The Removers: A Memoir (8 page)

I’m a sophomore at La Salle. A Sunday morning, fall of 1994, at home. My dad and I have squeezed out the attic window—maybe eighteen inches high—onto the sooty roof. When we stand up we’re black-bellied chimney sweeps. From here we can see maybe the top three or four stories of a brick building we call the Sears Tower, about a mile from our house. Sears, Roebuck warehouse space beneath a square, nine-story clock tower full of offices—my dad’s mother worked there for a time—it was the tallest building in Northeast Philadelphia, our little Big Ben. The great landmark of our part of the world, this monument to Frankford’s early-twentieth-century economic health can be seen from downtown high-rises seven miles away, and from the nearby bridges to New Jersey.

From our roof it’s a giant brown owl watching over Frankford. Before we hear the blast, we see the tower list slightly right. There is an instant when the tower doesn’t move any farther, and I have a flash of hope that the implosion has failed,
that we—the neighborhood, my father and I—have lucked into a reprieve, or a time warp. When the tower drops out of sight, Dad mutters, “Bastards.” Great clouds of milk-colored particulate rise up in its place.

The factories had all closed in his lifetime. The railroads were dead, the trestles removed. Longtime neighbors were bolting for the suburbs. Now the Sears Tower was blown up.

I started flunking courses at La Salle in my sophomore year. In my fifth semester, after collecting roughly three semesters’ worth of credits, I was asked to leave.

One afternoon in the summer of 1995 my mother and I sat at the kitchen table. For whatever reason—I don’t remember what led me to this, because never did we speak so candidly—I said, “Are you depressed?” She looked at me plainly and said, “Yes.” I pursed my lips. I didn’t even nod. I said nothing more and neither did she. The question and its answer just sat at the table with us. And then I left the room.

I had inched toward some greater connection with her, toward being her real friend, but I shied away from the potential energy. Maybe it wasn’t my job to be her friend. Maybe she should’ve gone to therapy or asked for a scrip for antidepressants, but these are rationalizations formed after the fact. We had all retreated too far into ourselves to be available for human interactions, and for that one moment when maybe we were
both available, both ready, both up at the surface, I dove back underwater at the first sign of land. Deep under. All four of us. We lived in bathyspheres, but of course we didn’t want to.

A few weeks before that, my dad’s side of the family had caravanned from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh for my cousin’s wedding. My mother didn’t go. Her mother was sick, but I’m sure she would’ve gone with us if things with my father had been different. I don’t know what she knew about his personal life in that time, but he seemed to be, if not actively carrying on a robust sex life, then at least acting like someone who wanted to be. At the wedding one of my cousins pointed out to me that my father was wearing his claddagh ring with the heart facing out, which apparently meant he was looking for love.

Whereas my dad seemed unable to stop himself from flirting with my sister’s friends, female cashiers, female toll takers, and female funeral directors, I never saw my mother do or say anything to acknowledge attraction outside her marriage besides loyally tuning in to Peter Jennings’s newscast. I don’t know if I ever saw my parents share a kiss that transcended in duration or passion the kind of peck I would give my grandmother. The kisses they exchanged in front of us before my father’s firing in 1990 were no less perfunctory-seeming than after, when they would sometimes be forced by circumstance—the gift of peace at the rare mass Dad would attend—to lean into each other. I don’t ever remember seeing them hold hands or put an arm around the other’s shoulder. When I was small, if my mother was having a bad day, sometimes she and my father would move into another room and exchange a long,
weary hug. If I walked in, the hug would break up. As I got a little older I would know they were hugging because their talking would stop, and I would go to where they were because I wanted to see. This is my memory of their bodies touching.

I traveled to my cousin’s wedding with the expired driver’s license of a twenty-four-year-old guy I worked with. I got drunk with my cousins and aunts and uncles in the hotel bar Friday night and then again Saturday after the wedding. There was a freedom in the drunkenness something like euphoria. Love and nostalgia were turned up, shyness was turned down; these few nights were the happiest I’d managed since puberty.

