Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art

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I watched for about twenty minutes, but when it started getting mushy (kissing), I took the flashlight out of my jacket and began shining it onto the screen. When people looked around to see which punk was doing this, I shut the flashlight off, fast. When the audience settled down again, I switched the flashlight back on. I started making circles on the screen – my beam of light competing with the beam from the projector. I got such a feeling of joy from doing this, until the manager came down the aisle with a horrible look on his face and told me to come with him. I followed him into his office.

“What’s your name?”

“Jerry Silberman. Please don’t tell my father.”

“Give me the flashlight.”

He took my father’s flashlight and kicked me out of the theater.

It was drizzling outside. I felt ashamed, standing under the overhang in front of the theater, wondering whether or not to tell my dad about his flashlight and about the manager kicking me out. I decided it would be safer if I waited till my dad noticed the missing flashlight himself … and that might not happen for months. He was born in Russia but came to Milwaukee with his family when he was eleven. He wasn’t dumb, but he was very innocent, and I knew what I could get by with if I wanted to evade a situation.

After I waited in the rain for an hour and ten minutes, my father drove up. I jumped into the car.

“So – how was the movie?” he asked.

“It was great, Daddy. It was really good.”

I started taking acting lessons with Herman Gottlieb the day after my thirteenth birthday.

I was eleven when I learned about sex – from my cousin Buddy, naturally. We were both in a co-ed summer camp. I couldn’t believe what he was saying.

“Oh, Buddy, what’re you talking about?”

“It’s the truth! You put your poopy into her thing – honest to God.”

“Well, how could that ever make babies?”

“Because you’ve got to put your germs into her germs. That’s how you do it.”

“… Well, what if you’re embarrassed? I’m not going to take it out in front of a girl.”

“Are you telling me you wouldn’t like to show it to her if she showed you her whatcha-call-it?”

“… Well …”

Then Cousin Buddy told this crazy idea to Alan Pinkus, another one of our friends. Alan was more shocked than I was.

“You’re nuts.”

“Well, how do you think you get babies, Alan? Do you think the stork brings them?”

Buddy tried his best to make Alan feel like a baby. Alan was embarrassed.

“No, of course not…. I just thought it came from … putting your saliva in with her saliva.”

“You mean spitting at each other?” Buddy laughed so hard that I started laughing too. That was when I figured that Buddy must be right. He was an expert about these kinds of things.

We never talked about sex in my family when I was growing up. The only time I came close to asking about it was when I was in second grade and I was walking home from school with two other boys. We saw a naked lady through her living room window, lying on a sofa, scratching her tush while she read a book. When she saw three little boys staring at her, she jumped up and closed the curtains. We ran away, and I heard one of the boys use the word “fuck.” When I got home, I didn’t tell my mother about the naked lady, but I did ask her what “fuck” meant.

“You want to know what ‘fuck’ means?” she asked, as she pulled me into the bathroom and turned on the faucet. She ran a bar of Ivory Soap under the water and stuck it in my mouth. “There! Now you know what fuck means.”

I started crying, and then, as was her habit until she died, she started crying and begging me to forgive her. Begging and begging, until I finally went into her arms and she hugged me and kissed my tears and kept repeating, “I’m sorry, honey. I was wrong. Can you ever forgive me?”

My mother had a distant cousin who lived in Los Angeles and whose thirteen-year-old son was going to a place called Black/Foxe Military Institute, run by retired Colonel Black and retired Colonel Foxe. My mother’s cousin said she thought it was a wonderful place, and it was in Hollywood, California. What she didn’t mention was that her son was going to Black/Foxe as a day student, so he went home each afternoon after school.

Since my mother was ill and felt that she and my father couldn’t give me the kind of training that I needed, now that I was thirteen – she thought I still didn’t know how babies were made, and I didn’t have the guts to tell her that I did – she got it into her head that Black/Foxe Military Institute might be the perfect answer. I think she was influenced by a movie called Diplomatic Courier, starring Tyrone Power. She thought that if I went to Black/Foxe, I would not only learn how to dance, play bridge and play the piano, but also how to be at ease with girls and learn everything there is to know about sex. So off I went to Hollywood. Something else my mother didn’t know was that almost every boy who lived at Black/Foxe came from a broken home – mostly they were sons of parents who wanted to get rid of their kids.

On my first night at Black/Foxe, I was assigned to a room on the second floor of the dormitory. When I walked in I was greeted by a short, tough-looking boy with acne all over his face.

