The evidence that he was going off the deep end steadily mounted. One of our favorite games as children was to trap bumblebees in tubby glass jars that had previously contained apple butter. The object was to tilt the jar toward the target as it nestled on a flower, delicately twist off the cap, and then catch the insect before the already incarcerated bees realized that the lid was open, that the moment for a jailbreak was propitious. The object was also to avoid getting stung. We kept records of how many bees we apprehended; George Lang, a boy who lived two doors down from my home, was the uncontested king of the bee catchers, having snared eighty honeybees and twenty-three bumblebees in a single day. George had been the only Zorro on the block until I showed up. After stumbling upon each other clad in black hats and black capes and black masks one afternoon—each of us straddling a sawed-off broom handle and lashing the crisp autumn air with our lariats, each of us absolutely convinced that we were the reincarnation of the fox, so cunning and free, who made the sign of the Z—George clippity-clopped off and hung up his Zorro outfit forever. I never knew why; I was perfectly willing to be Zorro on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and let George handle the champion-of-the-peons duties the rest of the week, but for whatever the reason, my new playmate abdicated the post without a fight.
Whenever we were out on our foraging expeditions, we made sure to punch holes in the jar lid so the bees would not suffocate, though we usually only kept them under lock and key overnight before releasing them. There was a widespread belief among my social set that bees could remember their captors’ identities and might unexpectedly return at some later juncture to wreak vengeance. So when we cut the bees loose, we took care to do it a few blocks away, theorizing that they would never be able to find their way back to our cul-de-sac, as they would now be too disoriented. We believed that while bees could remember human faces, they were completely stumped by road signs and house numbers. Our skills in the apian sector were limited.
We never tried to catch wasps, as it was rumored that these creatures could communicate with one another, that a trapped wasp could call in an air strike against his jailers from inside the bottle. It was further believed that consecutive wasp stings inevitably resulted in death. I have no idea who taught us this strange hobby or the improbable entomological theories that came with it, but it was a great deal of fun, especially for George Lang, who needed tons of diversions to take his mind off the fact that his father was locked away in the nuthouse and that his days as Zorro were over.
One day I came home to find that my bees had been drowned. So had my sisters’. My father, spectacularly juiced, explained that he had filled the jars with water on the erroneous assumption that bees required oxygen to live—and what better source of oxygen than water? It was nerve-wracking when he would do screwy, or what Philadelphians called “whifty,” things like this: A drunk we could handle, a bully we could at least get a read on, but a screwball was beyond our frame of reference.
One winter night when we were particularly hard up for money, my father told me to put on my coat and hat, as we were going off to visit the rectory. When things got really bad, he would sally forth and put the squeeze on some gullible parish priest for a few bucks to tide him over until his ship came in. These debts, I am certain, were never repaid. On the evening in question, we were ushered into a small office at the rectory and joined by a stone-faced young cleric. After the obligatory social niceties about the weather and the price of eggs, my father explained that he was between jobs and short of cash. He said that he had a bunch of children and no food in the house and we were running low on heating fuel. All this was true, though I am not sure the priest believed him. I was still very young at the time, barely old enough to understand that having to ask a priest for money was humiliating, even more so if the priest was half your age, was better educated, and made no effort to disguise his contempt. I was also old enough to understand that the priest was reluctant to hand over any cash whatsoever, that the whole situation made him uncomfortable, that he gave in only because spreading a bit of cash around was the sole diplomatic way to get rid of us. But I was not old enough or sophisticated enough to know that my father saw me not so much as a colleague or a confederate in this caper, but as a prop, that without my heart-melting presence, the priest would have sent him away empty-handed.
The priest forked over $20, a not-inconsiderable sum at the time. We thanked him and poured ourselves back into the night. It was too late to shop for food—grocery stores closed early—but it was not too late to visit a taproom. We wandered into a typically sepulchral watering hole, where my father ordered a whiskey with a beer chaser. The bartender brought me a ginger ale. Money was handed over, but when the change came back, I noticed that there was only about $12 left. My, these were certainly expensive drinks. I later came to understand that my father had been running a tab. He ordered another whiskey and another beer chaser while I had a second ginger ale and a bag of pretzels. He did not talk to me much when he was drinking like this; he chatted with the bartender or other patrons, usually about politics. It was universally agreed in such establishments that Republicans were the satraps of Lucifer, but there wasn’t much room for the conversation to expand in any exciting new direction, because nobody from the Republican Party ever came in to advance any countervailing arguments.