I spent part of both of these nights chatting up a bridesmaid whom, because of nerves, I was barely able to look at before a half dozen screwdrivers. Cute enough in the face, she was stupendously voluptuous, a quality enhanced by her strapless gown. At one point, after a conversation with her—presumably a talk at least partly about Pavement; I was too drunk to remember—had gone well, I asked my cousin Johnny if I could borrow a condom, which was presumptuous for a virgin but, in fairness, not so off base.

She and I left the hotel bar at the closing hour, and I led us out into the parking lot. Unbeknownst to me, Dad, who’d been talking to the both of us, followed. I dimly assumed he’d read my intentions and would let us alone. We got to a place where all the exiting cousins and aunts and uncles had drifted away, leaving just the three of us. We talked for a bit, and then there was a silence in which it struck me that my father and I were waiting to see who would leave first.

I resolved not to say a word until he did. I remember looking at him and him looking at me from behind that face I’d seen nearly every day of my life: his brown eyes and wire-framed glasses, his long nose, his thin upper lip covered with a mustache. The face of life. What else does a son think about his father’s face? It’s almost embarrassing to look at it too long, the face of your creator.

I was looking down now, biting my lower lip. I don’t know what the bridesmaid thought. I couldn’t look at her. Finally he said, “Okay,” like he was granting me a favor, and said good night. I don’t think he was angry with me. Maybe frustrated. Or maybe he wasn’t trying for her at all. It seemed like it, certainly. But maybe I had it wrong. I was drunk enough for that to be true. After he left I couldn’t say two coherent words to the girl—I was drunk, yes, but had been talking just fine before;
spells had been cast and the urge had been lost
—and after a minute of no words or eye contact, she shook my hand and went to her room. When she left I sat at the bottom of the steps leading up to the second deck of rooms. I’d shifted from a few-days-long stretch of feeling free, buoyed, hopeful to weighed down heavier than I could ever remember. At nineteen I was still lost in the shelter and damage of my adolescence.

That same summer, on a drive with my mother along Snake Road (just using it as a shortcut, not as its own destination; those days were gone), she said, “Do you want to know what he did?” She was angry at me, I think for having complimented my father about something. They were still living
together, so no matter what she told me she was still going to share his bed that night.

“Do you want to know what he was fired for?” she said.

“No,” I said.

Six months after the Pittsburgh wedding, a few weeks after being kicked out of La Salle College for good, I got a job through a friend doing data entry for Blue Cross Blue Shield in an office downtown. I did it for seven or eight months, and then I enrolled at Temple, where I lasted one semester before I flunked out. After that I got a job—through my cousin Shane, who also worked for Livery of Frankford—as a busboy in a sandwich shop downtown. I worked there seven or eight months and then went back to Temple and flunked out again. In this same time frame, my sister graduated from high school and started at Penn. When she enrolled, my dad took a second job to help pay for her tuition. This was when he was hired—through Shane—by Livery of Frankford.

4

One warm Saturday night in October 1995—I was nineteen, in my last semester at La Salle—I went out with Gazz; his girlfriend, Kelly; and a pack of the guys Gazz had grown up with, to a punishingly loud club in West Philadelphia called FUBAR. Gazz’s buddies, sweet and tender hooligans, found fistfights every other time they went out, and their idea of fun was to wait for one of their cohort to pass out drunk and set his feet on fire. Choochie, Bopper, Bob-o, Dom 1, Dom 2, Schroeder, Pooj, there were maybe a dozen and a half of these guys, and they had all grown up within a few blocks of each other in Port Richmond. Most of their parents had grown up together, too. (They made me ache at the thought of how sparsely kid-populated my corner of Frankford had been.) Gazz was the only one of them who traveled with a friend from another
neighborhood. For whatever reason—probably because I was harmless-seeming—they accepted me. Still, they must’ve thought the two of us were weird. I was long and goofy, big ears hands feet, skinny with the muscle tone of a newborn, a head taller than Gazz, who was fit and handsome with long, straight hair like Gram Parsons, and we spent most of our time whispering to each other.

