In the living room there’s a grand piano with a cello leaning in one corner, French horn beside the fireplace and piles of music on top of the piano. It’s a TV setup for “This Is Your Life, Albert Einstein.”
It’s hotter than hell. The humidity followed us all the way. We settle in a dining nook attached to the kitchen. There’s an electric fan there and we turn it on to push the air around some. There’s also a small television. We switch on and watch one of the local stations; it’s amazing how the Philadelphia accent comes through even on TV.
At about nine, a car pulls into the drive. The people fit the house. Pat is tall, thin and bald. If you can imagine a Midwestern Oppenheimer, you’ve got it: a quiet, deep-voiced, slow-spoken, deliberate man. Dad had told me about Pat’s strange childhood but I didn’t believe it. Pat was born to deaf parents on an isolated farm in South Dakota. He didn’t hear anybody speak till he was five years old. His home language is sign, and he has a slight finger accent in English. When he talks, it sounds like a simultaneous translation at the U.N.
Later, I ask about all this. You never know what embroidery Dad’s working up. But it’s truth.
Pat feels he has an enormous advantage over other people because spoken language is something he can tune in or out as he wants.
Rita is small, smooth, quick-moving and good-looking. This is the first of my parents’ friends who turns me on. I don’t know what it is; her moves, her voice, her vitality; and she doesn’t seem old. She has laugh lines down the sides of her face and wrinkles at the eyes. After you’ve seen lines like that on a woman’s face, young-girl faces are empty maps, undeveloped country, waiting for something to happen. I spend a good part of the evening sneaking looks at Rita.
The two daughters aren’t there. They’re both off working summer jobs trying to help pay off those enormous tuition bills. One’s working on a horse farm; she wants to be a vet. The other is waitressing at the shore in Atlantic City. They call the beach the shore here. The younger ones, Sandy and Kim, are quiet, bright-eyed, listening to everything happening. We have a great time.
Rita lights mental fires and Pat blows gently, keeping them burning. We talk about everything. Halfway through the evening Dad begins telling about what’s been happening in California. For the first time, I get the unexpurgated version. If he’s telling the truth, then I don’t know how he stuck it out long as he did. I hope he doesn’t expect me to put up with anything like that for him.
That evening I give the university thing another think. What’s physics or mathematics got to do with whether a conversation is interesting or not? Nothing I can see. But these people are interesting no matter what they’re talking about. They have a way of approaching any subject with curiosity, originality, a personal viewpoint. They know how to think. They’ve read a lot, they know about music and painting; but that’s not it either.
It’s hard putting a finger on it; they’re in tune, have good antennae. They know the rhythms of listen and respond. It’s three in the morning before we stop.
Rita shows us the upstairs bedrooms, the older girls’ rooms. Everything on the walls is interesting. By letting your eyes wander around you’re constantly learning. There’s the periodic table pasted on the ceiling over each bed. There are star maps stuck on the walls. There are classification trees for animals, insects, plants, everything, all in color, beautiful. There are rock and shell collections on the window sills. Each desk has a professional-type microscope. Just lying in one of those beds, scanning the walls, you could almost educate yourself. These people are deep into knowledge. I’m not sure I could make it here.
I lie there under the periodic table. Maybe I made a mistake. Maybe it was because I felt they were babying me. Maybe if I’d gone to a big university like UCLA or Berkeley I’d’ve made it.
Dad’s already out of bed and downstairs when I wake up. It’s raining like crazy. At least the rain makes the humidity bearable. This whole East Coast is one gigantic hothouse.
Dad and Rita are in the kitchen drinking coffee and eating doughnuts. They’re having a very heavy private conversation and hardly notice me come into the kitchen. Probably Dad’s unloading on her about California again.
I sit down and dig in. I’ve never seen doughnuts like these. There are some with holes, both glazed and sugared. There are solid ones with jelly filling, lots of jelly; and even fancy variations like maple-syrup fillings.
Rita asks how I want my eggs and pours orange juice. This is the best food we’ve eaten in weeks. Dad’s quiet; I have the creepy feeling I’ve interrupted something. But I’m not giving up on those doughnuts, no matter how much he needs that broad, firm, smooth shoulder.
