Sunny, one so true…

by David Benjamin 

MADISON, Wis. — One of the reviews of my book, The Life and Times of the Last Kid Picked, which is sort of a memoir, took note of the fact that I had let my dad off the hook for his human frailties and flagrant unfatherliness. The reviewer thought I should have echoed the tired American literary cliché of despising, blaming and harboring a whiny lifelong bitterness against my old man. 

Instead, I wrote an ambiguous, perhaps even nuanced portrayal of Big Bill, conveying equal measures of lament, admiration and irony — especially the latter. Irony was my dad’s most durable gift to me. If I were, for example, trying to drive a nail and instead smashed my thumb, Dad would assess the situation, while I whimpered in pain, and say, “Don’t worry. You didn’t bend the nail.”

Thanks partly to Dad, I chose instinctively to meet life’s trials, as much as possible, with a sense of (often dark) humor. By the time I got to high school, I was trolling the corridors and classrooms for friends who understood funny. This wasn’t easy. Teenagers are largely bereft of humor. But, among my discoveries was Dick, whose humor was wry, dry and lacerating. Keener, a master of sarcasm, monitored adolescent inanities and invented the ironic award, “Small Talk of the Week.” Blumreich and Schuster were straight men with a talent for dropping, occasionally, the finely tuned riposte.

Example: When I was a senior, I’d been wearing for four years the same khaki shorts and white t-shirt that composed the obligatory phy-ed uniform at LaFollette High. This was true for every boy in school. Blumreich’s shirt was, by twelfth grade, too small for him and was distinguished by a ragged hole that exposed most of his torso from chest to waistline. When one of the dimmer bulbs in gym class said, “Hey, Blumreich. There’s a big hole in your shirt,” Blumreich was ready.

“That,” he deadpanned, “is my navel observatory.”

Rim shot.

When I started trying out for high-school plays, I found the funniest friend I ever knew. His name was Steve Sundberg. He was short and a little bit roly-poly, two features that made him a potential target for bullies. Before I ever met him, however, he had concocted an antidote to any possible ridicule or cruelty from his peers. Instinctively, Steve had marshaled, against the merciless vicissitudes of youth, an air of bottomless cheer and a lightning wit that had the power to deflect the deepest malice. His nickname, Sunny, was a perfect fit.

Sunny was also an actor. Like him, I did high-school theater. I auditioned well enough (to my surprise) to perform — rather laboriously — the male lead in two plays. The pinnacle of my dramatic career was uttering the wonderful comebacks and soliloquies of Elwood P. Dowd in Harvey. 

Sunny, of course, had more talent than me — by a mile. When I ventured onto my high-school stage the first time, I was uneasy about exposing myself so nakedly. Not Steve. He was a natural. At age sixteen, Sunny had an uncanny insight into human foibles that turned him into a showoff with a thousand faces. A good actor, like Sunny, has no shame and a hunger for approval — even love —from as many people as he can crowd into a room. He’s willing to risk mockery and embarrassment for the sake of a “Bravo!” and a wave of applause.

I learned fearlessness from Sunny. Over two years and a series of plays, we bonded in our mutual lust for the roar of the greasepaint. Our best moment, however, wasn’t an official production. In my senior year, I was put in charge — for reasons I’ve never been able to fathom — of the annual school talent show. 

This afforded Sunny and me the opportunity to work up a two-clown act. I had come upon the ideal script in Bob Schuster’s basement, where his father had a scratchy old vinyl recording of the intricate Abbot and Costello sketch, “Who’s on First?” Physically, we were well-designed to copycat the two great comics. I was taller than Sunny and painfully thin, a la Bud Abbott. Sunny was the plump and roundfaced facsimile of Lou Costello.

Since the Sixties, “Who’s on First?” has had a revival thanks to video tape and internet media, but in 1967 it was unknown to most Americans under the age of forty. High school kids had no clue. This gave Sunny and me this golden, giddy chance to spring on our peers one of the juiciest routines in comedy history.

Our trouble: This is an act almost impossible to perform. First of all, it took us hours just to transcribe the script from Schuster’s LP. We had to keep re-setting the phonograph needle, scribbling furiously and inching our way around the grooves. But we couldn’t just read dialog off the page. Anyone who has heard Abbott and Costello do “Who’s on First?” has been both delighted and dazzled by the routine’s machine-gun pace and precise, relentless timing. One stutter ruins the flow beyond repair. Sunny and I had to not only memorize every word. We had to rehearse our parts in harmony with Abbott and Costello, struggling to match their dizzying speed, repeating exactly every pause, exclamation and outburst. We played “Who’s on First?” over and over, hundreds of times, on Schuster’s phonograph.

Of course, Sunny, as Lou Costello, had the harder role. A lot of my lines were one-word responses whose purpose was purely to befuddle.

“…Are you the manager?” “Yes.” “You gonna be the coach, too?” “Yes.” “And you don’t know the fellows’ names?” “Well, I should.” “Well then, who’s on first?” “Yes.” “I mean the fellow’s name.” “Who.” “The guy on first.” “Who.” “The first baseman.” “Who.” “The guy playing…” “Who is on first.” “I’m asking YOU who’s on first!” “That’s the man’s name.” “That’s who’s name.” “Yes.” “Well, go ahead and tell me!”…

Sunny and I put in at least thirty hours rehearsing this silliness. But when we were finished, we could snap every line, back and forth, in flawless synchrony with the worn-out record on Schuster’s spindle. When we hit the stage, we had it cold, we missed not a syllable and we got a sweet, rolling rumble of laughter. Of course, our little routine was overshadowed when Scott McKay’s blues band followed us on stage, brought down the house and sent kids dancing in the aisles. No matter. Sunny and I were quietly jubilant, because we had pulled off our act without a quiver, hitch or stumble. And we had been truly, lovably funny. 

No better feeling.

That was my last performance. I finished high school and went off into the world, from Rockford to Tokyo. Of course, Sunny and I lost touch. But he was always my friend. I always expected to circle back, track him down and reminisce about the mischief we’d fomented at LaFollette. We had made up stupid songs together. We’d been the life of every cast party. We had saved a performance of Cheaper by the Dozen by ad-libbing lines through half the Second Act. 

Which is why it came like a punch in the face this week when casually, hopefully, I googled “Steve Sundberg,” hoping to stage a reunion. Instead, I found Sunny’s obituary. Not only was he gone, but he’d been gone for seven years, killed at age 63 by a heart attack. 

I skimmed the obit, reading names of wife and relatives, making note of his career and retirement, but not studying very closely because this was news I did not want to know. I had lost both my parents, my stepmother Lyla, my big sister Peg and my kid brother Bill. I’ve lost Schuster. But I can’t remember a death — they’ re accumulating now — that hit me as hard the loss of Sunny. 

I guess this hurt more because we were oddly-matched brothers sharing a sort of secret joy that nobody else understood, which both of us so quickly outgrew. Neither of us acted later on. But, for a moment that passed without leaving a trace, we were — just the two of us — the incarnation of Abbott and Costello. Together, winking and riffing and united in irony, Sunny and I were the funniest guys in the whole small world.