In this era, going to a club like this—one aimed at attracting hordes of white kids with fake IDs—meant subjecting oneself to a never slackening dosage of Alanis Morissette, so we two spent the night conferring, huddled so as to defend the nobler flame of our culture, swallowing large amounts of bitter Yuengling Porter, as was the custom, while mixing in occasional shots that were thrust toward our faces by friends: kamikazes, Alabama slammers, lemon drops, and straight-up doses of Jägermeister and Goldschläger.

“
Green
—listen.
Green
is not better than
Reckoning
. It’s not. Let me just say that, because that just—that just feels important to say out loud.”

“Here’s a question. For you. Does
Reckoning
have ‘Hairshirt’?”

“Does
Green
have ‘Harborcoat’?”

“‘
I am not the type of dog
.’”

“The real killer—you know what the real killer is.”

“Tell me.”

“Is ‘World Leader Pretend.’”

“‘
I sit at my table
.’”

“‘
Seems like it’s all, it’s all for nothing
.’”

“The one song on that record, though, you know what it is, the one we’ll be listening to in fifty years.”

“Do you see that ass?”

“Talk to her.”

“I need an ass like that.”

“Go talk to her.”

“Maybe in a minute I will.”

“The one I want to hear when the lights are out and I’m in a fight with Kelly and nothing’s making me feel better.”

“Yup.”

“The one that may or may not put a lump in my throat every time I hear it.”

“I know.”

“Say it.”

“‘You Are the Everything.’”

“We’ve talked about this a dozen times.”

“Might be their best song. Period.”

“Who am I to argue?”

“‘
Drifting off to sleep / with your teeth in your mouth
.’”

For as much as I loved pop songs, for as strong as my yearning was for the intimacy of a human voice coming through headphones into my body, for as much as it was the only love I knew how to receive, a transfusion of tender sacred self setting my breastbone limp like ramen, Joni Mitchell making my shins go cold, the harmony in the Beach Boys’ “Meant for You” rolling bumps up the back of my neck (and in the harmony, or maybe simply in the effort to harmonize, the suggestion of communion between the Wilson boys, as if this were the
prerequisite: before a woman, first you must love your brothers), however music helped nourish my heart in these days when my home life was breaking it, however much it tried to instruct me in the sensual responsiveness of my body, however much I loved music and needed it, Gazz loved it and needed it more. His little brother was not coming back. At least my parents, ghosts that they’d become, walked among us. He was electrified with an underground sadness soothed only with the right songs. He was my teacher.

There were other teachers, too.

“Get the fuck in, get the fuck out. Ya got me? Get the fuck in, get the fuck out. That’s the whole secret.” This is Vince Visco—swarthy, overfed, sideburned, bald—a slightly taller Danny DeVito, the retired cop I’m out with on an afternoon removal. He’s sharing with me the whole secret and I’m too dumb to hear it. My dad has trained me to park the hearse in front of the house and let one of the two men go in to greet the family and reconnoiter. Courteous and practical. This was how the other men did it, too. Vince Visco, though, doesn’t want to waste a second. He figures the stop-and-chat adds precious minutes to the denominator of his imagined hourly rate. There is no hourly rate; we get thirty-five dollars whether it takes us ten minutes or three hours.

We’re in a neighborhood in the Northeast called Fox Chase, a bastion for white-flighters who’ve left places like Kensington and Frankford but still need to live within the
city limits to keep their jobs as cops and firemen. When I stay seated after I park the hearse he says, without looking at me because he’s expected this moment, “Come on. Get out.” He drags the stretcher behind him to the front door. I run a few steps to keep up. When a teenage boy answers the door, Vince says, “Where we goin’?” We’re led into a bedroom on the first floor, where we’re greeted by three middle-aged women. “We’re her daughters,” one of them says. I crinkle my eyes and, with my lips squeezed tight, nod at them. It’s a look I’ve been developing. I want it to say, “I’m really glad to meet you. God, it’s awful we’re meeting like this over your dead mom. Good luck to you in everything. There’s a decent chance I’ll be parking your car at the funeral.” I’m afraid, though, that, coupled with my suit and haircut, my look says, “I’ve been different since the war.” Vince barely blinks at them before he’s wrapping the woman in her bedsheet. I look to see if the daughters are upset, but they seem giddy, something I’ve never seen before in my short career. Vince is in such an addled rush that some faint pulse of guilt or better nature must patch itself through to his tongue. He stops just before he covers the dead woman’s face. He eyes her, then turns to her daughters and says, “She looks like a real nice lady.” With great solemnity they all nod thank you, but the act of playing serious and his use of the present tense make them delirious. One laughs despite herself, and then the others laugh at him, too. They’re holding their hands to their mouths, trying to behave. Vince smiles belatedly, but I can tell he doesn’t get it. He’s rattled.

