One of the tried-and-true stratagems of the accomplished alcoholic is the defective-memory gambit: If I was so drunk that I cannot remember doing something, then,
quod erat demonstrandum
, I didn’t do it. One night when I was sixteen, I came home to find that the blue velour wing chair that dominated our living room was absent from its usual place of honor. A snap reconnaissance revealed that it was lying on its side in the backyard, where my father had heaved it in a fit of rage the night before. This was after tossing a handful of beer bottles through the window, showering glass on my mother and my sister Ree, while they were hanging laundry. Now the chair looked not so much ejected as dead. The most upsetting thing about this incident was that the blue velour wing chair was a cherished family possession, the nearest we ever came to an heirloom. Though it was tatty and stained and rickety, the velour was so elegant by comparison with the chintzy fabrics we were accustomed to that the chair had come to assume in our minds the jaded majesty of a Louis XV fauteuil. I gathered it up and returned it to its rightful position in the living room, and my mother made sure that the window-pane was replaced. None of us ever mentioned the incident, nor did we attempt to pinpoint what insult or slight had precipitated such an explosion. This would only have rekindled my father’s ire, ensuring that even more chairs would go flying.
Events like this reinforced the sense that we were living in an asylum. Sleep was fitful, because we were always waiting for the lunatic-in-chief to fall asleep with a lit cigarette and incinerate the entire family. Yes, there are instances where inmates in such a facility might actually prefer death to life. But nobody wants to die in a fire. My sisters and I had not always viewed our father as a menace, as our implacable enemy. It had taken years to get to that stage. But by the time I was in my early teens, that juncture had arrived because his continued existence threatened ours. Our attitude was simple: We wanted him dead or we wanted him gone. The only positive thing he could do for us now was to walk in front of a truck or slit his own throat. Or, as insurance against a Rasputin-like escape from the clutches of the Grim Reaper, both.
Glenn knew none of this, as my mother always encouraged us to keep the truth about our home life “under our hats.” Unlike Len, whom my father envied and disliked, Glenn never infiltrated his consciousness. He was too prim and respectable to pose any kind of threat. He was pudgy and soft and drove a baby blue Volkswagen, which was neither a manly vehicle nor a virile hue. Anyway, he was a pharmacist, the bush-league version of a physician. Though our house sat no more than a hundred yards from the apothecary, I am not sure the two ever met. If they did, I cannot imagine what they had to say to each other. The only thing I ever told Glenn about my father was that it wasn’t worth getting to know him.
One day Glenn asked if I would like to spend a Sunday in New York. I had never been to New York; the closest I’d ever gotten was Trenton. Glenn picked me up at three in the morning and we headed north, adhering to some meandering itinerary that carried us toward Perth Amboy. At this point the vehicle abruptly veered east. A stickler for detail, and no stranger to romance, Glenn wanted me to see Manhattan for the first time while standing on the deck of the Staten Island Ferry. It was important to him that I be immediately, and quite hopelessly, smitten by New York. With the trusty old Staten Island Ferry gambit, he was pulling out all the stops.
Such high-pressure sales tactics weren’t really necessary; from the moment I laid eyes on the Manhattan skyline, I understood that New York was a question that had only one answer. Still, just to be on the safe side, Glenn piled it on thick. He started out by treating me to breakfast in Little Italy. Then we motored all the way up Park Avenue and down the Great White Way. We drove east on Fifty-seventh Street and west on Forty-second. We visited Harlem, Wall Street, Rockefeller Center, Central Park, the Brooklyn Bridge, Lincoln Center, and Greenwich Village. He took me to Chinatown for lunch, just to show me what a proper Chinatown—as opposed to Philadelphia’s junior-varsity version—looked like, and then wrapped up the festivities with a banquet in Sheepshead Bay. A rube off the streets of Philly didn’t have a chance in the face of such an onslaught; the deck was rigged, and the fix was in.
