My harbor city, beloved city of my youth, city of faith founded by ministers, city of industry where a mass-produced firearm was invented and also the lollipop, “Model City” of the War on Poverty, learned city of light and truth, now somnolent, desiccated, city fled by whites, abandoned by governments, riven with hardship and its Pyrrhic consolations, the public common a penumbra, the sidewalks empty at eventide, panic grass between the cracks, miles of neglected porches, all the vacant lots, fleets of tumbledown cars mottled in body-shop maroon, the acid-green river feeding the oil-soaked currents, heaps of scrap at the northern delimits, hills of slag to the south, a property without value, my city in ruin.
Since the gun factories began shutting down, the streets were less safe. New Haven had been in slow decline for many years, but I had failed to notice. Now, at the end of the 1970s, I awakened to a city that had so many slums they’d become bisectors of all sections, long, barren, car-door-lock-lowering stretches on which I could see through our raised backseat windows that men who had almost nothing would spend it all on a secondhand Cadillac. The jades working their lamp-lit trade at one notorious intersection inspired my sister and me to shorthand the siren dressers at our school: that sophomore’s look was, we agreed, “very Chapel and Howe.”
Downtown we watched a lone glass-and-steel box-tower rise on Church Street, read the “Office Space Now Available” sign, counted the months before there was light on a single floor, counted high. By now I had studied the schoolbook history of my city, and on cold winter evenings I could look into the frosted glass of that empty tower and see history reflected, a history that had been quickly punctuated by aspirations when in the 1640s, shortly after the founding of the Colony, a Great Shippe laden with investment cargo was sent through the January ice to England, the future hopes of the new settlement resting on the wealth that would come sailing back to New Haven. The ship never returned, though year after year New Haveners spotted its fugitive masts rolling aloft in the clouds, an apparition with enduring resonance in a lost city that ever after always seemed to be waiting for the money to arrive, for its ship to come in.
Yale, losing applicants, poured resources into security, and we denizens needed to see no memoranda to know it, for now the gray limestone walls of the courtyards seemed to be grommets holding off the turbulent city, buffering even the faint Brahms melodies drifting down to the sidewalk from the music school practice rooms.
A man named Gans asked me to guess where the four tall, rooftop, orange letters spelling out his name as signage for his eponymous suburban business had come from; after I gave up he told me, “I got them when Grant’s closed!”
Not only Grant’s, but Kresge’s, and J. Phipps’s, and Esther’s and George and Harry’s restaurant and Malley’s, more and more sturdy mercantilists deprived of their apostrophes until we had a downtown that felt voided of transaction, a seventeenth-century Colonial grid updated in plywood-shuttered windows and empty display cases, all of it backlit by traffic signals still calibrated to a busier day so that on red we sat lengthily in still streets, waiting and waiting for green. The true quiddity of white flight was scorned space, a residue of empty time. Nearby on George Street was a gray-white concrete parking garage built with Neo-Medieval arches that was noteworthy among architects—a famous exponent of Brutalism had drawn it—though to us, who lived in the shadow, it was only a good place to get held up. And across the way, the rusty hulk of the Veterans Memorial Coliseum, a civic center that had emanated corrosion since the ribbon cutting. Beyond it, the aborted turnpike beltway where the road abruptly ended in cat-grassy swale—all of this lending new meaning to “We Bombed in New Haven.”
In the dusk of a revival house screening of All About Eve, I watched as Addison DeWitt briefed Eve for her out-of-town preview at the Shubert Theater—the Shubert on College Street in New Haven, which I crossed every day on my way to school. DeWitt was explaining that “what looks like a very small city,” is really just a somewhere on the way to elsewhere. As he spoke, there in my cinema seat I had the sensation of eavesdropping on my own hometown.