Back in the car, he says, “You see what happens? Why did I have to say something? You see what happens when you waste time?”

Near the end of the night at FUBAR, Kelly, who liked me fine but I’m sure wanted me to monopolize less of Gazz’s time on the phone, stopped a girl who was walking by and asked her if she thought I was cute. The girl, Karen, a petite thing with a Dorothy Hamill bowl cut, said something that I understood as “I guess.” The gallon of alcohol in my stomach and the fact that I was witnessing this human verify that indeed I was not 100 percent hideous gave me the spurt I needed to make an approach. My opening question, as it was to all new acquaintances, was “Do you like Pavement?” By the time she had been caught up on the band’s creation story, the order in which to consume their records, and the universality with which critics seemed to ignore the chance to discuss
Crooked Rain
as a concept album, it was closing time. She gave me her phone number.

We went out the following Saturday night to a bar called Sugar Mom’s, very near to where Benjamin Franklin had lived. In his honor I did what I was used to and got stumbling drunk on pints of porter. That night we went back to her dorm room at a local art school. I insisted she play, on repeat, R.E.M.’s new single, “Tongue,” a Stylistics-style makeout song in which Michael Stipe’s narrator urges, “Don’t leave that stuff all over me,” which made it a perfect ode to condoms on this, the first night I would ever roll one on. (This was still a few years before
my first removal, i.e., before rolling on a condom reminded me of the reflexive act of pulling on plastic gloves at the sight of a dead body.) Between the rubber and the ten beers gulped at nervous speed, I didn’t feel much when she put me inside her. The sensation was markedly less enthralling than the pleasure my own lotiony hand could summon on a slow Tuesday afternoon. I plugged away for a long time, maybe twenty minutes of straight-up missionary jackhammering. If I had been asked for a summary of the thousands of whizzing thoughts and observations from those twenty minutes, it would have been “Oh my god. There’s a person stuck to my penis.” How shattering to discover that sex with a partner was as much of a slog as the rest of adult life. Karen was alternating between closing her eyes tight and making sounds with her mouth, but I couldn’t believe she was enjoying herself. Philadelphians are sandwich lovers nonpareil, but when I found myself, suspended on elbows over my first naked girl, conjuring a corned beef and Swiss shortie with mayo and pickles, I decided to ditch the mission. Hoagie interruptus. I offered several maximo bravado pumps and closed, like Monica Seles pouncing on a forehand, with a whopper of a grunt before stopping dead and setting on top of her like the flabby, long-limbed corpse I was. “You’re finished?” she said. Indeed I was, but I left wondering about the technical requirements for losing one’s flower.

We’re on Bridge Street, Dad and I, at the last house west of I-95, the monolithic interstate highway whose arrival in the
sixties ruptured the city’s river wards. It’s a tiny place made tinier by the roaring cars and trucks overhead. Dad goes in first. He comes out and says, “Yeesh.” He widens his eyes. “It’s gonna be tight.” Inside, in an easy chair the color of pea soup, a dead man waits for us. Buzz cut, ample jowls, navy blue and red plaid flannel shirt open over a white undershirt, navy blue polyester slacks, thick through the chest. He reminds me of Dolph Sweet, who played the father on
Gimme a Break!
He looks like the kind of guy who was picking butts out of the gutter and smoking them when he was eight years old, like my dad’s father had done. It doesn’t hit me that in scruffy old men like this Dad must see Pop. We’re only a mile or so from where he had lived. I remember him on a typical summer evening on his front porch, dressed in sleeveless undershirt; navy blue slacks, polyester; black dress socks. No bare feet. I think in all the nights of being in their homes, even counting the nights I slept over, I saw my four grandparents’ bare feet a total of three times. I saw my mother’s mother’s feet for the first time the night before she died, when I helped lift her legs back into bed.