After another round of drinks, my father turned to me and said, “How much money did the priest give us?”
“Twenty dollars,” I replied.
He shook his head and smiled in the way he always did when he was going to treat me like a nitwit. “No, not twenty dollars,” he explained with a civility I found unsettling, for the way his jaw now set sent out an unmistakable signal that I was skating on thin ice. “He gave us
fifteen
dollars: one ten-dollar bill and one five-dollar bill. Can you remember that when your mother asks?”
“Yes,” I said, since there was no possibility of saying no. Even though lying was a sin and suborning a child to perjury an even more serious one, my father had decided exactly how this was going to play out.
“So how much did he give us?”
“Fifteen dollars.”
“In what denominations?”
“One ten and one five.”
He returned to his drinking. There was more powwowing, then more drinking. As was always the case on these bizarre outings, I was being marinated with a beverage I was rapidly tiring of. We must have been gone from the house for two hours now, perhaps more. He had another drink, bought a round for one of his engaging associates. The bartender fiddled with the cash lying on the bar. A few more bills disappeared.
Again my father turned to interrogate me. “How much money did the priest give me?” he asked.
“Fifteen dollars,” I replied.
Again that granitelike set to his jaw. “No, not fifteen dollars,” he corrected me. “Ten dollars. He gave me ten dollars. Can you remember that?”
I could. I could also remember “five dollars,” which is what he had me tell my mother we had been given at the rectory when we finally got home late that night. She did not believe him, of course; he was a pitiful liar. Notwithstanding years of practice and innumerable occasions to hone his skills, he never got any better at lying as he grew older. He was not aware of this; like most drunks, he felt that attention to detail—the texture of the furniture, the ambience in the room, the pallor of the cleric’s cheeks—made his lies seem more believable, when in fact they rendered his falsehoods ever more insulting. Though dissembling was never where his true talents lay, he went to his grave believing he was one of the most gifted liars in the history of North American duplicity.
I remember that incident in particular because it was the first time I felt that it was ethically permissible for me to lose respect for my father. Until he enlisted me as a coconspirator in this boozy escapade, his drinking was something he kept at arm’s length. He got laid off from work, he got drunk, he hit us, he got drunker, we went to bed and prayed that he would stop drinking. But now he had forced me to lie to my mother, to corroborate a story that could not possibly be true. He was a liar; now I was a liar, too.
The next day, I told my mother the truth, and at some point she must have confronted him, registering disbelief that he would sink so low as to strong-arm a child into backing up his transparent deceptions. Though she didn’t need me to catch him in one of his lies—it was not as if his misdeeds were under review by some international tribunal based in the Hague—he knew that I had come clean, which made me a squealer, which was far worse than being a drunk, because God would forgive a drunk but he would never forgive a rat. As usual, a pretext was invented to work me over with the belt, as if one were needed. All in all, that trip to the rectory turned into quite an adventure: He got bombed, I got beaten, a permanent breach opened between us, a priest got stiffed out of twenty bucks, and my sisters, as usual, went to bed hungry. The only thing I got out of the deal was a half-dozen ginger ales. And I wasn’t even thirsty.
American folklore stipulates that those who rise above their humble circumstances do so because of an indomitable will to succeed, coupled with the good fortune to inhabit a country that rewards industry. That’s one way of looking at it. Here’s another: Poor people who succeed do so because they are born with talents that other poor people do not possess, because they are cunning enough to capitalize on these talents, and/ or because they are either born lucky or develop a lucky streak pretty damn quick. If you are born poor and stupid, you’re going to need to be very lucky. If you are poor and stupid and ugly, you are going to need to be even luckier. If you are poor and stupid and ugly and a member of an ethnic group that America purports to admire but secretly abhors, then you might as well skip the preliminaries and get yourself started on a life of crime at the earliest possible opportunity. Why bother standing on ceremony?