That I lived in a place many people hoped to leave was my recurrent discovery. We had minor league teams and Yale students, all of them soon to be moving on. Every spring I’d watch the station wagons line up on Chapel and Elm streets, all the undergraduate parents helping their children clear out for the summer. I had the idea that they were glad to be going. For years I had wanted to validate this place where I came from as it had once validated me. But perhaps now there came a divergent revelation—maybe I had begun to feel that I wanted to get clear of New Haven myself, though without any alternative destination in mind. Adolescence is life on the cusp of life. You crave options, but none are forthcoming because you’re not ready for them.
In a city with many unattractive public housing projects, among the grimmest was the Church Street South Apartments, which stood across the street from Union Railroad Station. The project was a funerary succession of low-rise roughened concrete blockhouses and unshaded courtyards ringed by a concrete outer wall, all of it pinched and jammed onto an arid parcel between the highway connector and the tracks. Less than a mile away were the Gothic cloisters of Yale with their wall friezes, belvederes, slate walkways, crocketed gables and pinnacles, a proximity that was not proximate at all, so pervasive was the isolation of the housing project. Though it was teeming with people, Church Street South nonetheless felt deserted, like a surrounded fortress that was slowly being starved into submission, the population languishing in their strangely present exile. That was the problem with Urban Renewal in New Haven, that the new buildings conceived as the concrete lodestars of civic progress stood conspicuously separate from the rest of city life, so that to encounter them was to see idealism gone awry, the failure of optimism. Whenever my mother left off Sally and me at Union Station, like all the other travelers, we went hurrying toward the safety of the terminal doors, I trying to resist looking back over my shoulder at the throng outside the project entrance, all the restless men with nothing but time on their dark hands, I resenting them because the choicelessness of their lot made me seem small to myself in my own discontents. If I also saw in them the man I was on my way to visit, I was unaware of it.
With its clean brick exterior lines, inlay of soaring Gothic window arches, and handsome ceiling work, Union Station had once presented arrivals with a dignified face on New Haven. Travelers entered a corniced grand hall where there was dusty light shining down from the high windows onto long and sturdy wooden benches, everywhere an amplitude of space that made our town seem welcoming. But now the building had fallen into disrepair and had become too expensive to heat and renovate, so passengers bypassed the sealed-off station proper, entering instead to the left under a temporary porte cochere that led directly into the tunnel ramping to the tracks. It was a remarkable comedown, as though a lean-to had been asked to stand in for a padlocked winter palace. The current station served only to funnel us onward, a purpose emphasizing my circumstances: I had to go. Each time I made this ingress, I believed I was shedding all that was good in my life.
Sally and I went to New York at off times, in the middle of a holiday week or on the Sunday of a long weekend when the trains were a quarter filled, most people already arrived and burrowing into the occasion. Nobody on the train ever spoke to us. People who yearn for weekends, holidays, and summers to be over, who become suddenly upset on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving and at the mid-December sound of Christmas carols in department stores, tend to be quiet with such secrets. Month after month, year after year, we left and came back in this way, and just when the dog-faced eventlessness of the journey seemed most intolerable, I learned how much I liked taking the train.
My father discovered that a bus ticket cost much less. Now our visits ended in the swirling bedlam of the Port Authority Bus Terminal. To me, unable to tolerate my father in full view, here I looked instead at the bus station habitués lurking in the windowless fluorescence, so man
y sly, desperate, and disconsolate faces. It was then that my father had begun to have his own homeless periods, months in his life about which I knew nothing, for excuses were made until he had been hospitalized and treated and released, ready to be home and visited again by his kids. His face didn’t look old, he hadn’t any wrinkles, but it was impossible not to associate him with this mangled place I came to because of him, impossible not to think of him as a mangled man.
We boarded the Greyhound and sat directly behind the driver for safety, though no driver ever looked at us and the small “Your Driver” name-card slot above the windshield was always left empty. Perched on seats of durable, striped synthetic, trying not to irritate one another by crossing the DMZ of the armrest and brushing elbows, Sally and I rode north in restroom air, smelling also cigarettes and the tang of snacks born by our fellow riders—two hours of pounding along the turnpike with the restroom door whanging against its frame, drink cans rolling up and down the aisle, until the driver swung into his bay, released the lock with a hiss, and we were in a parking lot beside Chick’s Auto Body in the shadow of the Coliseum. I never quite knew where I’d just been.
