Shore Leave in Brooklyn. That’s Pee Wee on the left.

The title of the second chapter of Nobody You Know (my unpublished memoir) is “Fetus,” as that’s me at the time, still in my mom’s belly. Little did she know who she was marrying.

My father, Harold “Pee Wee” Greenblatt, could’ve been one of the sailors on the Brooklyn docks in Hubert Selby, Jr.’s Last Exit To Brooklyn. Crude but handsome, he must’ve cut some figure to my mom Reba Greenfield when she first saw him in a Coney Island candy store. Every weekend she’d go to Coney Island from Newark with a gaggle of giggling girlfriends. The beach was their salvation. They’d sit under the sun and luxuriate in the knowledge that all the boys were giving them the eye. Flirting was now the artform in the late ‘40s. To let the boys, new boys, exciting boys, give you the eye, would do wonders for the ego, and—who knows?—maybe one of those boys would be rich! Reba didn’t miss a weekend at Mrs. Gramowitz’s boarding house.

The courtship was so whirlwind, the marriage plans so exciting, Reba knew she had met “the one.” After all, she was 21 already. She wasn’t getting any younger. And she was hellbent to get out of that Newark neighborhood. She had worked, and given her parents money, for three long hard years. Now she wanted something for herself, and none of the vociferous protests of my grandma Deb and grandpa Gunny could make her change her mind. She didn’t listen. She was in love. She loved everything about him. His crassness, dimples, curly blonde hair and rough’n’tumble ways reminded her of some of her beloved Hollywood mobsters. She even loved how he’d hold his cheap cigar between his second and third fingers while talking about what the future will bring them. Oh, he could talk, alright. She directed her enthusiasm, her passion, to all things Pee Wee. And, in the beginning, he was loving, very loving.