When I was small, I did not hate my father in the way I would hate him later. I did not wish he were dead; I simply wished he were elsewhere. One of the epochal vignettes from that era was the day my father, his younger brother Johnny, and my uncle Jerry clambered up a ladder onto Jerry’s roof to do some repairs and then got so drunk they were afraid to come back down. For no very good reason, they had gone up there to do some retiling and spread a little paint around and perhaps mend the outside of the chimney. My father was useless around tools; he could not hammer a nail, smooth a plane, replace a window, cut a lawn. My uncle Jerry was slightly less hapless, though he thought otherwise: He once replaced a lighting fixture without setting the house on fire and ever afterward thought this put him in the same weight class as Thomas Edison. The third member of this unlikely crew was Uncle Johnny, who had recently been paroled from the slammer and emancipated for one of his brief but eventful forays into normal society. Having served as a mechanic in the Navy during the war and having mastered all sorts of skills while in prison, Uncle Johnny was actually quite the craftsman. When he was not drunk.
It was boiling hot that afternoon, and the three of them started hitting the sauce pretty early, periodically asking us to fetch them fresh supplies. We were more than happy to provide this livery service, carrying bottle after bottle up to the men on the roof. My uncle Jerry drank only two brands of beer: Miller High Life, the beer that had, by reputation, made Milwaukee famous, and Carling Black Label, the beer that manifestly had not. My father, who always invested foods and beverages with precisely calibrated socioeconomic values, did not care for either of these brands: He thought their hifalutin names sounded Republican. He refused to drink anything other than Ortlieb’s or Schmidt’s, locally brewed swill so vile, so flat, you had to pour a shaker of salt inside to conjure up even a wan simulacrum of a foamy head. But that day up on the roof, he was perfectly content to guzzle my uncle’s Carling Black Label, because he was so lightheaded and happy, he’d completely forgotten about Republicans.
By the time the sun started to disappear, my father and my two uncles were three sheets to the wind, too plastered to make the perilous return trip down the ladder. They had no choice but to sit on the roof until they got their sea legs about them and felt steady enough to descend. That evening was one of the seraphic moments in my childhood. The lads seemed to be having a swell time of it up there, and the noncombatants—children, sisters, wives—were having an equally wonderful time down below. My father was up on the roof drinking, which was a potentially fatal activity. But none of us was hoping that he would fall and smash his skull and die without getting to remind us, one last time, that no matter how hard we tried, we would never amount to a pimple on an elephant’s rear end. We simply wanted him to stay up there, ever so slightly removed from his family, quaffing his beer, harming no one. We wanted him to stay right where he was, up on that sloping roof in Havertown, Pennsylvania, until the cows came home. We wanted him to stay up on that roof forever.
Chapter 2.
Sin City
In the milieu I grew up in, pivotal events were associated with a particular street or parish, rather than a specific day, month, or year.
“Your mother got a reputation for being flighty because of Wendle Street,” a chiding relative would report. What transpired on Wendle Street would go unexplained, as would the meaning of the word “flighty.”
“You look like you’re from Fifth and Gybyp” was a popular insult.
“Father Whearty got in trouble with the archdiocese, so they shipped him out to Our Lady of Victory” was the sort of unsubstantiated assertion my father loved to make, adorning a quip with the mantle of theory.
“Was I born in Holy Child or Holy Angels?” I would ask my parents, ignorant of the yawning socioeconomic gap that divided the two parishes.
Dates were irrelevant in such an environment, because everything anyone needed to know was contained in this otherwise inscrutable semiotic code. “Your father started his heavy drinking on Russell Street, but it didn’t get really bad until you moved to Saint Bridget’s,” my aunt Cassie would confide. Within its context, this was as exactingly precise as saying “The Spanish Armada was destroyed on August 5, 1588.” These were Irish-Catholic hieroglyphics that, however mystifying to the uninitiated, made perfect sense to us. The entire city was gerrymandered into parishes whose very names served as code words for distinct economic classes.
“They live in Saint Ambrose’s.” (
They’re loaded
.)
