Closing Time (2 page)

Sometimes, after paterfamilias’s latest regurgitation into the ranks of the unemployed, we would come home from school and find him storming around the kitchen, having a few beers, working himself into a lather. In these instances, he would sullenly inform us that he had been “laid off.” This well-traveled euphemism, a family delight, implied that he had been purged from the workforce through no fault of his own but because of unforeseen financial reverses compelling his employer to dismiss a handful of sacrificial lambs and/or black sheep. Such reverses always had something to do with the perfidious Dwight D. Eisenhower and the reptilian Richard Milhous Nixon, who seemed to take a personal interest in seeing to it that working-class people went to bed hungry. This was a situation that persisted even when Eisenhower and Nixon were no longer in office, suggesting that they had now taken to tormenting the proletariat purely as a hobby.

My father must have liked his job at the pretzel company much more than his other jobs, because he actually held on to it for a while—about three years, a very long stretch for one of such a refractory disposition. He enjoyed the job because he got to drive a nice-sized truck, which made him feel like a big deal, like he was his own boss. Sometimes he would bring the truck home for the night, and if we saw that he was not too tired or too obviously soused, we would beg him to take us out for a spin. When he was not in a black mood, he would oblige us, loading us into the back of the truck and thundering off into traffic, sending us careening back and forth between the unforgiving metal walls of the vehicle, all of us very merry indeed. The luckiest one among us—usually me—got to stand in the deep well on the right side of the truck, with the heavy sliding door pulled all the way back, allowing air to get in. If I was not careful, I could have easily tumbled out into the street and been flattened by oncoming cars. But I was careful—I was born careful—and these outings were rollicking good fun. Anyway, back in the Paleocene 1950s, when being fond of one’s children had not yet come into vogue, poor people didn’t seem to mind all that much if one of their offspring went flying out into traffic, as everyone had spares.

The day after my father’s accident, he rousted me out of bed early in the morning and said he would need me to go out on the truck with him, as it would be impossible for him to open and close doors with his hand in that condition. He would not be able to write anything in his order book, nor to ferry the boxes of pretzels and potato chips from the truck into the stores. He would not even be able to steer the vehicle. So my older sister Agnes Marie—always known as “Ree”—took a note to Mother Superior’s office saying that I had the flu, and off we went.

This was not the first time he had allowed me to play hooky, nor the last, but it was the one childhood escapade I would remember most vividly. The whole day was a miracle, from start to finish, which would not have been the case had anyone at the warehouse noticed the condition of his hand and suggested that he should not be driving as, even if the truck was well insured, the authorities would probably take a dim view of such extravagant interstate vehicular hijinks. Somehow, by dint of stealth and cunning, we managed to sneak out of the building without anybody being the wiser, and before you could say “Jack Robinson,” we were scooting across the Betsy Ross Bridge to south Jersey.

It was clear that my father was still in pain, lots of it, but he didn’t mope or grumble. Whenever he needed to change lanes or make a sharp turn, he would tell me to jump up off the pretzel can I was perched on, stand directly to his right, and ease the steering wheel around in the prescribed direction. It was first-class lunacy, careening around the highways the way we did that day. We could have been killed out there on the open roads, but we weren’t; he could have had his license taken away, but he didn’t. Neither of us would ever forget the bracing drama and high adventure of it all. We were making the best of a bad situation. We were rising to the occasion. We were staring down misfortune. We were the types of men—or, in my case, boys—upon whose like the world would not soon look again. My father was proud of me that day, proud in a way he had rarely been before. I was his confederate, his partner in crime. Gallivanting around the Delaware Valley with his fingers in ribbons and my untested hands at the helm was more daring and heroic than anything any of my playmates’ fathers had ever done or ever would do. And I was right there beside him, riding shotgun.

