While Glenn and I were conversing about one thing or another, the sound of dispatchers yakking to firemen was constantly cackling away in the back room. Even when he was standing at the front counter, gasbagging with customers about their rheumatism, chancres, or impending death from melanoma, Glenn would only half listen to what they were saying, his left ear always cocked for scintillating news from the pyrotechnic airwaves. It was the same procedure during his conversations with me; there I’d be, gamely feigning interest in the awful truth about Lucky Luciano’s shadowy dealings with mobbed-up dermatologists or Commodore Vanderbilt’s cornering the steamboat market back in 1862, and he’d suddenly jerk forward, put his fingers to his lips, then mince back to his lair with that signature gait of his, like Rumpelstiltskin trying to sneak up on the miller’s daughter, or, if she was not available, Rapunzel herself. Now, he could listen more intently to the news emanating from his contraband appliance.
“I’m telling you, if that baby goes to five alarms, I’m closing this joint!” he would exclaim. And, by God, he would close it, just the way Len used to padlock his clothing store and scoot over to the ballpark on slow afternoons. No matter what time of day it was, as long as there was a fire burning out of control somewhere within a ten-mile radius, Glenn would send me on my way, lock up, and giddyup over to the scene of the blaze in his glitz-free baby blue Volkswagen Beetle.
For official consumption, Glenn was doing this as a member of the Second Alarmers, a cadre of concerned citizens who, out of an ingrained sense of civic duty, would gallop off to major conflagrations and distribute coffee and doughnuts to firemen. They even had their own divine little Second Alarmers truck, the very height of hobbyist preciousness. But the truth of the matter was, Glenn was a textbook example of the wholesome pyromaniac, a scamp who was enthralled by fire, not only because of its immense destructive power, nor because of the heroism of the men who battled it, but because of the sheer drama generated by the incendiary event itself.
A couple of times he asked if I would like to tag along and watch a building or two burn to the ground. No, I would not; fire never held any allure for me, and it was hard to see how my watching someone’s possessions go up in smoke could be much fun. Besides, I could still remember that little girl who’d burned to death back in the housing project. Anyway, I was always the type who would rather play football with friends than witness the economic ruination of strangers.
Glenn was a serious student of the lore of combustion. At the drop of a hat, he would launch into an impassioned spiel about notable conflagrations he had witnessed, the most memorable of which was a granary fire in the 1950s that sent thirty-five people to the hospital. Other people liked to reminisce about neighborhoods that were now slums. Glenn liked to reminisce about neighborhoods that were now cinders. Manhattan fascinated him because of the glittering skyscrapers that would tower over the city until history had run its course. The only things in Philadelphia that interested him were buildings that had already burned to the ground.
Sadly for my employer, as for any devout firebug, Philadelphia, with few tall buildings, had trouble generating enough full-blown fires to keep him occupied. Stymied, he began casting about for another hobby. It wasn’t going to be stamp collecting. Whittling never came under serious consideration. He definitely wasn’t going to become a bird-watcher. Mercifully, neither the harmonica nor the hammered dulcimer ever entered the picture. Then one day, straggling in from school, I detected a fragrant aroma emanating from the back room. It smelled . . . well . . . piquant. Lo and behold, as I discovered when I made my way to the rear, Glenn had reinvented himself as a chef.
I could not imagine what had set this off, though one theory is that Glenn qua apothecarist delighted in the physical act of mixing substances together, in the same way that painters enjoy the visceral act of painting. Once the opportunity to use his hands on a daily basis was usurped by drug companies, he needed a substitute. Not really a gourmet, and having given no prior indication of any special interest in the preparation, presentation, or consumption of food, Glenn overnight decided to shed his identity as a pharmacist and henceforth tread the path of the epicure.
The fruits of Glenn’s initial foray into the realm of the culinary was a modest beef stew he cooked on a Bunsen burner he kept in the back room. At least I thought it was a beef stew; subsequently, he would inform me that the concoction I’d been invited to tuck into was a
boeuf bourguignon
he had whipped up by consulting one of that era’s trendy cookbooks, something along the lines of
Cuisine of the Dordogne for an Overweight Planet.