“They moved up to Saint Cecilia’s.” (
They think they’re better than us
.)
“They live in Saint Matthew’s.” (
They think they’re a lot better than us
.)
“They never got out of Saint Ed’s.” (
Those poor bastards are still living down there with the spear-chuckers
.)
This penchant for describing all urban phenomena in narrow diocesan terms sometimes defied logic. When, at age sixteen, I introduced a new friend to my mother, she asked if his house on the 4800 block of Franklin Street was located in Holy Child parish or the Church of the Incarnation. His name was Weiss; he was a lion of Judah; until that moment, he had no idea that he was living in an invisible city over which a Catholic zoning board held sway, surreptitiously reconfiguring municipal boundaries without any of the Jews, Baptists, Seventh-Day Adventists, or atheists being any the wiser.
Every family I associated with during my childhood could trace its rise or fall to a single apocalyptic event, terrible in its grandeur, seismic in its ramifications. It might be one pregnancy too many, or a job that got away, or a car crash, or the munificence of a wayfaring stranger bubbling up from an economic class of whose existence we had previously only heard unsubstantiated rumors. The watershed moment in our history occurred in 1958, when my father lost his job as an “expeditor” at a company called Proctor & Schwartz. The firm was revered the length and breadth of the nation for its sturdy Mary Proctor appliances, which included a line of staggeringly reliable toasters. An expeditor was the Triple A equivalent of a draftsman, a blue-collar acolyte poised hopefully on the cusp of the white-collar world yet still constrained by the fetters of the proletariat. Handy to have around but hardly indispensable, my father spent his entire tenure at the company living in fear of being laid off. His Waterloo occurred during an economic downturn brought on, at least in his version of events, by heartless Republican policies devised with no other purpose than to smash the dreams of the workingman.
At the time, we were living on Russell Street in a North Philadelphia parish called Saint Veronica’s. It was Saint Veronica who captured the imprint of Christ’s face on her veil as the Son of God was dragging himself through the backstreets of Jerusalem on his way to Golgotha; she was one of those star-crossed holy women who, unlike Saint Agnes or Saint Joan of Arc, did not become famous by doing something overtly theatrical, like spontaneously growing hair all over her body to demoralize potential rapists or assuming command of the armies of France at the age of seventeen. She was merely someone who happened to be in the right place at the right time. It helped that she came equipped for emergencies.
After my father’s unexpected expectoration into the ranks of the unemployed, we could no longer pay our bills and were forced to abandon our winsome home and move into a housing project in a neighborhood no one we knew was even vaguely familiar with. Though the Schuylkill Falls Housing Project—always referred to as the East Falls Housing Project because no one could spell “Schuylkill”—was only about six miles away from Russell Street, the psychological distance was Saharan. Everyone—relatives, friends, neighbors, creditors—knew that we were not moving there out of choice but because we had been banished from the lower middle class. We were slipping further down an economic ladder on which we had no more than a tenuous foothold to begin with. We were going into exile.
Storm clouds had been gathering on the horizon for some time before the day of our
hegira
officially arrived. One Friday night, I was watching a popular television program called
The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin
with my older sister. The central dramatic figure in the program was a diligent and resourceful German shepherd stationed at a frontier outpost in the Old West who, by dint of his prodigious tracking skills, quietly evolved into the nemesis of the depraved Apache, the bloodthirsty Kiowa, and the legendarily inhospitable Comanche. Unexpectedly, as we were marveling at Rin Tin Tin’s latest ingenious solution to some sagebrush conundrum, the doorbell rang. My mother answered, and a few seconds later two burly men in trench coats entered the living room, unplugged the television, and lugged it out of the house. I was eight at the time, my sister sixteen months older. My two younger sisters, five and one, were upstairs sleeping. Prior to this event, no one had explained the concept of property repossession to us, so we had no idea why or by what right the men had taken the television away. Luckily for them, my father was not home that evening, for had he been (or so we believed at the time), he would have fought tooth and nail to prevent the repo Gestapo from filching our TV set, or at the very least delayed them long enough to let us see the end of the show. But he was not there, as not being places where he ought to have been was standard operating procedure.
