Closing Time (32 page)

This closet conspiracy was fueled neither by malice nor by caprice. The guitarist, whose horizontally manicured bangs reflected the chilling influence of Prince Valiant, played a lime green Gretsch guitar, the sort of gaudy, high-priced instrument favored by foot-stompin’, fingerpickin’ hillbillies. Such an instrument, whatever its merits on technical grounds, was woefully out of place in a cutting-edge band like the Phase Shift Network, whose repertory ranged from Jimi Hendrix to Cream to the Doors but specifically excluded any material targeting the wangdoodle set. Given these circumstances, Roger Heiser simply would not do.

Roger had another serious drawback: He was a member of the Order of DeMolay, named after the last Grand Master of the Knights Templar, who was accused of witchcraft by the French clergy and burned at the stake in 1314 after undergoing unspeakable tortures. One of the most serious charges leveled against Jacques DeMolay and his
confreres
was that they asserted their fealty to Satan by puckering up and smooching the anuses of heathen house cats. Though no one in the band ever made much of an effort to ascertain Roger’s feelings about the clandestine foibles of the Knights Templar, it did not help that this otherwise likable florist’s son, Childe Templar or not, was not much of a guitarist. This unlikely combination of continental flamboyance, medieval depravity, nocturnal cat worship, possession of a hopelessly unfashionable musical instrument, and a tendency to highjack acid-rock numbers like “Eight Miles High” with his Foggy Mountain Breakdown strumming proved fatal, and the unfortunate youth was chucked out of the band. The ensemble’s reasoning was that, knowing what we did about the Knights Templar, an oddball like Roger simply could not be trusted when the lights went down. But in all honesty, I think it was the lime green guitar that did him in.

Rob Weiss, the singer in our band, soon became my best friend. Rob’s parents, the first Jews of my acquaintance, took an immediate liking to me and opened their doors on weekends whenever my father was on the warpath. The Weisses lived in a middling neighborhood teeming with Eastern Europeans, including a number of vindictive Ukrainians hell-bent on wresting control of Kiev back from the Soviets. The Ukrainians were fun to be around, if ever so slightly insane. The Weisses’ neighborhood was better than ours, but not for long; it, too, would soon disintegrate into a slum, the way all North Philadelphia neighborhoods eventually turned into slums.

Judaism was terra incognita for me. My parents were not virulent racists or anti-Semites, though black people and Jews eavesdropping on some of their conversations might have had a hard time believing it. They mostly treated people as they found them. But they had a strange way of talking about other ethnic groups, using a tidy collection of euphemisms they shared with everyone else in the white working class. My mother liked Negroes who were “educated” and Jews who were not “pushy.” It was odd to upbraid other people for being insufficiently “educated” or excessively “pushy” when you were married to a man who pissed into the sink and passed out facedown into the carpet, but that was the way she spoke.

When Irish Americans wanted to establish their bona fides in regard to blacks or Jews, they would say things like “I was standing on the corner in the rain, and this very nice Jewish girl came up and gave me her umbrella” or “A very nice colored man gave me his seat on the bus.” These anecdotes were transmitted with a sense of befuddlement at the gallantry of the ethnic benefactors in question, leavened by a ham-fisted self-congratulation at being progressive enough to give credit where credit was due. Not all Jews were cheap, was the subtext of these testimonials, not all Negroes were ignorant and dangerous. Many were, but not all. The nicest thing you could say about Negroes in this environment was that they were “refined,” unlike the cannibals who lived right next door to them.

There was nothing especially mean-spirited about this way of talking; white people acted as if affectionate condescension was magnanimous, perhaps even gutsy. What I learned growing up was that blacks and Latins were to be feared, Jews distrusted, Italians avoided, and Poles ridiculed—but always on a case-by-case basis. Wasps we had no frame of reference for. All we knew about them was that given half a chance, they would row crew.

The Weisses were unlike any family I had known up until then because both parents had white-collar jobs—Mary as an inventory clerk, Joe as a credit manager, first at a famous downtown department store called Lit Brothers, then at Temple University Hospital. They were also the only family I ever met that was headed by a Joseph and a Mary, which seemed like both a cultural and a statistical deviation from the norm. What the Weisses were doing with the most Christian names in all of creation was beyond me, though it would have seemed even stranger had either of them been born in Nazareth or Bethlehem in upstate Pennsylvania. Fond of books, fond of music, fond of life, the Weisses would take day trips and sometimes overnighters to New York City every couple of months to see topflight Broadway plays. Trophies they bagged included both Zero Mostel and Topol in
Fiddler on the Roof
and Lauren Bacall in
Applause.
They usually stayed at the Essex House, with its dazzling view of Central Park.

