“Mom!” I said. “Diamonds! Look at all those diamonds! I don’t even want to know where you got them, all I know is that we’re rich!”
She said, “No, no. I’m sorry, Mel. I got them from Aunt Sadie. They’re not diamonds. They’re called rhinestones. They look like diamonds, but they’re not.”
I said, “Well, they’ve got to be worth something, Mom. Look how shiny they are!”
“Yeah…” she said, “unfortunately, they’re worth less than a penny.”
Sadie had provided a little machine for my mother, which clasped the rhinestone with little tin stars with a hoop on the back so that they could be sewn together. Bitterly disappointed that we were poor again, I trudged back to bed.
Although my mother was wonderful, she wasn’t always perfect. When I was just old enough to have lost my baby teeth and gotten my second and permanent set of teeth, I began having toothaches. （Probably from Tootsie Rolls, which I adored and chewed nonstop.） After a few nights of listening to moaning about my toothaches, my mother decided to take me to the Bible House to get them taken care of. The Bible House was a children’s dental quick fix for the lowest prices in New York. So we went across the Williamsburg Bridge to somewhere on the Lower East Side. The dentist examined my teeth and told my mother that I had two cavities on the upper side of my mouth. Their prices were simple: a dollar for fillings and fifty cents for extractions. Well, you can guess the rest.
My mother promptly had the two troublesome teeth yanked out. I yelled my head off but soon everything was better, no more toothaches. Because of those extractions, later on in life I think I became a poster boy for a new concept in dentistry—implants. To this day many years later, although most of my lower teeth are still mine, fit, and working, a lot of my upper teeth are implants. They’re fine, they look and work like teeth are supposed to. I can’t really blame my mother for making that foolish choice. If we were going to cast blame, I guess we’d have to blame it on the Depression. Every penny counted, and if truth be told, we didn’t have a lot of pennies.
I remember when I was only about five years old we had a fateful family meeting. My mother informed us that our neighbors down the hall, the Applebaums, were moving out of the building. Their soon-to-be-vacant apartment was in the front of the building and had a view of the street. This was in stark contrast to our apartment, which my mother complained had a dismal view of clotheslines strung with freshly washed mattress covers, sheets, pillowcases, etc.—which my mother in a disparaging voice called “wet wash.” My mother said, “I’m sick and tired of looking out the windows and seeing nothing but clotheslines full of wet wash and a backyard full of cats.”
Her greatest heart’s desire was to live in the front of the building to see what was going on in the world. Unfortunately, the Applebaums were paying eighteen dollars a month for that magnificent view of Herstein’s drugstore and Feingold’s candy store across the street. We were only paying sixteen dollars a month. We didn’t have the extra two dollars. What to do, what to do?
Irving immediately said, “We can do it, Mom. I’ll find some extra jobs.”
Lenny chimed in with, “I know there is a part-time job open at Mercury Messenger and Arnie Miller will lend me his bike.”
And Bernie said, “I’ll run telephone calls from Herstein’s drugstore to everybody in the neighborhood.”
I said, “I’ll run with you, Bernie!”
（In those days the pharmacist, Herstein, had three telephone booths in his drugstore and people were often called from the tenements to come answer phone calls at his store.）
Somehow between the four of us we would earn the extra two dollars a month. It was a little like a 1930s Clifford Odets play, but believe it or not, like the happy endings in those plays, we did it. We moved into the front apartment, and my mother was in her glory, leaning on a pillow on the windowsill and looking at what was going on in the world beneath her. It was wonderful for my mother, but turned out to be terrible for my brother Bernie…
One night, when I was about six years old, I woke up and I desperately had to pee. My brother Bernie was in the bathroom, so I banged on the door and said, “Bernie! I gotta pee! I gotta pee! I gotta pee!”
And through the door I heard, “I’m making! I’m making! I’m making!”
I think making is a lot bigger than peeing. So there’s no way I’m getting in. What are my options? The sink! But I’m too little to reach the sink and I can’t find anything to step up on. I also can’t find a bucket or anything else like that. I’m really getting desperate. I can’t hold it in anymore; I think I’m going to burst. What to do, what to do…Ah! I’ve got it! I see my answer. An open window. So I quickly run over and in a perfect arc I pee right out the front window.