The Removers: A Memoir (9 page)

Baseball on the radio, birds feeding, the porch’s yellow smell of birdseed and tobacco, this is the scene my parents, my sister, and I would be received into on summer nights when we drove the five minutes from our house, down Oakland Street, crossing Arrott, Herbert, Foulkrod, Fillmore, Harrison, passing Frankford High School, where for one week in April the forsythia hedges would bloom yellow, crossing Allengrove, Wakeling, Oxford, Pratt, Bridge, making the left on Cheltenham up the hill to 1531. We were all couples then, single words: Grannyandpop, Marianandwill, Andrewandtheresa, Harryandwhitey. “Where are we going?” “To Grannyandpop’s.”

Dolph sits facing us with perfect posture, his back straight, feet on the floor, forearms on the arms of the chair, like a king receiving subjects. And here’s why it’s so tight: every inch of the palace is buried under old newspapers stacked in towers
reaching higher than his head. All that’s spared is a pathway as wide as a man. There must be rats, but we’re lucky to miss them. Someone on this evening—a landlord? a nephew?—has let the paramedics in to pronounce the king dead but hasn’t waited around for us. As we roll him out to the hearse, Dad says, “You don’t see women die at home alone like this.”

“What do you mean?” I say.

“Even if they’re alone when they die, someone always turns out to see them off.”

“But the men are different?”

“Seems like.”

A few days after picking up the newspaper king I email my sister’s friend Janie and ask her for a date. As with everything else, I don’t see the cause and effect at the time.

Philadelphia, you big bitch, throw me a bone. It’s June 1998. I’m twenty-two. I’ve bounced from failure at school to crappy job and back for two years. I spend my time outside the house either dragging the local dead around or getting drunk listening to rock and roll before coming chastely home to sleep ten feet down the hall from my parents. I’ve now handled far more dead women than live ones. I’ve only had sex a few times, only with one partner, and that was Karen, two and a half years ago.

At first Janie and I had been buddies. The summer before I started doing removals, I’d worked a temp job—through a
friend—at Penn in their Center for Psychotherapy Research. Did they know how much research they could’ve done on me? A few times I saw an old, white-haired man in a bow tie walking the halls. The people who worked there, mostly psychology PhD students, whispered about him in awe. “That’s Aaron Beck,” they would say. I had no idea who he was, but they told me he’d invented the style of therapy practiced there. My job was to read transcripts of hour-long therapy sessions and write up one-page summaries. I noticed the therapists’ mode of challenging the patients: “You say you can’t talk to him, but why?” Pretty much my whole life was based on hang-ups and self-made obstacles that I’d never been pushed to defend or even acknowledge. Things like: of course I have to live with my parents; of course we can’t talk about things; of course I should stay in Philadelphia. Reading other people’s therapy sessions, responding to their therapists’ prompts, I found myself in the best mood in years.

That summer, Janie worked at another office on Penn’s campus. She had long blond hair, which wasn’t my thing. I was looking for a Marisa Tomei stunt double. Janie wore modest sundresses and Birkenstocks, which also weren’t my things. She was never not appropriately dressed for Lilith Fair. But she read
Anna Karenina
on the El through Kensington, which made her the only one doing that. And she looked at me through extraordinary violet eyes that triumphed over her hippie veneer. And after getting to know her, I saw that her clothes belied a glorious, sad edginess. She would laugh at the same blue material I could get Gazz with. We started a routine
of meeting each day at noon on campus at a bench between a statue of Benjamin Franklin and a sculpture of a big broken button. I liked that she could talk for an hour with me barely adding a word—she had fire—but that she also listened when I had something to say. After a few of those lunches the talking balanced out between us, and we found we could get into just about anything and find ways to laugh. After we ate we’d walk around the neighborhood. She was nineteen. I was twenty-one. When the summer ended we were still just friends. She went back to her school in the Philadelphia suburbs, and I went back to Temple so I could drop out again.

That winter she came, at my sister’s invitation, to my dad’s fiftieth birthday party. My mom had organized the night; it would’ve looked funny if she hadn’t, would’ve aroused suspicion about their union. So all my aunts and uncles came to our house, neighbors came, a few of my dad’s friends, a few of his former students, and Janie, who was now a friend of both my sister and me.