“Hi, I’m Jonesy,” he said. “We’re going to be roommates for a long time so I’m taking this bed and you take that one.”

When I got into my brand-new pajamas that first night, Jonesy started smiling at me and said, “Lemme corn-hole ya.” I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. Then he told me to just lie down on my bed, facedown. He got on top of me and put his penis between my thighs and started pumping away until he had an orgasm. His “jizz” went onto my new pajamas, not into me. After he saw how upset I was, he never tried to do that again. He just jerked off in the closet.

This was 1946. When word got out that I was Jewish, some of the bigger boys started coming into my room and pounding me on the chest and on my arms. They didn’t hit me in the face, and I was glad of that, but I couldn’t understand why they wanted to beat me up. They never said why. One tall jerk named Macintosh barged into my room one day and started dancing around me – like an Indian in the movies, circling a covered wagon – and he kept singing, “We want the country! We want the country!” It scared me, but he didn’t hit me, so I was okay. I remembered seeing some movie about initiation tests when you got into a fraternity, so I figured it was some kind of tradition to beat up the newest cadets. Then I found out that I was the only Jewish boy at Black/Foxe, so I finally understood the reason. But it still didn’t make any sense.

I went to the sergeant’s room at the end of the hall. He was a real sergeant who took the job at Black/Foxe when he retired from the army. I told him about all the beatings and asked him what I should do.

“You want them to stop beating you up?”

“Yes, sir.”

“The next time one of them comes into your room, pick up a chair and smash it over his head.”

“… But … I can’t do that. What if I killed him?”

“You asked me what to do. I told you.”

I never went to him for help again.

There were several Mexican boys at Black/Foxe who came from very wealthy families. In those days bubble gum was very hard to come by, but the Mexican boys always seemed to have some. Instead of charging the other boys one penny – which was the market price for one of those pink bubble gum squares – they would charge one dollar. The tallest Mexican boy kept trying to sell me bubble gum, and I kept telling him that I didn’t have that kind of extra money. Then he would say, “I give you a bubble gum if you jerk me off.” I would laugh and pretend that he was making a joke, but I knew he wasn’t joking.

On Fridays we always had a dress parade, which meant tie, jacket, hat, and well-shined shoes. We marched on the Black/Foxe drill field, which bordered on Melrose Avenue and Wilcox. People in the neighborhood would stand along the sidewalk each Friday afternoon to watch all the cute young cadets go through their routines.

As we were marching, one flamboyant, very likable young boy named Ronnie, who had a shock of bright red hair, kept telling me that he was going to be a big star one day. I would say that I was studying acting with Herman Gottlieb, who was a great teacher in Milwaukee. Ronnie would just answer, “You’ll never make it, Silberman. I’ll bet you anything you want that I’ll be famous before you are.” People who live in Hollywood are different from other people.

On Thursday afternoons I went to my piano lesson. The teacher was a nice-enough man but not a very good teacher. He assigned me just one song, called, ironically, “Nobody Knows the Troubles I’ve Seen.” I don’t remember if I ever told him about the troubles I was having with the other boys; I don’t think so. And I know he wasn’t that good a teacher to have purposely assigned that song to me as a way of using my unhappiness to help me play it better.

I wrote to my father and told him about all of this stuff, but he never showed any of those letters to my mother, I suppose for the same reason that I didn’t write to her about it.

At Thanksgiving I called my father and asked if I could come home for Christmas vacation. He said yes. When it came time to leave – for some reason I can’t explain – I needed to say good-bye to Jonesy. My bags were packed, and the bus was waiting downstairs, but I searched all over the second floor for him. When I finally found him, he shook my hand and said, “So long, pal.” Jonesy and I were never friends, and he was a jerk, but he never beat me up, and he had acne. I don’t know why I needed to say good-bye to him. I’m sure it wasn’t because he corn-holed me. I do remember that on one occasion he shared a box of candy with me that his aunt had sent him. Maybe it was because someone told him that chocolate wasn’t good for acne.

My father and Corinne picked me up at the airport in Chicago, and we drove back to Milwaukee. I had on my blue, sort of itchy dress uniform, but I wanted to be wearing it when I walked into the house and saw my mother again.

