Other men in the family looked down on Johnny, not so much because he was a career jailbird, a second-story man, and a bail-jumper but because he drank wine (which was bad) and port (which was worse). This, to their way of thinking, epitomized Johnny: He was deliberately thumbing his nose at the official, culturally sanctioned beverages—beer and whiskey—that seemed to suit everyone else in the ethnic group just fine. Such behavior was an inexcusable deviation from Irish-American heterodoxy, which decreed that the imbibing of beer and spirits was acceptable in any social context, even if done to excess, but that the consumption of wine in any of its myriad manifestations identified one as a stinking lowlife, since wine was something Italians and Puerto Ricans drank.
Though she did not dislike him personally, my mother dreaded Johnny’s Yuletide visits, which to her suggested a Dickensian irony on the part of the Keystone State penal authorities: Other families got Father Christmas; we got Uncle Johnny. Her apprehension about his visits was not predicated on his reputation as a hard case, as he was really quite a splendid fellow. Her concern was his influence on his malleable sibling, because when Johnny started quaffing the accursed, ethnically verboten fruit of the vine, he would invariably beguile my father into partaking of the abhorrent libation with him. My father succumbed, not because he enjoyed wine per se but because he wished to be chummy.
Unfortunately, wine made my father “rammy,” causing him to become even more sullen, vindictive, explosive. Johnny, a convivial dipsomaniac, simply drank himself into a coma, then lurched off to bed. He would hang around for a few days, repeating this routine on a daily basis, promising that he would soon land a job, get back on his feet, and move into his own place. Then one day he would disappear. A few weeks later, we would get a report from Uncle Jerry or Uncle Charlie that he had again flouted the rules governing the commonwealth, landing him right back in the pokey. For the longest time, we honestly believed that Uncle Johnny could straighten out his life if he would only switch to a more salubrious beverage and evolve into a functional alcoholic like our dad. This was during the period when we still believed that alcohol itself was not the enemy, merely the dosage.
Always a pushover for entry-level iconoclasm, I admired Uncle Johnny because of his peripatetic ways, his refusal to take orders, and his insistence on drinking an ethnically prescribed refreshment that met with no one else’s approval. Being a criminal did not sully his escutcheon in my book, given that the Count of Monte Cristo and the Man in the Iron Mask had also been wrongfully imprisoned after running afoul of the law, as had many of the Apostles and even Christ Himself. If anything, it made him seem more attractive, as hardened criminals were “tough customers” and I was not. Not until I found out that Uncle Johnny had a habit of going through women’s pocketbooks foraging for cash, had a reputation as a light-fingered Louie, and was basically a small-time hood and nothing more, was I forced to purge him from my list of prospective role models, redirecting my idolatry back toward the martyred Uncle Henry.
As a child who was desperate to be taken seriously, I made sure that every new friend got to see that gold watch and that hemoglobin-encrusted missal, providing me with yet another opportunity to trot out the saga of Henry McNulty, Lone Wolf of the Kodiak. But I am not sure they cared, as many of them had their own gaudy skeletons in their family closets, and the story sounded a bit dodgy. When I entered college and began to consort with well-bred types whose family trees were devoid of murderers, drunks, and knife-wound victims, I would wait for an opportunity to recount the circumstances of Henry’s demise. In the back of my mind I already knew that one advantage, and perhaps the only advantage, of growing up poor was having instant access to a rakish family tree, from which one could blithely exhume a few stiletto-filleted cadavers to bedazzle the gentry. Affluent suburban students I got to know in college could lay claim to embezzling uncles, predatory aunts who stripped to their foundation garments once they got a bit ginned up, and grandparents who had been the victims of bloody pogroms. But nobody I met ever had an uncle who got cut to ribbons in an Alaskan knife fight.
Somewhere along the line, Uncle Henry, man and myth, began to slip away. I never completely cut him adrift; he was always lurking there in the back of my mind as my personal Sergeant Preston of the Yukon. But as I grew older it became less and less politic to tell strangers that my uncle had finished second in a back-alley knife fight somewhere north of the forty-eighth parallel. This otherwise engaging anecdotal material was not the sort of thing you could use to impress girls. I also worried that my newfound friends, or their parents, might fear that the sins of the uncle would be visited upon the nephew, that the criminal urge might be congenital, that I, like my male forebears, might be the incarnation of the bad seed, with the mark of Cain engraved upon my very brow.