Watching a young man fall in love with a city that he himself had foolishly jilted was a bittersweet triumph for Glenn; it was as if he were converting me to a religion he had unwisely abjured. Still, it was obvious that my enthusiasm, my sense of wonder, and my refusal to take anything for granted elated him. He’d taught me a lot about New York over the two years I’d been working for him, and I had learned my lessons well. I understood that Chinatown and Central Park and Saint Patrick’s Cathedral and Harlem were mythic. I needed no one to explain to me the symbolism of Wall Street or Madison Avenue or Times Square. I knew all about the sonnets and bonnets at the Fifth Avenue Easter Parade. The day I saw New York was the day I saw the future. And even though my affection for the city would never extend to its sports franchises—to start cheering for the pathetic Mets or the accursed Yankees would be a betrayal of my roots—I had already decided that one day I would come to live in the Empire State, and that once I did, I would probably be staying. Countless times over the years, I have reminded myself that New York is not my home; that despite the passage of years, I am only passing through. But the idea of leaving it remains beyond contemplation. When I fantasize about other lives I might be leading, I have no trouble visualizing that first day in Paris. What I cannot visualize is that last day in New York.
Adults hate to arrive at the point in their lives when young people start offering them advice. They hate it even more when the advice is worth taking. As crime mounted and our trusty old clientele either returned to dust or absconded to antiseptic Jersey suburbs, I urged Glenn to sell his business right away, while it was still possible to fetch a decent price. By now, my family was getting ready to move again, spurred on by gang violence that had become rampant in the neighborhood. But Glenn refused, adhering to the dictum that things could not get better until they got worse. Things did not get better. One night, a hood came in, put a gun to Glenn’s head, forced him onto the floor, and emptied the cash register. Glenn was not harmed, but he was terrified, and that was the end of his apothecary days. Shortly thereafter, he sold the store and took a job at a suburban hospital filling prescriptions. There he no longer cooked Welsh rarebit and no longer served up bouillabaisse. His days as a free-wheeling entrepreneur were over.
After I moved away from West Oak Lane, I stopped by to visit Glenn a few times; but once I entered college, after he had padlocked his operation, I never saw him again. The hospital where he worked was not easy to reach by public transportation, and I did not drive, and I was busy with my studies, and I had a girlfriend, and so on and so forth. I did learn from my mother that things continued to go badly for him over those last few years. But things were not going badly for me. So Glenn dropped out of my life.
Losing contact with the two men who had meant so much to me growing up has always been a source of regret. But I was reluctant to renew contact with them until I had made something of myself, and by the time that happened, they were gone. I am not even sure they would have been happy with the results; if they were seeking a clone or a reflection, I could not accommodate them. The whole time I was living in the shadow of these men, I knew that I would not grow up to be anything like them. I had no intention of being a marine, a boxer, or a retailer, and I certainly had no desire to be a pharmacist. Glenn was bald and tubby and wore a silly hat and drove a misshapen baby blue Volkswagen that I, the prototypical teen, was mortified to be seen in. At a time when people were still driving flashy Thunderbirds and Mustangs, Glenn had already surrendered to lackluster functionality. It was hard to square this with his passion for the improvident Jay Gould, the freewheeling Diamond Jim Brady, and all the other rakish heroes of the Gilded Age. Still, by observing him, being inspired by him, taking a bit of this and throwing away a lot of that, I managed to cobble together a personality that would stand me in good stead for the rest of my life.
When a child grows up to be the person he dreamed of becoming, it is easy to forget that his dreams did not always seem attainable. Without Len and Glenn, I would have been sucked into the void. This is not so much because of the wisdom they imparted, nor even because they kept reminding me that there was light at the end of the tunnel. It was because they taught me that the light at the end of the tunnel was meaningless unless you were willing to go into the tunnel. These otherwise very different men taught me that there were two kinds of people: the ones who thought the world was a dangerous place, and the ones who did not. My father feared the world; it was an adversary to hide from. Len and Glenn went out to meet it head-on and encouraged me to do the same. They taught me not to throw my life away, because I was not going to get another one.
Neither of these men has ever left my thoughts. They are a link with a now vanished urban, working-class world that was neither hopelessly dangerous nor ludicrously synthetic like the twee districts that ring Center City Philadelphia today, rechristened with smarmy names like Northern Liberties. Len and Glenn were unpredictable and difficult to get a read on and in some ways strange, but they were authentic and original and irreplaceable. And now they are gone.