We were now in the purest form of our grotesque limbo, my father and I, I not wanting to have any thoughts about him, resistant to knowing anything, sure it would terrify me, yet always waiting for something terrifying to happen. Though I was getting older, my memories of New York from the bus years are in even shorter supply than those from earlier in life—which was by design. I remember the passes he would make at the saleswomen and waitresses we encountered during the course of the New York day, the arguments he’d get into with strangers in cramped public rooms where there was no way for me to melt into the wall, the dirty magazines scattered around his apartment. And I remember his circuit-breaking rages where his weirdly flickering eyes looked as if they were going to spring out of his face as he went on and on about how all the good women in our family were whores: “It’s true, Nicky, all of them, and your Aunt Susi was the worst. A real flirt. She was always coming on to me.” Every meal I sat eating with him I spent praying to hear the sound of my own footfalls.
I couldn’t do anything about any of it, and there were still years to go before the mast, so when I got back to New Haven I just worked hard to dispossess myself. The situation seemed so impossible and horrible that where my father was concerned, mostly what passed through my mind were ruminations. One went like this: I have to go see him even though he never does anything good for me; not true—he gave me life. And another: he bears no responsibilities; given that, can he be considered irresponsible? In French class we were learning about Sartre’s “other,” and these musings likewise seemed too existential for me to engage with; I didn’t know what to do with any of them. Eventually, I would learn that my father also was struggling to explain himself. His technique was to present people with copies of Saul Bellow’s novel Seize the Day, the story of a man of high promise falling apart.
Back on the bus, I used to wonder how my mother could have married this person. It was frightening that such an able woman had made such a colossal error. I could not imagine two less compatible people than my parents, and there was, in these moments, something repellent about the whole thing to me. How could she have been so foolish, so careless? But I knew. The time I talked with her about it, she told me how deeply in love they had been, how “charming, and good-looking, and funny, and intelligent Don was, how much he loved me. You never knew him the way he was, Nicky.” Then she said, “I thought I could make him happy and that with me he would be well. I was very young and very romantic and very hopeful.” As for me, she said, “You got only the best parts of him, Nicky.”
A light heart lives long,” my mother liked to say, but only the rest of me was complying. My wrestling weight classes through high school progressed from 96 pounds to 105 pounds to 119 pounds as a seventeen-year-old junior—when the coach took me aside following another lost match to ask in consternation, “What’s going wrong for you, son? Why aren’t you getting better?” It’s uncanny how all the hours of life you put into something can come to a head with such stunning compression. Day after white winter day in our low and narrow wrestling room that warmed through practice like a bread oven, I’d rehearsed the moves and counters he taught me, their names as vivid as chess combinations—openings, defenses, and endgames like the single-leg takedown, the fireman’s carry, the Suplay, the Granby roll, the cross-body ride, the figure-four scissors hold, the several fractions of Nelson, the guillotine. His name was Kirchhofer. He had a cowlick, sideburns, squinty eyes, and enormous, hamlike woodcutter’s forearms that he seemed to wear in the same way he did his sharply creased chinos. If something upset him he’d exclaim “Gadzooks!” When really exasperated, he’d add an intensifier: “Good gracious.”
Wrestling wasn’t fun the way games like baseball and soccer and touch football were. I did it because of Kirchhofer. What I liked best about wrestling was how much he wanted us to honor it. Every day when he walked into that stifling room with its crosscurrents of ammonia and old sweat, he was luminous with higher intent. “When you’re in here with me,” he’d say to us at the beginning of practice, “I don’t want your mind on your math test or your girlfriend or your problems. Just have your mind on wrestling.” Nothing was more important than our doing this spare, ancient sport not only well, but beautifully, and the hours I spent with him were so strenuous that during them I indeed couldn’t think of anything else.
