The Removers: A Memoir Page 7
Miss Hippel was kind, an eager babysitter, and had that bygone romance about her that my parents, more than any other neighbors, were helpless against. My dad especially liked her. Unlike my mother, she drank a bit and smoked. In summer the three of them would sit behind the houses at cocktail hour, the yards separated only by a two-foot-high wall of stacked bricks that they would put their feet up on. Miss Hippel knew the history of the neighborhood, the block, and our house, which especially fascinated my father. She loved to tell us that when she was a little girl there were no houses on the other side of Oakland Street, just meadow, with sheep grazing by a stream. By the early eighties you’d have to drive maybe thirty miles outside the city to see a sheep, but she kept a touch of that wilderness alive. The backyards on our block were a uniform size, about thirty feet deep and twelve feet wide. Miss Hippel’s was something different: a brick path crowded on both sides by explosions of snowdrops, daisies, ferns, azaleas, cosmos, violets, dusty miller, mums. Her front yard, maybe fifteen by ten, was covered in pachysandra and surrounded by a regal chest-high hedge. (We had the same kind of hedge in front of our house, only with ivy as ground cover. In spring, somehow, a few daffodils would come up through Miss Hippel’s pachysandra but never through our ivy.) My father has a poem called “Hippel’s Wilderness” that says a lot of what I’m trying to say, but much better. One stanza reads:
You have seen the faces fall away, like trees
along the street, and, grey, the soot from diesels
build up everywhere, traffic rattling
sashes up and down the block. But you
have saved a bit of city as it was.
In a yard smaller than a good-sized truck
Frankford as it used to be goes on.
Our house shared an enclosed porch with Miss Hippel’s. Between the two porches was a window that swung open. (It had been painted shut for decades, but my father chiseled the paint away one day to make the commerce between houses easier, and so that on winter nights she could come in or vice versa without having to set foot on icy steps and sidewalk.) Many Saturdays in fall and winter the four Merediths would climb through to her house for cocktail hour. One night I wore a blazer over my usual T-shirt and sweatpants, and Dad tied me a bow tie. Theresa and I drank orange juice in highball glasses. I remember, too, handfuls of macadamia nuts; the smell of cigarettes rich in the butterscotch carpet; easy laughs among the adults; golf from the West Coast on the television in the early dark of winter. Miss Hippel was like a third grandmother to my sister and me, but she did so many things our parents’ mothers never did. She traveled, had a career, played sports, lived alone. Neither of our parents’ mothers drove, but Miss Hippel kept her cream-colored ’66 Buick Skylark convertible in a garage in the neighborhood and would take it out to the Main Line to play golf or visit a nephew or her old friends, human links to a time when it was not inconceivable to leave Frankford for enclaves like Bryn Mawr or Swarthmore. No one else I’ve met in my life has left Frankford for Bryn Mawr or Swarthmore.
In 1985, Miss Hippel gave up her Skylark after an accident, and my mom started to shop for her groceries. Later in the year she moved out to the Main Line to live in a nursing home near her nephew and his family. She died in the spring of 1986.
Her house wasn’t empty for long. By the summer a couple named Peg and Bill Stanley moved in with their three toddlers. The day they arrived they backed a pickup truck full of their possessions over Miss Hippel’s hedges. After moving day they dug out the remaining hedges and pachysandra. In its place they threw down grass seed that never held for all their kids’ foot traffic. The Stanleys eventually bought a Rottweiler named Tank that would sit in their front window and, seemingly as if trained, bark in long, lingering rumbles whenever a black person walked by. One day Tank was reduced to cowering by an aggressive poodle on the block. For the rest of that night we could hear Bill through the wall bellowing about his “faggot dog.” “Buy a rockweiler and he’s scared of a fuckin’ poodle. You’re a fuckin’ faggot dog.” Before the summer was over all of Miss Hippel’s backyard flora was gone, replaced by a monster aboveground swimming pool. Peg and Bill and their friends would stay out there till late at night drinking beers and smoking joints. The four of us spent more time inside than ever.
By Christmas of 1986, Miss Hippel, both of my dad’s parents, and our neighbor Mrs. Hollins, who was my mom’s close friend and the mother of my buddy, Richie, had all died in a twelve-month span. Mom stood on the front porch that day and cried about the hedge. She cried the rest of that night. Grief, I’m sure, but also the fear of trading one kind of wilderness for another.
* * *
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 loya
lly 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 M
itchell 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.