Before we returned to the warehouse that day, we stopped off at the Latimer Deli in downtown Philadelphia for a hamburger with a side of fries and a vanilla milkshake the size of Vesuvius. This would never cease to be my favorite meal, not even when I was all grown up and could order anything I pleased, because every time I had a burger with fries and a milkshake I would remember the day my father was the bravest man in the whole wide world. Returning home in triumph that evening, I felt, for perhaps the first time in my life, that God had put me in a situation where my father not only loved me but actually needed me.

For years, I’d believed that if I prayed hard every night and was very patient, He Who Knew All and Saw All would eventually come through for me. God, in my opinion, was not cruel; He was merely otherwise engaged. So when my father died one balmy December evening thirty-four years later, the day we went out on the truck together was the one I chose to remember him by. He was the man who drove the pretzel truck with a single hand, his other hand wreathed in bandages, because he did not want to lose his job and see his children go hungry. He was the man who would do anything for his family.

 

Days like that were rare. My father got broken when he was young, and he never got fixed. He may have wanted to be a good father, a good husband, a good man, but he was not cut out for the job. He liked to drink, but unlike some men who liked to drink, it was the only thing he liked to do. Among our relatives, he had a reputation as a happy-go-lucky fellow who, once he got a few beers in him, would turn into the life of the party. He was not the life of our party. Most of the time he was already dead drunk when he came home from work, spoiling for a fight with whoever crossed him first. When the fancy struck him, and he was not too tired, he would take off his belt and beat us. Other times he would announce impending beatings, only to explain that, as he was too tuckered out to administer a whipping that day, we’d have to reschedule. He had gotten it into his head that these stays of execution were in some way merciful, perhaps even appreciated.

By the time I started getting worked over by a man five times my size, beating children was going out of style in this great nation. By “beating” I refer not to generic spanking but to the ritualistic act of stripping your offspring and whipping them across the buttocks and thighs with a thick leather belt so that they scream and plead and bleed and stay marked for days and wish both you and they were dead. By the 1950s—the age of the progressive, though some said overly permissive, Dr. Benjamin Spock—even the reflexively barbarous poor were beginning to realize that inflicting severe, humiliating punishment on one’s children was inadvisable, if only because those same children might grow up to be large, muscular barbarians who would one day return home and inflict severe, humiliating punishment on their parents.

As was so often the case, my father trailed far behind the pedagogical curve in this sphere of human relations. At some point in his life, he had decided that if he could not cast a shadow over the world, he would cast one over his family. And so he did. He beat us often and he beat us savagely. He beat us individually and he beat us together. The worst beatings were when he got spectacularly bombed, came unmoored from reality, and grasped the belt by the wrong end. Then the metal flange would wrap around my thighs and flail against my penis and testicles. It was no use protesting that the punishment was not being meted out in strict accordance with Marquess of Queensberry rules, as this would only make him more angry, and the normal level of rage he routinely, effortlessly attained was bad enough. He could go from zero to sixty in a hurry.

Years later, I verified—through discreet inquiries—that none of my close friends was ever subjected to such a reign of terror. At the time, I had no way of knowing this: As youngsters, we were not aware of what went on inside our classmates’ homes, and these issues did not come up in conversation. Recreational mistreatment of children merely seemed like something expected of fathers, a prerogative of sorts, as working-men needed to let off steam at the end of a long, hard day. We knew that some of our friends’ parents were drunks, and that at least one of them had to be carted off to the loony bin from time to time to get his noggin reconditioned. But our friends did not live in fear of their fathers, nor did they want them out of the picture. We did.

I never forgave my father for the way he treated us. I never fell prey to the
tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner
slant on dysfunction, the notion that if you assembled all the pertinent data about a malefactor’s childhood and reviewed it dispassionately, you would come to understand the forces that had shaped him and assign the blame, or at least a good portion of it, elsewhere. This put the victim in a position where absolution, previously an act of charity, was now deemed morally compulsory.

