Closing Time (38 page)

A high-ranking priest at Cardinal Dougherty had the last name Nevins, and word got out that Natalie was his sister. One day, a rumor began to spread that a schoolwide letter-writing campaign was being organized in the hope that Welk would change his mind about canning Miss Nevins after receiving sixty-five hundred irate missives from Philadelphia high school students vowing to boycott the program forever if this very fine, though perhaps overbearingly bouncy, singer was forced to walk the plank. Some of the students who would be asked to write these letters were already donning preposterous sixties camouflage—wide-wale corduroy bell-bottoms, paisley dress shirts, granny glasses—and slipping off every weekend to a Center City dive called the Trauma, where they got to inhale overpriced reefer and ogle scantily clad tartlets while bands with puzzling names like the Village Fugs hacked their way through such catchy tunes as “River of Shit” and “Slum Goddess of the Lower East Side.”

At the first concert I attended at the Trauma, a gang of bikers had a bit of a dust-up with a quartet of goonish record-company representatives after the men in suits refused to stop heckling Jesse Colin Young & the Youngbloods, who had recently deserted Mercury Records for RCA. The Youngbloods’ limp signature tune exhorted the youth of America to (1) smile on their brothers; (2) get together; and (3) love one another, if at all possible, right now. The band was so strapped for material that they had to play their two big hit songs—the other was “Grizzly Bear”—twice in each set. The Youngbloods and the motorcycle gang were not a natural fit, but the bikers, to their credit, apprised the four well-turned-out goons that their antisocial behavior was ruining things for the other patrons. When the goons did not take the hint, they beat them on and about the head, smote them hip and thigh, and threw them down the stairs.

Teenagers witnessing this episode with a mixture of apprehension and self-congratulation—“No two ways about it, Tom; we’re men!”—were not likely to sign any petitions begging Lawrence Welk or anyone else to reconsider a seemingly impetuous personnel decision. Especially those, like me, who had been press-ganged into watching his show in the first place. I never found out how many letters Dougherty students ended up writing to the bandleader, if any, but Natalie Nevins did not keep her job.

By the time I met Susan Orsini, music had become the center of my universe. My bandmates in tow, I would rush out every weekend to hear the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Cream, the Doors, Jefferson Airplane, the Kinks, Big Brother & the Holding Company, the Mothers of Invention, Procul Harum, Sly & the Family Stone, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Steppenwolf, the original Fleetwood Mac, the Grateful Dead, and, whenever possible, the Rolling Stones. For reasons he never made clear, my father did not object to any of these bands, but he refused to let us play any songs by the Beatles within the confines of his house. Shortly after the lovable Liverpudlians made landfall in America, a Catholic newspaper published an article branding them minions of Lucifer, scions of Baal, and wolves in sheep’s clothing—the malefic trifecta—whose sole purpose in life was to corrupt the youth of America and lead them down the road to rack and ruin. After reading this, my father never relaxed his animosity toward a pop combo that, by comparison with many other ensembles of the time, seemed cheerful, upbeat, innocuous, and actually kind of cute.

When the Beatles appeared on
The Ed Sullivan Show
on three consecutive Sundays in February 1964, my father refused to let us watch them. He also refused to let us go out and watch them elsewhere. He forced us to stay indoors, staring at the clock, fully aware of what we were missing, while the sands of time ran out. It was as if he were inviting us, nay, encouraging us, to slip rat poison into his lager. The most disorienting thing about his cruelty was that it had no detectable pattern or theme, as he didn’t object to our watching the Rolling Stones on a Saturday night variety show called
The Hollywood Palace,
nor did he raise a fuss when we reserved the console to watch Jim Morrison & the Doors the night they appeared on
The Ed Sullivan Show
four years later. None of this made any sense, because the Stones and the Doors really were minions of Lucifer and made little effort to disguise it.