She was waiting in our living room. When I walked in, she hugged and kissed me. Then she asked me to play something for her on the piano. Oh, God. I didn’t think it would come that soon. I wanted to put it off. I made up some kind of flimsy excuse about not having practiced for several weeks, but she wanted to hear me play “just a little bit.” So I sat down at the piano and played “Nobody Knows the Troubles I’ve Seen,” and I played it terribly, with a hundred mistakes. She got up and went into her bedroom. I began to cry. My dad said maybe I should change my clothes and get ready for dinner. I took off my shirt and went into her bedroom to explain how I only had one lesson a week and how little time there was for me to practice, when she suddenly gasped. She was staring at my body. There were black-and-blue bruises on my chest and arms. My dad finally told her some of the troubles I had described in my letters. She started crying and begging me to forgive her, until I finally went into her arms and she kissed my tears and kept repeating, “I’m sorry, honey. Please forgive me. I was wrong. Can you ever forgive me?”

I never went back to Black/Foxe.

When I was fifteen, I went to a downtown movie theater to see Great Expectations, but before the movie started, they showed a short subject called:

VINCENT VAN GOGH

I had no idea who Vincent van Gogh was – I’d never even heard of him. Twenty-three of his oil paintings flooded the screen, one after the other, in full color. I don’t know why they call it “dumbfounded” – I think they should call it “dumblosted,” because after seeing the paintings, I was lost. When I walked out of the movie theater I started thinking about my second-grade teacher, Miss Bernard, who used to put up paintings from almost all of the other boys and girls in my class on the classroom walls – paintings that she considered worthy – but she never put up one of mine. She never told me why or gave me an encouraging word, but I got the message: “You’re no good at art, Jerry.”

The following Saturday I took an early train to Chicago to see the van Gogh exhibit at the Chicago Art Institute. I could only stay for an hour because I had tickets for the two o’clock matinée to see Judith Anderson in Medea. My critical judgment wasn’t fine-tuned yet; I thought the play was just okay. Then I walked to a theater about a half a mile away to see the five o’clock showing of Laurence Olivier’s film version of Hamlet. That was okay, too. Hamlet let out at 8:10 P.M. so I ran – as fast as I could eat my hot dog – to see the 8:30 P.M. stage performance of A Streetcar Named Desire, starring Uta Hagen and Anthony Quinn. That was more than okay.

I think what I did was dumb – crowding all those great things into one day – but Milwaukee was a big “small town” in those days, and it would never have had a van Gogh exhibit or Medea or A Streetcar Named Desire with Uta Hagen. Today perhaps, but not in 1948.

My mother had wanted to be a pianist before she got married. When I told her about the van Gogh exhibit and how much I loved him, she gave me a little money to buy some paints. I took the bus to an art supply shop downtown and bought eight tubes of oil paint and two frames of stretched canvas, 18 × 24 inches apiece. The owner of the store helped me pick out a couple of brushes and advised me to take a small bottle of linseed oil. I also bought a print of a van Gogh painting for $3.50. It was called Lady in a Cornfield. When I got home, I set up shop in our basement, mounted the van Gogh print on a chair, and painted Lady in a Cornfield. My mother liked it so much that she had it framed and hung it on our living room wall, next to her piano. I’ve been painting ever since. So you didn’t win, Miss Bernard. You didn’t win.

MY FIRST PLAY

When I was still fifteen, I auditioned for the Milwaukee Players, which was a very good community theater that put on big productions of classics and also gave lessons in makeup. I passed my audition, and the first play I acted in – in front of a paying audience – was Romeo and Juliet. I played Balthasar, Romeo’s manservant, and I had only two lines, but I also had a fencing scene, which I loved. It wasn’t real fencing, of course; it was just sort of “try to make it look real” fencing.

My next part was the Messenger in Much Ado About Nothing. One evening, while we were in production, I got to the theater early and had just started putting on my makeup when one of the male dancers came in, very bouncy and cheerful. He had always been very friendly, but when he saw that we were alone, he started behaving strangely. I had never met a homosexual before – I had only heard Corinne talk about what were then called fairies – but this handsome dancer, who must have been at least ten years older than I was – started chasing me around the children’s classroom that we used as a makeup room. I dodged in and out of the rows of little desks, trying my best to make the dancer believe that I believed that he was just playing a game. Just as I was getting frightened, two other actors came in, said, “Hi,” and started putting on their makeup. I sat down at my desk and started putting on makeup again. I didn’t look at the dancer until he knelt down next to me.

“You know I was just joking around, don’t you?” he whispered.

“Of course! Are you kidding?”

I wish I had acted in Much Ado About Nothing as well as I did for the dancer.