There’s a photo from that night of me posing with my arm around my mom. I’m smiling, eyelids half-closed from too many bottles of Yuengling. She’s trying her best to smile, but because my father’s the one taking the picture, her closed lips merely tighten and her cheek muscles gather around her eyes as if to defend them from the light.

Catty-corner to the block I grew up on sat an abandoned railroad freight yard. When I was in my early twenties my sister
and I bought a dog, Wendy, and I would walk her through the lot at dusk. From the corner I could see the red neon lights of the PSFS building downtown, seven miles to the south. To the west, out beyond the lot’s chest-high grasses grown up through cracked concrete, beyond the rise at the back rim of the yard that held the tracks, a tick to the left of the setting sun, blinked the red lights of Roxborough’s giant radio towers, ten miles west of Frankford. Littered as it was with broken Rolling Rock bottles, the lot still conjured in me some kind of atavistic yearning: wilderness had reclaimed what had been a paved white sheet of city block.

The old factories in the neighborhood hugged the tracks; the second floors of these buildings all had big doors to load and unload the train. The factories were empty. Trains no longer ran through here. But they had run right behind the backyards of the houses on Sellers Street, at the south end of the lot, where my mother’s mother grew up. On Orthodox, at the north end of the lot, where my mother’s father grew up, you could stand in your front yard and hear the El going by four blocks away. Factories and trains had made the neighborhood—why else would all these thousands of people be living together in a few square miles of brick boxes?—and they had gone. So what made the neighborhood now?

In the late nineties a tall chain-link fence was erected around the freight lot. A few months later construction began and the whole block became a parking lot with a Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall set down in the middle. No more views of distant flashing lights. New brick buildings closing
in. No open spaces abided. A place for worship would seem a net gain for the neighborhood, especially when it replaced an empty lot. There was something about the sustained emptiness of that space, though, that had felt like an honest expression of the neighborhood’s present.

After the newspaper king removal, Janie agrees to go out with me. We discover in my parked car that all the hours of talking we’d done the summer before are now channeled into a crazy genital-liquefying attraction. I’d never felt anything like it. It only takes a few nights of dropping her off at 3:00 a.m. at her parents’ house before her mother tells Janie we’ll be murdered parking like that, and if we want to “spend time together,” we should do it in their basement.

Maybe because I’m so short on experience being with a pretty girl with soft lips and dreamy eyes, especially one who reads good books and seems to like me, I fall into an immediate daze. I am in love in those early weeks with what Janie gives me, which, I see now but only felt then, is a way out of myself. I tell her after a night of making out in the basement, after only a few weeks of dating, that I love her. We haven’t slept together yet. We haven’t even talked much in these weeks since we spend all our time together chewing each other. I startle her when I say it and she doesn’t say a word in response. Part of me knows when we hang out that she’s somehow reserved, hiding something, that even though she can talk a mile a minute about her sisters or the movie we’ve
just seen, in our most intimate moments she radiates what I recognize from myself and my mother and sister as a deep, taciturn sadness. That suggested in her purposefully unmet looks is the presence of a wall that may be holding back an ocean. But I am a baby at love, powered only by blind need, and so I ignore any signs for caution, keep pursuing, pushing, flirting, hoping to have it said back. I say it because I want something, just as my dad had when he said it to Theresa and me. I need to hear it back more than anything else in life. I wouldn’t have blurted it so early otherwise, but of course I can’t see that. As the summer goes on I understand that I do love Janie, and it’s a relief that I haven’t been misled by my needs, that I’d just needed to catch up to them.

