the company was unionized. The year was 1957. I experienced a newfound sense of security. This is what I was, and this is what I would be for the rest of my life: a workingman, a good provider with a steady job. I tried to tell myself that I was all set from now on.

  For a while, it even seemed to be true.

  Chapter Seven

  The Big Grey Dog

  Beginning in 1957, when someone asked me what I did, I said I worked at Greyhound as a baggage handler. That answer classified me as blue-collar as surely as if I had shown them my union card. From the start, I fit right in at my new job. The Greyhound station at 245 West Fiftieth Street in Manhattan had waves of humanity crashing through it on their way to elsewhere. This was in the days before air travel became commonplace. For the vast majority of Americans, the “Big Grey Dog” was the transport of choice. The passengers in the terminal were visiting relatives, traveling for work, or setting off to seek greener pastures.

  The midtown Greyhound station was built in the 1930s, and by the time I started there, it had become worn out a bit from hard use. I liked it anyway. As I got used to the job, I looked upon the place as my own personal turf. The constant to-and-fro of travelers made it seem like something was always happening.

  Other people’s luggage seems random, but it is intensely personal. Handling baggage all day, humping hundreds of bags, suitcases, and boxes, I was getting an up-close view of America. There were hard-traveling bags and upper-crust monogrammed luggage. If there was a cord tied around a valise, it probably meant the owner was down on his luck. Mostly, I didn’t have time to think about which bag was whose. I just slung.

  With a solid job, I thought all the uncertainty, worry, and secret doubts that had troubled me would vanish. They didn’t. Instead, my anxieties increased in severity until a strange affliction started to kick in. Several times a day, a tightness would seize the back of my neck. I was sure that I was about to pass out. I suppose these sudden fits were a kind of panic attack, but no one used that term back then.

  I didn’t know what was happening to me. I had a wonderful family, had a steady paycheck, and was living in the greatest city in the world. I should have been content. Instead I was laid low by a mysterious opponent. A street fight was one thing. A punch to the head that sent my brain reeling, that I could handle. But these attacks came out of nowhere. I tried to deny what was happening. I dodged talking about it to Sandy.

  Finally, with the tempo of the episodes increasing, I checked myself into the Kingsbridge Veterans Hospital in the Bronx. I was examined and told by the military doctors that they could find nothing physically wrong with me. I didn’t understand. Feeling the way I did, how could that be true?

  The hunt for a cause moved from the physical to the mental. This development made me uneasy. The disgrace attached to illnesses of the mind held sway. Me, a nutter? It couldn’t be. I was the strong one, the reliable one, the guy who could always get the job done. Yet the shrinks kept poking and prodding at my stubborn anxieties, which turned out to be the root of the problem.

  The diagnosis? Nervous exhaustion.

  “That’s one step below a nervous breakdown,” my physician told me. “If you keep on like this, a breakdown is exactly where you’ll find yourself.”

  I ended up in a locked psych ward for two weeks in the summer of 1963. I was too ashamed to tell anyone at Greyhound the specifics of my illness. I was just “out sick.” The doctors on staff prescribed sedatives to calm me down. I refused to take them. I had never put anything stronger than an aspirin into my system. I wasn’t going to start now. I was the classic example of a guy who always declined to see a doctor no matter how ill he was.

  In my confusion and anxiety, I held fast to the idea that there was a physical cause to my illness. There were times I thought that I’d rather have a brain tumor—something, anything, rather than be afflicted with a wimpy-sounding condition like nervous exhaustion.

  A psychiatrist suggested physical therapy. A male nurse took me out to the huge lawn on the hospital grounds during the day. I carried a bat, and the nurse had a dozen softballs in a bucket. He would pitch to me for hours. Many of the balls I hit ended up flying out onto Kingsbridge Avenue.

  In my precarious mental state, my love of the game comforted me. The solid thwack of the bat hitting the ball centered my mind. It was something I knew. Playing ball had smoothed my time in the military. Now slamming away at those pitches helped me in a different way. It wasn’t the first time that the sport wound up saving my ass, and it wouldn’t be the last, either.

  I felt good while I had a bat in my hands. But when I went back to the ward, I immediately fell sick again. I would sit on a couch and watch patients a lot younger than I was, who appeared to be a lot healthier than me. They paced up and down the corridor, staring directly at the floor, not making eye contact, with nothing alive in their expressions. Pharmacology wasn’t as sophisticated back then as it is now. The pills my fellow patients swallowed had turned them into the walking dead.

