The Other Side of Me

One day when I got home from school, Otto and Natalie were screaming obscenities at each other. I decided I couldn't stand it any longer. I needed help. I went to my Aunt Pauline, Natalie's sister. She was a sweet, loving dumpling of a woman, pragmatic and intelligent.

When I arrived, Pauline took one look at me and said, "What's the matter?"

I was in tears. "It's Nat and Otto. They fight all the time. I don't know what to do."

Pauline frowned. "They're fighting in front of you?"

I nodded.

"All right. I'll tell you what you do. They both love you, Sidney, and they don't want to hurt you, so the next time they start to fight, you go up to them and tell them that you don't want them to ever fight in front of you again. Will you do that?"

I nodded. "Yes."

Aunt Pauline's advice worked.

Natalie and Otto were in the middle of a shouting match when I walked up to them and said, "Don't do this to me. Please don't fight in front of me."

They were both immediately contrite. Natalie said, "Of course. You're right, darling. It won't happen again."

And Otto said, "I'm sorry, Sidney. We have no right to put our problems on you."

After that, the arguments continued, but at least they were muffled by the bedroom walls.

We were constantly on the move from city to city, with Otto looking for work. When someone would ask me what my father did for a living, my answer always depended on where we were. In Texas, he worked in a jewelry store; in Chicago, it was a clothing store; in Arizona, it was a depleted silver mine; in Los Angeles, he sold siding.

Twice a year, Otto would take me shopping for clothes. The "shop" was a truck parked in an alley, filled with beautiful suits. They were so new that they still had their price tags on them and they were remarkably inexpensive.

In 1925, my brother, Richard, was born. I was eight years old. We were living in Gary, Indiana, at that time, and I remember how thrilled I was to have a brother, an ally against the dark forces of my life. It was one of the most exciting events of my life. I had big plans for us, and I was looking forward to all the things we were going to do together as he got older. Meanwhile, I raced him around Gary in his buggy.

During the Depression, our financial situation was something out of Alice in Wonderland. Otto would be away, working on one of his fantasy mega-deals, while Natalie, Richard, and I lived in a dreary, cramped apartment. Suddenly Otto would appear and announce that he had just made a deal that paid him a thousand dollars a week. Before we knew it, we would be living in a grand penthouse in another city. It seemed like a dream.

It always turned out to be a dream, because a few months later, Otto's deal would have vanished and we would be back living in a little apartment again, in a different city.

I felt like a displaced person. If we had had a family crest, it would have been a picture of a moving van. Before I was seventeen, I had lived in eight cities and attended eight grammar schools and three high schools. I was always the new kid on the block - an outsider.

Otto was a great salesman and when I started at a new school, in another city, he would always take me to see the principal on the first day, and almost invariably he would talk him into promoting me a grade. The result of that was that I was always the youngest boy in the class, creating another barrier to making friends. Consequently I became shy, pretending that I enjoyed being a loner. It was a very disruptive life. Each time I would start to make friends, it was time to say goodbye.

Where the money came from I don't know, but Natalie bought a little secondhand spinet piano, and she insisted I start taking piano lessons.

"Why?" Otto asked.

"You'll see," Natalie said. "Sidney even has the hands of a musician."

I enjoyed the lessons, but they ended a few months later, when we moved to Detroit.

Otto's proudest boast was that he never read a book in his life. It was Natalie who instilled the love of reading in me. Otto was concerned because I enjoyed sitting at home, reading books I took from the public library, when I could have been out on the street, playing baseball.

"You're going to ruin your eyes," he would keep saying. "Why can't you be like your cousin Seymour? He plays football with the boys."

My Uncle Harry went further. I overheard him saying to my father, "Sidney reads too much. He's going to come to a bad end."

When I was ten years old, I made matters worse by starting to write. There was a poetry contest in Wee Wisdom, a children's magazine. I wrote a poem and asked Otto to send it to the magazine to enter it in the contest.

The fact that I was writing made Otto nervous. The fact that I was writing poetry made him very nervous. I later learned that because he did not want to be embarrassed when the magazine rejected my poem, he took my name off it, substituted my Uncle Al's name, and sent it in to the magazine.

Two weeks later, Otto was having lunch with Al.

"The damnedest thing happened, Otto. Why would Wee Wisdom magazine send me a check for five dollars?"

Thus, my first professional writing was published under the name of Al Marcus.

One day, my mother came running into the apartment, breathless. She hugged me and exclaimed, "Sidney, I've just come from Bea Factor. She says you're going to be world-famous! Isn't that wonderful?"

Bea Factor was a friend who was reputed to be a psychic and there were many acquaintances of hers who verified it.

To me, it was wonderful that my mother believed her.

In the twenties and thirties, Chicago was a city of noisy elevated trains, horse-drawn ice wagons, crowded beaches, strip clubs, the smell of the stockyards, and the St. Valentine's Day Massacre, where seven mobsters were lined up against a wall in a garage and machine-gunned down.