Glenn enlisted me and my friend Richie Giardinelli, who also worked in the apothecary, as guinea pigs in this exciting new enterprise. He would always have a meal waiting for us when we came in after school and would perch himself on the far side of the table like a voyeuristic gargoyle, chin resting on his hands, watching with shimmering glee as we devoured a repast he hoped would elicit the highest encomium imaginable. Alas, Richie’s mother was a fantastic cook, hardly a rarity among Italian Americans, so he found the whole undertaking a bit goofy. I was in a completely different situation. My mother was arguably the worst cook in the history of Western cuisine, so I was all in favor of Glenn’s setting off in this bold new direction, as the vittles were quite tasty.
Like most real-life chefs, Glenn had no interest in eating what he prepared; his pleasure came from giving pleasure to others. Cautious by nature, the hedgehog rather than the fox, he kicked off his second career with mildly adventurous dishes such as coq au vin, chicken with forty cloves of garlic, and linguine in vodka sauce, but quickly progressed to much more exotic fare along the lines of bouillabaisse and Welsh rarebit. As soon as I opened Glenn’s front door after school, I could smell the bouquet of whatever he was working on wafting in from the storage room he had now transformed into a gremlin’s keep. I had my favorites—Welsh rarebit was not one of them—and was grateful for his generosity and industry.
My sole beef with these impromptu meals was the diminutive portions he served; the birdlike offerings were perhaps West Oak Lane forerunners of nouvelle cuisine. I would have gleefully welcomed heartier portions while dining chez Dreibelbis, because I was furiously trying to bulk up so I could fend off bullies, including my father. At the time I worked for Glenn, I weighed only around 145 pounds, soaking wet.
The pivotal event in this era was my mother’s decision to go back to work after a sixteen-year absence from the ranks of the employed. This was a heroic act that enabled us to rent a house in a decent neighborhood, escape from public housing forever, and bid farewell to white trash, hooligans, guttersnipe, and scum. But it was also an emotionally transformational experience for her, because it meant that she would no longer be financially dependent on her husband. Her initial duties at Germantown Hospital were relatively menial, but when the Medicare program was introduced in 1965, she was put in charge of the collections desk. She remained in this position until her retirement twenty years later, after which she would endlessly reminisce about her time at the hospital, not so much because she was excited by her duties or her interactions with colleagues but because she enjoyed work in the abstract sense. For just as a house with a porch and a garden and a puppy gives a family a sense of dignity no apartment unit can confer, having a job gave my mother back her life.
Because she had white-collar skills that my father did not possess, she was soon earning more than he—before long, considerably more. This, for the first time ever, gave her the upper hand in the relationship. She immediately capitalized on her good fortune by devising a schedule whereby he would work nights and she would work days. This way, she would be asleep by the time he got home, and he would be asleep when she left in the morning. The arrangement meant that they only had to see each other on weekends, if either of them so desired, and sent a pretty clear message to her husband that she despised him. Their marriage, long a travesty, had now descended into the realm of farce.
In all likelihood, my mother had handed him an ultimatum: Either he would agree to a schedule that would get him out of the house during most waking hours so the rest of us could breathe, or she would throw him out. Of course, the four of us were hoping that her job would pay enough so she could turf him out into the street forever, but this did not come to pass. Constrained by the teachings of the Church, by the social mores of their class, and perhaps even by the delusional notion that a bad father was better than no father at all, she could never quite persuade herself to bring down the curtain on their pointless liaison forever. More important, neither of them ever made enough individually to support a decent standard of living; only by pooling their salaries were they able to lift us above the poverty line. My father grudgingly accepted this arrangement, because he had no other choice.
