Closing Time (43 page)

My work schedule during the summer was crafted to make sure I was never in the house during his drinking hours. Because my shift started at eleven and my father did not come home from work until midnight, I could get through most of the week without seeing him. When I dragged myself in at seven in the morning, he would be in bed; I would sleep till noon and then go out with friends and play cards or have a few beers before going to work. True, occasional face-to-face meetings were unavoidable, on his days off, weekends, sick days, or nights when he returned early from work and wanted to talk. Until I graduated from high school, I had generally drunk beer when I was out with my friends, but once I entered college, I started to hit the hard stuff. This was mostly because of him. In order for me to stomach his presence, I had to be a couple drinks ahead of him before he walked through the front door. Throughout my senior year in high school and my four years in college, I always kept a bottle of cheap bourbon stuffed inside a boot in my bedroom closet, right next to my Bowie knife. An hour or so before I heard his footsteps on the porch, I would start swigging the whiskey, hoping that by the time he got home, I would be wasted enough to ignore him. The only way I could stand to be in the same room as a drunk was to be drunker. I rarely drank whiskey when my father was not around; I never developed a taste for it. I resorted to alcohol because it gave me the false courage I needed to stand up to him night after night after night. Undoubtedly, he and his father had developed a similar relationship back during the Great Depression, when talk was cheap but liquor wasn’t.

It did not occur to me at the time that if I kept drinking like this, I might end up like my father. Everyone I knew drank heavily all the time without worrying about the consequences further down the road. If a man was a drunk, we believed, it was because he had flabby moral character, not because alcohol itself was dangerous, much less destructive or evil. Since I could handle my liquor, which several of my friends could not, there was no possibility of my ending up an alkie.

There were certain topics it was best to avoid in our house. You could not say a bad word against Police Chief (then Mayor) Frank Rizzo, by this point notorious for raiding the headquarters of the Black Panthers and parading them in front of newspaper cameras stark naked. It was a bad idea to talk about religion, politics, immigrants, or professional sports. It was also inadvisable to talk about college life, because words like “campus” and “syllabus” and “curriculum” evoked the specter of the gentry. I never let him see my grades in college—I graduated seventh in my class, first among liberal arts majors—because I knew it would trigger yet another discussion about how far Christ managed to get without a college degree. It was impolitic to joke about Christ in his presence; he would get rammy if he heard the word “geez” and did not take kindly to smart-aleck comments that Christ, when he did finally wrap up his terrestrial life that Friday afternoon on Golgotha, hadn’t actually gotten all that far careerwise. It was equally unwise to remind him that, despite Christ’s lack of a sheepskin, He had started out in life with a few obvious advantages: He was a fine public speaker; His earthly father, Joseph the carpenter, had taught Him a trade; He was divine. Sarcasm sometimes worked on my father, but not after the third drink, and not if the conversation involved the Lamb of God or anyone in His rough-and-tumble entourage. All in all, this was not a hospitable atmosphere for a first-generation college student.

“Why do you always keep a chair pressed up against your door?” he once asked.

“Because I’m afraid of ghosts,” I replied.

“There’s no such thing as ghosts,” he said, “and even if there were, a wooden chair isn’t going to keep a ghost out of your room.”

“It’s worked so far.”

Purporting to be looking for a clean pair of socks or a subway token or a passage to India, my father had gotten into the habit of rifling through my things when I was out, eyes peeled for drugs. He was convinced that when I dragged myself in late at night, sporting dark sunglasses but no tee shirt and reeking of vodka, I had been out on the town doing LSD or heroin. Quite to the contrary, I’d been out on the town doing vodka. The Purple Jesus—vodka cut with grape juice—was my old standby; the religious symbolism was probably not accidental, though the concoction itself was revolting. While he never encouraged me to drink to excess, he always encouraged me to drink, if only to keep him company. On the more serious issue of narcotics, he, like most hard-drinking men of his generation, was convinced that drugs posed a threat to the republic. It was true: Drugs did pose a threat to the republic; the social carnage of the seventies would leave no doubt about that. But none of this had anything to do with me. If I posed a threat to the republic, it wasn’t because I was shooting heroin. It was because I was drinking liquor, in any and all forms.