In retrospect, I realize that this casting about for role models was a crude attempt to assemble a personality with bits and pieces I picked up here and there from other people. It is difficult to grow up happy, much less sane, when there is no one in your social circle that you wish to resemble, when the men you most admire are murder victims, jailbirds, suicides, or a personable but generally unlucky religious leader whose mutilated corpse peers out at you from gruesome paintings mounted in every room in the house. To compensate for this, I manufactured my personality modularly. Men of the world, men-about-town like Uncle Jerry and Uncle Johnny and Uncle Henry and Uncle Charlie, transfixed me with their bravura style and bulging wallets and powerful scent of carcinogens, so I took careful mental notes whenever I found myself in their company, scavenging for bric-a-brac, annexing this or that chunk of their personalities, mixing and matching traits in an effort to simulate having an identity. Ultimately, this transformed me into a bit of a schizophrenic, so that by the time I grew up, I had not one personality but half a dozen. Still, in deciding which persona to adopt in this or that situation while going about my daily life, it’s always been nice to have so many choices.
Despite the potent influence of these powerful, intriguing men, I bore no real resemblance to any of them and knew that I never would. It was true that they were larger than life, but that was only because the life I was leading was so small. They were tougher than me, coarser than me, better versed in the ways of the world than I could ever hope to be. They were spectacularly colorful; they drove big cars, smoked huge cigars, drank mammoth tumblers of whiskey, and used cryptic expressions like
“Schwärze,”
“conniption,” “killjoy,” “Death Row,” and “Jewish lightning.” They had access to far-flung regions of the English language to which minors were not invited, bandying about phrases like “He took the five-finger discount,” “It knocked me for a loop,” “He’s still wet behind the ears,” and “He got caught playing a tune on the cash register.” They were tough in the clinches; they knew how to put bad actors down for the count; they despised men who took a powder, went into the tank, threw in the towel, or took French leave. They were “solid citizens,” and solid citizens never used prissy, pantywaist words like “poppycock” or “balderdash”; they preferred earthy terms like “malarkey” and “cold-cocked” and “horseshit,” and whatever else they may have done in their lives, they did not row crew. For this alone, they seemed worthy of knighthood.
They knew all about Skid Row. They could immediately ascertain who was a little light in the loafers, who was not playing with a full deck, who was a punch-drunk lollapalooza, and who was most likely to take a dive. They liked Gritty Carbuncle in the fifth at Aqueduct, though only to place, and were sure as shootin’ that Sugar Ray Robinson would take out Kid Gavilan with just one punch, because Gavilan was a tin can, if not an outright palooka, who couldn’t fight his way out of a paper bag and was, in any case, so skinny he had to come out twice just to make his own shadow. They rarely hung fire, preferring to risk the whole kit and caboodle on one shot at the brass ring. Though I mostly had no idea what they were talking about when they used these expressions, to me it was all hypnotically exotic, and before long I, too, was talking about cold-cocking punchy stumblebums and dispatching their sorry asses straight to Queer Street. After that, it went without saying, everything would be copacetic.
This program of modular personality assembly manifested itself most dramatically in 1959, when I fell under the spell of a barrel-chested war hero named Len Mohr. Len was the proprietor of a tumbledown clothing store about a mile from my home. Because his prices were so low and because the store was the kind of unprepossessing dump where the working class felt right at home, my family became regular patrons. Len took quite a shine to me, because I was bright and polite and asked tons of questions about the medals he had hanging on the wall.