I’m into my fourth, seconds on the sugar-coated, solid, jelly-filled ones, when Pat comes down. He’s dressed for the university. I can see him at a lectern all right, the perfect university professor: bald head gleaming in the light; trying to be gentle and clear but scaring the shit out of his students because he gives off an aura of accumulated knowledge and know-how tucked behind those eyes, under that bald head.
Pat takes a glass of orange juice and some coffee. He chooses one of the plain glazed ones with a hole. Rita gives me two fried eggs with some weird-tasting stuff called scrapple.
Dad gets out the papers on our car with the delivery address and Rita unfolds a map of Philadelphia. Neither Pat nor Rita will believe this car’s going to the address we have. We’re delivering to a swarming, seething, black slum, one of the most dangerous sections in Philly. They say they wouldn’t even drive a tank into that neighborhood. Dad and I look at each other; this is something we hadn’t counted on.
Rita also hands me a letter she forgot to give me yesterday. It’s from Debby; I dash upstairs to read it in private.
She’s coming to meet me in Paris on the point of the island the way we said. She’ll be there July loth, wants to be with me in Paris to celebrate Bastille Day. She says in the letter “celebrate breaking out of my own personal prisons, too.” I read that letter over about ten times. Holy shit, all my dreams are coming true. We’re really going to do it. I realize Dad and I missed the Fourth of July in there somewhere without noticing; it could explain the heavy traffic after St. Louis.
When we try starting the car, it looks as if we won’t deliver at all. We turn the motor over until the battery runs down. Pat has a charger, so we take the battery into the garage for a quick charge.
It’s got to be all the rain and humidity has fouled the electrical system. For some reason, Dad’s convinced it’s the carburetors. Pat stands on the porch and makes suggestions of things to check. I can almost hear the relays clicking in his brain. It’s still raining like hell and we’re soaking wet. The trouble is, if we don’t deliver today, the fifty-dollar bond is forfeited, even with the extra two days.
I take out the sparks and clean them. Dad’s blown all the jets on the carbs; he smells like a fire-eater. This car is not only gigantic, but all the parts are tucked in the most impossible places. With Pat’s help, I find the points and clean them. We put the battery back in and give it another try. Nothing. We turn it over till it’s obvious the sparks are flooded again.
Dad tries calling Scarlietti to tell him his car’s in Philadelphia, but can’t get anybody. Things are screwed up as usual.
Rita comes out on the porch with a blue-and-white striped umbrella. She looks under the hood with us. I’m wondering if it might be the timing. But how could the timing get off overnight? Rita says she read somewhere, when everything’s wet and humid so a car won’t start, you should take out the electrical parts and bake them dry in an oven at a slow heat.
We look at her as if she’s crazy. There’s something hard to handle about putting automobile parts in an oven where you bake cakes, or cook roast beef.
But it makes a kind of sense; besides, we’ve run out of things to do. We twist out all the sparks again, unhook the coil, the lines from the sparks to the distributor, the distributor, the condenser and the brushes for the
generator. We take off the distributor cap and rotor. We spread all these parts on a piece of aluminum foil and stick the whole mess into her oven.
We bake them slowly for fifteen minutes; according to Rita, about the time it takes for a batch of cookies; then we take them out. They’re not only dry, they’re red hot. We have another cup of coffee while they cool. I’m enjoying myself. Pat’s stayed on. He says this is more interesting than anything going on at the lab.
Dad’s more relaxed than he’s been in months. This is his hometown and probably geography, geology, everything works on the body so you’re most comfortable where you’ve grown up. Maybe Grandpa’s Coriolis effect has something to do with it, too; the body’s a sort of hydraulic system, when you think about it. We should ask Pat.
Pat’s explaining some of the decisions they’re making about what to engrave in gold on the next satellite as a message to beings in outer space. It’s complicated but it make me think of all the bottles with messages in them I’ve thrown into oceans since I was a kid.
