Closing Time (44 page)

A famous writer known for her incisive prose who then became a director of sappy movies once told me that when she left a newspaper job she dearly loved, she assumed that she would see many of her colleagues afterward but never did. This convinced her that people fell into broad general groups that were interchangeable, that if you moved from New York to Los Angeles or Berlin, you could effortlessly re-create your circle of friends back home by finding virtually identical replacements elsewhere. This is one of the casualties of growing up with money to burn: The well-heeled
are
largely interchangeable. There are a fixed number of roles to play, with a fixed number of themes, and everyone is handed his or her script at birth and then gets on with it, oblivious to the fact that they are merely types. There is the go-getter. The maverick. The hotshot. The recluse. The black sheep. The neurotic. The bohemian. The jerk-off. They are all in some ways different from one another but they are all fundamentally the same. They are unique in the same way that snowflakes are unique; no two are exactly alike, but they certainly seem identical to the naked eye.

Susan Orsini was interchangeable with no one. Suburban children trained in the classics are a dime a dozen. A violinist who grows up in a row home in Philadelphia is like Halley’s Comet. In a world of subdued colors, Susan Orsini was a supernova. She was the only classically trained musician I ever met who was raised in modest circumstances in a working-class community, who did not attend a fancy prep school, who did not grow up in an environment of ease and comfort. The musicians who grow up to play in the great orchestras of America may be gifted as all get-out, but it is hard to tell one from the other. The musician who died in a car crash on a cold winter night in Delaware was one of a kind.

Meeting Susan would lead directly to the watershed moment in my life. As I learned more and more about the classics, I began to acquire arty LPs by the fistful. They were mostly meat-and-potatoes stuff—Chopin’s complete piano works by the Brazilian wonder Guiomar Novaes, Schubert’s Impromptus by Alfred Brendel. But there were also a few oddities thrown in—Webern’s transcriptions of Bach, Messiaen’s weird bird music, even a collection of sixteenth-century Spanish organ pieces—purchased for no other reason than to edify the vulgar. I adored these LPs and listened to them constantly; they were far and away my most precious possessions. The records were stored in a cardboard carton that sat at the foot of my bed. It was a collection of which I was enormously proud.

My belligerently proprietary attitude toward my record collection brought about the dénouement of my long, unsatisfactory relationship with my father. By the time I turned twenty, I had developed my own skills at sticking the knife in and breaking the human heart, having learned at the feet of the master. I knew that my deliberate scattering of dog-eared copies of Eugene Ionesco’s
La cantatrice chauve
and Jean Anouilh’s
Becket, ou L’honneur de Dieu
around the living room was simply a way of taunting him. These cultural talismans symbolized the dreams that lay within my reach but outside his: Bach would get me into graduate school; Courbet would facilitate my ascension into the middle class; Balzac would make me rich. Art, music, and literature, which had started out as diversions, had now evolved into artillery. My father’s arsenal consisted of alcohol, brutality, and contempt; I fought back with Apollinaire, Brahms, and condescension. It was still unequal combat, as I was not yet capable of destroying him; but there was no doubt that the battle had been joined and the war would be pitiless.

One day when I came home, I found a half-dozen of my cherished LPs strewn all over my bedroom floor. Collecting them, I noticed that they were badly scratched, some beyond salvaging, some covered with beer stains. I gathered from my sister that my father had been listening to Chopin and Scarlatti while I was at work, with the usual results. The charitable view was that he was making an effort to extend the olive branch by putting
Movie Themes Go Mambo!
on the back burner and taking a crack at Mozart’s Requiem. But all I saw was carnage. So I got out a piece of paper and wrote him a note:

I was perfectly aware that leaving that sign on top of the record box was insanely provocative, that I was waving a red flag in a bull’s face. I didn’t care; I was spoiling for a fight. A few days passed, then one night I took the bus to Havertown to visit Uncle Jerry, whose wife had died a year earlier at the age of forty-nine. A heart attack had killed Aunt Cassie, though all the pills she was taking for various maladies may have helped. Uncle Jerry was having a rough time of it, but I was more than welcome to stop by, as he had always enjoyed my company. We were sitting in his living room, having a few drinks, when the phone rang.

