The year in France was much as I’d expected it to be: a dream come true. From the moment I stepped off the plane, exchanging the City of Brotherly Love for the City of Light, I felt that I had crossed into another dimension. Night after night in the peanut gallery at the Comédie Française. Twice-a-week concerts at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, where Stravinsky’s
Rite of Spring
caused a riot in 1913. Lots of friends, loads of alcohol, tons of merriment. Hundreds of books, hundreds of movies, scores of plays, even a few tentative stabs at writing fiction. But mostly culture, sex, and liquor.
Certain memories stand out more clearly than others: A sixth arrondissement boardinghouse filled with Spaniards, Venezuelans, Japanese, Czechs, and Yugoslavs who were desperately trying to master a language they were obviously no match for. Meeting Jean-Louis Barrault, whose wife, Madeleine Renaud, I had seen at the Barbizon Plaza Theatre in New York two years earlier. Looking up to see snow falling on the Eiffel Tower on Christmas Eve. A strapping Finnish girl rowing me around in a dinghy on the Grande Jatte; a petulant Dutch woman explaining to me why Richard Brautigan beat Dostoyevsky hands down; a chic French-Canadian nurse introducing me to the most vital rite of passage of all: sex with someone who knew what she was doing.
There was also a brief fling with a moody Long Island girl who recruited me as her escort on a trip to Tangiers to buy Goulami beads. Along the way, we visited Pamplona, the Prado, and the Alhambra, none of which I ever saw again. More noteworthy still were my nightly subterranean encounters with a Japanese pastry chef studying at Le Cordon Bleu who kept me alive all winter by stuffing my face with the latest delicacy he happened to be concocting. Every night, I would careen into the boardinghouse at three in the morning from some Left Bank bistro and find him downstairs in the communal kitchen doing his homework. His homework was pastry. He would sit there and watch me ingest an entire cake or pie or
clafoutis
or flan, or a plateful of petits fours or
jésuites
, never expecting compensation or even thanks, only asking if tonight’s treat was up to my usual standards. Sometimes I would bring along an undernourished friend. My unlikely benefactor from Kyoto didn’t mind in the least. Seventy-five percent of my diet that year consisted of pastry: Now I knew what Marie Antoinette was talking about.
Finally, and perhaps most memorably, there was a chance encounter with a displaced francophobic Australian surfer that would result in a friendship that lasted forever, no matter how great the distance between us. I would never have met Mick had I not first crossed paths with his brash, fetching French girlfriend in a Montparnasse supermarket while she was engaged in what I believed at the time to be shoplifting, though she may have merely been straightening her poncho.
“Oh, you’re American,” she said, fiddling covetously with a rather plump rib-eye steak. “My boyfriend’s Australian, but he can’t stand French people. Why don’t you come over on Thursday night for dinner?”
That friendship lasted a lifetime, too; she was a cook to be reckoned with. In the end, I didn’t spend all that much time studying language and literature at the Sorbonne, which was what I was supposed to be doing, but there was certainly plenty of time for wine, women, and song. The entire year in Paris, for the first time in my life, I felt supernaturally happy, at least until the United States government, finally conceding that the war in Vietnam was lost, sued for peace, causing the dollar to crash overnight, and my money ran out, all thanks to that son of a bitch Richard Nixon, who had been the bane of my family’s existence since 1958. When I was a little kid on Russell Street, I could never understand why my father hated Nixon so much. Now I knew.
One June evening at the end of that year, my French teacher, who had engineered my trip to Paris in the first place, turned up out of the blue. Diplomatically, over a smashing dinner he paid for, Nixon’s disastrous foreign policy having left me threadbare, I confessed that while I had indeed signed up at the Sorbonne to take a few courses the previous September—primarily to get a student I.D., which allowed me to eat meals in university restaurants for thirty cents apiece—I’d spent most of the past ten months carousing.
“That’s what we expected you to do,” he said nonchalantly, never breaking stride as he worked on his couscous. “How’s the ratatouille?”
After I returned to the United States, Paris refused to leave my thoughts. Philadelphia made sure of that. The City of Light resembles no other city on the face of the earth, as is widely known. But it is particularly dissimilar to the City of Brotherly Love, which is long on angst but short on charm. Paris was more than a moveable feast; it was a feast I never had to share with anyone else. The year I spent on the Rue Mayet was the touchstone I could come back to again and again; it was the year I nixed the official family credo and decided that life was to be seized by the throat, not merely endured; that it was a gift, not a chore.
