Closing Time (10 page)

As soon as we arrived at the target destination, he would park the car, turn on the radio, and leave me sitting there while he went inside to sell gas and electric. Immediately, I would turn off the music—piffle like “How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?”—and read my comic books. I was particularly fond of Batman, who, though he possessed no superpowers as such, was not a man to be trifled with; moreover, like my third-grade teacher back at Saint Veronica’s, he was a benevolent plutocrat who was committed to giving back to the community. I did not hate or even envy the rich when I was young, because I never knew any rich people personally; my only exposure to the upper classes was Miss Needham and Bruce Wayne, who both seemed absolutely peachy. Eventually, Uncle Jerry would return to the car and tear open a paper bag filled with industrial-strength salami-on-rye sandwiches. Salami was an unbelievably exotic food in the 1950s, and after overcoming my initial distress at its piquant taste, I soon became a lifelong devotee. Rye bread was something I had never tasted at home, not only because it was more expensive than white bread but because my father viewed esoteric items like rye and caraway seeds as deeply suspicious, perhaps even a menace to the republic.

For a public-utilities salesman, Uncle Jerry had an awful lot of panache. He drank foreign-sounding beers at a time when such beverages were almost impossible to find in the Keystone State. He played canasta. He played pinochle. On a few occasions, he may even have tried his hand at Mille Bornes. He taught me how to play chess, using the most unusual chessmen I have ever seen: dueling caballeros. I can no longer recall whether he had purchased the chess set on a trip to Mexico itself or picked it up at some curiosity shop in the States, but the chessmen made a lasting impression on me. One army was beige and brown, the other crimson and white. The bodies were hand-carved wood, and the heads were made of hard plastic, though I did not know this at the time; I imagined they had been crafted from mother-of-pearl by artisans named Antonio de Chavez y de Cusipata and Ignacio Gonzalez-Portilla. The pawns had what looked like pointy little beanies on top, while the knights resembled horses, but all the other pieces sported fancy headdresses that looked emphatically Castilian. The lone exception was the rooks, bold-as-brass roués decked out in raffish sombreros. My uncle, a so-so chess player, had a hard time telling the pieces apart, and I rapidly progressed to the point where I could capitalize on his miscues and beat him without any trouble. This may have been because of all those fancy Milwaukee beers he was downing, or maybe he was merely taking a dive to make me feel better about living in a housing project.

All this was joyously strange and wonderful. I started playing chess at the age of nine not because the game interested me, which it did not then and does not now, but because I had fallen in love with those dazzling little chess pieces. Just as my mother would adorn the walls of our house with inexpensive paintings of show horses cantering off into the sunset or of well-heeled Victorian women sipping afternoon tea, I felt that each time I played chess with my uncle, I was transported to another time and place where everything was classy and lacquered and shiny and expensive. This may not have been Mexico, but at least it was not East Falls.

My uncle Jerry and aunt Catherine (always known as Cassie) were extraordinarily generous to us while we were living in the project. They were also riotously entertaining. Fights were their forte; the more witnesses, the better. They argued here, they argued there; they did not stand on ceremony, they had no sense of occasion; the possibility of being reproved for waging war in an inappropriate setting would never have occurred to them. They argued in living rooms, in dining rooms, in basements, in attics. They argued in movie theaters, in pizza parlors, in parking lots, in doctors’ offices. They argued in Buicks, in Chevys, in Oldsmobiles, in Pontiacs; they argued with the roof up and the roof down. They once took my sister Ree and I to Dunkirk, New York, an all-day drive from Philadelphia, and argued nonstop for 422 miles.

