Closing Time (8 page)

“Well, sort of.”

As a family, we had lived through the fifties, but only in the narrow chronological sense. My father, who rarely spoke to anyone without at some point demanding, “How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” or warning them, “Don’t take any wooden nickels,” an exhortation he never bothered to explain, also used to endlessly repeat a nonsensical rhyme:

That was my family to a tee. We were there and we were not there. We were in the fifties but not of it. And though I would not come to fully understand this, or even think about it, until many years afterward, a great many other people were not of it, either: Things were infinitely worse for black people living south of the Mason-Dixon Line, who were being raped and lynched and generally treated like animals while the rest of the country was chuckling at the latest pickle Lucille Ball had gotten herself into. The idea that the mythical 1950s encompassed an entire nation is cretinous. But this is a country that has never been in any danger of running out of cretins.

No afterglow accompanies these experiences. Nothing good ever came out of living in that project. One might argue that the degrading experience of poverty taught me to be ambitious and self-sufficient, but it would be more accurate to say that it taught me to be ruthless and cruel, indifferent to other people’s feelings, particularly if I was writing about them. I never had any warm memories of the project; it gave me nothing, it taught me nothing. The rich old men who run Hollywood have long been smitten by the romance of indigence, zealously manufacturing life-affirming cultural pornography that appeals to middle-class people who quite fancy the poor but only in an innocuous celluloid incarnation. Up close and personal, the poor are less appealing: They wear bad clothes and use bad language and do bad things, and have guns. They make excellent fodder for films but even better fodder for cannons. They are fascinating when seen from a distance, less fascinating when they move in next door. They make unsatisfactory dining companions; they are too busy being desperate to be idiosyncratic or clever. My sisters and I understood this perfectly. We knew that there was nothing poetic or ennobling about our plight. We could not understand why we had been subjected to it. We were the odd men out, and we did not know why.

Throughout those long years of mandated misfortune, I felt, perhaps with the genetically transmitted aloofness of my mother, that our predicament was a momentary aberration that had been visited upon us due to a mix-up in paperwork down at the Municipal Building. Soon it would be all sorted out and we would be restored to our rightful place in the social firmament. This exemplifies mankind’s ability to unearth wheat among chaff, diamonds amid rust. For even though we were living in the proverbial “run-down neighborhood,” infested with creeps, lushes, petty criminals, the functionally insane, women of ill repute, and a wide swath of social misfits who fell under the general rubric of “fuckheads,” my parents, and my mother in particular, never stopped reminding us that things could have been worse.

They were right. None of us ever got stabbed, shot, or raped while we lived in the project. We never experienced the devastating horrors that black urbanites were subjected to in subsequent years in the public housing developments of America’s worst neighborhoods, because we never had to deal on a daily basis with violent crime. Our poverty was economic, spiritual, and psychological, but we were never in fear for our lives. We were never as badly off as the children in Cabrini-Green or Compton or North Philadelphia. We were simply badly off.

Other housing projects—those situated in the epicenter of the urban wilderness—would have been worse, certainly from an aesthetic perspective, as they were isolated, completely cut off from parks or rivers or creeks, and far more dangerous. But this was hardly cause for jubilation. We never went to the parks or the rivers or creeks near our home; they were entirely outside our range of experience, as were swimming pools, ice-skating rinks, arboretums, zoos, aquariums, and museums. None of us ever learned to swim or ice-skate; the idea of mastering these skills never occurred to us. We were poor, and as poverty ground us down, we began to acquire the self-flagellatory skills at which the poor are so adept.

My parents never understood that just because things could be worse, that didn’t mean things weren’t already bad. For even though my sisters and I were unsophisticated, impressionable children, we were not imbeciles, and it soon became apparent to us that there was something down-market about our new living arrangements. One indication was the fact that we had to walk a considerable distance to reach the closest grocery store, which meant we were never allowed to go shopping alone at night. Back in Saint Veronica’s, there had been stores of one sort or another on every other corner. Not here. The owners of the nearest grocery kept a ferocious Great Dane in the backyard, locked behind a fence, frothing and glaring, where everyone could see him. We assumed that this display of canine menace was intended to deter shoplifters living in the adjacent project. One day the dog attacked a beautiful young girl who worked in the grocery, ravaging her face beyond repair. There was some sort of out-of-court settlement, but none of us ever felt comfortable entering that store after that, nor, presumably, did she. It was a cautionary tale for potential thieves. I lived in East Falls for four years and never once went into that store without reconnoitering to make sure the Great Dane was locked up in the yard.

The only retail activity in the project itself was an illicit operation run by a family of extravagantly uncharismatic albinos, who sold candy, batteries, lightbulbs, cigarettes, and sundries out of their living room. People who could not afford a pack of twenty cigarettes could instead buy individual smokes from these most unlikely of merchants. The albinos overcharged for everything, making them the target of immense antipathy in the community, but two cigarettes were better than none, so customers learned to grin and bear it. My father would sometimes send me over to buy a couple of cigarettes from them, thereby introducing me both to the underground economy and to a world where nicotine served as a vaccine against reality.

I went to school with the two albino children, neither of whom could be called sugar plums. No one seemed to like them, not other children, not their teachers, not even the nuns. At the time, I could not understand why they did not make more of an effort to be cordial toward their classmates, but in later years I would see the glaring faults in my logic. These were poor albinos, the children of unemployed adult albinos, condemned to life in a housing project, where they had been abandoned to the tender mercies of the children of the poor. It’s hard to see how being nice could have helped.

After a while, my sisters and I began to suspect that there was something disreputable about our situation, because no one who lived outside the project ever invited us over to play with them. I lived in the project from 1959 until 1963 and never once stepped inside the home of anyone from outside it. Perhaps my classmates’ parents feared that kids from the project would heist their jewelry or geld the schnauzer or dismantle the plumbing and sell the fixtures to Roscoe the Fence. Whatever the official explanation, we now sensed that we were persona non grata.