Once Susan entered my life, pop music began to diminish in importance. This was partially because everything anyone needed to know about pop music he knew by the time he was fifteen, whereas classical music could keep a person occupied for a lifetime. Pedagogically speaking, Susan did not believe in starting at the bottom and working your way up. She refused to begin my education with
Night on Bald Mountain
or
Pictures at an Exhibition;
she did not buy into the theory that those who dipped their toes into the water with
The Four Seasons
would ultimately acquire a taste for Bach’s
Magnificat.
To her, it made more sense to start on the mountaintops (Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Wagner), then work your way down through the lower peaks (Ravel, Prokofiev, Bizet) until you finally reached the cities of the plains, where Aaron Copland and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov would be waiting for you. If you felt comfortable down on the flat, dry mesas, where
Billy the Kid
was always galumphing along in the background, that was fine. But you shouldn’t start down there.

Susan was a fountain of informed opinions, and soon I had annexed all of them. She told me that that Dmitri Shostakovich could have been the greatest composer of the twentieth century were it not for the psychotic meddling of Josef Stalin, who kept threatening to kill him if he didn’t start writing more music that celebrated the inevitable, though somewhat delayed, triumph of the industrial proletariat over the boot-licking forces of capitalism. She told me that the reason no one ever accused Brahms of writing half-baked incidental music—even those who disliked Brahms—was that he destroyed everything he did not want published, which Mozart did not. She told me that Gabriel Fauré was the greatest composer American audiences knew nothing about, with Leoš Janáček a close second.

Because I was thoroughly unschooled at the time—a tabula rasa, as she put it—this approach worked to perfection; I quickly, if not immediately, grasped why Haydn was superior to Borodin, why Delius was not in the same league as Berlioz, why Schubert was a colossus and Albéniz was not. Because of Susan’s inflexibly patrician tastes, which I quickly acquired, it took me years to work my way backward and learn to appreciate the less obvious charms of the second- and third-tier composers, to understand that even if Jacques Ibert was not as brilliant as Giuseppe Verdi, Jacques Ibert was nevertheless brilliant.

Susan adored the titans, but she also made a place on the shelf for curiosities. Shortly after she began tutoring me, we went downtown on a record-buying expedition, during which she monitored my purchases with a martinet’s rigor. She informed me that I must, must, must pick up Glenn Gould’s 1955 recording of
The Goldberg Variations,
Vladimir Horowitz’s haunting interpretation of Liszt’s
Années de Pèlerinage,
and Rudolf Serkin’s elegant rendering of Beethoven’s
Moonlight, Pathétique,
and
Appassionata
sonatas. Also on the compulsory buying list were Beethoven’s Third, Fifth, and Seventh symphonies as performed by Wilhelm Furtwängler and the Vienna Philharmonic, Bruno Walter’s bracing set of Brahms’s four symphonies, and Igor Stravinsky’s
Petruschka
as played by the Boston Symphony Orchestra with the very capable Pierre Monteux at the helm. But she also pressured me into buying lesser-known works like Paul Hindemith’s
Symphonic Metamorphoses of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber
. This is a beautiful, thoroughly accessible little number that—like Vaughan Williams’s
Sinfonia Antarctica
and Josef Suk’s Serenade for Strings—should be in the standard repertory but isn’t, because for some reason music lovers who ought to know better have never taken a shine to it. The recording I bought was by the Philadelphia Orchestra under the baton of its longtime conductor Eugene Ormandy.

Susan had strong opinions about conductors and shared the reigning view among those in the know that the Hungarian-born Ormandy was a lightweight, a dud, a high-class hack at best. Advocates of this theory dismissed the bald, chubby Ormandy as a recycled fiddle player who had been lucky enough to inherit one of the world’s greatest orchestras from the legendary Leopold Stokowski, but that his basic function was to serve as a diligent curator until a better conductor could be found. Soon, I began to express similarly strong opinions about conductors, voicing the view that Ormandy was a lightweight, a hack, a reconditioned Magyar fiddler who functioned purely in a curatorial capacity until a better conductor could be found. It was exhilarating to reach a point in my life where I could cavalierly toss around such opinions, casually slandering one of the world’s most famous conductors and looking down my nose at some of its most revered composers. This brand of aspirational haughtiness—condescension from below—made me feel like a member of the elite, a North Philly cognoscente, if you will. This was what I had always imagined life would be like once I got called up to the majors.

