Closing Time (6 page)

Perched at the very top of Warden Drive stood the modest little house where Grace Kelly had grown up. Several times in the middle of a surprise blizzard, my father and I trudged up to the Kelly residence, which stood directly across the street from a public park, and shoveled the snow off their path. I was amazed at how slender and unostentatious the building was, given the clan’s international fame and fabulous wealth; in this sense it resembled Graceland or the
Mona Lisa,
both of which are much smaller than first-time visitors to Memphis or Paris expect them to be. Though we never met any members of the family—patriarch John B. Kelly was already getting along in years; Grace had long since blown town, first for Hollywood, then for the bright lights of Monaco; and Olympic champion playboy son John B. Junior never seemed to do anything but row crew—we felt honored to clear the snow from the sidewalks of Philadelphia’s most storied Irish family.

John B. Kelly Jr. was a beloved figure among the Irish, and for much the same reason as was John Kennedy: To all appearances, he did not have a job, at least not a real one, which to people like my father was a dream come true. “Work is the curse of the drinking man,” he used to joke, pilfering a line from Oscar Wilde, but he wasn’t joking. It was as if the entire Irish-American population of Philadelphia was able to derive vicarious pleasure from John B. Jr.’s life of ease, even though they themselves had to go out and sling hash, scrub toilets, and mop floors. This affection was rooted in the belief that an ethnic group hadn’t really arrived (or, in Kelly’s case, made a splash) until they had sons—nay, scions—who didn’t have to work for a living. Or, if they did, worked only on advisory committees and blue-ribbon commissions. Kelly’s father, by contrast, had a reputation as a hard-ass who’d made his money in the brick business. My father maintained that the bricks used to build the housing project were supplied by Kelly’s outfit, conferring upon us an even more intimate mythic rapport.

Usually, once we’d gotten the shoveling out of the way, the staff would bring us hot chocolate and cookies. They were not great tippers; perhaps they felt that the sheer honor of servicing the sidewalks of our ethnic group’s most cherished icons was adequate recompense for our efforts. They were probably right, though the reason I never bought a snowblower as an adult, the reason I always loved shoveling snow, was that it elicited atypically warm memories of my father. It had nothing to do with Grace Kelly.

When I was a child, I always thought of Warden Drive, and especially the Kelly house, as breathtakingly classy, but I never dreamed of living in places like that, because my parents nourished only plausible dreams. “Don’t get your hopes up, because you’ll only be disappointed” was their credo. This was a philosophy that contaminated the cumulative psyche of the city, breeding an attitude that kept fans from even dreaming about triumphs on the playing fields, because dreams were better left undreamt; at least that way, they wouldn’t get smashed. It is hardly a surprise that the statue of Rocky Balboa outside the Spectrum arena in South Philadelphia dwarves the statue of Julius Erving. Erving is a flesh-and-blood superstar whose career was perhaps something of a disappointment to the locals, as he brought home only one championship. Rocky, in sharp comparison, is the hometown hero, the valiant underdog who never fails to come through in the clutch, the working stiff whose rough-and-tumble demeanor and can-do attitude captures the gritty blue-collar ethos of the city, most of whose season-ticket holders live in the suburbs and work in front of LCD screens. Rocky, however, does not exist, and Sylvester Stallone grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland. Curiously, in the original
Rocky,
the only film in the long-running series that comes close to being believable, Rocky finishes second.

It took a long time for me to overcome this predisposition toward tamping down expectations. As an adult, living in New York, a state that had no emotional connection with my youth, it would give me great pleasure to drive past beautiful homes and park the car for a few minutes, purely to admire their grace and elegance. It wasn’t necessary for me to live in them, or even have enough money to live in them; I could derive joy from the mere fact that they existed. A beautiful house, I had come to appreciate, made everyone who looked at it feel better, while an ugly house could drag down people’s spirits for the next hundred years. But as a child, I never wasted any time gazing at rich people’s homes. If I wasn’t going to live in them, what was the point of looking at them?

