Closing Time (39 page)

“I’m going to Catholic University to major in music, and after that I’m going to get a job in a small orchestra,” she explained. “I’m going to work hard, I’m going to meet a conductor at a small regional orchestra, and I’m going to marry him. I’m not coming back to Philadelphia after I graduate. There’s no point in our continuing this.”

Because I was already crafting dreams of being a writer when I grew up, I resented Susan’s acting as if she was the only one who had big plans for the future. But there was no denying that her grand strategy was better thought out than mine and that, even if I was going places, I wasn’t going there as fast as she was. She was taking off for the nation’s capital; I was staying behind in Philadelphia. She was headed for a prestigious Catholic university that attracted students from all over the country; I was headed for a Catholic college attended mostly by commuters. She had specific goals mapped out, with a clear idea of how to achieve them; I was still in the murky, jailbreak phase of my existence. Susan did not want me to write to her, and she did not want me to come down and see her in Washington, D.C. We’d had a nice summer fling, but the fling was over.

Though I did not see her my entire freshman year and was crushed that she did not phone over the holidays, I quickly met another girl who did return my calls. She, too, took over my life. Marguerite, who had grown up poor and fatherless in the slums of North Philadelphia and was now living in the housing project we had fled five years earlier, was one of nature’s miracles. She had been born with nothing, but viewed this as a fact, not a verdict. Like Susan, she seized the role of mentor, teaching me everything she knew about jazz and poetry. She took me to an art museum for the first time in my life; she gave me my first book of poetry; she bought me a ticket to my first foreign film,
The Organizer,
starring Marcello Mastroianni. From Marguerite I learned about Yusef Lateef, Charlie Mingus, Ornette Coleman, Pharoah Sanders, not to mention Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Jean-Luc Godard, and Giorgio de Chirico. From her I learned that it was possible to visit the main branch of the Public Library in Logan Square and borrow recordings of Duke Ellington trading solos with John Coltrane, and to listen to them on turntables in a special room reserved for music lovers. From her I learned that the Philadelphia Art Museum, a sandbox for the rich, had an ancillary function as a sanctuary for the poor. Marguerite, a product of the slums, knew that if you were standing in front of a Brancusi and the light hit it just right, you could briefly forget that you were poor. She never took beauty for granted, because beauty was a finite resource, especially in Philadelphia. To those who had grown up around beautiful things, a museum was the cultural equivalent of a billiard room; to those who had not, a museum was Valhalla.

I was fiercely proud of the cultural armament I was strapping on these days, and particularly proud of my francophilia. But I always hid the French books when I came home, because I was aware of their powers to enrage. Like most alcoholics—indeed, like most ex-alcoholics—my father could never abide not being the center of attention. None of us was ever allowed to read a novel or listen to music in peace; if you were up in your bedroom, minding your own business, humming along to a pop song that had made your life worth living for the past three weeks, he would wait until the dramatic crescendo arrived, then force open the door and tell you to lift the needle off the record so he could remind you how much he disliked Martin Luther King and everything he stood for, even after Martin Luther King was gone. When he saw one of us curled up on the sofa with a book we were obviously enjoying, he would tell us to put it away and come out to the kitchen for a stiff drink. In issuing this command, he would invariably repeat his favorite cautionary tale, an urban myth that had absolutely no basis in fact. “You don’t want to be like that kid at Penn who read so many books he ended up blowing his brains out,” he would warn us. “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

I was not a dull boy, and my sisters were anything but dull girls. He knew this, yet the fact brought him no joy. He was not so much jealous of who we were as who we might become. He saw the ship leaving the harbor, and if he couldn’t be on it, he’d just as soon it went down with all hands. It never crossed his mind that our good fortune could be his to share; he could not imagine his children returning later in life to act as his benefactor or seek his counsel the way children had been doing since time immemorial. He was convinced that he was beyond forgiveness, incapable of understanding that while forgiveness cannot always be earned, it can always be granted. But he wasn’t going to hold his breath waiting for that to happen. He had seen the future. And it didn’t include him.

