MY NEW YORK STORY

By Tom Leopold

The rent was $114 a month when I signed the lease. Actually, my dad had to sign for me as I wasn’t yet 21...I’d lived on my own in New York City for three years. I could drink, get held up at knifepoint and dodge transvestites with the legs like a Dallas Cowboy halfback, but I couldn’t sign a lease for a $114. The good times!

Two forty seven West Eleventh Street in Greenwich Village: even now that address knocks my nostalgic block off. The claw foot bath tub was right out in the open in the kitchen and the toilet was outside the apartment in the hall. It was in a little closet outside my front door. It had a lock and was just for my individual use. It really wasn’t that bad if you didn’t mind hearing the Polish neighbors schlepping groceries up the stairs while you were, say, in the middle of, a ‘sacred’ moment.

I spent most of my well spent/miss spent youth on West 11th Street. I got a lot of good stories out of it to. Each one of the occupants of this dilapidated (it was in worse shape than the Acropolis) rent controlled building on an idyllic tree lined street could be the stars of their own three act play. There was Mrs. Pogan who lived down the hall with her paralyzed ex fireman son. She was continually complaining about how her rent had skyrocketed to $30 a month. And Jeff Lobato who worked on one haiku poem for 20 years. We are talking about a four line poem here folks. “It’s almost done, Tom, almost done.” And an as yet unknown James Gandolfini, lived on the first floor. He left his door open all the time. You could do that in those days. You’d get robbed but you could do it. He wore overalls and no shirt, even in the winter. I was scared of him.

Seinfeld

THE SHOW ABOUT NOTHING
That building and the charming Greenwich Village corner it stood on provided more than enough stories for a show about nothing—Seinfeld. Of course, there’s nothing funny about your next door neighbor blowing the back of his head off on Christmas Eve. That sad tale became the episode called “The Suicide”. I’ve always thought abject sadness can make the best family entertainment and strongest jokes. And what’s wrong with making a few bucks off what you’ve been through and if the residuals contribute to the deductible on your antidepressant medication. So be it! “The Suicide,” now, there’s a show title you wouldn’t have seen on an episode of I Love Lucy or Father Knows Best! “Tonight on Channel 4, Bud commits suicide when Father won’t allow him to drive his jalopy to the Country Club.” Where was I?

Oh, this strange young guy lived in the apartment next door. His toilet was inside his apartment so for the life of me I can’t imagine what could have made him so depressed. He wouldn’t look at anybody when they said hello and would compulsively lock and unlock his front door a thousand times per lock. The sound of which was worse than waterboarding. He would also blare The Phantom of The Opera cast album day and night. I should have been the one committing suicide!

Tom Leopold

A SAD DEMISE
One day my wife and I smelled what we thought was a dead mouse in the wall but tragically it was our neighbor. God forgive me for saying this but I was a little relieved as I have an unnatural fear of rodents. My therapist blames it all on those years I spent with the William Morris Agency. When the smell continued, I called the Super and we knocked at his apartment. One tap and the door opened slow and spookily like the door in Abbot and Costello Meet The Wolf Man.

A multiplied rush of what we’d been smelling was like a bus full of senior citizens on their way to see a matinee of Wicked! The Super who I brought along with me and who spoke no known language indicated I should go further into the dark apartment. I did and saw my neighbor’s body on the couch. It was pumped up and purple and his head was bent all the way back looking at me with bulging Jackie Gleason eyes. He looked like the horse in Picasso’s painting of Guernica.

The cops were called and they used our apartment as a command center. I was very excited about that which annoyed my wife but I love cop movies and tried to sound like a cop myself when I offered them coffee and scones. They asked me to go into the dead man’s apartment and ID the victim. I had always wanted to ID a victim. They told me to brace myself and they heated some of our maple syrup because that’s the only thing that can cover the stench of death. You might want to post that on your refrigerator.

With Jerry Lewis And The Gang

The body had grown more bloated. A policeman told me if I hadn’t notified them the body probably would have exploded. That was a nice thought! It’s not bad enough you are dead but you explode all over your furniture? Knowing my landlord they probably would have deducted the cleaning fee from his security deposit.

There was a note on his chest. A cop told me later what was in it. It seems his wife had left him just before Christmas and wasn’t coming back. It was very sad. And the amazing part of the story was that his wife moved in a couple days later which is less an indictment of her than a comment on the housing market.

In my Seinfeld version I had written that the neighbor was just in a coma because the audience wouldn’t laugh as hard at death. And laughs are important in my line of work. I had Jerry in love with coma-man’s girlfriend and wondering what was the proper waiting period before asking her out.

In a later episode of Seinfeld that I wrote “The Cafe”, we needed a secondary story… so, I used another experience from my old building. Years ago on West 11th Street a very pretty woman who lived on the top floor at the time had a job giving people IQ tests and she kept asking me to take one. I declined fearing I was even a bigger moron than she thought I was. So in that show I had George taking the test to impress another young lady. But like me he too was afraid of the results so he bribes Elaine to take it for him. This ends in disaster. In this episode I also introduced the character of Babu Bott, an East Indian café owner, who shakes his finger angrily at Jerry yelling, “You’re a bad man, Jerry! You are a very bad man!”

Chevy Chase And Friends

That really happened to me as well. This little café, The Dream Café, opened on the corner of West 11th and Waverly Place right next door to our apartment building. I couldn’t avoid walking by it if I tried. A tiny Vietnamese man owned the restaurant and there were never any customers. I became obsessed with him and his dying dream. My wife said we should try it out but I knew if we did we’d be too guilty to stop. Near the end of the café’s short life the owner went nuts with the menu. He added Russian, American Barbecue and Kosher food to the menu. Still no customers. Desperate signs went up in the window. “Free coffee with dessert.” “Free dessert and Coffee. Bring your dog,”to hell with the health department!” “Half my family died in a boat coming over, free appetizer!”

In the show Jerry’s curiosity gets to be too much and he dines there and winds up offering well meant but terrible business advice that hastens the restaurants demise. “Jerry, you are a very bad man.”

Here’s something we couldn’t fit into the episode: At night the proprietor put two of his four tables out on the sidewalk and candles next to the now enormous menu. He would then button the top button of his short-sleeved madras shirt. As if this somehow made the outfit elegant after six wear. Some things are just too sad to be funny!