I spent much of that memorable summer trashing Ormandy within earshot of anyone who would listen. It did not concern me, or deter me, that none of my friends had any idea what I was talking about, as they knew as little about classical music as I had known just a few weeks earlier. Throughout those months, I honed my material carefully, sharpening my rhetorical weapons for the moment that would inevitably arrive when I started college and would cross swords with someone foolish enough to try defending Eugene Ormandy. Armed with Susan’s blast-furnace contempt—which I borrowed from her without actually asking, much the same way Patroclus filched that suit of armor from Achilles—and emboldened by my rapidly expanding knowledge of the classical idiom, I felt that I would soon be ready to sally forth and emasculate the philistine. Woe betide the benighted clod who dared venture into my wheelhouse.

A few weeks after I met Susan, a second unexpected development occurred. My mother came home and announced that we were moving to the 5200 block of North Second Street in a neighborhood called Olney. This was literally right around the corner from the Orsinis, who lived on the 5200 block of American Street. What’s more, for the first time since our exile from Russell Street, we were actually going to buy a house, not rent one. Even better, at least from the ethnic-ambience perspective, the neighborhood was filled with Germans and Italians instead of the usual down-market Irish, Poles, and blacks we were used to. Olney, in fact, was a Reich-leaning enclave where the FBI had busted up pro-Nazi bunds during the Second World War, and it still evinced a low-key “Axis in exile” flavor. But that didn’t matter to us; we were willing to let bygones be bygones. Naturally, we were excited at the news that we would be moving, as West Oak Lane was rapidly turning into a slum, with teenage gangs shooting up rivals all over the place, on one occasion right down the street from our house. Alas, we had no way of knowing that Olney’s best days were behind it.

Buying a house in a neighborhood that was heading south fast continued our venerable family tradition of urban leapfrogging. We would escape from a rapidly decaying neighborhood, skip past one that was decaying at a slightly more temperate pace, and then pitch our tent in a neighborhood poised on the very precipice of decay. But we did not know that at the time. For now, the bad times lay in the future; when I was seventeen, it was a very good year. Moving to Second Street was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me, not only because I was smitten by Susan but because I was smitten by what Susan represented.

After we got off welfare and moved from the housing project to West Oak Lane, we were sure that the excision of this enormous social stigma would improve my father’s disposition. But his disposition did not improve, partly because he hated his job as a security guard, partly because he realized that his children rarely saw a speeding truck without wishing he was under it, partly because our new neighborhood quickly fell apart. We had similarly high expectations when we moved to Olney, but they, too, were soon dashed; not long after we moved in, the old people who had maintained their homes so well for so many years began to die or move out, and what my parents referred to as “a rough crowd” moved in. We were now hemmed in by voluptuously unappealing Eastern Europeans—Iron Curtain white trash—who held all-night pool parties in their postage-stamp backyards, inviting my father over leer at hard-core pornography on their colossal basement TVs even though they knew that he was a religious man and despised them. Our new neighbors were industrious palookas from far-flung communist climes who had come to America seeking a better life, but for them a better life meant a closetful of Dallas Cowboys tee shirts, cheap porn, and the opportunity to use the word “nigger” twenty-four hours a day in an incantatory style, as if repeating it often enough would make the subways safer.

In short, moving to Olney did not work out the way I had hoped it would. A summer with a fairy-tale beginning gradually turned somber as my relationship with Susan took an unanticipated turn. As the day of her departure for college approached, Susan grew distant, no longer interested in traveling downtown to see arty movies, no longer interested in teaching me the difference between a fugue and a chaconne. Pygmalion, it would seem, had wearied of Galatea. Shattered, puzzled, I barraged her with phone calls—fruitlessly, as she was never in—and walked down American Street every twelve minutes to see if she would ever resurface. Because we seemed to have hit it off so well, I was baffled by this glacial onslaught. I did not see her for one solid month. Then, a few days before she left for Washington, she called and suggested that we get together for a chat. I was excited and relieved, but not for long. Over coffee she told me that she had big plans for her life, and none of them included me.