Chapter 10.

In the 1960s, irate students would often stage violent protests, seizing control of university buildings and refusing to be dislodged until their grievances were addressed. These grievances were compiled in a list of “non-negotiable demands,” which usually called for an immediate end to the war in Vietnam, the elimination of racism and poverty, and the emancipation of women. Occasionally, someone would drop in something about migrant workers. Until these non-negotiable demands were met, or at least negotiated, students would remain holed up inside the administration buildings, to the consternation of the faculty, the police, and most of the alumni. The students did not care; they would not be moved. For these were the Days of Rage.

At the college I attended from 1968 to 1972, exactly one insurgency of this nature occurred. Whether the war in Vietnam, endemic racism, or institutional poverty ultimately made it onto our list I cannot say, but I do recall our ultimatum that the administration reassess its draconian policy regarding library hours and keep the building open until midnight—or risk the consequences. The administration took our other demands under advisement, but quickly moved to extend library hours by hiring additional personnel. Our victory complete, we returned to our dorms and the uprising came to an end. This was the sixties. This was Saint Joseph’s College. And these were our Days of Rage.

Saint Joseph’s College, founded in 1851, had long had a reputation as an above-average liberal arts institution that also boasted an impressive physics department. It was located at the western edge of Philadelphia, straddling City Line Avenue, which was actually Route 1. This was the busy thoroughfare that separated the tough-as-nails City of Brotherly Love from the affluent Main Line. One side of the campus was in Wynnwood (which some called Overbrook), a formerly upscale community that was steadily taking on a more hardscrabble edge. The other side was in Lower Merion Township, where names like “Latch’s Lane” abounded, as Lower Merion was nothing if not prim and traditional. Saint Joseph’s catered to Irish-Catholic alumni of local Catholic high schools, with a fair number of Italians thrown in for ethnic balance. The majority of the students were commuters, though this would change, as over time the composition of the student body became less urban. The school prided itself on producing the kinds of solid citizens that kept places like Philadelphia running smoothly, as well as quite a few people who went into the insurance business. It also produced a handful of high-powered entrepreneurs, the occasional captain of industry, and assorted clergymen. One of its most famous alumni from that era went on to become secretary of the navy under Ronald Reagan. This was not perhaps the career goal Saint Joseph’s always managed to foster, but it was the kind of goal it aspired to.

My decision to attend Saint Joseph’s was predicated on a number of factors that had nothing to do with one another. One, I was pretty sure I could get in. Two, I suspected that I could get financial aid, as both the federal government, under Lyndon Baines Johnson, and the state of Pennsylvania were spreading a fair amount of cash around in those days. Otherwise there would have been no chance of my going to college. Even though everybody I knew was trying to drive LBJ from office, we didn’t mind taking his money.

Factor number three was the family tradition of attending the school: My cousin Jimmy, who sold me a life insurance policy before my voice had changed, graduated in 1960, and my cousin Joey, the roly-poly sourpuss with the blabbermouth mother and the father who professed to be the smartest mail carrier in Quaker City history, got his diploma four years later. Neither of these relationships would have inspired me to follow in my cousins’ footsteps, but because Jimmy and Joey’s parents were constantly rattling on and on about the school, it may have made me feel a more intimate emotional connection.

There was never any possibility of my attending Penn or Haverford—too ritzy—much less applying to any university out of state. That was the sort of thing people like Susan Orsini did, people who had quantifiable talents and big dreams. My dream was to make a living by ridiculing people, and it didn’t seem to matter all that much where I got my degree, as one couldn’t actually major in satire or invective. Temple University—Saint Joseph’s for Jews—never came under serious consideration, nor did Philadelphia Textile (too industrial), Penn State (too rah-rah), or Villanova (too effete). People with my background despised the tony and all its works, and Villanova, which suffered from the delusion that it was Notre Dame (just as Notre Dame suffered from the delusion that it was Harvard), radiated toniness. It basically came down to this: If you were attending a school where you could effortlessly get yourself mugged within three blocks of the campus, then your alma mater could not possibly be regarded as tony. Things simply didn’t work that way.