My father could not understand how any of this had come about: My all-expenses-paid trip abroad had to be the work of fairies, gremlins, demiurges, succubi. In the emotionally cauterized mind of the Depression-era Irish American, good fortune is never earned, cannot last, and is probably the work of the devil. While I was away, there were occasional letters from my mother and my three sisters, but not one from my father, who was the only one in the family who actually liked writing letters. When I spent a king’s ransom to phone home at Christmas from the post office, which, since I had no phone, was the only place I could make a transatlantic call, he was at work. I had forgotten that he always worked holidays, in part because he got paid double time but mostly because nobody wanted him around on Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving, or even Flag Day. I spent eleven months not hearing his voice, nor he mine.
While I was in Europe, his drinking problems continued, but the number of family members on hand to terrorize had dwindled to a paltry two: my mother and my youngest sister, Mary Ann, still in high school. Ree and Eileen were long gone, sharing an apartment in New York City, both attending college. My mother continued to live with him and tolerate his abuse, though none of us had any idea why. The official explanation was that neither could manage financially on their own, though more likely she stayed with him because that was what Catholic women of her generation were expected to do. To leave him would be to admit defeat both as a Catholic and as a female. She did call the police several times when he got plastered, turned violent, chased her and my sister out the door, and locked himself in, and on more than one occasion she forced him to spend the night at his sister Rosemary’s house, a few blocks away. Of course, it had been years since my parents shared a bed, so this was a marriage in name only. But she never formally threw him out of the house while there were still children living in it. There would always be a reconciliation, a half hearted apology, a promise to lay off the sauce and “get help.” But help, never sought, never arrived, and shortly thereafter the same destructive cycle would resume.
I returned to Philadelphia after my year in Paris, renting an apartment in a quaint suburban town ten miles north of my parents’ home. As soon as I was set up in my new living quarters, I began preparing for a career as a novelist. I made a list of the 250 greatest books ever written, and over a two-year period I polished off all of them—
Ulysses, Budden-brooks, The Brothers Karamazov, Moby-Dick
—convinced that if I read enough great prose, some of it might rub off on me. Things did not work out the way I had hoped; my fiction was dreadful. But I did not know this at the time, nor did I care.
During this period, I supported myself with a number of offbeat, and sometimes crummy, jobs. For six months, I worked on the assembly line at one of the most admired corporations in the history of addressing machines. I did this under the tutelage of a porky, nearsighted man who despised me. Assembling addressing machines was a lark for college boys like me, but he was no college boy, and this was no lark. I did not go out of my way to display contempt for the semiskilled milieu in which I found myself, but my attempts to disguise my true feelings were unsuccessful, as he clearly wished I was dead, along with all the other college boys who went slumming in factories for a few months before taking management jobs with IBM.
I also worked for a south Jersey term-paper factory, cranking out hundreds of inappropriately thoughtful essays, filled with facts I had pulled out of thin air, supported by footnotes I sometimes marshaled from sources that did not exist. What happened when those papers got turned in to professors by the legion of pinheads who patronized the term-paper factory is beyond me; few of our customers could spell Macbeth, much less explain what caused his relationship with Banquo to unravel. The job didn’t pay much, but the hours were good.
For about a year, I worked at a gigantic supermarket warehouse as a “casual” laborer, doing all the tasks the older men did not have to do because they belonged to a powerful union and could do as they pleased. The job paid more than twice my salary at the addressing-machine factory. The older men on the loading dock were mostly high school dropouts, like my father, who would have cut off his right arm for a job like this. They responded to the good fortune society had showered on them by reporting for work bombed out of their skulls, refueling at break time on shots and beers purchased at a buck a pop from a fellow employee who operated an informal saloon out of the back of his station wagon. Some of the younger men also smoked reefer, though not in front of the old-timers, who viewed drugs as un-American and out of step with the ethos of the proletariat. As a rule, the younger men drank for the first four hours of their shift and got high the second four, while the older men drank only at lunchtime. Once everyone was suitably hammered, they would spend the rest of the night deploring their miserable lot in life, cursing management for forcing them to do what little work they did do, as if sulking was going to make the time pass any more quickly.
