Closing Time (12 page)

Later on, I would have similar feelings about misty-eyed films like
Dead Poets Society
and
The Emperor’s Club:
When I was young, Dead Poets Society boys were as far removed from my experience as the ancient Medes. What the rich were, what the rich hankered after, none of it had anything to do with me. I did not want a yacht or a Mercedes or a chance to participate in the regatta. I did not want to accompany pert debutantes to the cotillion. I did not want to attend the Hackley School or Wankworth Academy or become a master of the
poignard.
I wanted a pair of shoes. I wanted a pair of shiny black Cuban-heel slip-ons that I could wear when I served Sunday Mass, rather than the high-top Converse sneakers I usually wore, to the consternation of the assembled faithful. I did not want to look rich. I wanted to stop looking poor.

By the time we had been living in the project for a couple of years, my father had come to accept that he would never again have a desk job, that his life from this point on would be a daisy chain of minimum-wage stints as a truck driver, a security guard, a deliveryman. One year he went through thirteen jobs, none of which suited him. We did not understand why he could not hold a job, or would not, only that he did not. He would get fired for calling in sick when he was actually drunk, or he would quit because he wanted to stay home and get drunk. Sometimes he quit because he hated the work, sometimes because he hated the commute, sometimes because someone looked at him the wrong way.

From this point on, he drank at every opportunity and beat us whenever the mood took him. His skills with the belt proceeded apace; his wrist maintained a supple quality long after the first bloom of youth had faded. He terrorized us by day, and kept us awake at night. Sometimes he would be quite a sporting fellow for entire days; sometimes he would be a pig for weeks. Slowly we began to get it through our heads that nothing we did could ever please him, that to him our mere presence was a reminder of all those dreams that had gone up in smoke. We were proof of his poor judgment, his wasted opportunities, his forfeit life. He had given hostages to fortune, and fortune had now come to collect. To him, we were nothing more than leeches, millstones, saboteurs. We did not bring him joy. We brought him bills.

I did not hate living in the project anywhere near as much as I hated living under my father’s roof. I could have tolerated hunger and poverty and having to wear sneakers instead of shoes and never going to the seashore if only my father had not acted as if my nativity was his funeral. When I grew up, I never felt that surviving poverty was any great achievement or that no longer being poor would in and of itself guarantee a person’s happiness. But not having to live under my father’s roof would. Poverty is bad, but some things are worse.

Music, for example, particularly the popular tunes of the Great Depression era, whose baleful legacy hung over our lives forever. From the moment my sisters and I were old enough to study history, we realized that the teeth-rattling, awe-inspiring, incontestably heroic poverty of the Great Depression had us whipped. Depression-era penury was the V.S.O.P. of adversity; our breezy I Like Ike-era indigence paled by comparison. We didn’t have murderous bootleggers or armies of paupers marching on Washington or distraught plutocrats leaping out of skyscrapers, nor were we forced to experience the trauma caused by the overnight collapse of the global financial system. Our poverty lacked the epic, mythic, death-defying quality of the poverty in
The Grapes of Wrath;
it gave off a fetid, bargain-basement aroma. It was Brand X mendicancy.

One thing that made the Great Depression so special was the sound track. The story ran something like this: At the very darkest moment in the history of the republic, Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman, Harry James, the Dorsey Brothers, and yes, perhaps even Duke Ellington and Count Basie, swooped down from the heavens and administered the kiss of life to a stricken nation, their foot-stomping swing helping a catatonic race scratch and claw its way out of the crypt. It was the credo of my family that the Big Bands in general, and one bandleader in particular, had single-handedly rescued American society from the asphyxiating gloom of the 1930s.

My father was a mystic who had somehow conflated the teachings of Jesus Christ with the string arrangements of Lawrence Welk. In the 1950s and 1960s, Welk hosted a very popular television program that aired on Saturday nights at 8:30 p.m. Welk was a bellicosely corny German-American accordionist who had recorded a handful of minor hits in the 1930s. He hailed from Strasburg, North Dakota, but talked as if he came from the Danzig Corridor. He wore repellent baby blue suits, loved to cut the rug with plump, ungainly octogenarian audience members, and cultivated an atmosphere of wholesome fatuousness on his show, furnished in large measure by barbershop quartets sporting pasted-on handlebar mustaches and fresh-faced songbirds preening in flouncy petticoats. No expense was spared in an effort to evoke an innocent, bygone, small-town America that not even Welk himself, who made his home in Los Angeles, could honestly have believed had ever existed.

