Up Till Now: The Autobiography

B’rith camp, the head of the camp announced he was going to paddle an Indian war canoe up the St. Lawrence to Lake Champlain, across Lake George, then down the Hudson River all the way to New York, and invited six of us to go with him. I have always loved history and the concept of traveling this ancient waterway to America—just as the Indians must have done hundreds of years ago—enthralled me.
    I have always had a love affair with America. I believed completely in the American myth, that the president of the United States was a great and noble man and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court rose to that position because of his experience and equanimity and wisdom and that J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, was watching out for us all. Hoover wearing a dress? How could anybody believe something so preposterous?
    I remember being frightened by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s warning that Communists were hidden in the State Department and then realizing that Americans had seen many crises yet somehow the Constitution survived and actually grew stronger. I thought of America as this place of promise, where dreams were possible. I had always wanted to go to America.
    So seven of us climbed into this wooden war canoe and our journey began. It was a romantic vision, we were paddling a thousand miles to America. And within a few strokes I remember realizing: we’re paddling a thousand miles to America?
    It certainly didn’t take long for that romance to end. Within a day we were exhausted and cold and there was nothing we could do but keep paddling. I remember standing up in the canoe in the middle of Lake Champlain on a gray day and trying to pee into the lake. Six guys turned to look at me and I got so self-conscious I couldn’t do it, so I sat down. The media loved the story, seven kids paddling from Canada to New York. We were scheduled to stop in Kingston, New York, for a big celebration the Jewish community had prepared for us, but just before we got there a sailboat threw us a rope and began towing us—right past Kingston. The welcoming committee was standing on a dock waving happily to us. We waved right back to them and just kept going.
    We camped out at night, under the mosquitoes. To keep the meat we’d brought with us fresh we trailed it behind us in the water—and it got just as rotten as it would have if left in the sun. Within a couple of days the only thought in our minds was, we gotta get out of this damn canoe. It might have been about that time that I understood that I wasn’t an Indian, I was a Jewish kid with blisters on hishands from all that paddling. But finally we made it to America, to New York City, tying up at the 79th Street marina.
    This was my first time in New York City and I was truly naïve, an innocent in the big city. I had heard all the stories of this city and I knew I had to be very careful. But the people were so nice. I was walking past Radio City Music Hall and a nice man asked me, “Would you like to go to the show?”
    Wow, who knew New Yorkers were so friendly? He bought me a ticket and we sat down and the lights went down and the Rockettes came onstage and he put his hand on my knee...I stood up and literally ran right out of the theater.
    I remember walking through Times Square and seeing the Broadway theaters for the first time and being totally enchanted by the bright lights and the overwhelming sense of life going on all around me. I wanted so much to be part of it. On another day I met someone else and we started talking and I told him I wanted to be an actor and finally he said, “I’ve got some people you’d like to meet.” I went with him into a club and into a back room. There was a large rectangular table with probably ten people sitting around it. When we walked in he looked at me and smiled warmly, then said, “We were expecting you.”
    I ran right out of that room, too. This was some city, this New York.
    A couple of years later I spent a summer hitchhiking across the United States. Following my freshman year at McGill, a friend and I had decided to explore America. We had no money, so we made signs reading TWO MCGILL FRESHMEN SEEING THE U.S. and hit the road. We spent three months living in cars and sleeping on the grass and on the beach. We made it from Montreal to Washington to San Francisco, then Vancouver and home. We had no fear and no problems at all. We got rides easily. We made it to Santa Barbara and we were sleeping on the beach, near