 

The entrance to the East Falls Housing Project was no more than a couple hundred yards north of the Schuylkill River, which flowed straight through the city. The Schuylkill was neither a raging cataract nor a mythical waterway, and while it is true that the river was the preferred setting for many paintings by Thomas Eakins, the greatest artist America has ever produced, few Americans are aware of this. Despite this lack of epic stature, the river was reasonably wide, with plenty of open space on either bank where people could picnic, fish, frolic with their children, or sit back and watch the world go by. It was a feature of the landscape that had the power to console and inspire; it was lovely, it was accessible, and it was free.

My family never went down to the Schuylkill. We never went on picnics. We never set up a folding table and sat out playing cards or checkers. And we certainly never watched the regatta teams row past. The river was off-limits to us. The official party line was that it wasn’t safe for children to go down to the river by themselves, because the area was poorly traveled and rampaging Negro gangs from North Philadelphia were known to pounce on defenseless tykes and beat them to a pulp. As for the prospect of a picnic, that would never have occurred to anyone in my family or just about anyone in my neighborhood. Poor white people didn’t go on picnics; the bucolic fête was the province of the bourgeoisie or otiose Negroes. Poor white people stayed inside and watched sports and drank beer and terrorized their kids. All the years that we lived in the project, all the years that we lived just a few hundred yards away from a placid, slow-moving river that could have provided a respite from our unhappiness, we simply ignored it.

One summer morning not long after we moved to East Falls, my father woke me early. He said he was headed downtown to apply for unemployment compensation and wanted me to come along. I did not know what unemployment compensation was—it took me a long time to understand the protocol involved in losing a job—but the prospect of embarking on an adventure with my dad was thrilling. What I did not realize when he issued the invitation, however, was that we would not be taking the bus, the subway, or the trolley car downtown that morning, because we had no cash on hand. Not one thin dime. Not one red cent. Not even one wooden nickel. Nothing. Instead, we would be making our way on foot. Children have a distorted concept of size and space, so in my memory the distance between our home and downtown Philadelphia was easily fifteen to twenty miles, a Herculean undertaking for a youngster, as we would also be making the return trip on foot. This made the outing immeasurably less appealing.

Life in those days, for the Queenans at least, was a trail of automotive tears. Not having a car in the age of the Thunderbird was a tremendous humiliation for a grown man. It was bad enough not having a television or a telephone, but those were minor inconveniences. Having no car left us at the mercy of the dreaded Philadelphia Transportation Authority and its fleet of unreliable, herky-jerky buses, subways, and trolleys, most of them going places we did not wish to visit. No car meant no trips to the country, no trips to the seashore, no trips to visit those few relatives we did not wish to see impaled on sharp sticks. Not once in his life did my father own a new car or anything resembling one. For most of my childhood, we did not have a car, and on the rare occasions when we did scrape together enough cash to buy one, it would turn out to be some wheezing bomb that keeled over and died within a few weeks. To the best of my knowledge, my father also never flew on a plane or found himself in a position to order room service. The late twentieth century had a lot to offer working-class people, but he missed out on all of it.

Carless, cashless, we hoofed it downtown that day. Though there were several routes we could have taken, he opted to walk straight down Ridge Avenue, straight through his old childhood haunts, straight through the heart of the North Philadelphia ghetto. My father was not especially fond of Negroes; like most white people we knew, his idea of race relations was to stay as far away from black people as possible. But he was adamant in his refusal to surrender this hallowed terrain to these tetchy intruders. To him, traipsing through a slum was a way of abolishing reality, a way of insisting that the past was still the present and always would be. It was an attitude he maintained until the end of his life, when he would breathlessly tell me about his latest excursion to an unappetizing neighborhood his ethnic group had deserted two generations earlier. To him the phrases “Eighth and York” and “Strawberry Mansion” forever evoked the glory of days long past. Such glories were not apparent to the uninitiated. Our trek through the urban wilderness scared me speechless; I didn’t know anything about black people except that they weren’t all that fond of white people. Throughout that forced march down Ridge Avenue, I kept my eyes down, my face forward. And I walked double-time; I wanted to make sure we were out of North Philly before nightfall.