Unlike Ellington and Basie, geniuses who helmed virtuosic jazz-based ensembles, Welk was a calculating schmaltzmeister who compelled gifted musicians to play as if they were not gifted, to crank out the same bland, assembly-line numbers, cryogenically frozen in mothballed arrangements, over and over again. Because my father forced us to watch the program every Saturday night, as part of a rigid cultural-indoctrination program that closely resembled those invented by the communists he professed to despise, my sisters and I developed a special bloodlust toward Welk and his putatively merry “Champagne Music” makers. Notwithstanding his lofty taste in films and literature, my father had the same haphazard, intermittently crummy taste in music as everyone else of his generation, and no one was more objectionable than Lawrence Welk. Forcing us to listen to this tripe was a Procrustean form of child abuse, suffused as it was with a subtext of intergenerational reprisal. Veteran bozos like Guy Lombardo, Louis Prima and Mel Tormé had had their moment, we felt, and now it was time for them to get off the stage and let somebody else step into the spotlight. But my dad felt otherwise.

Ex-cons often complain that the worst thing about prison is the noise; in the domestic detention center my father had constructed, the worst thing was the music. As a child, I placed music in an emphatically punitive context: Dad’s cueing up a record on the turntable, whether it was Welk or Bing Crosby or Mitch Miller and his insufferable bouncing sing-along dots, was merely another way of being cruel to us. A neurasthenic sappiness saturated the tunes of that era: “How much is that doggie in the window?” “Hey mambo, mambo
italiano
.” “What did Della wear, boy, what did Della wear? She wore a brand-new jersey, she wore a brand-new jersey.” The tunes spewing out of our tinny little radio were flatulent, juvenile, nauseating. We were not only suffering from deprivation and contempt; we were being driven around the bend by a man whose suzerainty over the infrastructure of entertainment in our household was absolute.

The off-brand music fell into a special category. My father was forever coming home with the “generic” version of a current hit; the voice gasping from inside the portable stereo was never Dean Martin singing “Non Dimenticar” on a Warner Brothers LP but Dino Martino warbling “Te Adoro” on an album put out by Vinodyne Records. It was never Frank Sinatra singing “Come Fly with Me” on Reprise; it was Fred Sinerosa squawking his way through “You, Me, and That Sulky Old Moon” on Voxogroove. The record that most stands out in memory was a horror called
Movie Themes Go Mambo!
or something to that effect. This was a cheese-ball compendium of fully orchestrated samba, tango, rhumba, and bossa nova versions of the themes from
Gone with the Wind, My Fair Lady, Ben-Hur, Roman Holiday, The Bridge on the River Kwai,
and
High Noon,
as performed by Lex Rabinowitz and the Van Nuys Strings or the Rancho Mirage Festival Orchestra or some pickup ensemble of that general ilk. My father would play this chilling record at ear-piercing volume at all hours of the day and night; our only hope was that enraged neighbors might one day break down the doors and rip him to shreds, knowing full well that no jury in the land would ever convict them. This is the unreported side of poverty: It’s not just rats in the basement or cockroaches in the bathtub or alkies in the bedroom or drug dealers in the hallway. It’s a linen closet filled with scratched LPs called
Sal & Edna Sing Steve & Eydie
and
Blame the Theme from
Exodus
on the Bossa Nova!

 

After we had been living in the project a year or two, we began to suspect that our father was a lost cause. But somewhere along the line, we started to realize that there were other things wrong with him. Maybe the old tin plate in his skull was acting up. For example, he got into the habit of coming into the bathroom to relieve himself when we were taking baths, a gross violation of privacy for which my sisters never forgave him. He sometimes slept in my bed, sometimes in the spare bed in the room my sisters shared. He never explained why, and no one cared to guess. He grabbed me by the testicles a few times in a ham-fisted effort to explain “the birds and the bees.” I did not like this one bit. This kind of unpredictable behavior went on for years while my mother diligently worked her way through that pile of newspapers down the hall.