The old-timers manifested a curious strain of patriotism: Their cars were festooned with American-flag decals and coarse, jingoistic slogans; they approved of everything the Nixon administration was doing in Southeast Asia; and they bellyached ceaselessly about the threat posed to Americans by the communists among us. Yet they themselves were bereft of the virtues that had made America great: the belief in an honest day’s work for an honest day’s pay, a determination to improve one’s skills and get ahead in life, a cheerful, upbeat attitude about the future. Mostly, they were grumpy mopes. Mostly, they were bums.
Casual laborers had to wait all day for a phone call informing them that their services were required that evening. No one got called back unless he had loaded one thousand boxes onto a truck the night before, a feat that was impossible to achieve without working through lunch breaks. One night, slaving away in the middle of the night, desperate to reach my quota, I found myself surrounded by four older men. They were the kind of men who munched on Red Man chewing tobacco not because they enjoyed it but because newspaper photos of murderous Dixie Klansmen invariably depicted them with a pouch of Red Man tobacco protruding from their shirt pockets, and the local canaille valued its iconic power. They were not especially scary, but they made up for this by being numerous.
“We don’t work through lunch breaks,” they informed me with that terse malevolence cowardly men can effortlessly muster when accompanied by several other terse, malevolent men. “Don’t let us catch you working through your lunch break again.”
I never did work through my lunch break again. I simply worked harder, because I wanted to raise enough money to move to New York or go back to France. I never worked anyplace where I more thoroughly disliked my coworkers or more resented the way some people took the American dream for granted. I liked them even less than the rats that came bounding out of the fifty-pound bags of dog food, because at least the rats had a solid work ethic.
During this period, I would occasionally see my father “socially.” He would invite me out to lunch, regale me with a few vintage tales, then reach into his wallet and offer to cover the $12 check. Discovering, to his amazement, that his cupboard was bare, he would stick me with the bill and then shamelessly borrow a fresh twenty smackers. He was nothing if not bold. He would always order two Manhattans as soon as we arrived, then two more, as if he feared that the restaurant might run out of liquor or suddenly get padlocked following a surprise raid by the Feds. He would toss back a minimum of four stiff drinks, with a couple of beer chasers, each time we convened, after which he would drive home, well and truly ripped. This did not faze me. In my mind, he had already entered the lovable-rogue stage of his life: He continued to be dishonest and unreliable, but at least he did it all in a cheerful, almost scamplike, way. One day I asked him why he was drinking at eleven o’clock in the morning, as he had long adhered to the rule that a man who abstained from demon alcohol before noon ipso facto could never be accused of having a drinking problem.
“It’s afternoon in Bangkok,” he replied.
By this point, I had begun using my father as a punch line. I would regularly cite pithy phrases he used, such as “Work is the curse of the drinking man” or “When Queenan drinks, everybody drinks; when Queenan pays, everybody pays.” Or I would adopt one of his time-honored gambits and bang on the hood of a car whose driver was madly klaxoning and sneer: “Your horn works, buddy. Why don’t you check your lights?” All this was a ploy to turn my father into someone less villainous: a rapscallion, if you will, a jackanapes, a will-o’-the-wisp, but certainly not a churl. For years, I had viewed him as a monster. Now I viewed him as a clown.
We didn’t argue anymore; on the rare occasions when we saw each other, we mostly reminisced about how wonderful things were back in what he referred to as “the good old days.” The good old days were set in an era antedating the birth of his children; he never recounted cute little stories about things we did as toddlers, preferring to dwell on the exploits of Glenn Davis and Doc Blanchard in the epic 1946 Notre Dame game at Yankee Stadium. Like the Notre Dame-Michigan State Game of the Century twenty years later, that one ended in a tie, in this case with neither side actually putting any points on the scoreboard. Because children remember little that happened before the age of five, they must rely on their parents to confirm that they actually said or did amusing things as tykes. Every so often, it would have been nice to hear him talk about the times when his children brought him some small measure of happiness, the golden years before all his dreams got smashed by Eisenhower and Nixon and the 1958 recession. But he never talked about our childhoods. He talked about Notre Dame.