Between a Heart and a Rock Place Read online

  So there I was, a Polish-Irish girl who wanted to be Italian and whose best friend, Brenda Cherney, was from one of the three Jewish families in the area. When I wasn’t building forts with the boys, I was playing paper dolls with Brenda. She was my outlet for all things girlie. Together we were starstruck little girls who worshiped glamour. We loved all the movie stars—Claudette Colbert, Cyd Charisse, Barbara Stanwyck, Doris Day, Judy Garland, and Katharine Hepburn. I thought that Maureen O’Hara was just the most beautiful woman in the world, that Sophia Loren was perfect and so Italian. But my absolute favorite was Audrey Hepburn, with her striking looks and high-fashion image in her films. No one looked like those people where I grew up. I obsessed over movies from the thirties and forties, admiring the women of that era for their grace and strength. What I didn’t like was their passivity. I thought if you could combine being beautiful and being capable you could rule the world.

  Brenda was one of the first people whom I listened to “popular” music with. We loved listening to 45s on my Victrola, and I kept the records in a little case with a poodle on it. The first song I remember buying was “The Twist” when I was about five or six. But I listened to all kinds of music. When we were a little older, we got into the Beatles, and became obsessed. The only fight we ever had was over the fact that she knocked my imitation leather “John Lennon” hat into a mud puddle. I loved Tony Bennett and Frank Sinatra, not to mention big band music and show tunes. My family’s selections were not always to my taste. They loved Jerry Vale (I heard “Volare” every day), and my mom and Ruthie listened to Perry Como, Andy Williams, and Louis Prima. I adored Louie Prima even then, but even though I wasn’t as sold on their choices, I learned to appreciate all sorts of styles.

  And of course, since Brenda and I were both boy-crazy, we talked nonstop about boys. I remember having a little friend, Bobby Leto, in the first grade, kissing him by the fountain, and then running off giggling about it. That was about the extent of what boy-crazy meant in those days. Kisses and giggles. But my second boyfriend was important, because he was my first great Italian love, Vincent Pizzello. Oh, how I loved him, with that black hair and those sparkling dark eyes.

  Because of our neighborhood, I developed a great respect for other people’s religions. Brenda’s mother, Ida, taught me how to keep kosher, and I loved Hanukkah as well as Christmas. I enjoyed the traditions of both religions and the traditions of the various ethnic groups, the Germans, Polish, Irish, and Italians. In Lindenhurst, you embraced everyone’s heritage, and I loved that diversity. There wasn’t an issue about any of it. I’m not saying there was no prejudice, because I doubt you can ever completely get away from that. But for the kids, differences were simple and often about food or who owned the rarest baseball card. You ate poppy-seed cakes at your Polish friends’ homes, potato pancakes with your Jewish friends, and good bread and pasta with the Italians.

  Whether it was celebrating Christmas or Hanukkah, I loved the holiday season. I came by Christmas madness as naturally as Andy came by his anxiety—by following Mom’s lead. Christmas was one time when she threw caution to the wind. All year long we worried about running out of toilet paper, and then came Christmas. There were presents for everyone, wonderful foods, visiting with the family in Brooklyn. A similar phenomenon happened every summer. Suddenly we had money to take a wonderful vacation to a hotel with a pool or near a beach.

  It was only years later, when they finally moved from the Lindenhurst house, that I found out these summer trips and Christmases were financed by constant loans they’d taken out against their home. By the time they moved, the loans had built to over $45,000 on a house that had originally cost them $7,000 because they had borrowed against it so many times. So not only had they not paid off a dime of the original house note, they were deep in the hole. For years they’d given us vacations and presents, never thinking about what the consequences would be down the road. This simultaneously endeared them to me and drove me crazy. Personally, I could’ve done without a week in Florida for a little more peace at home, but it made them happy to give us these things.

  And so twice a year they’d given the family a big time. That’s what my parents were like. They worked and worried all year, then sunk themselves in debt in hopes of giving us kids some great memories. When you think there’s no chance of things ever really getting better, you go for anything you can and hope for the best.