Most things in life come down to the luck of the draw. Line up ten poor people. Nine of them won’t make it. One, maybe two, will. It might as well be you, third pauper from the left. It will help if you are born with chutzpah and personality or are capable of unleashing a stupefying amount of violence on complete strangers in a short period of time with little concern for the consequences. But even that may not be enough. Everyone who is saved is saved because someone tossed him or her a lifeline or, in my case, numerous lifelines. It may be a parent, it may be an employer, it may be a teacher, it may be a priest, it may be a boxing instructor, it may even be a parole officer. But, as the events of Good Friday make abundantly clear, no one is saved all by himself. Alumni of the slums succeed either because someone is reaching down from above or because someone keeps pushing hard from below. Or, in the ideal situation, both.
By the time I was ten, I recognized that my sisters and I were trapped. It was pointless to try running away; we would only be sent to institutions or foster homes, and we knew what they were like. It was useless begging relatives to intercede; they would dutifully report our grievances to my father, perhaps even gently upbraid him, and he would then rip the skin off our hides as soon as they were gone. It was futile to try reporting my father to the authorities, because there was nothing to report. He got drunk every night, he terrorized us, he hit us with belts, he made us feel useless. But, lacking top-flight data, we assumed that most parents did the same things back then, at least in that social setting. He did not mutilate us or put out his cigarettes on our flesh or hit us with metal objects; our lives were not threatened, merely ruined. This was not a job for social services; it was an internal affair. One of his favorite movies was
Gaslight,
in which a serpentine aristocrat (Charles Boyer), operating behind closed doors—far from the scrutiny of friends and well-wishers—methodically drives his innocent wife (Ingrid Bergman) mad, all the while passing himself off as the wronged party, the long-suffering victim of her all-consuming dementia, the man more sinned against than sinning. Our lives were lit by gaslight.
The predicament I found myself in was clear. My dad was a drunk, his dad was a drunk, his dad had probably been a drunk, and unless I played my cards right, I was going to end up a drunk, too. This was not shaping up as an idyllic childhood. The same held true for my sisters. We had landed in a perilous situation and our survival was by no means assured. We were going to need outside help, lots of it. I knew this to be a fact. I also knew that if I did not get a break, I was going to be crushed beneath the wheel like so many others who started out poor. If I did not get a break, I was going to be trapped in the underclass forever, where the cuisine would be execrable and the sculling would be at an absolute minimum. If I did not get a break, I was going to end up exactly like my father, a miserable, deranged, booze-soaked failure.
Perhaps it was time to bring God into the picture.
Chapter 4.
Domine, Non Sum Dignus
Around the age of five, I announced to all and sundry that when I grew up, I intended to be a man of the cloth. To underscore the seriousness of my intentions, I commandeered a pudgy little fruit cup, a cracked dessert plate, and a frayed tablecloth from the kitchen and erected a makeshift altar atop my bedroom dresser. Soon after, I added a crucifix, a Bible requisitioned from my parents’ bedroom, and a pair of candlesticks. Then, to further the illusion that I was a cleric in training, I fashioned a flimsy version of the garment known as the chasuble, using a sheet my mother had dyed more crimson than the blood of Saint Bartholomew, the first of Christ’s twelve apostles to be flayed alive. In Armenia, no less.
Somewhere along the line, I added a colorful armband known as a maniple, though in all honesty I could never see the point in draping this extraneous object over my arm, as it made it much more difficult to distribute what passed for Holy Communion in my compact inner sanctum. Decked out in my liturgical finery, I began saying mass in the privacy of my bedroom, using cherry Kool-Aid as a substitute for the wine I would pretend to transubstantiate into Christ’s blood, with stale bread serving as the prosaic foodstuff I would simulate transmuting into His Most Precious flesh. All these I would mix together in my fruit-cup chalice. I conducted most of the service in a tot’s simulacrum of Latin, an idiom I learned to mimic by repeating pithy phrases I had heard in church: “Confiteor deo, omnipotente,” “Tantum ergo sacramentum,” “Requiescat in pace,” that sort of thing.