One day he confronted me with a vial of suspicious-looking tablets that he found in the top door of my chifforobe. He was certain they were contraband.

“I’ve got a friend down at police headquarters,” he warned me, “and if he tests these pills and finds out that they’re drugs, I’m not going to protect you.”

“They are drugs,” I told him. “They’re painkillers for when you have a toothache. Try one.”

In all likelihood, he never asked his friend down at police headquarters to test the Darvon compound I’d brought home from the apothecary, because his friend down at police headquarters did not exist. In any event, his fears were unwarranted. He never realized that no matter how much I wanted to belong to a loftier economic class, working-class values were so ingrained in my psyche that I would never dream of using drugs like acid or cocaine or heroin. Peer pressure alone precluded this: Working class boys, meaning virtually everyone I knew, drank liquor, which proved that they were men, while middle-class boys smoked reefer, which proved that they were beatniks or hippies or pussies or liked jazz. Within a few years, all this would change as the working class discovered not only the delights of daily drug abuse but the pleasure to be derived from mixing drugs with alcohol, especially when operating heavy machinery. But my attitude toward mood-altering substances never changed; I never developed a taste for drugs in any form. I had hand-stitched my personality by watching a procession of hard-drinking men drinking hard. None of them smoked joints. None of them would have dreamed of putting something in his mouth that had just been in another man’s mouth. They had high standards of oral hygiene, but they also had a clear code of conduct. Men didn’t swallow other men’s saliva.

One summer day, my father and I drove to Wildwood, New Jersey, to experiment with a popular new ritual called a bonding experience. This was my mother’s suggestion, and, as was often the case with her ideas, it was a bad one. We stayed at a nondescript boardinghouse my parents had been visiting for the past few years. We took some rides at the amusement park on the boardwalk, had a nice Italian meal, threw down a few drinks, and then went back to our lodgings. The sitting room in the boardinghouse was dominated by an upright piano, and my father, now feeling his oats, asked if I could bang out a couple of tunes for him and the other guests. What he had in mind was something along the lines of “Sweet Rosie O’Grady” or “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” I told him that I didn’t know how to read music, didn’t know any standards, and played the guitar, not the piano. This precipitated a lengthy, thermonuclear discussion of my failings as a human being and a son, because a son who loved his father—and, by extension, all of humanity—would have learned to play the piano, as opposed to the “banjo,” as the piano gave ordinary people like him and the other people in the boardinghouse pleasure in a way the goddamned “banjo” did not.

“I don’t play the banjo,” I corrected him as the other guests and the landlady looked on in mounting dismay. “I play the guitar.”

“Well, what’s the difference between the banjo and the guitar?” he sneered. “Tell me, what’s the difference between the banjo and the guitar?”

“Just drop it . . .”

“No, I want to know, college boy. What’s the difference between the banjo and the guitar? Come on, tell me . . .”

The landlady eventually asked us to vacate the parlor, so we continued the conversation in our bedroom down the hall. It wasn’t much of a conversation; I kept telling him to go to bed and sleep it off, and he kept asking me why I had never learned to play the piano, to the benefit of the faceless millions, and precisely what constituted the difference between the banjo and the guitar. I went outside and slept in the car that night, and the next morning the landlady told him that his patronage was no longer desired. We cut the bonding weekend short and drove back to Philadelphia.

“I’m sorry, buddy,” he said as we motored through the wilds of south Jersey, “but no matter how hard I try, the two of us just seem to rub each other the wrong way.”

It was true; we did. So we drove back home. I grabbed some clothes and went out and got drunk with my friends; he stayed home and got drunk all by himself. When he was younger and less maudlin, there were men who would drink with him, but those days were long gone, as were the men. Even men who drank too much and too often didn’t want to do it with him. This was the last time we ever scheduled a meeting of the minds.