They argued on the beach, on the boardwalk, on the patio, on the front lawn. You never had to wait for them to take the gloves off, because they never put the gloves on. For as long as I could remember, my aunt and uncle were always feuding, and by the looks of things, they enjoyed every second of it. Sometimes they argued about household matters. My uncle fancied himself a bit of a handyman, which was considerably more of a handyman than he was, and consequently their house was filled with doors that did not quite shut, windows that did not quite lock, and drapes that did not quite billow, as if he had made all his purchases at Monsieur Inept, a down-market hardware emporium specializing in prevandalized household fixtures. But mostly they argued about politics. Aunt Cassie was a Kennedy Democrat, Uncle Jerry a dyed-in-the-wool Republican, and their donnybrooks regarding the talents and merits of one Richard Milhous Nixon were the stuff of legend. Uncle Jerry never stopped insisting that JFK was a scoundrel; Aunt Cassie steadfastly maintained that Nixon was a tightwad, a liar, a Gloomy Gus, and an all-around son of a bitch. History has proven both of them correct.

Although these arguments often attained a level of vitriol no child would have expected from a married couple—my parents did not scream at each other, preferring to conduct their lifelong war in proxy skirmishes featuring alcohol (him) or abdication of the conversational prerogative for weeks at a time (her)—there was something comical about my aunt and uncle’s squabbles. Whenever she was losing an argument, which she often was, she would resort to the tried-and-true taunt “Go ahead, Schwartz, go shit in your hat and pull it down over your ears.”

This was shockingly coarse language for a woman in that era and that social milieu; my mother never cursed, rarely mouthing anything earthier than “that dirty so-and-so,” and my father never tolerated profanity of any sort in our house. He would throw a fit if someone merely said “Geez,” contending, perhaps speciously, that this was the blasphemous diminutive of “Jesus.” He felt so strongly about swearing that when he did fly off the handle, he would substitute the term “G.D.” for “goddamn,” as if such declamatory shorthand mitigated the impiety of the expletive. As for the villainous execration “motherfucker,” just to think about it in his presence was to run the risk of on-the-spot disembowelment.

Despite these sensitivities, he took no umbrage at his sister’s indelicacy; like many men who smile at the maledictions of irate women who have never learned to swear properly, he actually found it rather charming. What made Cassie’s trademark epithet so memorable was that it was the only crude remark that ever passed through her lips; it was the trick pitch she fell back on in the bottom of the ninth when she desperately needed an out. Whenever those two would come visit, I would sit on the edge of my seat waiting for the main event to get under way, the knock-down, drag-out slugfest that always involved Nixon and JFK and always ended with Aunt Cassie sneering, “Go ahead, Schwartz, go shit in your hat and pull it down over your ears.” Though employed in a profane, secular setting, these words were as solemn, ritualistic, sacrosanct, and inevitable as the exhortation “Ite, missa est” with which priests signaled that Holy Mass had come to an end. Once Aunt Cassie told her husband to go shit in his hat and pull it down over his ears, we all knew it was time to go up to Trenton for pizza.

 

A generation older than my parents, my uncle Charlie shared many of Jerry’s traits. They were both German American, a genuine rarity in our closed Hibernian circle. They both made their own hours. They both liked to spread their money around. They both smoked like chimneys. They were both fond of women, and not just their wives. Neither took any lip from anyone. Each, in his way, was larger than life.

Uncle Charlie, like Jerry, did not have a regular job. By day he worked in some unspecified capacity for the local Democratic Party, making sure that on Election Day the right people voted and the wrong people didn’t. By night he worked as an entertainer, or what was called a saloon singer. He was a self-taught musician who played a gorgeous midnight-blue tenor guitar. It was a Gibson, the top of the line. The tenor guitar, now obsolete, had only four strings, and while chords could be played on it—in an emergency—it gave off a shrill, tinny sound and was generally played as a solo instrument, the guitarist plunking out a melody while another guitarist or a pianist lent background support. Uncle Charlie, for whatever reason, had always flown solo. Like many musicians of that era, he had started out playing the ukulele before switching over to a less whimsical, less robustly Polynesian instrument. He could not read music, had no great gifts as a singer, and, ultimately, I came to realize, wasn’t much of a finger-picker. Guitarists short on talent usually played a six- or twelve-string guitar, because these instruments were easily mastered and, if thumped upon with sufficient verve, could produce just enough of a din to create the illusion that the person playing them knew what he was doing. This was especially true if he was performing in a bar filled with comatose lushes and loudmouthed floozies who were already three sheets to the wind.