After everything’s cooled off, we put the parts back in, take the charger off our battery and turn her over. She booms into life with the first try—as if nothing had ever been wrong. We all take turns dancing with Rita and congratulating her. Any excuse. She needs to go change because we get grease over the back of her dress. The rain’s stopped, the sun’s out and it’s hot, humid again.
Dad and I wash up, put on clean shirts and take off. Rita says she’ll throw our other clothes in the washer and they’ll be clean when we get back.
We drive through Fairmount Park, heading north. The farther north we go, the grimmer it gets. As soon as we pass Broad Street and tour past Temple University, it turns totally black. There are people standing around staring blank at this monster of an automobile going by. I know if we don’t keep up speed we’ll be jumped. Almost simultaneously, Dad and I push down the locks. Dad smiles; I wonder if he’s scared as I am. I’ll tell you if I were one of those people living out there, seeing this car driving down my street, I’d sure as hell be throwing things.
There’s an elevated train here over the street, just like the Paris Métro out by Bir-Hakeim and through Passy. Only this is nothing like that, this is desolation! It looks as if there’s been a war. It’s worse than just slummy and dirty. There are burnt cars in the streets. There’s garbage, old furniture, refrigerators and broken, rusted washing machines on the sidewalks. There’s trash over everything. The curbs are packed tight with debris so they’re rounded off between street and pavement.
The farther along we go, the fewer and fewer women we see, and the men begin looking meaner. They’ve started stepping off curbs toward us, and twice guys stoop down and pick up bits of junk to throw. I’m wishing we didn’t look quite so much like Captain Haddock and a bearded Tin Tin.
All the houses here are row houses. The windows are broken out and the railings on porches are splintered and hanging. The tiny bits of lawn in front of each house are only packed dirt, with holes dug into them and more garbage strewn around.
There are kids and women hanging out of windows, mostly broken-paned windows, but the houses look as if nobody lives in them. There are no curtains or drapes. Junk wrecks of cars are pulled up on lawns and in alleyways. Boy, I never knew what a real black slum looked like. There’s nothing like this in California or Paris.
I’ve been to Watts, but at least there it’s individual houses, not these walls of broken windows. There it looks temporary; here it’s as if it’s been this way forever and is going to stay that way.
People are stretched out on the streets and on pavements, like Paris clochards—only young people, some of them wearing jeans, T-shirts; and nobody’s paying any attention.
Now we’re starting to run red lights because every time we slow down or stop, the car’s covered with people. They jump on the hood, knock on the windows, thump on the sides of the car with fists or open palms. If we stop two minutes, goodbye car; goodbye hubcaps, aerial, anything that can be torn off. So we’re carefully running red lights and staying away from the sides of the car. I’m working over our map trying to zero in on the address. Dad’s hunched around the wheel as usual.
The wild thing is most everybody’s laughing. They think it’s the funniest thing in the world seeing these two whiteys in blue driving this wet dream of an automobile straight through their territory. I don’t think they actually believe it. Maybe they’re only trying to be friendly and aren’t being threatening at all, but it looks threatening and we’re both scared shitless. The car’s beginning to stink from our fear, even with the air conditioning.
There’s another thing that’s weird. Out there, everybody’s in undershirts or without shirts and the sun’s beating down after the rain. Pavements and streets are steaming, steam is coming out of manhole covers; it’s all filthy and disordered. But inside the car, we’re sitting on smooth leather seats. We’re surrounded by clean, canned car air; the radio’s playing stereo with soft background classical music. It’s hard putting it together. We’re astronauts, tearing through a hostile environment, only able to exist because of our support systems. If one thing goes wrong, if we make one mistake, we’re goners.
The kings of France must have had the same feeling. Poor old Henry IV, with some nut jumping into his carriage in the Place des Vosges and doing him in. No wonder Louis XIV built that château out in Versailles; he was probably one of the first people moving to the suburbs, escaping center-city madness.
Well, we finally come to the address on our papers. We’ve got the right street, the right number, everything tallies, but this can’t be the right place. This is 2007 Montgomery, but it’s the worst of all. This area is unbelievable. There are practically no houses which aren’t completely boarded up. The people in the street are virtually naked. There’s a broken fire hydrant across the street and kids are jumping around bare-ass in the water. This is pure jungle in the middle of Philadelphia.