The piano episode underscored the fact that music, a social glue for many, never failed to divide my family. Toward the end of my stay at home, my father developed the habit of getting plastered and then putting the sound track to
Jesus Christ Superstar
on the record player. As was his wont, he tended to do this in the middle of the night. I have no idea where the LP came from; I think one of my sisters may have purchased it in a momentary lapse of sanity.
Jesus Christ Superstar
was brand-new at the time, and while uncompromisingly stupid, it was not completely unbearable in the way the scores to
Cats
or
Starlight Express
would be later.

My father, forty-two years old at the time the show first saw the light of day, clearly fell outside the demographic parameters Andrew Lloyd Webber was targeting. Yet, for whatever the reason, he adored that sound track and was particularly enamored of the bouncy, irreverent number in which Herod mocks the self-styled King of the Jews. Night after night, hour after hour, we would hear the man who had brought us into the world thrashing around in the dining room, juiced to the gills, listening to the same insipid song over and over again, constantly lifting the needle to repeat the exercise. We were never quite sure whether he was doing this because he pitied Christ or because he was starting to come around to Herod’s point of view: that Jesus was an instigator and a bit of a goof. Blind drunk when he did this, he would often lose his grip on the needle when he lowered it onto the LP, scratching the record and causing it to skip and repeat. The CD player may have been invented to protect families like ours from such tribulation. This sort of behavior went on for years. Only much later in life did I begin to suspect that my revulsion for Webber’s music, while genuine and spontaneous, may have had less to do with the composer than with my father. I am sure I would have grown up to hate Andrew Lloyd Webber anyway, as would be true of anyone who loved Schumann’s Cello Concerto. But I might not have hated him as much.

Of course, had I not met Susan Orsini that fateful June afternoon in 1968, I might have grown up worshipping Andrew Lloyd Webber, like so many of my blockhead peers. Tellingly, the iron curtain Susan seemed to bring down on our relationship just before we both started college was not all that solid; I took her out several times during the subsequent summers, our friendship springing back to life once she realized that I no longer had my heart set on her and she no longer had to worry about breaking it. But our moment had passed, and neither of us made any serious attempt to recapture it. I did not see her much my junior year, perhaps once or twice, then one day my sister Mary Ann came home from school and announced that she had been killed in a car accident in Delaware while driving back to Washington. When I saw her parents at the wake a few nights later, I did not linger, as I felt that my very presence reminded them of the golden child who was no more. I never saw the family again after her funeral; I stopped walking down American Street forever. The Orsinis remained in that house as the neighborhood disintegrated, but a few years later my family moved away. And that was the end of that.

Susan was the first of my friends to die. When I knelt beside her casket at the funeral home the night of her viewing and stared down at her corpse, I could find no sign of the brassy girl who taught me that Debussy wrote his Études with the specific intention of driving his students to distraction, that Scriabin honestly believed he had unearthed a “magic chord.” The morticians had flubbed their assignment; this was not the Susan I had known, not the Susan her parents had known, not the Susan any of us had known. Susan would never settle for something as glum and obvious as this wake. Susan had joie de vivre; when she was anywhere in the vicinity, the fireworks went off. The wax figurine lying in the casket was an impostor.

That night when I returned home, my father studied the mass card I brought back from the wake and asked how old Susan had been.

“Twenty-one,” I said.

“Twenty-one,” he repeated, bombed out of his skull, as usual. “Only twenty-one years old. So much talent, so much to live for. Why couldn’t God take me instead of her?”

“Good question,” I replied.

Immediately after Susan’s burial, I went downtown to the Academy of Music and heard the Philadelphia Orchestra perform Brahms’s Fourth Symphony. The orchestra was under the baton of the very old, very uncharismatic Eugene Ormandy, but that day, as if in her honor, Ormandy rose to the occasion. It was the first Friday afternoon concert I ever attended, but there would be hundreds and hundreds more, in Philadelphia, in New York, in Boston, in Chicago, in St. Louis, in London, in Paris. I would never go to a Friday afternoon concert without thinking of the day Susan was buried, though not in a spirit of reminiscence but of homage. Susan Orsini was the first girl to break my heart, but I would happily have had it broken a thousand times just to hear her talk once more about the solo viola passages from
Harold in Italy
.