  THE WHEELS THAT WOULD ultimately pay off my parents’ house and allow us to buy more than two toilet paper rolls at a time started turning when I was pretty young. I was always something of a ham, singing little songs and dancing around when I was a kid, entertaining the family and getting rewarded with a hug. I usually initiated the show. The Brooklyn relatives would be on Long Island for one of our barbecues, and I’d be pestering everyone.

  “Let me sing a song! Watch this!”

  The older folks would say, “Okay, okay. Sing us a song.”

  I’d show off, and everyone would clap. “That’s great, Patti!” I even sold concessions, buying penny candies at Brenda’s uncle’s candy store and selling them to my relatives and neighbors during the performance. Then the uncles and aunts would give me hugs, and I’d run off with the cousins to play.

  But in the fourth grade music went from being a sideshow to being a major part of my life. That was the first year I was old enough to sing in the grade school choir. On the first day of choir that school year, the teacher had everyone sing so she could assess our vocal ranges. After I sang, I noticed the choir teacher looking at me with an odd expression. After choir, she approached me.

  “What’s your name? I want to call your mother.”

  Oh no. I thought I was in trouble. I never got in trouble at school. Breaking into a thinly veiled panic, I went with her to the phone, and while I held my breath in one of those horrified Doris Day–movie moments, the teacher dialed Mom at work.

  “Do you know about this child?” she asked my mother.

  What in the world? I was paralyzed with fear. I couldn’t imagine causing a problem for my parents. My aunt Ruthie, with her smoking and sneaking out with boys, was the troublemaker in our house. What had I done?

  “Patti has a wonderful voice, Mrs. Andrzejewski. A great voice. I think she should be encouraged in music.”

  Whew, it was the opposite of trouble. Instead I was actually having someone validate what I believed to be true: I knew how to sing.

  My parents were thrilled with this news. My mother already knew that I could sing, but she’d never interfered, never wanted to impose her views on me. By this age I was fiercely independent, and she was always careful to give me my space. But from then on everybody was all over me like the plague when it came to music. I was groomed to represent the school at all the local and regional competitions. I spent extra hours after school working with the choir teacher on voice training. I loved it. I was that little Andrzejewski girl who could sing. I practiced all the time in my upstairs bedroom with the window open, much to the frustration of a boy named Joey who lived across the street. He would throw rocks at my screen and yell up to me, “Andrzejewski, shut up!” Of course, I only sang louder.

  Maybe it was to help encourage my new interest in music, but the year I was ten my parents got me a red transistor radio for Christmas. Even I couldn’t have dreamed up as fine a gift as that red radio, and I couldn’t wait to open it—for the second time. By this time I knew that Santa wasn’t the one delivering presents on Christmas morning, so I usually went on a hunt to find where Mom was hiding the packages. That year they happened to be under her bed. I got the present out and carefully opened it when she was at work.

  I gasped so loud that I’m surprised my grandmother didn’t hear me and rush into my parents’ bedroom. There it was: a bright red plastic transistor radio. My hands were shaking so hard with the excitement of it that I could barely get the radio wrapped back up. But I did, and she never had a clue (or at least she never let on) that I’d been into her stas
h of gifts. Of course, that made the time before Christmas drag so much I thought it would never come. But it did, and I acted my part perfectly—shrieking with surprise. The “ohhh”s and “ahhh”s. I was so sneaky. That radio opened up whole new worlds of music to Brenda and me. Suddenly the Stones and the Beatles were a turn of the dial away.

  My parents didn’t like their music quite that loud. And for quite a while in 1964, all they heard was the Beatles blasting out of my room. I would hear Dad say, “Make her stop that!” Finally Mom would shout: “This is ridiculous! I know all the words to those songs! Shut your door.”