We go around the block three times, not knowing what to do. By the second time around, they’re waiting for us. Kids run up as we go by with mouthsful of water, spurt at the windows and laugh. The house with the right number looks to be completely abandoned.
We’re finishing the third turn and we’re about to crash on out of there. We stop for one more close look to see if there’s any chance anybody could possibly live at that number. Two kids climb up over the hood and sit on top of the car with their bare wet feet hanging down across the windshield.
Amazingly, a door opens in the house and a white woman comes running down toward us. She’s wearing a yellow dress with no sleeves; she has dark, almost blue hair. She runs to the side of the car and presses papers against the window. It’s a copy of the delivery papers with Dad’s picture stapled to the top. I unlock the door, she pulls it open and slides in beside me. She smells of whiskey and perfume. Opening the door is like opening the door to an oven. It’s the first time we’ve had a door or window open since we left Bala-Cynwyd.
“Are you Mr. Tremont?”
Dad reaches over and takes his papers out of the glove compartment.
“It says here I’m supposed to deliver this car to a Mr. Scarlietti.”
He shows her the papers with that name.
“I’m taking delivery for him; Mr. Scarlietti is out of town right now. I’ll sign for it and give you the fifty dollars. That’s right, isn’t it?”
Dad looks at me and I shrug. What the hell else are we going to do, sit in this car forever? At least the kids have all scrambled off and are sitting or standing along the curb across the street. Dad pulls out the repair bills; they come to over three hundred bucks. She looks at them, then at us suspiciously. Dad tells her he called from Los Angeles and Mr. Scarlietti gave permission to have the voltage regulator replaced; the universal joint was done right here in Pennsylvania on the turnpike, but we couldn’t get to him for permission.
“If you don’t believe me, just call the garage, the phone number’s there on the bill; it??
?s in a place called New Stanton.”
He points to the number and she stares some more at the bills, then smiles.
“Looks as if this is some car. I don’t have that kind of money on me; one of you’ll have to come inside and get it. Four hundred would cover everything, right?”
Dad nods. I’m having a hard time putting together that kind of money and this car with this neighborhood, if you could call it a neighborhood. Dad says he’ll stay in the car while I go in.
I’m more than a little bit nervous. This woman is good-looking, too good-looking, maybe thirty-five, flashing eyes, smooth arms, good legs in high heels with platforms.
She runs up the cracked cement walk between the worn-down lawns and up some broken steps onto an unpainted porch. Outside the car, I catch not only the full push of heat but the smells. It’s a mixture of a burning dump and rotten oranges.
When I follow her through the door, I can’t believe my eyes, or skin, or anything. First of all, the place is air-conditioned, but that’s the least of it. I’ve stepped into a gigantic room. They’ve knocked down the walls to about ten of those row houses and put them together. The walls are covered with red brocade and there are mirrors everywhere with soft pinkish-orange lights. The rugs are dark, burgundy-wine red. It’s like those last thirty-nine pages in Steppenwolf! It makes Caesar’s Palace look like Savon drugstore. I’m standing there with my mouth open and the lady’s disappeared.
I’m expecting to be hit over the head with a velvet-covered blackjack. This is some kind of big-deal gambling joint or whorehouse, maybe both.
I’m thinking I’d better just run and tell Dad to drive like hell. We can drop this car in some white neighborhood with square curbs. We’ll phone from there, tell them where the car is and jump on a plane. We’re way over our heads. I’m actually beginning to feel cold under my jean jacket. Maybe I’m going into shock, my circulation isn’t pushing the blood fast enough.
I look around. There are staircases up for each of the different houses they’ve put together, so I can look down the line and see one staircase after the other. With all the mirrors and the dim lights, it’s hard to tell exactly what you’re actually seeing anyway. There are small wooden bars built in under each of those stairs, and leather or red plush couches all around the walls. It’s got to be a whorehouse all right. I’ve never been in one, but this is the way I’d’ve imagined one up.