It was my father. He was delirious.

“Did you leave that sign on those records?” he demanded. I could practically smell the liquor seeping through the earpiece.

“Well, they’re my records—”

“Yeah, well, if that’s the way you feel about it, pal, don’t bother coming home tomorrow! I don’t want you in my house anymore! I don’t want to see your fucking face again! I don’t need a son like you!”

Then he slammed down the phone.

I returned to the living room and had another beer. My uncle asked what all the fuss was about, and I told him. By this point, our relationship had changed. I wasn’t a child anymore, and I wasn’t a Republican. The hero of my youth, the man in the gray flannel suit and the natty fedora who used to take me out on his sales calls, had hardened as he grew older, becoming bitter and confrontational. I am not sure if this was the result of losing Aunt Cassie at such a young age; I knew by now that he was “a ladies’ man” and had probably been a ladies’ man straight through his marriage. In the end, I think the world turned gray because he had lost a sparring partner he had come to admire and realized too late that she was a born scrapper who could not be replaced.

That night, words were exchanged. Somehow, we segued from my father’s drinking to Uncle Jerry’s favorite topic: the iniquities of the Democratic Party. On and on he ranted about George Wallace and Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown and
None Dare Call It Treason
and the John Birch Society and Tail-Gunner Joe and Barry Goldwater and that son of a bitch JFK and the tragically misunderstood Richard Nixon. In his eyes, everyone under the age of thirty was in secret contact with Chairman Mao and Ho Chi Minh; we were only waiting for nightfall so we could sneak up on the adults, slit their throats, and topple the republic. He didn’t understand that long hair and disheveled attire and Eldridge Cleaver posters and Che Guevara tee shirts were virtually devoid of political content; that very little of it had anything to do with revolution or civil rights; that it was mostly about fashion. Even when I was sitting directly in front of my uncle, downing bottle after bottle of Carling Black Label beer, he must have thought I was doing it only to humor him, that I couldn’t wait till he had gone to bed so I could get out my kit and shoot some horse or pop a few tabs of acid. He saw young people as the enemy of everything he valued—and I was young. Before my very eyes, my childhood idol had transformed himself into a cynical, middle-aged man who no longer believed in the American dream. Those face-offs on that hacienda-style chessboard seemed awfully far away now.

Shortly before he went to bed that night, Uncle Jerry stopped off in the living room for one final comment. “Your father may have his faults, but we all have faults. You have faults, too.”

“I know that.”

“Sometimes when I come down in the morning, you’ve put a half-bottle of beer back in the icebox,” he continued. “If you don’t put the cap back on, the beer goes flat and I have to throw it out. And sometimes you leave the mustard out on the drain board. So don’t be too hasty in judging your father. We all make mistakes.”

This said, he went off to bed.

Like many Americans of German ancestry, Uncle Jerry was tight with a buck. Incontestable evidence of this was supplied that night when I went upstairs and opened the medicine cabinet. There, arrayed before me, sat bottle upon bottle of sedatives and painkillers, the mélange of sleeping pills and assorted barbiturates that my aunt had amassed and had possibly mixed together in the fatal cocktail that inadvertently killed her. Though she had been dead for almost two years, Uncle Jerry had never thrown them out. Perhaps they constituted some idiosyncratic pharmaceutical memorial to his fallen spouse, or perhaps he was just cheap. The pills sat there, beckoning to me or anybody else in a suggestible frame of mind. I was tired now, worn out by a lifetime of discord and hatred. I was tired of all the conversations about Richard Nixon, Ho Chi Minh, Martin Luther King, Christ Our Savior. I may not have made a conscious decision to cash in my chips; I cannot even recall swallowing the pills. But I did swallow them, and I must have swallowed quite a few. Then I went to bed. I was going to drift off now. Things had not worked out the way one might have hoped. It was time to try something different.