In the two years I worked at the apothecary, my father’s downward trajectory continued, as if he was unaware that the bottom he was seeking had already been hit. His drinking and depression intensified; his fury at the world reached a maniacal level. Now he was a human powder keg. His rage mystified us, given our improved financial condition. But as was always true in his sector of a congenitally spiteful ethnic group, he viewed a wife’s good fortune as a husband’s disgrace. With his spasmodic employment history—fired, quit, fired, quit—he could no longer find work as a truck driver or even a deliveryman. The best job he could wangle at this late date was as a security guard at nearby La Salle College. This was a position that literally required no skills other than the ability to remain upright for eight hours a night. He did not like his job and had good reason not to. Even in those days, when the occupation was relatively new, security guards were figures of mirth. No one took them seriously; they did not get to carry guns; they were derided as “rent-a-cops.”
This epithet enraged them. Cops in Philadelphia were feared but respected, particularly Frank Rizzo’s leather-clad, jackbooted highway patrolmen. Security guards, by comparison, were thought of as impostors, cartoon cops. They dressed like policemen in the same way that stubby-legged little girls dressed up like ballerinas, but realistically they were in the same class as apprentice clowns who were permitted to wear rubber noses and oversized shoes but weren’t allowed to be funny. My father spent the rest of his life taking jobs as a security guard or a night watchman at various academic institutions, apartment houses, and hospitals, and at all of them he made less money than my mother. In theory, the influx of extra cash should have cheered him, as a huge financial weight had been lifted from his shoulders. But because men who earned less than their wives were viewed with contempt—particularly in blue-collar neighborhoods—and because money cannot buy happiness, her good fortune simply reinforced his own perception that he was a failure. Unlike Glenn, who was not so much a failure as a has-been, a one-time success whose services society no longer required, my father did not have the financial resources to indulge any personal whimsy to allay his disappointment in the way his life had turned out. He would not be going out on any gleeful forays with the Second Alarmers. No
boeuf bourguignon
lay in his future.
Throughout these years, everyone in my family devised stratagems to avoid seeing him. Whenever they were on the premises simultaneously, my mother would barricade herself in her bedroom with that old standby, a stack of newspapers containing all sorts of bad news it was not in her best interest to read. Ree worked at a dry cleaner’s and spent every free weekend with my uncle Jerry and aunt Cassie out in the suburbs. Eileen developed her remarkable singing voice, made a lot of friends, excelled at school, and otherwise kept a low profile while plotting her escape to New York City. Her plan, the details of which she loved to recapitulate to the rest of us, was to graduate from high school at noon, grab a snack, jump on the one-forty-five train to Gotham, and never come back. I think she may have kept the latest timetables hidden away in her bedroom just to make sure she didn’t miss the train.
Keeping out of his way was not easy, as my father never stopped treating Eileen as his personal nemesis, the one child too many who had broken the back of the family financially, the one responsible for our losing the house on Russell Street. To him, she was less a daughter than a writ of execution. Mary Ann, our little sister, was usually left to her own devices; her sunny disposition may have enabled her to survive those years reasonably intact, even though she spent more time in my father’s company than the rest of us. Ree, Eileen, and I always felt that Mary Ann had gotten off easier than her siblings, that she did not suffer routine physical abuse the way the rest of us did. We were also jealous of her, because she was cherubic and peppy, and because we believed that she was far and away our father’s favorite. But this was an honor with few perks; it was like death by firing squad rather than death by hanging.
My personal diversionary strategy throughout these years was diabolically cunning: I made sure that when my father was home, I was not. I worked, studied at the library, played basketball, played football, played baseball, played pinochle, played guitar in a rock ’n’ roll band called the Phase Shift Network. I was recruited into the band by a close friend I had taught to play guitar, with mixed results. He then switched to the bass, a wise decision, as bass players were always in demand. Jaw-droppingly suave for that era, let alone that neighborhood, Joe Alteari was the first person I ever knew that dared to appear in public clad in paisley and somehow managed to pull it off. This may have been because he was Italian, and Italians felt at home in regions of the fashion world where less exotic ethnic groups feared to tread. The newest member of the band, he was also the one who was most sensitive about its image. From the moment he joined up and got the lay of the land, he was determined to stage a palace coup and purge the current rhythm guitarist from the ensemble, thus freeing up a space for me.