CLOSING TIME: A Memoir
Joe Queenan
Viking
Memoir
ISBN: 9780670020638
This is the kind of memoir only a cultural critic and satirist with the talent of a Joe Queenan could write. CLOSING TIME is a painfully honest, savagely funny, wise and ultimately moving story of growing up in Philadelphia in the 1950s and ’60s while outgrowing life in the home of a brutal, alcoholic father.
One of the mantras of the decidedly lower-middle-class, Irish-Catholic Queenan family was that things could always be worse. But in the space of a few months in 1958, when the recession cost his father the only white collar job he ever had, eight-year-old Joe and his family hit bottom. It wasn’t the first job, or the last, Queenan, Sr. would lose --- in one year he gloriously burned through 13. Evicted from their modest rented home, the Queenans descended into a public housing project nicknamed "Sin City," where they spent the next four years in “society’s version of a called strike three.”
The family survived what Queenan calls “these wilderness years” through three things: “the Catholic Church, the generosity of the few relatives who did not abandon us in our time of need, and the public library.” As much as it is the story of Queenan’s poisonous relationship with his father, CLOSING TIME is the frank account of the author’s steely determination to claw his way out of a grim fate that easily could have seemed predestined. “Every book I read,” he writes, “every movie I watched, every idea I assimilated furnished yet another tool to aid me in my flight from my father’s economic class, a class I sought not only to exit but to disown.”
Motivated by that intense desire to escape the hellhole of his home (“my father’s necropolis”) and even entertaining the prospect of an early martyrdom that would lead straight to canonization (“I wanted to be torn to shreds by roving heathens a full decade before reaching adulthood.”), Queenan boldly announced at age five that he wanted to enter the priesthood. He spent his freshman year of high school at the Maryknoll Junior Seminary in the hinterlands of northeastern Pennsylvania. That year ended with the rector, Father Casey, inquiring, “You weren’t thinking of coming back here next year, were you, Queenan?” thus pronouncing a benediction over the young man’s ecclesiastical dreams. Queenan returned to Philadelphia’s massive (6,500 students) Cardinal Dougherty High School, and on to Saint Joseph’s College, laying the foundation for the writing career that would not blossom until he reached his mid-30s.
With the same corrosive wit he applies in recounting his father’s failings, Queenan generously credits a pair of unusual men who helped lift him out of the slough that was his family life. Ex-marine Len Mohr was the owner of a clothing store Queenan describes as an “unprepossessing dump,” whose inventory “consisted almost entirely of attire Len himself would not have been caught dead in.” Mohr hired eight-year-old Joe to work after school every day and 10 hours on Saturday (paying him six dollars a week for those 20 hours), and for the next seven years he served as a relatively sane surrogate father, even offering to adopt his assistant and confidante at one point. That job gave way in high school to one in an apothecary owned by Glenn Dreibelbis (“a twenty-four-karat oddball who navigated perilously between the shoreline of lucidity and the shoals of lunacy”), his passion for New York City eventually inspiring Queenan to make it his home.
For readers born in the 1950s, CLOSING TIME also offers an entertaining nostalgia trip, providing the opportunity to recall dreadful cultural touchstones of the time like Lawrence Welk, Jackie Gleason’s variety show (whose faux alcoholic sidekick, Crazy Guggenheim, infuriates Queenan to this day) and “The First Family,” a comic record featuring a limp impersonation of President Kennedy that Queenan’s father played incessantly as he mourned the dead president.
But Queenan’s memoir never strays far from the toxic relationship that festers at its core. The ultimate judgment he renders on his father is unsparing, yet he sidesteps the trap of demonization and somehow humanizes this profoundly flawed man whose life was an epic poem of abject failure, concluding that “the laundry list of things I admired about him…was surprisingly long.” Queenan, Sr. was a ninth grade dropout who read Fitzgerald and Hemingway, a student of history who would not tolerate the use of profanity in his home. That same man drank away a good portion of the money he earned when he was briefly employed in some marginal job, occasionally leaving Joe and his three sisters with little or nothing to eat, and subjected them to frequent, merciless beatings. “My father’s attributes, laudable though they might be,” Queenan concludes, “did not alter the fact that once he took on the role of a parent, he had wandered too far out of his depth.”
In an emotionally-charged concluding chapter and epilogue, Queenan sums up the last two decades of his father’s life --- what he describes as his “Bedouin phase” --- watching from a geographic and emotional distance as the man drifted from modest rental room to flophouse. Still, he tends to this man who lacerated his childhood every bit as much as he did his body as his father lies dying from cancer in 1997: “I was determined to be at my father’s side when the end came, not because he deserved it or would appreciate the gesture but because having a bad father does not give anyone the right to be a bad son.”
CLOSING TIME is filled with moments of intense pathos and rollicking humor. Skillfully navigating the full range of human emotions, Joe Queenan has delivered an account, artful and heartfelt, of what it means to be a good father and a good son.
--- Reviewed by Harvey Freedenberg (mwn52@aol.com)
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