At the ripe old age of thirty-two, when the Japanese launched their sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, Len had enlisted in the marines, landing a position as a drill instructor, teaching young men how to box. For the next couple of years, he organized boxing exhibitions as entertainment on troop ships, sometimes acting as referee. Then, despite his advanced years, he persuaded his commander to let him participate in the invasion of Iwo Jima. On the wall not far from the cash register hung a couple of medals he had won for his valorous actions. My dad, by contrast, had served as an infantryman who may have fired a few shots in anger on an island the Japanese had already abandoned, caught malaria, got shipped home, went AWOL, got into trouble with the MPs, and ended up doing three years’ hard time in a Dixie military prison. His transgressions earned him a dishonorable discharge, a fact I unearthed while researching a school project. This was a career-wrecking badge of shame that would haunt him for the rest of his life. Len Mohr had his war, my father quite another.
One day when I was getting fitted for some back-to-school shoes, Len asked my mother if I could work for him. The arrangement he proposed was that I put in two hours every day after school and work from nine in the morning until seven at night on Saturday. The salary was $6 a week, hardly a king’s ransom but not an out-and-out insult. I was all in favor of the idea, as was my mother, because it would give me a sense of purpose and provide me with a little bit of pocket money for the first time in my life. Asking an eight-year-old to work twenty hours a week probably wasn’t even legal back then—though child labor laws were rarely enforced—but inasmuch as the job had the potential to save my life, I grabbed it.
By the standards of the retail sector, where merchants tended to be sallow, ectomorphic, and decrepit, Len cut a fine figure. He was roughly six feet tall, heavily muscled, with a stomach like granite. He sported a magnificent lion’s mane, and nothing gave him more pleasure than to sweep his hair down over his forehead, shake it wildly, then whip it back into place, after which he would lovingly run a metal comb through that thicket of massed tendrils. He would do this several times a day, making quite a spectacle of himself in the process. He never cut his hair short, not even in the summertime, when the entire planet was baking. He was as intoxicated by his hair as any sixteen-year-old girl girding for conquest before her vanity table. His grooming tics evoked Samson, scourge of the Philistines, perhaps signifying a subconscious fear that his seemingly boundless retailing powers would vaporize were his locks ever shorn.
Even in photographs from his younger days, you could see that his hair was always amazingly copious and thick, an iconoclastic image, given the grooming mores of the era. After he left the service, Len never again got his hair cut like a marine; he always looked like Johnny Weiss-muller in his Tarzan the Ape Man mode. This was most unusual, given that Len was a jarhead who had fought with valor in the living hell of Iwo Jima. Moreover, the era we were living through was a buttoned-down, straight-arrow entr’acte between the flashy forties and the swinging sixties, when white men sported close-cropped hair and lightly starched personalities to match. This juxtaposition of seditious hair and middle-of-the-road GOP values made an unusual combination. But from Len I learned the most valuable lesson of all: that if you had money, you could do whatever you damn well pleased.
Len’s Clothing Store was a two-story stone structure drowning in faded yellow stucco, with crimson trim adorning the doors and windows. Defiantly ugly, it achieved the almost unimaginable distinction of being regarded as an eyesore by the neighbors even though it stood just a few yards from the rubbish-strewn railroad tracks, adjoined a dingy, poorly maintained social club, and sat no more than a stone’s throw down the road from a heating oil company’s fleabag headquarters. The building looked diseased, as if jaundice had devised a mechanism for expressing itself in the patois of commercial architecture. Len did not care about the store’s outer appearance, nor how it looked on the inside, which wasn’t all that much snazzier. I never got the impression that Len actually needed to earn any money, which was good, because the store never generated much. One torrid day in August of 1961, we took in a grand total of $2. This may have been some sort of retail record, even in the notoriously tightfisted Quaker City.
Len’s principal source of income was the stock market. He had made a tidy fortune speculating on sizzling new issues in the late 1950s and would later make a killing during the Kennedy administration, cleaning up on a group of legendary stocks called the Nifty Fifty, plus a handful of brash new outfits like Ling Electronics and National Video. Though I did not learn this until much later, some of the massively hyped, self-levitating issues he favored, many of them the brainchildren of enterprising rogues, subsequently imploded, wiping out immense paper fortunes. In my thirties, when I worked for
Barron’s
editor Alan Abelson, I found out that he had written disparagingly about these companies right around the time I was working for Len, warning readers that the whole thing was a house of cards, that investors should get out while the getting was good, before the sharpies fleeced them. But most of them did not.