Last Words Read online

  this passage, put your hands over their eyes. Or if you're reading this

  to them at bedtime, skip the next paragraph.

  This simple, intensely satisfying stunt involves gathering a gob of

  spit in your mouth with a "clam" or "lunger" mixed in with it to give

  it elasticity. Tilt the head slightly forward. Let the spit dribble slowly

  from your mouth until it hangs down in a long string, like a bungee

  cord of saliva—then suddenly suck it back into your mouth the second before it breaks off. This was so disgusting it even grossed me

  out. And I was the one doing it.

  Besides a budding talent for what you might loosely call physical comedy, I was also a pretty good mimic. I could do anonymous

  character voices like drawls and brogues but I could also do many of

  the adults us kids had to deal with, especially the nuns and priests of

  Corpus Christi. Later I branched out to include storekeepers, local

  characters, the parents of my friends—a minefield that one—and

  the friends of my parent. I also did the standard celebrity repertoire

  of the time—Peter Lorre, Jimmy Cagney, Sydney Greenstreet—

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  even though my voice was an octave too high for accuracy. They

  were a generous audience on the stoop.

  But the exciting thing was the discovery that I could create funny

  dialogue for these characters and voices. Plenty of people can do

  imitations, lots of kids can mimic grown-ups. The real power is in

  making up stuff for your impressions to say. And the most exciting

  thing of all was to try this stuff on my mother and have it work. I

  knew her laugh and I knew when it was sincere. It felt great to be

  able to say, in answer to her question "Where did you hear that?" "I

  made it up."

  Around fifth grade I began to feel I might have a future as some

  kind of performer. "Some kind" because my thinking on the matter

  was scattered. A fifth-grade autobiography assignment I still have

  required a closing paragraph on "What I want to be when I grow

  up." I wrote, "When I grow up I'd like to be an actor, impersonator,

  comedian, disc jockey announcer or trumpet player."

  Disrupting class made school more bearable once lessons had

  been mastered, but after-school—that longed-for part of the day that

  belongs to the kid alone—was what counted for me and the kids of

  my generation. Small screens hadn't yet co-opted the play of children and it was out on the streets with us, exploring neighborhoods,

  hopping the subway downtown, hanging out, stealing . . .

  I remember so much from those days. Like the Turds. A guy

  named Bob Cross ran the playground at Riverside Church. He was

  one of these nice midwestern guys studying PE at Teachers College

  and this was a local project that gave him a credit. He had a Softball

  league and asked us street kids if we'd like to be in the league. We

  said yes, so he asked the name of our team. We said, "The Turds."

  He might have let it pass because we spelled it t-e-r-d-s. (We didn't

  know any better.) So there up on the board in chalk, for the nice

  Protestant congregation to see and enjoy, was: "First Game This

  Evening: The Panthers v. The Terds."

  I remember my fedora. It was black and this is how I got it. You

  would go into the IRT subway at 116th Street and in the nice weather

  when the trains came in, some of the windows would be open. This

  was way before air-conditioning, and the vertically oriented win3 6

  CURIOUS GEORGE

  dows would open from the top down. So if a guy was sitting inside

  with a hat on, you would wait until the doors closed and then just as

  the train had begun to lurch forward you'd reach through the window and grab his hat. Then you'd trot alongside and wave and give

  him the finger. If you got lucky you got one that fit. I got a fedora of

  the low-rent variety where it's almost as flat as a porkpie. But it was a

  fedora, it was black and it fit.

  So long as we're into stealing, there were also my magnificent

  pegged pants, or more accurately, pistol-pocket pegged pants. Another kid and I discovered that the Chinese students who lived in

  International House at Columbia played tennis and volleyball down

  on Riverside Drive on these makeshift courts at the bottom of a hill

  we called Greenie, which used to be our sled-riding hill. They took

  their civilian clothes off and laid them down alongside the court,

  and we found out by sitting there—making believe we were really

  interested in their games—we could steal their wallets.

  One day we made a big killing—around eighty dollars—and we

  split it. With my forty bucks—a small fortune in the 1940s—I went

  to Fulton Street in Brooklyn to buy my dream item of male haute

  couture: "Guinea" pegged pants. I ' d seen guys at Coney Island with

  colored pants—bright red or green or electric blue pants but with

  different-colored cuffs and belt loops, high rises and pistol pockets

  (back pockets with a flap and shaped like a pistol). All these details

  had to be in a color that contrasted with the pants proper but coordinated with all your other accessories. Very complex, very important,

  very impressive.

  So in seventh grade in a Catholic school I sported electric blue

  pegged pants with gray pistol pockets, a two-inch rise, gray belt

  loops and saddle stitching with a fourteen-inch peg and exaggerated

  knees. Topped off with—I almost forgot—an orange leopard-skin

  shirt. When I showed up in class with them the nun who was our

  home-room teacher said, " I ' m so pleased you're working now."

  She thought I'd gotten a job as an usher in a movie theater.