Kirchhofer was an excellent instructor because he passed along both the skills and a private sense of objective so urgent that kids who were not otherwise illustrious began to see themselves as champions and then became them. Although he never talked in a proselytizing way about God, we all knew that Kirchhofer was a religious Christian and it was apparent that to him there was an article of faith in wrestling. He asked people to draw from wrestling a kind of physical truth, and, when it happened, you saw the way wrestling could express what was admirably individual about every kind of person. I had hoped to be one of those boys, and now I had failed him.
The apparent reason was lack of strength. Mounted on the gymnasium wall was a climbing pegboard. Other wrestlers sped up and down, manipulating the pegs in and out of the many rows of holes with such ease and precision that they looked like sculptors up there with chisels, their feet in those striated shoes we wore seeming to walk right upon the wall. I couldn’t do it. I would cling at the pegs, kicking my legs, thrashing my torso skyward, attempting to hurl myself toward the second row of holes, finally removing a peg and wildly trying to slam it into the higher hole in the split second before my right arm gave in and my weight swung me away, still flailing at the hole, until I drooped absurdly on one arm, inches from the ground.
Then one afternoon in wrestling practice, I took down the great Valente in a match for a spot on the varsity. Soon enough he reversed matters and pinned me. I was expecting to lose. Mr. Bakke, another coach who was refereeing, looked at me and said, “You know, Nicky, when you took him down, I would have thought you’d go harder after him. You seemed to hold back.” Mr. Bakke was my favorite history teacher because in the classroom he could make you see great events in time as an algorithm—the step-by-step consequences for big actions that foretold the progress of man. I knew he was right about my wrestling, and for weeks I wished I had gone harder, because the moments life gives you to surprise yourself aren’t predictive or frequent; you have to be ready for them to come up.
My solution was to remake myself: I would shrink until I was light enough to be strong for my weight. My wrestling diet allowed one tiny meal a day, an evening repast of a single slice of jam-spread bread, an orange, a glass of juice, and a bouillon cube. Immediately afterward I’d sink into a broiling bathtub to sweat it off. I was so famished I craved the acorns on the ground, but I was also inflamed with purpose. “What are you doing to yourself? Are you crazy?” my mother would cry. She’d once taught a wrestler who passed out in class. Already ski
nny, now I rapidly became twelve pounds skinnier, my waist as lank as my arms. By depriving myself in that way I experienced some sense of the body control other kids got on the pegboard, and for a time I won a lot of matches and a trophy in the year-end tournament, launching myself at opponents with a starved fury of aggression that was startling both to me and to at least one rival, who, after a first period on the mat with me, flatly refused to return for the second. I was indignant and also amazed at this; so far as I knew, nobody had ever been afraid of me before. But these self-denials were gamings of the system, false triumphs. Since the true essence of wrestling is its purity as a test of self, I could not get better because I was not yet myself.
One summer day in 1979, as sixteen-year-old I worked my maintenance job tending the grounds and grooming the red-clay tennis courts at the New Haven Lawn Club, I was sweeping the area along a baseline directly beneath the dining terrace where Gordo and his family were reclining over what looked to be the fresh berry and ice cream parfaits that were the kitchen’s dessert special all summer, when my broom handle snapped with a rifle crack. “Did you get in trouble?” his younger brother, Stew, asked me later. In fact, when I telephoned my boss and confessed about the damaged broom, he replied, “Don’t bother me at home with something like that.”
Many families from my school were members of that club. I knew that even if we could have afforded it, we never would have joined. My mother hated exclusivity of all kinds, and she loathed the Lawn Club, which, she said, had a long history of discrimination in its membership policies against “blacks, Jews, Catholics—just about everybody.” I understood all that, and, yet, when in my work clothes I confronted my schoolmates at their leisure in Speedos and tennis whites, I would have to struggle to remember that mine was the nobler course. As I raked and trimmed, I used to watch them on the tennis courts I had swept for them.
The Crowd Sounds Happy Page 22