My family literally had no money when we arrived in the project; we were on what was then called public assistance, or, as it was more commonly known, relief. “Relief ” was a surgically precise term in that era, though it would later be replaced by the coy euphemism “welfare.” Being on relief was mildly shameful for women and children, but it was an out-and-out disgrace for able-bodied men. It meant that you were so devoid of basic human dignity that you literally had to beg the government for money. This strongly suggested that you were a bum, a perception reinforced by the routine involved in obtaining the federal government’s monthly food allowances. In the days before food stamps were invented, people on welfare were given vouchers for use at designated supermarkets. The vouchers could not be used to purchase fair-traded brand goods; they could be used to acquire only baking supplies. Every month or so, we would exchange these vouchers for allotments of flour, sugar, canned egg yolks, and powdered milk. The powder could be mixed with water to make a clotted beverage that tasted like calamine lotion; the egg yolks gave off a disgusting odor not unlike that of rotting eggs; sometimes, if the containers had ruptured, the flour and cornmeal were already playing host to bugs festering jubilantly inside.

The supermarket stored the baking supplies in metal compartments directly beneath the fruit and vegetables, creating a jarring juxtaposition of the immanent and the potential. The flour, cornmeal, and milk came in generic brown cardboard boxes, so as we trooped out of the store shoppers who were not on welfare could see that we were. As we had no car and the establishment could not be reached on foot, my father had to ask a neighbor to drive him to pick up our monthly supply of ingredients that served little more than a decorative function in our home. Sometimes he would bring us along, thereby allowing us to share in the humiliation of being viewed as “pikers.” All the while we would cast envious glances at the Cheerios and Wheaties beckoning to us from the nearby shelves; all the while we could feel the contemptuous stares of the staff.

For the Queenan family, these shopping excursions were pointless, as my mother possessed neither the talent nor the inclination to bake bread, muffins, cookies, or cakes. Before she met my father, she worked as a secretary at the Navy Yard at the southern tip of the city. Unlike her husband, who had not finished ninth grade, she had a high school diploma and considerable white-collar experience. She was the product of a slightly loftier economic class and a better neighborhood than he was; her own father was a baker, employed by a venerable Philadelphia bread company, whereas my father’s father was a common laborer. She had worked hard to rise above the circumstances into which she was born, evincing a ladylike aplomb that was otherwise in short supply in the project. She never dressed especially well, as our financial situation prohibited it, but she spoke well; she was never vulgar or profane and never displayed any emotion in public. She was blue-collar in neither temperament nor demeanor, and she never would be.

Ditching her job when she married my father was the biggest mistake of her life, a self-engineered calamity she would never cease to regret. Marriageable, presentable males were in short supply after the war, so, to use her terminology, she “grabbed the first guy off the boat.” She then proceeded to have four children, not because it was her lifelong dream to raise a family but because children were what married people had. Large families were a Catholic tradition in that era; children were the unavoidable by-products of cohabitation; any effort to frustrate the natural procreative process assured one of an eternity in Hell. Compliantly, my parents adhered to the Church-mandated birth-control method known as “rhythm,” a jerkwater procedure that did not so much prevent conception as reduce its likelihood by 13.6 percent. Had she been born a few decades later, by which point the Church had started to look the other way whenever the issue of recreational sex was raised, she might never have given birth. Procreation, parenting, anything involving nurturing, was a burr under her saddle; even when we were adults, she did not hesitate to remind us that being a mother was a job she never felt cut out for.

“I could never play with you kids like that,” she would remark in her detached way as she watching me rolling around on the floor with my infant son and daughter, tickling them till their fat little cheeks turned red. She would monitor this otherwise heartwarming scene like a spectator watching a sport whose rules she neither understood nor had any great interest in learning. Then she would add, “I never wanted children.”

It was an undiplomatic thing to say, but she said it anyway. It wasn’t that she recoiled at the sight of her four children; it was simply that they were never the be-all and end-all of her existence. Children were the result of sharing a bed with a man one did not love. Children were not gifts from above but retribution from below. This she did not ever say in so many words, but this was what was strongly implied.

Cooking was another punitive consequence of marriage, but this was one indignity to which she refused to succumb. Never seeking to be a housewife, much less a mother, she drew a line in the sand and refused to acquire the skills needed to succeed in this sphere of domestic activity. My father, though generally a menace in the kitchen, was not completely inept; in a pinch, he could fry an egg, grill a steak, open a can of soup. Of course, if he was under the influence, things could go woefully awry. Once, after he got roaring drunk while my mother was in the hospital, he served the four of us heaping plates of spaghetti dripping with catsup he had warmed up in a saucepan. We nibbled at the periphery of the pasta but no farther, as the meal was really quite revolting. He then threw a fit when we tried to explain—know-it-all ingrates that we were—that while catsup and tomato sauce were undeniably cousins, they were not in fact interchangeable.

Though my mother was more knowledgeable and better trained than he, her approach to cooking was uncompromisingly castigatory. Preparing dinner was a Kafkaesque ritual in which a rib roast or a sextet of pork chops were reprimanded for crimes of which they were wholly innocent. She took no joy from cooking; to her it was more like a vendetta. She did not prepare food; she chastised it. This was not because she explicitly wished to punish her family; her attitude was more in the interests of self-preservation. If she had ever learned how to convert the ingredients we gathered up each month into bread or cake or muffins, it would signify that our descent into the ranks of the underclass was complete. Happily for her, she never did, remaining the least enthusiastic, least resourceful cook I have ever met. Her nearly supernatural incompetence in the kitchen was her badge of honor.