Suck and Blow Read Free Page A

say, “Shut up,” but by the time our parents got to us, they were so worn down that we could swear all over the place.
    My dad didn’t want Hungarian kids in America; he wanted American kids, so he never taught us to speak Hungarian. I know the words for “May you be butt-fucked by a horse,” but that’s about it, and it does you no good in a cab. (I was in Budapest, and I so wanted to show the driver I could speak Hungarian, but where was that going to get me?)
    My brother Tom lives in Hungary—I can’t tell whether that makes him a renegade or a prodigal son—where he’s the editor of a newspaper. He says that the way my dad speaks Hungarian is like ancient Shakespearean Hungarian.
    We were in Egypt once, and this guy in a thick Egyptian accent asked my dad where he was from. My dad, in his thick Hungarian accent, said, “I am an American.” And the guy, in his thick Egyptian accent, asked, “No, where are you really from?” And my dad answered in his thick Hungarian accent: “I am an American.” They went back and forth like that for a while.
    Once he was an American, that was it.
    When I was a kid I’d wake up and he’d be singing, “I’d love to be an Oscar Mayer weiner . . . . . .” horribly out of tune and making up the words but bellowing at the top of his lungs. He loved the sound of that song. I think it was because he’d had to learn English, and in Hungarian the W sound is substituted with a V sound, so singing that for him was liberating. (When my little brother was five they went around the class asking what words began with the letter V, and my brother said, “vindshield viper.”) He told me that he used to fall asleep with his lips in a pucker to help him with words like “you”—speaking Hungarian doesn’t require much puckering.
    Every now and then I try to imagine what it was like for him—to leave behind everything you know and go to this whole new place with all of these different rules and learn a completely different language. Then, if you keep driving through the smoke, you’re going to get a life that you wouldn’t otherwise have been able to get.
    I think that’s why I’ve always enjoyed the Marx Brothers because I can appreciate their perspective. It’s immigrant humor. It’s anti-authoritarian and subversive, and that’s part of the American story. It was also my attitude in school.
    I admired Groucho, but I was Harpo. Harpo was a free spirit. Groucho was more pragmatic; he accepted that we have to talk our way around situations, which is basically an intellectual approach to being Harpo. Whenever I saw Harpo my eyes lit up. I wanted to be that guy. After all, who doesn’t want to pull a swordfish out of his pants?

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    WHIPLASHED
    When the film Whiplash came out in the fall of 2014, I heard from a friend that the character of the perfectionist teacher/band leader, for which J. K. Simmons would go on to win the Academy Award for Best Actor, was based on my high school band teacher Anthony Biancosino. So I went to see the film, and the real giveaway was that the beginner band is called the Nassau Band and the competition band is the Studio Band. Those are unique to Princeton because Nassau Street was the main street in Princeton. Eventually I read an article that said that the writer/director, Damien Chazelle, did indeed attend Princeton High School. Although it was two decades later, Mr. B was still there and, like Miles Teller’s character in the film, Damien was a drummer in the band.
    Mr. Biancosino did a lot of good things for people, and I never saw him slap anyone, but he was a serious perfectionist about the drums. Just like in the movie, he would kick someone off the drum kit and put him on this really bad, out-of-tune conga drum. He would put a drummer on, kick a drummer off, put a drummer on, kick a drummer off. When I was there all the