The Red Jacket

I did not like school. I was crazy about sports, especially football, and liked girls, and being around other kids, but the classrooms, where you had to sit and listen because the teachers were in charge-not for me. Maybe I thought I knew too much, had too clear a picture of the world and its hierarchies and where public school teachers fit into those hierarchies. I sat by the windows in back of class, looking over the rooftops of the Bronx, the chimneys and pipes. Beyond school was the Grand Concourse, beyond the Grand Concourse was Manhattan. I was impatient to see the world, and thus a usual suspect for the truant officer. I would look into the hall before first period, sign the sign-in sheet, then take off. Hurrying across the avenue with my collar pulled high to cover my face, I would run up the steps to the platform of the elevated. The D train was my limousine as it tottered and wheezed its way into the city.

One afternoon, I saw a red jacket in a store window on Mt. Eden Avenue, just around the corner from our apartment. That red jacket changed everything. It was worn by a mannequin, in a casual, hanging-out, street-corner pose. It was an exact replica of the one James Dean wore in Rebel Without a Cause. I imagined myself slouching in it, leaning in doorways in it, speaking bits of tough, cynical dialogue in it. (All the time! I don't know what gets into me-but I keep looking for trouble and I always-I swear you better lock me up. I'm going to smash somebody-I know it.) I took it off the mannequin and slipped it over my shoulders. It fit like a glove and hummed like a wire. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I had to have it. This was the first time I felt that consumerist urge: need it, need it, need it. I dug in my pockets. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Sadness followed by determination. I went around the corner, got my father, and dragged him back to the store. He watched me take down the jacket, zip it up, and turn around, all the time nodding in approval. "Oh, yes, Jerry, that is a gorgeous coat. It looks great on you, too, like it was made for you."

"Can I get it?" I asked.

"Sure," he said, "do you have the money?"

"No," I told him. "Can't you buy it for me?"

"Oh, no, that's not how it works," he said. "You get a job, save your money, then you buy it. Then you'll enjoy it. Otherwise, it won't mean anything. You'll get tired of it in an hour."

It was the beginning of my life as a working man. I got the jacket, of course, wore it till I lost it, but, by then, the jobs I had taken to buy the jacket had become more important to me than the jacket itself had ever been. At some point, you forget the object, and the means becomes the end. You work for the joy of the work. My father must have known this would happen.

One of my first jobs was in a movie theater on 170th Street in the Bronx. I was fourteen years old. I had been sneaking into the place since I was a kid. You could swing onto the balcony from a fire escape. It was dangerous and exciting. One night, the manager caught me. His name was Mr. Allen, and he was a good guy. He could have called my parents, or the police, but instead said, "I know you sneak in here every day and see the same movies over and over. Why don't you just work as an usher?"

When I was thirteen, I got a job at Goldberg's, a resort in the Catskills. I started as a busboy but was soon promoted to waiter. One day, I was serving a big wheel named Abraham Levitt. This is the guy who built Levittown on Long Island. He invented the modern suburbs. He took an interest in me. He asked about my parents, my plans, my dreams. This has been a theme in my life: Somehow, I have attracted mentors. Again and again, who knows why, older men have taken me under their wing. Maybe they recognized something in me, a vision of their younger selves, before their wife left them, before they were disappointed by their children, whatever. "Why are you working here?" Mr. Levitt asked. "Why aren't you at the Concord or Grossinger's? The big places. You're never going to make any money at Goldberg's."

I told him I did not know anybody at the Concord or Grossinger's.

"Don't worry," he said. "I'll take care of you."

The next morning, he drove me over to the Concord and introduced me to the owner, Arthur Winarick, and to his children. They gave me a job at the pool. At night, I danced with the girls. I went there for years, first as a cabana boy, then as a guest, finally as a talent agent. Relationships are the only thing that really matters, in business and in life. That's what I learned from Abraham Levitt.

I started my first business around this time. It began with a sudden realization, an insight. There was a dry cleaner's on the ground floor of our apartment building. It was owned by a man named Angelo Bozanellis. I used to sit on the fire escape of our apartment and watch the men get off the train and rush into the store, then head home with their dry cleaning. I went to Mr. Bozanellis and said, "I can't stand to watch these men struggle every night. Do us all a favor. Let me deliver the cleaning. That way, a man comes home from work, he goes directly to see his wife and children. Maybe we'll save a marriage."

He said yes.

I asked what I would get paid.

"You'll make money on tips. People will give you nickels and dimes. But you gotta hustle. It's up to you."

Fine.

I made my deliveries every day at four, racing though the neighborhood, up and down stairs, in and out of the little, tomblike elevators, delivering the dry cleaning to housewives an hour before their husbands came home. One afternoon, I saw a regular customer coming out of the Chinese laundry with a sack of clothes, and then it hit me. The same people who were having their cleaning done were also having their clothes washed. So I went in and spoke to the owner, Louie Hong, an old Chinese man with dark, mysterious eyes. I said, "Look, Mr. Hong, as long as I'm delivering the cleaning, I might as well bring the wash, too. It's going to the same houses."

Just like that, I had become an entrepreneur.

But I had done a stupid thing. It did not take me long to realize my mistake. No matter how many packages I carried up the stairs, the tip stayed the same. There must be a business-school term for this: I was competing against myself, driving down my own prices. I figured out a solution. I would carry everything up in one trip, but hide the washing under the landing. First I would deliver just the dry cleaning, then loop back later to deliver the laundry. This way, I got two dimes instead of one.

Over time, the neighborhood took on a different aspect for me. I saw it with new eyes. It was no longer just streets and stores: It was needs and opportunities, money to be made. Once you see the world this way, things are never the same. It is like recognizing the pattern in the carpet. You cannot unrecognize it. The grocery, the fruit stand, the newspaper seller-I was making deliveries for all of them. Very quickly, there was too much business to handle on my own. I went to my brother and said, "Melvyn, I have a good thing going, but I need help." We recruited a half dozen kids from the corner, and I soon had a little army of delivery boys running all over the neighborhood, with a percentage of each tip sent up the chain to me.

I learned lessons from this business that I still follow today: People will pay you to make their lives easier; always take the time to make the pitch; personal service is the name of the game; never get paid once for doing something twice.

When I was fourteen years old, I ran away from home. I don't mean down the block away, or in the city overnight away, I mean away, away. I was standing on the corner with my friend Stuie Platt when the restlessness took hold of me.