Loading up his beautiful instrument, Uncle Charlie would saunter off to various North Philadelphia watering holes in the early evening and spend the next few hours croaking out adamant, demonstrative, but not terribly lyrical renditions of “Yellow Bird” and “On a Slow Boat to China,” accompanying himself feebly on that majestic Gibson. He was the sort of person who, though he could not actually sing, had learned how to “put a song over” by dint of moxie and flair. All the time he was bulldozing his way through a number, he would be chomping on a cigar. It was never a cigar in the humidor-stored sense of the word but, rather, a stinking old tree trunk that made the entire room smell like a trough. It was clear from the way the audience applauded that Charlie was a tremendously popular fellow, probably more because of his political connections and the cash he could spread around on Election Day than because of his musicianship or taste in cigars.

I got to see my uncle perform several times when I was young and was impressed by his stage presence, if not his craft. Warbling “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” or “Beyond the Blue Horizon” while puffing on a stinking cigar was an amazing feat, yet somehow he was equal to the task. “Puffing” is probably not the accurate term to describe the procedure; like most serious cigar smokers of that era, he would physically munch on his cigar the whole time it was entrenched in his mouth. I now believe that one of the reasons men chewed on their cigars that way, ripping them to shreds and drowning them in saliva, was to prevent other men from stealing them. My uncle Charlie was the first man I ever met who was invested with the undeniable moral authority to smoke a cigar. When I grew up, when imported cigars became ludicrously fashionable among men of suspect manliness, the act of smoking a cigar took on a ritualistic, fetishistic aura. Preposterous striplings would gather furtively in fancy tobacco shoppes, check the inventory in their padlocked humidors, and discuss Nicaraguan wrapper quality with similarly silly men, who themselves would wax poetic about long-dead masters of the hand-rolled Cohiba, men whose remains were now interred in unmarked graves in Havana or Managua. These
sigaristas
had somehow confused tobacconists with notary publics, vainly hoping that the establishments themselves would certify a virility no one would otherwise believe they possessed.

Uncle Charlie, by contrast, simply smoked his stogie; and then when he was done, he started smoking another one. Fortunate to live in an era when cigar smoking was still viewed as a vice rather than a symbol of eccentricity, he didn’t need to go to any fancy emporium to enjoy his cigar, and he certainly didn’t need any company while he was demolishing his lungs. He could sit there and wreck them all by himself.

Early on, Uncle Charlie had taken a liking to me. This may have been because he was not on the same wavelength as his own son, a good-looking hotshot who drove a shiny red convertible and would one day carve out a fine career for himself as a banker. Cousin Bobby had a snazzy crew cut, a seraglio of ravishing girlfriends, and a passion for Johnny Mathis records—at the time, the very height of sophistication, particularly in our down-at-the-heels environment. Bobby had almost certainly patterned his personality after Ricky Nelson, the charismatic star of
Ozzie and Harriet,
and we all worshipped him. He gave us money for treats, sometimes took us for a spin around the block with the hood of his convertible down, and always acted pleased to see us. But he didn’t usually hang around that long; whenever we came to visit, he would abruptly vaporize into the night for an assignation with one of his fetching inamoratas. He was a high-powered go-getter who was going places his father had never been, and his father knew it.

This being the case, it was not surprising that Uncle Charlie liked having me around. He could see that I was fascinated by his ability to generate cash without having to report to a place of business or punch a clock or inform anyone of his movements. To say nothing of the fact that he took no guff—it was not in his nature. My father did take guff, quite a bit of it. One day when we returned from a foray on his pretzel truck, his boss, a short, wiry grump who was more than a few years his senior, stalked out of his office and excoriated him right in front of me. I am not sure what my father’s offense was that day, but I could see that he was ashamed to be chastised in front of his son by a middle-aged beanpole he could have decked with one punch. Even as a kid, I knew that his boss’s behavior was beyond the pale; it was the sort of gratuitous cruelty that permeates the workplace in this country, one colossal job-creating machine in which millions of Americans start their own businesses every year because they cannot stomach even one more day of abuse from their superiors. This way, they can run their own operations and mistreat their underlings, who will then run off to start their own businesses.