Seeking to impersonate a happy family, he would sometimes take us along on one of his little outings. These would usually start out as attempts to mend fences but almost always ended badly, because deep inside he did not really enjoy our company, finding children overly judgmental when confronted by substance abuse. He would often recruit us for missions that were inappropriate for small children, dragging us into depressing, amoral, or emotionally insalubrious environments. He would bring us along when he went to visit his brother in prison. Or he would take us to saloons to see old cronies or to trade anecdotes with bartenders of edifying perspicacity and Shavian wit.

I spent a lot of time in saloons as a boy. My father would sometimes treat me and my older sister to a movie, covering our eyes with his hands during the risqué sequences, then stop off at a nearby taproom for a few belts. We were usually not allowed to sit at the bar, as this sort of thing didn’t sit well with bartenders or even with some of the patrons. Instead, he would plant us in the plush leather booths that ringed these establishments and bring us one ginger ale after another while he slowly got soused. When we were quite young, we thought such excursions a lark, because we could plunge our fingers down into the upholstery and excavate loose change that had tumbled out of someone’s pockets and into these crevices. But as we grew older it was much less diverting to sit there for hours on end, watching our father slowly transform himself from a well-spoken gentleman into a brute spoiling for a fight. It was also less fun because nobody—not even a kid—wants to sit for three hours straight drinking thirteen glasses of ginger ale.

On occasion, a tippler might buy us a soda, using this as a pretext to slide into the booth and chat with us, at least until my father shooed him away. When we asked who these men were and why he had given them the brush-off, he would simply say that they were “odd.” They
were
odd, but so was he; nobody else we knew brought their kids into gin mills and exposed them to public drunkenness and the oddity of strangers, then acted as if this type of outing was normal.

My father had a powerful sense of social obligation. He made a fetish out of visiting his uncle Joe, a cadaverous Irishman who seemed to have been in the process of dying, without making much headway, since the Japs seized Manchuria. Uncle Joe lived in one of those heartrending two-story redbrick houses on a pygmy-sized street in a part of Philadelphia where at night the entire neighborhood would hunker down on their front stoops and guzzle sickening concoctions devised by local brewers to whom quality and taste were alien concepts.

My mother refused to live down there; the boozy camaraderie and claustrophobia of those grim, taut thoroughfares felt to her like an ethnic straitjacket. This, I later suspected, was the origin of the Wendle Street folktale. My mother thought she was too good to live in a dump like this, a glorified ghetto teeming with coarse men in stained under-shirts and brassy women who wore revealing shorts and skintight pedal pushers. Years later, communities like this, now on life support, would be resuscitated by artists flooding in from the suburbs, urban pioneers who found something positively thrilling about rolling up their sleeves, yanking out their trowels, and gussying up the dilapidated homes of the chain-smoking, lunch pail-toting, salt-of-the-earth proletariat and then selling them for three times their value to attorneys.

Many a Sunday morning, my father and I would make the long trip by bus, bus, and trolley to Uncle Joe’s home on Mutter Street, where we would spend an hour or so watching him die. Uncle Joe was perpetually lying in state in a bed upstairs, doing his level best to get this thing over with, but he was never quite able to close the deal. For all I know, he may still be alive today, rasping and wheezing and bitching about the cupidity of the transit workers’ union and the villainy of Negroes, at the ripe old age of 128. Though the truth is, he was never much of a conversationalist, at least not by the time I met him. He had an impenetrable brogue and seemed content to listen to guests bellyache about some miscarriage of justice or offense to common decency, then nod his head in agreement. I am not even sure how he was related to us, only that he had exactly the same name as my father and me. He didn’t seem to get much out of our visits, and even though other relatives said that I emitted a certain elfin charm as a child, I got the definite impression that it was wasted on him.

Uncle Joe’s bedroom was suffused with an aroma of vomit, cirrhosis, nicotine, immigration, and failure. There was a brass spittoon at the side of the bed into which Uncle Joe would spew mucus or blood or other unsavory bodily fluids. My father used the elegant term “cuspidor” to describe this object; this was my first exposure to the world of euphemism, where the unspeakably disgusting could alchemically be transformed into something markedly less repugnant merely by a slight shift in terminology. But I never thought of that spew-drenched receptacle as a cuspidor. To me, it was a spittoon. The thing I most clearly recall about those Sunday morning visits was that while other kids were going to the movie theater to see
101 Dalmatians,
we were going to an in-house oncology ward to watch a relative twice removed by marriage try to die. This was my father’s idea of fun.