Manufacturing excuses for my father’s behavior was a family industry. For as long as I could remember, an army of back-porch barristers—his sisters, cousins, aunts, even a couple of commiserating brothers-in-law—stood ready to cite chapter and verse to explain away his misdeeds, positioning his cruelty in a context that made him seem far less culpable. One, his father had been beastly to him, abusive in the generically horrific way that Irish males often are to their sons. Two, he had grown up during the Great Depression, when poor people literally peddled apples on street corners and many a night the entire Delaware Valley went to bed hungry because there was no food in the larder, and perhaps not even a morsel of stale bread left in the entire tristate area, because rats the size of ocelots had already gotten to it. Three, he had undergone a series of heartbreaking wartime experiences, with both his parents dying in their midfifties while he was just a few hours away, standing guard over Italian prisoners of war at Fort Knox. Four, despite being only a few hours away at Fort Knox, from which the harmless Eye-ties in his custody were not terribly likely to escape, he was denied a pass to attend either parent’s funeral, and his volcanic response to that rebuff—deserting his post at a time when going AWOL was punishable by death, and getting into an ill-advised slugging match with a pack of MPs back in Philadelphia—landed him in a military prison in Georgia. There he languished for three years, from 1944 until 1947, a slender young northerner of the Irish-Catholic persuasion in a prison manned by beefy, middle-aged men of the Johnny Reb persuasion.

Mitigating Circumstance Number 5 was that he had never finished high school, even though he was far brighter and considerably more gifted than most people who did. Six, he was a fine-looking chap who was emotionally traumatized by losing his hair in his early thirties. Frankly, I never understood how that one made it onto the list, but it kept popping up anyway. Seven, he never recovered from the 1958 recession, which cost him the only white-collar job he ever had. Eight, he never recovered from the disgrace of losing our house in 1959, as a result of losing his job, as a result of the 1958 recession, a disaster for which Dwight D. Eisenhower was personally responsible.

Nine—and this was the real haymaker—he had been shot in the head at age twelve, when a friend accidentally fired off his father’s service revolver and the bullet ricocheted off the kitchen ceiling and into his skull, where it remained until a grizzled army surgeon motored all the way down from West Point to excise it, as it was lodged so close to the brain that no jerkwater Delaware Valley sawbones would dare take a crack at it. The surgeon, legend had it, thereupon inserted a metal plate in the back of his head; legend also had it that the plate was still there. If this was true, and we had no reason to believe it was not, it was the sort of H. P. Lovecraft development that in and of itself might account for my father’s explosive, unpredictable behavior.

Justification Number 10, as if all that preceded it were not enough, was that his baby sister Betty had died under mysterious circumstances when he was still a small child himself, and this tragedy had haunted him for the rest of his life. The circumstances were murky; he may have been playing with matches, then run away and hidden in a neighbor’s house while his two-year-old sister burned to a crisp, but there were also suggestions that the luckless toddler had tripped and fallen down the stairs while he was supposed to be babysitting. No one could ever say for sure how Betty perished, only that she did, and that he was in some way responsible. Speaking for myself, I always felt that the infant sibling’s death should have taken the top spot on this cavalcade of rationalizations, but within the family, it was the metal plate in the head that occupied pride of place. Little Betty’s death might explain why he was depressed. The bullet in the head explained why he was crazy.

Given this phenomenal
curriculum vitae miserabilis
, there was no point in our bellyaching about a handful of character-molding flayings here and there, or a few nights going to bed without a proper meal, or my sister and I being left to fend for ourselves out on the street in a raging blizzard when she was eight and I was six while he was somewhere nice and toasty getting juiced to the gills, and while his wife was giving birth to his fourth child, or having no food in the house and three cavities and a manic-depressive mother who had been missing in action since Shrove Tuesday. No matter how sorry you might feel for yourself initially, you would eventually pull up short and come to your senses, realizing that you couldn’t outpoint an opponent holding as many high cards as him. He was tough in the self-vindicatory clinches; no one in the history of urban misfortune had ever experienced more setbacks, emotional trauma, and all-purpose injustice than our very own Quaker City Jean Valjean.