Вуди Аллен - Apropos of Nothing

But enough about me and what a lowlife I started out as. I was filling you in on my parents and still haven’t come to the part where Mom gives birth to her little miscreant. My father led a charmed life and my mother—who by necessity had to handle all the serious problems of daily survival—was all business and not fun or interesting. She was intelligent but not book smart, which she’d be the first to tell you, proud of her “common sense.” I frankly found her too strict and pushy, but it was because she wanted me to “amount to something.” She glimpsed the results of an IQ test I took at five or six, and while I won’t tell you the figure, it impressed my mother. It was recommended that I be sent off to Hunter College special school for sharp kids, but the long train ride every day from Brooklyn into Manhattan was too grueling for my mother or my aunt, who alternated taking me on the subway. So they plopped me back into P.S. 99, a school for backward teachers. I hated all schools and probably would’ve gotten little or nothing out of Hunter had I stayed. My mother was forever browbeating me, telling me I had such a high IQ, how could I be so complete an idiot in school? Example of my scholastic idiocy: In high school I had two years of Spanish. Upon entering New York University, I hustled my way into being allowed to take freshman Spanish—like it was totally new to me. Can you believe I failed it?

Anyhow, my mother’s smarts did not extend to culture, and so neither she nor my father, who never rose academically above baseball, pinochle, or Hopalong Cassidy movies, never once, not one single time, ever took me to a show or a museum. I first saw a Broadway show when I was seventeen, and I discovered paintings on my own playing hooky and needing a warm place to hang out, and the museums were free or cheap. I can safely say my father and mother never saw a play or visited a gallery or read a book. My father owned one book, The Gangs of New York . It was the only book I browsed growing up, and it imbued in me a fascination with gangsters, criminals, and crime. I knew gangsters like most boys knew ball players. I knew baseball players, too, but not like I knew Gyp the Blood, Greasy Thumb Jake Guzik, and Tick-Tock Tannenbaum. Oh, I also knew movie stars, thanks to my cousin Rita, who papered her walls with color portraits from Modern Screen . I’m saving writing about her as she was one of the true bright spots of my growing up and deserves some special space. But in addition to Bogart and Betty Grable and how many wins Cy Young had and how many RBIs Hack Wilson hit in one season and who pitched two consecutive no-hitters for Cincinnati, I knew Abe Reles could sing but not fly—plus where Owney Madden wound up and why an icepick was the weapon of choice for Pittsburgh Phil Strauss.

In addition to The Gangs of New York , my entire library consisted of comic books. I read only comic books until I was in my later teens. My literary heroes were not Julien Sorel, Raskolnikov, or the local yokels of Yoknapatawpha County; they were Batman, Superman, the Flash, the Sub-Mariner, Hawkman. Yes, and Donald Duck and Bugs Bunny and Archie Andrews. Folks, you are reading the autobiography of a misanthropic gangster-loving illiterate; an uncultivated loner who sat in front of a three-way mirror practicing with a deck of cards so he could palm off an ace of spades, render it invisible from any angle, and hustle some pots. Yes, I eventually got blown away by Cezanne’s heavy apples and Pissarro’s rainy Parisian boulevards, but as I said, only because I would cut school and needed succor on those snowy winter mornings. There I was at fifteen, on the hook, confronted by Matisse and Chagall, by Nolde, Kirchner, and Schmidt-Rotluff, by Guernica and the frantic wall-sized Jackson Pollock, by the Beckmann triptych and Louise Nevelson’s dark black sculpture. Then lunch in the MOMA cafeteria, followed by a vintage movie downstairs in the screening room. Carole Lombard, William Powell, Spencer Tracy. Doesn’t it sound like more fun than Miss Schwab’s obnoxious picklepuss demanding the date of the Stamp Act or the capital of Wyoming? Then the lies at home, the excuses next day at school, the hustling, the tap dancing, the forged notes, caught again, parental exasperation. “But you have such a high IQ.” And by the way, reader, it’s not so high, but you’d think from my mother’s cri de cœur I could explain string theory. You can tell from my movies; while some are entertaining, no idea I ever had is going to start any new religion.

Plus—I’m not ashamed to admit it—I didn’t like reading. Unlike my sister, who enjoyed it, I was a lazy boy who found no joy in cracking a book. And why would I have? The radio and movies were so much more exciting. They were less demanding and more vivid. In school, they never knew how to introduce you to reading so you’d learn to enjoy it. The books and stories they chose were dull, witless, antiseptic. No one in those carefully chosen stories for young boys and girls compared to Plastic Man or Captain Marvel. You think a hot-to-trot kid (again, defying Freud, I never had a latency period) who likes gangster movies with Bogart and Cagney and cheap, sexy blondes is going to go a hundred over “The Gift of the Magi”? So she sells her hair to buy him a watch fob and he sells his watch to buy combs for her hair. The moral I drew was you’re always safer giving cash. I liked comic books, sparse as the prose might have been, and when school later introduced me to Shakespeare they managed to force-feed it in such a way that when it was over you never wanted to hear another hark , prithee , or but soft as long as you lived.

Anyhow, I didn’t read until I was at the tail end of high school and my hormones had really kicked in and I first noticed those young women with the long, straight hair, who wore no lipstick, little makeup, dressed in black turtlenecks and skirts with black tights, and carried big leather bags holding copies of The Metamorphosis , which they had annotated themselves in the margins with things like “Yes, very true,” or “See Kierkegaard.” For whatever irrational carnal singularity, those were the ones who captured my heart, and when I called for a date and asked if they’d like to go to a movie or a baseball game and they wanted rather to hear Segovia or catch the Ionesco play off Broadway, there’d be a long awkward pause before I said, “Let me get back to you,” then scrambled to look up who Segovia and Ionesco were. It’s fair to say these women were not eagerly awaiting the next issue of Captain America or even the next Mickey Spillane, the sole poet I could quote.

When I did finally date one of these delectable bohemian little kumquats, it was brutal for both of us. For her, because early on in the evening she would realize she was stuck with an illiterate imbecile who didn’t seem to know what position Stephen Daedalus played, and brutal for me because I became aware that I was indeed a submental and if I ever hoped to kiss those unlipsticked lips or see her a second time I was going to have to actually delve into literature deeper than Kiss Me Deadly . I couldn’t get by just on anecdotes about Lucky Luciano or Rube Waddell. I was going to have to grab a look at Balzac, and Tolstoy, and Eliot so I could hold up my end of the conversation and not have to take the young lady home, as she claimed suddenly to be stricken with a case of Bronze John. Meanwhile, I would wind up at Dubrow’s Cafeteria to commiserate with the other strikeout victims of Saturday night.

But those fiascos lay in the future. Now that you have some idea of my parents I’ll mention my only sibling, my sister. Then I’ll double back and get born so the tale can really take flight.