The only other strong contender was LaSalle College, which had once employed my father as a security guard. LaSalle was a perfectly respectable institution, and I could have gotten a fine education there, but as it was only a couple of miles from my house, and as half my graduating class at Cardinal Dougherty planned to enroll there, it was never on my short list. I wanted to get away from it all, and going to school way over on the west side of Philadelphia would make me feel that I was venturing out into the wide world and setting off on some big adventure, even though Saint Joseph’s was only two long bus rides from my home.

Another major factor in my decision to attend Saint Joseph’s was the abiding allure of the Society of Jesus. The Jesuits had a reputation for intellectual acuity, deviousness, and a tendency to ignore everyone else and play amongst themselves. I liked that. Even though I had struck out as a Maryknoll, I had long believed that, had the Jesuits operated a junior seminary when I was thirteen years old, I would have almost assuredly continued down the path toward ordination and become a priest. I am not sure why I clung to this belief so obstinately, given that I did not believe in God and had been obsessed with females since age fourteen. But I did.

The final reason I chose Saint Joseph’s over all the other local schools was that throughout the 1960s, it fielded a superb basketball team. Despite the college’s puny size—around 1,250 students—its Hawks regularly competed for the national championship. In retrospect, I now accept that this was probably the single most important factor in my decision to go to Hawk Hill. It may have been the only one.

The spring before I began my studies, I was taken on a campus tour by a member of an organization called the Crimson Key. Part booster, part catechist, my tour guide was attired in a maroon jacket, gray trousers, a white shirt, a maroon tie, and a pair of spit-shined black lace-ups. He assured me that I would be happy at Saint Joseph’s, though I am not sure how he could have possibly known this, since he had only just met me and I was not wearing a tie that afternoon. I for my part was not so certain I would be happy there, as one of my top criteria in selecting an institution of higher learning was finding a school where I would not have to wear socks. The sockless look seemed to me to be the very height of sophistication, but if the Crimson Key wardrobe was any indication, no one at Saint Joseph’s went in much for that sort of thing.

Turning a corner toward the end of my visit, we stumbled upon a throng of slovenly attired students gathered around a pudgy young man in a fringed buckskin jacket who was emptying a plastic bag filled with goldfish and stuffing them down his throat. The students, many of them sandaled and sockless, were egging him on, and he seemed to be having a ripping good time himself. The tour guide, miffed that these scuzzy lowlifes had gone and spoiled everything just as he was getting ready to close the deal, bitterly referred to them as “slimeballs,” and tried to pull me away. But I insisted on staying, purporting to be mesmerized by the vivid socio-anthropological elements implicit in this baroque tableau. I was later told that the boy clad in buckskin was attempting to set the world record for goldfish consumption, but I refused to believe this, as he seemed more of a clown than a competitor, and at no point did he appear to be the kind of person who could start out as a myth and then become a legend. Still, the presence of these slobs, deadbeats, and wastrels allayed my fears that the student body at Saint Joseph’s consisted only of go-getters and straight-shooters, and played a large part in my decision to spend the next four years of my life there.

Until 1968, Saint Joseph’s was populated by serious, sober, sensibly attired young men who needed eighteen credits of theology and eighteen credits of philosophy in order to graduate. After 1968, the weirdos in the buckskin jackets gradually began to infiltrate the student body. Very few of these students were authentic hippies; people from West Philadelphia and the immediate suburbs of Delaware County rarely had the chops to pass themselves off as authentic bohemians; they always looked as if they were merely out trick-or-treating. Most of them, I suspect, were ringers: lacrosse players masquerading as hashish aficionados and devotees of Kahlil Gibran in order to impress girls. If this was their objective, they had come to the wrong place; Saint Joseph’s did not admit women until my senior year. These ersatz flower children were never numerous enough to challenge the reigning ethos of the school, but there were enough of them to make the nerds and jocks that had previously dominated campus life feel nervous, fearing that a cultural Armageddon was nigh.