This was not the only sign that something was amiss. On Saturday mornings, we would often be jolted awake by the sound of a mammoth wooden cart—more like a gigantic wheelbarrow—being hauled up the street to our front door by a squat, powerful man belonging to an ethnic group with which we had had no previous social congress. I think he may have been Lebanese. The cart was laden to overflowing with quality foodstuffs purchased at Neubauer’s Market, a mildly upscale emporium of the type that my parents never patronized, as they had rarely been in the chips and viewed the purchase of pricy foods as evidence of “snootiness,” at that time a grave ethnic transgression. The merchandise had been paid for by my aunt Addie, an eccentric figure cloaked in copious mystery, whose own snootiness was indulged, if not encouraged. Strictly speaking, Aunt Addie was not my aunt, nor my father’s; she was some sort of cousin. But in those days, any benevolent, gray-haired spinster eternally poised to loosen her purse strings was known as an aunt. These women were rarely lookers.
Aunt Addie (short for Adelaide) had slaved away her entire life in downtown Philadelphia, in some midlevel secretarial capacity. She was famous hither and yon for attending daily mass at nearby Old Saint Joseph’s Church, the longest-standing Catholic house of worship in the city and one of the most venerable in all of English-speaking America, before reporting for work. As daily mass included Saturdays and Sundays, this obsession demanded an immense commitment of time and energy on her part, given that she lived miles away from downtown Philadelphia, nowhere near the church, and was completely dependent on public transportation.
It was said by some that my aunt Addie had narrowly missed crossing the Atlantic on the
Titanic
in April 1912, that her taxi had been delayed or her train halted at the junction or her steamer trunk mislaid, but this was unlikely. People back then liked to tart up their otherwise humdrum biographies with apocryphal tales of narrow escapes from epic nautical disasters or chance encounters with shadowy associates of Buffalo Bill or John Dillinger or Quanah Parker. Aunt Addie was gruff but generous and had doted on my father since his youth, deeming him a victim rather than a victimizer, an ill-starred will-o’-the-wisp who never got the breaks. His marriage was one of the breaks he had not gotten. My mother and Aunt Addie never got along; my mother, in her opinion, was the one responsible for my father’s failure—something about Wendle Street, thinking she was better than him, flightiness.
One day, the magic wheelbarrow rolled up for the very last time, and a week or so later we were turfed out into the street. Because we had vacated our house under ignominious circumstances, we never went back to visit our friends in the old neighborhood. I never saw my playmates again, though I remember their names to this day: Jackie Purnell and Charlie Lebencki. Little else about the neighborhood has stayed with me, only that my third-grade teacher was the first rich person I ever met, a scioness who was determined to give back to the community, in the way that only the children of the rich can.
The assumption that Miss Needham was rich was predicated on two facts that could not be gainsaid: She had the same last name as the founder of a nationwide trucking firm, and she was breathtakingly pretty. If she were not rich, so the common wisdom went, then her decision to take a job as a poorly paid elementary school teacher—and to do so in a working-class neighborhood—made no sense, as her brains and her matinee-idol looks should have enabled her to do much better for herself elsewhere. She was teaching because she could afford to teach; she was dawdling in the precincts of the proletariat to make some kind of point to her parents. That settled it, then: She was rich. This was my introduction to the concept of noblesse oblige. Noblesse oblige or not, she was an outstanding teacher.
One other memory from those years stands out. There were two slovenly but merry drunks named the Parker brothers who lived around the corner on Tioga Street, one of those evocative names that urbanites used to confer on highways and byways, thoroughfares and streets, back in the days when people still thought cities were beautiful. The Parker brothers lived right next door to a reclusive barfly rumored by neighborhood children to be a witch. Both houses were falling apart at the seams. Juvenile necromancy was the first casualty of our relocation; the housing project, hampered by both its recent nativity and its terse, brutalist style, lacked the shabbiness, architectural nuance, and sense of faded grandeur needed to support the illusion that witchcraft was afoot at the local level.