  Sandy and my mom came to the ward for visiting hours, but I let none of my neighborhood friends know what had happened. It was enough to see my wife and mother devastated by my illness. Sandy had witnessed my attacks. She saw me stare into the mirror and start to cry, moaning, “I feel like I’m going to die.” Even though she knew that the hospital was the right place for me, my wife was still knocked for a loop seeing me committed to a mental ward.

  There is no misery sharper than the dread that you might be losing your mind. I shared a double bunk bed with a city bus driver who seemed like the most normal guy in the world. I would lie there at night, and incredibly enough I could loo
k out my window and see the Marble Hill projects, where I lived. Sandy kept a bright light shining in our fourth-floor window for me to see.

  The night I decided to leave the hospital, I was staring longingly at that bright light of home when the bus driver in the bunk below me began to cry. He was a strapping guy who looked as if he could be playing football for the New York Giants, but he wept like a son of a bitch, huge racking sobs that continued on and off all night.

  I do not belong here, I told myself, listening to him. These guys are all nuts, not me! Meanwhile all those other patients in the ward might have been looking at me and thinking the same thing.

  The next day, I asked to be discharged.

  “Well, Corporal Aiello,” my veterans’ hospital doctor said, “you admitted yourself voluntarily, so you are allowed to leave at any time. But I have to tell you, it will be AMA.”

  The military loves its acronyms. “What does ‘AMA’ mean?” I asked.

  “ ‘Against medical advice,’ ” he said.

  “If that’s the way it has to be, then that’s the way it has to be,” I said. “I just have to get out of here. If I don’t, I think I’ll go crazy.”

  I thought he might get the joke, but he didn’t laugh. Instead, he gave me a good piece of medical advice. “If you have this feeling of yours again, whenever you believe you are going to pass out, I want you to lie down. I don’t care where you are, at work or at home or on the street even; if you feel an attack coming on, lie down.”

  That suggestion helped, but it didn’t cure me. Whenever an episode started, whenever that familiar tightness would start to grip my neck, I would immediately prostrate myself on the floor. Anyone around me would be convinced that I was indeed nuts. It happened once while riding the subway. Down I went, flopping over into some surprised stranger’s lap.

  I returned to work at Greyhound, humping baggage. Whatever doubts Sandy harbored about my mental state, she remained relentlessly positive and encouraging. For two years after I left the hospital, the attacks persisted. I experienced the same panicked feeling, but I willed myself into going to work every day. It was my self-prescribed therapy.

  Looking back, I think my mind must have been trying to tell me something. I was in my late twenties at this point. A question hung in the air back then: Is this all there is? Perhaps my illness was my mind’s way of insisting that baggage handling at Greyhound could not be my only option in life. Maybe I had a secret desire to be more than what I was. Maybe I didn’t know who I was.

  Two years after they began, the attacks gradually tapered off. I no longer had the conviction that I was in my death throes every other day. Looking back, the end of my affliction coincided with a change in my daily work.

  * * *

  One thing I especially enjoyed about the Greyhound job was the godlike tones of the public address announcer, reciting the far-flung destinations all across the country. For each departure, the names of the towns echoed through the terminal. It was like living inside an atlas. The words had a rhythm, speaking of the romance of the road.

  Hearing the announcements so often, I had the reaction that I’d like to be the one calling out the distant bus stations. I wanted to be the voice over the loudspeaker. A lowly ambition, maybe, to go from baggage handler to station announcer, but what the hell, it was still an ambition.

  When I saw a posting for a public address announcer job opening at Greyhound, I put in for it and got the gig. There was a small increase in pay. My new position had me interacting much more with the other personnel in the terminal, getting to know the drivers, the secretaries, the company bosses.

  More than that, I heard my own voice every day echoing through the bus terminal. I won’t deny that it fed my ego. I can still recite in order the bus route destinations all over the country:

  “May I have your attention, please? Across from platform three, a departure to Philadelphia, Harrisburg, Pittsburgh, Wheeling, Columbus, Indianapolis, Terre Haute, Effingham, Saint Louis, Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Denison, and Dallas, Texas, with connections in Jersey City for Montclair, Denville, Dover, Budd Lake, Hackettstown, Strasburg, Mount Pocono, Tobyhanna, Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, Clarks Summit, Nicholson, Hallstead, O’Toolesville, Binghamton, Canandaigua, Pittston, Towanda, Waverly, Elmira, Corning, Batavia, Mount Morris, and Buffalo!”