The next morning, the phone began ringing. It rang for a long time. It was around ten, Uncle Jerry had already left for work, it must have gone on ringing forever. I finally answered it. It was my father. At least that’s what I gathered, in my woozy condition. He was calling to apologize. I said that was nice. The receiver tumbled from my hand. He kept on talking, but I couldn’t hear him. I was worn out. I needed to go back to sleep.

A few minutes later, the front door to the house came flying off its hinges. My father had called my uncle, my uncle had called the fire department, the firemen rushed me to the hospital, the nurses inserted a catheter in my penis and pumped my stomach. That hurt. Other than the catheter, I remember very little that happened that day. It was as if I was not even there, as if I no longer wished to be part of any equation that included me. Like my father when he had run away from the war, I’d gone absent without leave.

Chapter 11.

The unscheduled theatrics of late August proved to be a stroke of tactical genius, bringing an elegant new structure to my relationship with my father. Henceforth, he was excised from my existence. From the time the firemen kicked in my uncle’s door and carted me off to the hospital until the waning days of his life a quarter of a century later, we had almost nothing to do with each other. I had come to my senses. The spell had been broken.

Why I would risk ending my life rather than walking out of his is impossible to explain; nor do I fully understand why I spent so many years seeking the approval of a man I did not respect, much less love. It was perhaps because he was more than a bad father; he was a bad habit. Until I downed those pills, the idea of living the rest of my life without fashioning a workable relationship with my father would never have occurred to me. It would constitute some form of ethnic betrayal; Irish Catholics didn’t do things like that: They might hate their fathers, but they did not turn their backs on them. Fathers were problems sons had to solve before one of them died. This, of course, was madness, the very thing people came to the United States to escape. But the logic that prevailed inside our house was the logic that holds sway in a bad dream: Until the sleeper is roused from his slumber, everything that transpires inside the dream makes perfect sense. My father was a nightmare from which his family needed to awake.

His were sorcerer’s powers; stymied by life, he tricked his children into believing that they would never amount to anything either, that their sole function was to placate their household Svengali. We were citizens of a country that had only six inhabitants, a penal colony where everyone had his last name. Somewhere I had read that no matter how much Charles Dickens’s father mistreated his family, Dickens never stopped loving him, in no small part because he was enchanted by his father’s ne’er-do-well charm. For a time, I had similar feelings about my father, or at least that was the way I talked about him around my friends. My admiration for his sharp intellect and fine sense of humor and clever turn of phrase, and my envy of his abundant charisma and personal magnetism overshadowed my dread of his company. Those days were now past. Our relationship was a jigsaw puzzle I had been trying to assemble for twenty years with no hope of success, because too many of the vital pieces were missing or had never arrived with the original packaging.

From that time on, I operated as an independent contractor. I’d spent my entire life hoping to have a father like my friends’ fathers—somebody you could look up to, somebody you could emulate, somebody you didn’t have to arm yourself against with a Bowie knife. Now I realized that these options were not, and never had been, available. Acceptance of this fact was liberating: Neither his opinion nor anyone else’s ever mattered to me again after that; I did not care if people disliked my work or my attitude or my values. I had squandered my youth trying to please someone who could not be pleased; now I would please myself.

It was euphoric to enter a world from which this lifelong nemesis had been purged. I would wake up every morning overjoyed to know that even if things turned out badly, at least he wouldn’t be around to make them worse. From then on, I would spend a few minutes of every day in a state of private exultation, basking in the aura of his absence. He understood how I felt; the significance of my histrionic gesture that August night was impossible to misconstrue. When the squaws swooped down onto the Seventh Cavalry after the Battle of the Little Big Horn and began mutilating the troopers’ corpses, they took special care to stick long knitting needles through George Arm-strong Custer’s ears. They did this because they believed that nothing the Sioux and Cheyenne had ever said to him had gotten through. Now he could hear.