  Listening to those bands was mind-blowing for me. They were like nothing that I was being trained to sing and nothing that I’d studied. I knew no one who was involved in rock music. No guitar players, no one rehearsing in a garage. I knew about shows that played in New York City, because sometimes the school took us on musical outings. I knew about being in plays, about glee club, about choral groups at the school. And it was through one of those grade school performances that I met a woman who would become almost a surrogate mother to me, most assuredly my musical mentor.

  She walked up to me after my solo performance during the spring concert when I was in sixth grade.

  “Do you know who I am?” she asked.

  “No,” I said, although I knew she must be somebody because she had a definite air of authority, of importance.

  “My name is Georgia Ruel. I’m the high school choir director, and in four years you are mine.”

  Her words alone scared me to death; I couldn’t imagine what she meant. As it turned out, what Georgia Ruel meant was business. She took it upon herself to see that I was classically trained, that I had the scholarships and grants for lessons my family couldn’t afford. She didn’t wait for high school, either. She started helping me get the money for private lessons right away, and for the next six years I received training that was as good as anyone could buy.

  The woman who took immediate charge of my training, Emma Foos, was kind of a stern taskmaster. She was German and could barely speak English. She reminded me of those old black-and-white movies where women of a certain age have boobs that hang right down to the waistline of their housedresses. But she understood classical voice training, and she kicked my butt. Emma had a pointer that she waved around for emphasis and direction. She also used it to whack my diaphragm if I wasn’t giving the exercises my all. She was dead serious about music, and she reminded me of this fact every single day.

  For the most part, things went on like that for a few years. Thanks to Georgia Ruel I learned and progressed, while things at home stayed pretty much the way they had always been. That is, until I was fourteen and my only real childhood trauma began to take shape: my parents split up.

  At the time my brother and I were completely in the dark about any troubles. Of course, there were always the money problems, and my father was more exhausted than usual. But Andy and I were living in a vacuum, clueless about any storm brewing. There was no fighting, not even an argument that I heard. Everything was just as it had been for years. They worked, came home, and collapsed. I didn’t have any idea anything was wrong until I watched my dad walk out the front door carrying two suitcases. I was in a complete state of shock when he left. I just stood there with my mouth open and watched him drive away. And when I finally got myself together enough to demand an answer, Mom’s explanation was short.

  “Your dad and I are getting a divorce.”

  The words seemed so foreign it took me a few minutes to realize she’d actually said them out loud. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t know what was happening. Not only was I shocked, I was angry.

  Perhaps even more shocking was that thirty days later they were back together. They’d gotten a divorce, and then suddenly my dad was back in the picture. He moved home, they remarried, and my mother acted as if nothing had happened. If anything she was a little dismissive about the whole ordeal, and it was never something that we spoke about. I, however, was livid, with the kind of righteous anger fourteen-year-olds are particularly good at. (I should note that my parents then stayed happily married until my father’s passing in 2009.)

  I WAS JUST STARTING school at Lindenhurst High when my parents divorced and remarried. Instead of using all my pent-up anger as an excuse to act out, I turned more and more to music. Basically, I started high school pissed off and singing for Georgia Ruel.

  Of course, when I wasn’t singing, I was still completely boy-crazy. My first great teenage love was named Shaun Lynam. He carried my books; we held hands in the hallway and gazed at each other. We were such an item in junior high and the early years of high school. We spent every evening together doing our homework; we went to the movies, went ice-skating, and of course, went to Crud Beach. I went to all the ball games to watch him play basketball, and he came to watch me sing at school events.

  We were hot for each other—we did everything imaginable except “the deed.” When we finally broke up it was because we both knew we were on the verge of taking our relationship farther, and at fourteen, neither of us wanted to take that step yet. If we kept on seeing each other, it would only lead to trouble, so we both agreed to cut it off.

  I liked having one boyfriend at a time, and I wouldn’t have been out slutting around for anything. But I didn’t mind tarting up my image. I started high school in disguise, dressing in what I’d call provocative preppie. I loved those pleated plaid skirts and the madras shirts. Underneath it all, I was closer to Sally Field in Gidget or Marlo Thomas in That Girl, but I swaggered through the halls looking more like Britney Spears in her first video.