A busy livery man collects grubby little handwritten checks from funeral directors for twenty and thirty-five dollars. On a good day you’d get two or three in the course of a few hours, and since my dad was looking to this work more for his bridge tolls and grocery money than for anything else, he frequented a check-cashing place at Bridge and Pratt, which is Northeast Philadelphia’s public transportation hub, the place where buses and trolleys meet the El’s northern end of the line. Until I was five my mother’s parents lived a few blocks from Bridge and Pratt, and I have memories of sitting in the car at sundown with my dad on an evening in the late seventies waiting for my mother to get off the El there so we could go to her parents’ for dinner. In those days, there was
an indoor skateboard park at Bridge and Pratt and a grocery store called Farmer’s Choice. There was a diner there, too, the Continental, that my grandparents frequented. I remember being in it one night in 1979, with my mother and her brothers and sisters and their spouses, everyone meeting there to wait while my grandmother had surgery a block away in Frankford Hospital. Safe at night on the Avenue amid the cold, red cheeks of well-dressed, good-looking young professionals who loved me. My people. Bridge and Pratt in the late seventies was, I guess, like a lot of urban transit hubs: crowded, policed, dangerous if you were alone at the wrong time of night, but for the most part safe. By the late nineties it probably wasn’t too different, but like so much of life in Frankford, it felt coarser, more stripped of anything that felt generous or bountiful of spirit. The check-cashing place was run by a guy named Glen, a decent-seeming man with a ridge of crude hair plugs running across the peak of his forehead. Glen knew Dad’s name and said hello when we walked in. I liked this. I imagined maybe this was what life in the neighborhood was like for my grandparents at my age or even my parents: shopkeepers owning their places for years and decades, knowing you and your habits, what you wanted, whereas most of the neighborhood stores I frequented were chains—Acme, Rite Aid, Kmart—with huge staffs and heavy employee turnover and no owner, of course, maybe within a thousand miles. The only difference between Glen and those shopkeepers I would conjure from my grandparents’ era was the half inch of Plexiglas between him and
us, and the sawed-off shotgun that hung from two brackets in the glass at the level of his chest. “Have a good day, Will,” he said. Dad said, “You too, Glen.”

The next time we hang out, Janie tells me that in the past semester, just a few months before, the drama teacher she’d called her mentor, the one who kept telling this skinny girl how she’d have to lose weight to get any acting jobs, had put his hand up her skirt when they were alone in a classroom and tried to scare her into sleeping with him. A process began, she says, of her telling another teacher, then having to file a report, steps ultimately leading to the firing of this man for sexual harassment. I feel like I might fall over sideways. She has said the secret words out loud. She tells me this is why she’s having trouble eating, why I only ever see her sucking breath mints and chewing gum, why she’s always up for going out to the movies but never to a restaurant. When she tells her story I imagine my father as her violator. I am certain she’ll end it with me if I tell her about him.

Janie loves me, too. She tells me so one night. And I love her more when I tell her, after weeks of avoiding it, what the charge had been against my father when he was fired. (The actual events were something I didn’t know at this time. I’d never asked. I didn’t want the extra trauma of hearing something worse than the gentle flirtation I’d hoped for.) She tells me she
doesn’t care. I can tell there’s a feeling about the both of us, that we’re helping the other come back to life after much sadness. We get comfortable in our routine that first summer—going out to movies, sometimes to bars that won’t card her. One Monday night that August we watch from barstools as the president says, “I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate.” That’s your problem, Bill. I’ve finally got a good thing going for myself.

Even though we’re all turning twenty-three this year, Wilbur and Gazz are already with the women they’ll be with until they die. Wilbur’s been with Stefanie since we were fourteen. Gazz has been with Kelly since we were seventeen, and they have a three-year-old together. It’s only natural I suppose that I start to think of Janie this way. My two best friends are locked up already, why shouldn’t I be? It would be hard to do better than Janie. And why would I want anything different?

This is the way we knew: you settle where you grew up, with someone you grew up with. My aunts and uncles were married to people they’d known from high school or the years just after. Every aunt and uncle I have—my parents are each one of five—met their spouse within fifteen miles of William Penn’s hat. When my parents were in high school, my dad’s older brother was engaged to my mom’s older sister. There were small inklings in me that I should leave Philadelphia, but nothing articulated. I assumed I would learn how to be an adult from proximity to the adults I knew. We were taught to be provincial, to trust the institutions and the places we came
up in—school, parish, neighborhood. This was ingrained, the kind of life you left at your own peril. My parents had left it for two years in Gainesville and come right back. They had proved there’s no use leaving.