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 Phillies 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.
Baseball on the radio, birds feeding, the porch’s yellow smell of birdseed an
d 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 ab
out 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.
The Removers: A Memoir Page 8