  We had a dress code at Lindenhurst High, so I couldn’t leave the house looking like that. I had to leave my skirt down below my knees until I got to school. Then I’d be in the bathroom rolling that sucker up as high as I thought I could get by with. (At Lindenhurst, the seniors always gave the freshmen gifts at the end of the school year, and that year the senior boys gave me a pair of bloomers because I wore such short skirts. Mission accomplished.) It wasn’t that I was fishing for attention, because I wasn’t; I just had my own look. Even though people would have described me as cute, I was skinny and flat chested with thin hair—nothing like the Italian goddesses who were my friends and populated the school like beautiful ripe figs.

  The halls were patrolled by the Matron, a woman who watched us like a hawk, checking to see who’d been rolling up their skirts and demanding we roll them back to a respectable length. If someone had not rolled up her skirt, if it really was too short, the Matron swung into action. You had to kneel down in front of her, and if your hem didn’t touch the ground, she pulled a seam ripper out of her pocket and let out the hem herself! Then you walked around the rest of the day ragged but right.

  Bangs were another sore point with the Matron. I wore them just the way she hated them, right down over my eyelashes. I loved those long bangs that the English models had and thick eyeliner like Sophia Loren wore. I spent most of my time in the halls looking around to see if she was coming so I could brush my bangs to the side. If the Matron thought your bangs were hanging too low, she had another weapon in her pocket: a pair of scissors! She made you stand up against the lockers while she cut your bangs into Mamie Eisenhower territory. No way was I going to let that happen, so I was watchful at every turn. (Can you imagine what would happen today if some adult hall monitor ripped out the hem of a girl’s skirt or whacked off her bangs?)

  My entire mission with this look was, of course, to make the boys take notice. And they did, especially in choir. When you first walked into the choir room, the singers were lined up in this order: basses, tenors, altos, and sopranos. So I had to parade in front of everyone to get to my spot. I’d start the walk, my short skirt flipping, and the basses and tenors would start with the catcalls: Andrew-eski. They were actually yelling “Andrzejewski” except that they couldn’t really pronounce it. I’d bat my nicely made-up eyelashes and look sassy.

  My high scho
ol experience was split up into two parts. Boys were pretty important. I loved to flirt and tease, but I wasn’t a backseat type of girl. And then there was music. While I did try sports here and there, Georgia Ruel was having none of it. Swim class? Forget it. The pool might be too cold and I might get a sore throat. Cheerleading? No way. Yelling outside in cold weather might damage my voice.

  Georgia also helped to keep me in line when it came to drinking and smoking. My mother was pretty in the dark about what other kids were doing, but Georgia, she knew what was up. I would have been dead if she found out that I’d smoked even just one cigarette, but I wasn’t really interested in smoking. Similarly I never had more than a beer or two, because drinking never appealed to me. With the memory of Ruthie’s first husband fresh in my mind, I couldn’t see the fun in being wasted—only the danger. Georgia reinforced my natural inclinations. With the exception of an occasional highball on New Year’s Eve, neither of my parents drank or smoked. Despite being a teenager, my responsible nature just had a way of kicking in when it came to stuff like that. The one time Brenda and I got drunk it was a disaster. It was New Year’s Eve, when we were fourteen. I was spending the night and Brenda’s parents when out to a party. We managed to consume half a bottle of Seagrams 7, and then spent the remainder of the night alternately trying to stop the room from spinning and throwing up. After that my drinking days were over. Of course, I had friends who did those things, and that was fine, but I knew it wasn’t for me.

  With no sports, drinking, or smoking, boys and music mostly summed up high school—though there was more music than boys. Every possible minute was devoted to music. Georgia saw to that. She envisioned me becoming a classical singer or going into musical theater. Even though I loved rock music, we never even talked about it. It wasn’t just Georgia Ruel’s traditional outlook that caused us to avoid the topic of rock; I couldn’t envision myself ever singing rock because my voice was all wrong for it.