Even though producers of that era still staged tryouts in Philadelphia and Boston before opening in New York, the Weisses liked to see the shows in the big city, recognizing that a day in Philadelphia was merely a day in Philadelphia, while a day in New York was not. They gave the appearance of walking on air when they returned home Saturday evening or Sunday afternoon, because, in fact, they were. To me, these excursions to Gotham were the height of sophistication, the sort of thing no adult in my family, my neighborhood, or my ethnic group would ever dream of doing. The people I grew up around were perfectly happy to dismiss New York City as dangerous, overpriced, iniquitous, and extraneous. They were misinformed and aimed to keep it that way. Rob’s parents felt otherwise.

By the time I was a senior in high school, the Phase Shift Network had been renamed Stained Glass, and the Weisses knew all about my family situation. I was always welcome in their home. I taught Rob how to play guitar and spent many Saturday nights sleeping on his bedroom floor, avoiding my rampaging father. Rob and I played a lot of music together, but his passion for performing dwarfed mine. No more than a passable bassist, a so-so guitarist at best, a singer whose gifts never extended very far beyond the realm of adequacy, I was a musician whose career was one long rehearsal for being an ex-musician. No matter what band I played in, the band was never in demand. I understood that the end was near when we rechristened our psychedelic wedding combo Baby’s Death. Now we were even less in demand. I may have played music as long as I did only because I liked being around the Weisses.

My family’s everyday existence improved significantly after we escaped from the project. When we moved into a real house in a real neighborhood, as opposed to the converted garrison where we had been interned for four years, we found ourselves in a proper community with cute little grocery stores and pizzerias and Chinese laundries and even an oyster house. Best of all was the Number 6 trolley line right down the street, which would ferry us to the subway stop a mile or so away, where we could grab a train downtown, where the bright lights awaited us. No longer did we feel inferior, shipwrecked. For a while there was even hope that the removal of the welfare stigma might enable my father to quell his demons and pull himself together. But this hope proved illusory.

Before we moved to West Oak Lane, my father still adhered to a few rules that, he believed, insulated him from the charge of being an alcoholic. One, he did not drink in the morning. Two, he did not drink on the Sabbath. Three, he did not bring distilled spirits into the house, and if he did, he hid them. Four, he did not sit on the front steps and get loaded with the riffraff. Five, he did not get so drunk that the police had to be called in. Six, he did not mix beer with whiskey in “depth charges” or boilermakers. Seven, he did not drink on the job. This was his credo. Now everything changed. He drank all the time, he drank anywhere, he drank anything, he drank with anybody. He had gone someplace from which he was not coming back. Just as he had done when both his parents breathed their last in the spring of 1944, he had gone absent without leave. But this time, he was going AWOL for good.

One event that helped push him over the edge occurred in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963. Like most Irish Americans, my father took John F. Kennedy’s death personally. Because he was the son of penniless immigrants and grew up in an era when the Irish were despised, JFK’s murder seemed to epitomize everything that was wrong with America; the Gracchan tribune of the workingman had been slain, and once again the Catholics had gotten the short end of the stick. But unlike most other Irish Americans, who were reasonably happy with the way things had turned out for our ethnic group in recent decades, my father never got over JFK’s assassination.

While Kennedy was alive, my father, like 7.5 million other Americans, purchased a comedy record called
The First Family.
The LP featured an assortment of little-known comics and bargain-basement thespians acting out ostensibly humorous vignettes featuring the president, his brother Bobby, his wife, Jackie, and such notorious political figures as Nikita Khrushchev, Chairman Mao Tse-tung, and Fidel Castro. The man playing JFK was a Massachusetts stand-up comic and musician by the name of Vaughn Meader, whose voice and inflection bore a remarkable resemblance to the president’s. Of course, this could be said of just about any male between the ages of sixteen and eighty-five who was a native of Boston.