  Sure, it’s easy enough to write it down, but try letting it roll off your tongue. Years later, during an appearance on David Letterman’s show, he asked me to reprise my old public announcer “act.” When I sang out the final word, “Buffalo,” the audience went nuts; it ended up as one of the best times I ever had on a talk show.

  I have to confess that one of those towns I called out is a ringer, an inside joke. I always inserted “O’Toolesville” into my spiel because one of the bosses was named O’Toole. But there was no such town, and no one ever came up to me demanding to know where the hell O’Toolesville was either.

  I wasn’t going to stop at being the terminal announcer. I now had ambitions beyond that. The Greyhound drivers, baggage handlers, and other workers were represented by the Amalgamated Transit Union, Local Division 1202. I attended shop meetings and became known as a loyal union man.

  My experience as a kid on the streets of New York City gave me the world’s best education in human psychology, so when issues arose at Greyhound, I came across as a dependable guy. I got along with most of my coworkers, and more importantly, I was able to stand my ground when it mattered.

  In 1961, four years after I started working at Greyhound, the union membership voted me in as shop steward. By the end of 1965, I was elected president of the twelve-hundred-member Local Division 1202, the youngest person and the first nondriver ever to hold the post. I won the vote by a five-to-one margin.

  As union president, I conducted meetings in front of scores of my fellow workers. I would speak off the top of my head. At first I had no idea how I would do it, but my communication skills turned out to be quite good. I got a copy of Robert’s Rules of Order and studied up on parliamentary procedure.

  The union rank and file favored me with their support as a result. The terminal personnel had always felt that they were second-class citizens compared to the drivers, and I lifted them up. The experience was tantalizing. I began to dream about a move into politics.

  As part of my job, I used to travel to Montreal, the home base of some of the drivers represented by our local union. I’d go give a talk in front of a whole crowd in the city’s Laurentian Hotel ballroom. Most of the union guys up there were proud French-Canadians who didn’t speak much English, and I didn’t know a word of French. Somehow, I got through to them. I was getting unanimous approvals on the measures I put up for a vote.

  “What’s going on?” I asked one of the English-speaking drivers. “I don’t even speak the language. How come they trust me?”

  “They trust your eyes,” the driver said in a strong French accent.

  I thought I was hot shit, and I was—for about a minute. Humble as my success was, it all came apart during the long hot summer of 1967.

  Greyhound came down with a new directive that June. They wanted our drivers to submit to a different schedule. Instead of two days on, two days off, management ordained that henceforth, the schedule would be two days on and one day off. I thought this change would be unsafe for both drivers and passengers.

  The “past practice” clause in our contract stipulated that any alteration in the work rules had to go through a vote by the union membership. The Greyhound executives informed us that the vote didn’t need to happen. The new rules would go into effect without any input from the union.

  The Greyhound bus drivers decided they weren’t going to accept longer hours without a fight. As president of the local, I supported them. The national Amalgamated Transit Union, however, did not. They removed me from office pending an investigation. In protest, my coworkers went out on strike.

  Wildcat strike! That’s what it’s called when workers go off the job
without the backing of their union. They went out on June 21, 1967, the day after my thirty-fourth birthday. Greyhound had moved farther downtown into the Port Authority terminal by then, meaning we were smack-dab in the middle of Lincoln Tunnel traffic. The work stoppage completely disrupted the streets of midtown.

  The Port Authority became a battleground. Company supervisors stood facing off with a vocal squad of wildcat strikers. Buses arriving at the terminal stopped short, refusing to cross the picket lines. Soon enough, traffic backed up across Ninth Avenue. Cops screamed and supervisors yelled, but nothing moved.

  Some of those Montreal drivers I represented took it a step further and got violent about it. They waylaid Greyhound buses that were headed down the New York State Thruway to Manhattan, first carefully emptying the vehicles of passengers, then smashing windshields and attacking the buses with sledgehammers. It was sheer insanity.

  I was a little stunned by the pandemonium we had wrought. Unfortunately, given my nature, I was such a strong representative that I refused to bend. Nor would the workers. I stood solid as a rock, failing to do what a savvy politician might, which was keep a back door of compromise open.

  If I had handled the strike differently, if I had been amenable to concession and negotiation, perhaps I would be a politician today. Those who know how to play the game always leave themselves a way out. They’re able to emerge from difficult situations and come back to fight another day.

  I couldn’t do it. In my own way, I was an idealist. My mind balked at the idea of what the company supervisors might think of me if I caved. I didn’t want them to believe for one moment that my decisions were based on strategy and calculation. That to me was a lie. My position flowed from principle, not politics. So I stood my ground and locked that proverbial back door.