Many years later, on a visit home, I took a long, relaxing walk along the river. I was forty-seven yet had never once strolled any great distance along the Schuylkill. My feelings toward the city of my birth would always be mixed. One part of me loved to revisit a municipality whose charms had generally eluded me when I was growing up; but sometimes, particularly when I would hear the chillingly pedestrian Philadelphia accent, I felt as if I had never moved away to New York, as if my adult life had never happened. This return visit was a particularly illuminating experience. Casting my mind back, viewing events through the eyes of a nine-year-old, I remembered the distance between the housing project and Center City Philadelphia as Bunyanesque, a veritable death march. But now, after all those years, I discovered that the total distance was only about six miles, that it was no more than a sixty-minute hike from the foot of the Art Museum to the project entrance. Kelly Drive, named after Grace’s sculling sibling, was now a tree-lined urban paradise for joggers and bicyclists. This was a revelation. When my father dragged me downtown to sign up for public assistance thirty-seven years earlier, he made a point of marching through a slum, where we were not wanted, rather than along the banks of the river, where we might have enjoyed ourselves. He preferred to wallow in melancholy urban nostalgia rather than avail himself of Mother Nature’s restorative powers; he would rather sift through the ashes of the past than take delight in the present. The river, the bushes, the flowers, the trees—none of it meant anything to him. The river had not been part of his childhood, so it could never be part of his adulthood.

What accounted for this attitude? He was poor. Libertarians, self-made men, and sage pundits believe that money can make any problem disappear, that if one merely put enough cash into the hands of the poor, they would draw on the prodigious reserves of wisdom and enterprise they’d been clandestinely stockpiling for so many years and make all the right choices needed to turn their lives around. School vouchers are the most obvious example of such thinking; who, after all, is better positioned to make Solomonic decisions about her child’s education than a sixteen-year-old mother of three? Adherents to this school of thought have difficulty grasping that poverty is as much a state of mind as an economic condition, a pathology that encourages the poor to make bad decisions. Ravished emotionally, not widely liked, rarely chipper in disposition, the poor early on develop a knack for making bad situations worse. Their folly is thereupon used as an additional indictment of their character. Poverty becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: It may not be your fault that you were born poor, but somewhere along the way you’ve certainly mastered the art of behaving like a poor person. You are shiftless. You are self-destructive. You are foolish. Now, go away.

One of my earliest memories of the project was being dispatched into the streets to gather up cigarette butts for my father. If the butts were long enough, he would smoke the remains; if they were not, we would rip them open, pour the contents into a jar, and use the remnants to roll fresh cigarettes, using a handy, inexpensive device manufactured and sold by some enterprising tobacco company. This was the ragpicker phase of my youth, though I did not know it at the time. I thoroughly enjoyed these foraging expeditions, as I thought I was being useful to my father and also in some way creative. I did not yet fully realize how straitened our circumstances had become.

There were plenty of hints. While we were living on Russell Street, my father’s job at Proctor & Schwartz had been a reasonably well-paid position, with clear possibilities for advancement. But after he got laid off, he would never work in an office again. Instead, he labored at menial, low-paying jobs with no future whatsoever. He moved furniture. He worked as a security guard. He logged time in a factory or two. He manned a lunch wagon. And, of course, he drove a pretzel truck.

None of these jobs ever lasted very long; he would get tired of them, grow despondent, start missing work, get himself fired. Then we would be back on relief. Things around the house would start to disappear: The TV would get hocked to a pawnshop, then the radio, then the clock radio. He unloaded these items not to buy food but to buy liquor. Because he liked to drink in taprooms, and because my mother would not allow him to bring whiskey into the house, the money never lasted very long. We hated to see him start drinking, because as soon he opened that first bottle of beer we realized that he had already given up on the day. As time went by, he started throwing in the towel earlier and earlier. He was only in his middle thirties, but he knew that he was already playing out the string. In an oft-heard idiom of the era, which described many adult males of our acquaintance, he’d had it.