Piecework

“He had beautiful Spencerian handwriting,” Gleason remembers. “And he would fill in the policies with the names. I remember him sometimes doing the work at night at the kitchen table.”

Herbert Gleason was paid $35 a week; he sold candy bars on the side. The family moved all around Bushwick, living on Herkimer Street and Somers Street, Bedford Avenue and Marion Street. But young Jackie stayed in the same school, P.S. 73. And he went to the same church, Our Lady of Lourdes. The Gleasons settled at last in the third-floor-right apartment at 358 Chauncey Street, the street where, many years later, Ralph and Alice, Norton and Trixie were to establish permanent residence.

On Friday, December 15,1925, at ten minutes after noon, Herbert Gleason took his hat, his coat, and his paycheck, left the offices of the insurance company, and was never seen again. The night before, he had destroyed all the family pictures in which he appeared. When Mae Gleason realized that he was not coming back, she took a job as a change clerk in the Lorimer Street station of the BMT. And Jackie started his education on the streets. He was a member of a gang called the Nomads, hung around Schuman’s candy store and Freitag’s Delicatessen’s (as it was pronounced). He went dancing at the Arcadia when he had money, and he learned to shoot pool. About his father, years later, Gleason said, “He was as good a father as I’ve ever known.” But his father did leave him with something: a vision.

“My father took me to the Halsey Theatre, a real dump, a classic,” he says. The Halsey featured a daily movie and five acts of vaudeville. “We sat way down front, in the first row. I’d never seen this before, guys coming out and saying funny things, getting laughs. And for some reason, at some point, I stood up and looked out over the audience. That was the moment. I knew I wanted to be like that, facing an audience, the audience facing me. I knew I wanted to do that.”

It was a while before he faced an audience again. After his father left, Jackie started hanging out in Joe Corso’s Poolroom One Flight Up (“That was the whole name”). He went there with his friend Carmine Pucci, and when they won at pool, they’d buy cheap wine or “loosies” (individual cigarettes). “I was a rack boy when I was ten, and hustling guys already. Graduation day was always the best. On graduation day, everybody’d get these gold pins. And I’d play them for their gold pins. Then I’d take the pins to the hockshop and get maybe $20, and nobody ever asked what a ten-year-old kid was doing with all these gold pins.”

When he graduated from P.S. 73, he talked himself into the school play, doing a recital of “Little Red Riding Hood” in a Yiddish accent that tore up the place, and then went on to John Adams High School, supposedly for “vocational training.” He never finished the first year, and moved on to his true school: the streets.

“For a while, I worked as an exhibition diver for a guy named Chester Billy: He was the star and the rest of us did all the funny stuff. We had this portable tank that was six feet deep. They greased the bottom so when you dove in you slid right up. The bottom was terrible, disgusting; it stunk of grease. They would fold up the tank after the show with the grease still in it. And all the girls in the show had green hair from the chlorine.

“Anyway, we ended up in Bangor, in some kind of an armory. And Billy was supposed to dive into the tank from some girders. About 90 feet. But this day he was sick — he got loaded the night before or something — and he said to me, ‘You do it.’ I said, ‘Are you kidding?’ He said, ‘You do it, or you’re fired.’ So I climbed up in the girders and looked down, and said, ‘What the hell,’ and dove. Obviously, I lived. But when I pulled myself up on the side of that greasy tank, I said to myself, ‘That’s it, I quit.’ And I did.”

Still, it was show business. In Brooklyn, he went with his friends (and his first girlfriend, Julie Dennehy — pronounced Dunnahee, immortalized later by Joe the Bartender) to places called the Bijou, the Gem, the Diamond. “There was an outdoor theater, too, where they couldn’t start the picture until it was dark. I got the Poor Soul from the assistant manager in one of those places.” And finally he arrived at the Halsey again, where there was an amateur show on Wednesday nights “which was usually guys who played stomach pumps and things like that.”

Gleason thought he could do as well as most of the contestants, probably better (“Vanity is an actor’s courage; if he doesn’t have that, he’s finished”). He worked up an act with a friend named Charlie Cretter, who had a soprano voice. Cretter dressed as a girl; Gleason told jokes.