The next weekend I saw Karen again, and this time I was able to relax and enjoy the trip back to her room. She was twenty, a year older than I was, but tiny, nearly elfin, with a child’s mini fingers and tender nails. She liked to talk hockey. One night I took her to a Friendly’s near her campus; a young man’s cache of seductive tricks must always include the Fribble. We
ran out of things to talk about. The next week I was on the phone with her in my bedroom when I heard the doorbell ring downstairs. I was home alone. I asked her to hold on. It was a neighbor returning one of my mother’s Pyrex dishes. On the way back into the living room I walked by the TV and saw the Sixers tipping off. I watched the whole game, forgetting about the phone. When I went back upstairs to use the bathroom I saw my bedroom light on, went in, and saw the phone sitting there off the hook. I picked it up and said, “Hello?” Karen said, “Hello? What happened?” I couldn’t understand someone being so into talking to me that she would sit there for two hours with a silent phone to her ear. Yet I knew she really wasn’t that interested in me. We barely knew each other. We didn’t have any overwhelming rapport. We talked like strangers in Winnipeg. What kind of need, I wondered, would make a person hold a phone to her head for two hours? Whatever it was I wanted no part of it.

A few nights after that we went to my friend Bob’s apartment for a soiree featuring five or six other young minds and a few cases of Old Milwaukee. Bob made Karen laugh, and even though she and I disappeared in the middle of the party to use his bedroom for sex, at the end of the night I told him he should ask her out. He told me I was crazy. I called her the next night and she said she couldn’t talk because she had Bob on the other line. My response was to feel mortally wounded.

But something had changed. I had evidence of a girl liking me. For those few weeks of talking to Karen on the phone I
hadn’t felt so bad. And I had this taste of drama from it ending badly. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was learning to use girls for the same sort of distraction from misery I used songs for. I started to get the idea that whatever was wrong with me, whatever it was that school hadn’t solved, maybe girls would solve.

Pop Meredith’s porch, like all the others on his block of row homes, was recessed about twenty feet from the curb, allowing room at the top of the first of two sets of steps for a landing that on most of the houses of the block was a concrete slab, but which my grandparents had converted to brick pavers with room enough for beds for tulips and marigolds, and for a rosebush that gave months of pink blooms. Pop watched cars go by, said hello to passing neighbors, tossed birdseed on the bricks. He cooed to the sparrows and chickadees that came to the porch’s hanging feeder, and went still when one landed on the black wrought-iron railing in front of him, the creature eyeing him with seconds-hand ticks of its head. When it left, Pop ashed his Camel into the stand-up ashtray kept, indoors and out, always at his left hand, even though he was right-handed and needed to cross himself to ash. The ashtray stand was black plastic molded in the shape of a horse’s head, an amber-colored glass dish resting on the crown of the skull. Granny sat next to him, working a needlepoint, and then talking with a neighbor who’d stopped by. A transistor radio was tuned to Harry Kalas and Whitey Ashburn calling the Phil
lies game. For all their charms, for the way their mutual affection came across in their chat, Harry and Whitey’s pairing was made exquisite by its portions of silence. They felt no need to speak when the game didn’t require it, and so they endowed the night with aching slips of quiet—five- and ten- and sometimes fifteen-second gaps—while the pitcher took his signs or called the catcher out for counsel. Many nights you could dial in the game not because you heard a play being reported but because you’d found the one spot on the dial where static gave way to a singular near absence of sound, no hiss, only the low, steady murmur of the crowd like a box fan running two rooms away.