The First Family
was the fastest-selling record in American history, and only the fourth to sell a million copies. Forty years later, I flew out to Monterey, California, to interview the man who had dreamed up the
First Family
concept. From him I learned that the album had been recorded in front of a live audience the night JFK went on television and warned the Soviet Union that if they did not pull their nuclear missiles out of Cuba, the United States was prepared to go to war. The sequestered audience, entirely oblivious to Kennedy’s speech, was laughing quite enthusiastically at the First Family’s foibles. They were probably the only people in the United States of America who were laughing enthusiastically that evening.

As is so often the case with pop cultural supernovas,
The First Family
was not an especially funny record, and it has not stood the test of time. What sounded witty then sounded hokey later. But there is no denying that the lighthearted material was tremendously appealing to everyone in my family back in 1963, not just because of the contrived romance of Camelot that swirled around the Kennedy White House but because it made my father laugh, and anything that made him laugh made him less likely to hit us.

Shortly after Kennedy’s death, the abrasive comic Lenny Bruce gave a performance at a well-known nightclub in New York City. Bruce had a habit of wandering onstage and fussing about with newspaper clippings before officially launching into his act. On this occasion, he kept his fans waiting nervously for several minutes before approaching the microphone, staring at the audience, and rasping, “Boy, is Vaughn Meader fucked.”

Fucked and then some was what life henceforth held in store for the luckless Bay State artiste. Nobody who loved JFK—their numbers, of course, did not include the many, many southerners who received the news of Kennedy’s assassination with visible equanimity—wanted to see or hear Vaughn Meader after November 22, 1963, because seeing him only reminded them of Kennedy’s death. My father was perhaps the lone exception to this view. Whenever he went on one of his benders, he would wobble into the dining room and load his badly scratched copy of
The First Family
onto our cheap, tinny portable record player. Then he would jack up the volume full-force, blasting the shopworn routines through the entire house. Sometimes he would do this at three in the morning, even though he knew that his children had school the next day and that his wife had a responsible job. Pillows wrapped around our heads, always fearful that he would set the house on fire, we could hear him downstairs, weeping and knocking over furniture, lamenting the lost splendor of Camelot. Sometimes he would give hell to Chairman Mao; other times he would mock, chastise, and even mimic Castro. I suppose, looking back on things, that this behavior may have been poignant or sad, or at least signified the presence of deeper emotions. But at the time it merely seemed terrifying.

When I came home from work on Saturday nights after trekking halfway across Philadelphia on the K bus, my father would force me and my sisters to watch
The Jackie Gleason Show.
Gleason was a beloved Irish comic whose success conferred a vicarious sense of achievement on unsuccessful Irish Americans. In this, he was heir to the mantle once worn by Jimmy Cagney, a tough little Mick if there ever was one, who was to the Irish what Frank Sinatra was to the Italians: the proud ethnic who refused to change his name or his attitude merely to get ahead. Gleason, who seemed less plangently Irish than Cagney but Irish all the same, had starred in a popular show called
The Honeymooners
in the early days of television and had performed admirably as a pool shark in the 1961 film
The Hustler
. Cagney’s mother, it just so happened, was part Norwegian. But never mind.

Now, a decade after
The Honeymooners
had ceased taping, Gleason hosted a popular variety show that originated in Miami Beach. The show featured an assortment of comic skits, some of them funny, some less so. Each and every broadcast ended with Gleason in the role of an irascible bartender conducting an exasperating conversation with a barfly named Crazy Guggenheim. Crazy Guggenheim was a daffy, incoherent drunk, a fountain of malapropisms and homespun idiocy. My father adored this character; the closing segment in the taproom was the high point of his week. The sequence always wound up with Frank Fontaine, the man who played Crazy Guggenheim, turning on the just-add-water charm that is the stock-in-trade of the Irish and warbling some mawkish ditty like “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” or “I Love You Truly.” Fontaine’s comic material was pitiful, and his singing was worse: phony, sentimental, needy. I loathed both him and his alter ego; I hated the way he repackaged a vice that had ravaged a million families into something innocuous, laughable, sweet: a cute ethnic tic, like the funny little Frenchman with his beret, his Gauloise, and his baguette. Gleason’s addled associate was widely viewed as a lush, a rummy, or a tippler who’d had a snootful, when what he was, in fact, was a drunk. This is the term I have long preferred when describing an alcoholic, because its harsh, primordial texture captures the essence of the beast. “Drunk” is a coarse, besodden word that deprives the waterlogged quadruped of even the tiniest pretension to dignity. It makes a drunk sound like what he is.