One afternoon toward the end of our relationship, I strolled into the apothecary, smelled something funny, and discovered that Glenn was expanding his horizons yet again and morphing into a
Braumeister
. Earlier that day, he had excavated his long-dormant home-brewing paraphernalia and concocted a potent beverage he identified as mead. Mead, sophisticates will aver, is a yeasty libation that reached the height of its popularity in the thirteenth century, right around the time Gandolf of Frith slew Wamba the Stoat Fetcher. That Glenn was going off in this unanticipated feudal direction seemed par for the course; he was always a man out of time. From that point on, he kept a creditable supply of home-brewed mead on hand, never failing to hand me a flagon when I reported for work after school, thereby ensuring that I would be ever so slightly blitzed as I was counting out a few hundred Valiums for our reliably inanimate clientele. Once again, the very act of delegating official pill-counting authority to a high school student with no formal training in the pharmaceutical arts, a youngster who was well and truly ripped after imbibing such a powerful, neomedieval brew, was in blatant contravention of long-standing FDA policies regarding sobriety in the workplace, especially at the secondary-school level. Glenn did not blink an eye. He was the most persistently, defiantly, authentically unhinged person I ever met.
In the end, what I valued most in these two men, apart from their decency, was their wholesome eccentricity. Unlike my father, whose antisocial approach to life always culminated in mayhem, Len and Glenn demonstrated how it was possible to thrive in this society even though one had in some sense seceded from it. When I see Glenn in my mind’s eye, he is not the defeated chain-smoker lying facedown on the floor with a gun pressed against his temple amid the ruins of his apothecary, but the mad scientist brewing a fresh vat of mead for the bibulous pleasure of his teenaged assistant. When I think of him, I see him in Sheepshead Bay, gobbling up his oysters, or in McSorley’s Old Ale House, quaffing a beer. I see him in Greenwich Village, standing on the spot where Dylan Thomas busted a gut, or on 125th Street in Harlem, or on the footsteps of the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine, the half-finished temple that will still be under construction the morning of Armageddon. Finally, I see him in old Times Square, telling all the boys on Forty-second Street that he will soon be rejoining them, and this time for good. His beady Swiss-American eyes are sparkling now; he is once again the boy from coal country who came to the big city in search of adventure. In a nation of fakers and poseurs and bogus mavericks and phonies, Glenn was the real thing. His was an apothecary like no other apothecary the Keystone State had ever seen, and for twenty-four months I was lucky enough to work in it. Those who speak ill of pharmacists in my presence do so at their peril.
Chapter 8.
C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre
At the time I was attending it, Cardinal Dougherty was the largest Catholic high school in the world. To me, this is a fascinating résumé entry, like once having worked as a mason on the Great Wall of China; but even though I have gone through life clamorously making my quaint, statistically improbable educational pedigree known to strangers, always expecting them to be impressed, they never are. Perhaps it is because they do not believe me, suspecting, not without some justification, that Catholics have a tendency to fudge the numbers.
When I graduated, in 1968, shortly before the school began an inexorable decline that would reduce its size by 85 percent, Cardinal Dougherty boasted an enrollment of sixty-five hundred. This was five times the size of the college I would attend. Years later, when I would encounter alumni from the same graduating class, they would act as if we were comrades in arms, battle-scarred veterans of Belleau Wood or Antietam. In fact, having matriculated simultaneously at a school the size of Cardinal Dougherty gave us roughly as much in common as two tourists who had once been in the same train station in Stuttgart. I never felt like I was in high school; I felt like I was in a half-dozen high schools.
Students were assigned to one of three sections—Academic, Business, and General—based on their perceived cerebral skills. Once a student had been dispatched to the section deemed most suited to his gifts, he could never transfer out. This meant that by age thirteen, at least one incontrovertible, life-altering decision had been made for each student as a result of a calibration process of questionable merit. There were the anointed ones, there were the runners-up, and there were the castoffs. Those in the top Academic section were viewed as college material; those in the Business section would make fine bureaucrats; those in the General section would go to Vietnam to fight a war they were not going to win. Without the deferment from the draft that was awarded to college students, boys had a good chance of ending up dead in Southeast Asia. Many of them knew this, but there was little they could do about it. The rest of us had other options.