  There was my first group sex. It was that time of year when it's getting cold enough that you hang around in the hallway rather than

  out on the stoop. I'm with the guys—maybe six or seven of us. One

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  of the neighborhood girls who was well developed for her age came

  by. And someone said, "Let's feel her up." What did I know? I run in

  the hallway with them. While she's not struggling, our schoolmate

  is trying to make it known that this is not her first choice of activity. The guys are taking turns putting their hands inside her blouse

  and feeling her tits for a couple seconds and then it's the next guy.

  Both sides working. "Georgie, go ahead, go ahead." So I felt her tit

  and thought, "Hey, wow, that's it? That's what it's like? That's nice."

  My first experience of group sex.

  Now we'd be called "delinquent," "troubled," "alienated" or

  worse; certainly some of the guys from the neighborhood later did

  time. But there was something innocent about running wild on the

  streets back then. For one thing the streets were pretty safe. There

  were no weapons and no one ever got hurt.

  A good deal of this activity I did in the company of Brian McDermott, Roger Hogan and Johnny Sigerson. Ah, those magical names.

  Let's have some more of them:

  Arthur Dempsey, David and Susan Foley . . .

  Bobby, Demmy, Dido and Gerry Brennan . . .

  Cecilia Pineda, Floyd Conant, Danny Kim . . .

  Una Clausey, Joanie Sheridan, Bill and John Peck . . .

  Condit Allstrom,
John, Mary, and Jill Birnam . . .

  Gertie and Peggy Murphy, Pierce and Marian Mulrooney . . .

  Levitra Schwartz, Charlotte and Sarah Firebaugh . . .

  Agnes Stack, John Wendell, Bill Pigman . . .

  Johnny, Judith, Theodora, Clailia and Jedidiah Steele . . .

  What poetry in a mere list of New York names. Just typing them

  is a profoundly nostalgic connection to those sweet days. My childhood, the block I grew up on are instantly embodied in the young

  faces that go with them. They mean nothing in the world of hype

  and showbiz. But they mean everything to me. They're the All-Stars

  in my Hall of Fame.

  I stayed a night recently in New York and I didn't know it had

  snowed, so when I opened the drapes I was immediately back in

  that wonderful childhood world of waking up with snow. All those

  little things you noticed as a kid: the way the mortar that sticks out

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  CURIOUS GEORGE

  between the bricks picks up a little snow on each level. Those weird

  porcelain insulators screwed into the window frame that the people

  before you left behind: they have little piles of snow on them. The

  clotheslines strung between the buildings on every floor have a

  fine line of snow all the way across. And suddenly, for no reason, a

  little bit falls off.

  There's one other thing with snow. Even when you're fifteen or

  sixteen and you just want to get laid and snowballs no longer hold

  the slightest interest for you—or even for that matter if you're never

  going to see sixty again—when it snows you've always got to make

  one snowball. Only one, but you gotta.

  Just to see if it's good packing.

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  THE ACE OF ACES

  AND THE DUDE OF DUDES

  My brother, Patrick, is what shrinks call a self-installed role

  model. I went to his high school, I followed him into the

  air force, I learned to dance from him. He's the one who

  taught me: "George, if you're gonna steal, never get caught." His

  idea of honesty. We took care of each other and fought my mother

  and were partners in that struggle.

  When I started first grade at Corpus Christi, Patrick was in seventh grade. One day he showed up in my classroom. Not because

  my mother had gotten sick or our house burned down. No, he'd

  been acting up in class, so Sister Marion had sent him down to first

  grade where he could be with children "closer to his own emotional

  level."

  He perched on one of those tiny first-grade chairs and settled in.

  I came over and offered him a hunk of clay. We made little balls

  out of them and pegged them at the other first-graders. Yeah. He's

  always been my best pal.

  My mother's primary motive in leaving my father was to protect

  me from the beatings he gave little Pat. It was the central fact determining the shape of our lives—and it certainly shaped Pat. My

  father, beaten by his father, was one of the many Americans who

  thought—and still do—that inflicting physical pain will persuade a

  child to act a certain way—beginning when they're, say, two.

  My father's chosen weapon of discipline was a slipper, leather,

  bedroom, hard heel equipped with. He was a stocky, powerful

  guy and he felt no need to hold back. Especially with a couple of

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  drinks under his belt and an opponent who weighed almost thirty

  pounds.

  From the start Pat took his torture in the most honorable way—he

  didn't break, he didn't fold, he didn't give Dad what he wanted. Little two-year-old Pat's view was that when his father got home from

  work, he'd be simply itching for an excuse to take Pat and the slipper into the bathroom and get on with the fun. Patrick Senior's first

  question as he came through the door was always: "And how was

  my little man today?" To the credit of his unbowed spirit, Pat invariably told the truth about how the little man had been that day. And

  walked right into the teeth of the beatings. My mother, appalled by

  the violence, would always try to get him to lie to spare himself the

  slipper. But that wasn't Pat's way. He once described to me a typical day:

  My mother and Leone, the family's black maid, try to get little Pat

  to wear his little sunsuit for a trip to the park. Little Pat doesn't want

  to wear his little sunsuit. Little Pat wants to wear his little sweatshirt. Little Pat throws a monumental tantrum lasting several hours,

  which finally ends when he's confined to his crib, where he resolutely refuses to sleep. Toward nightfall, my mother pulls him out

  of his crib, makes him look presentable and implores him to tell his

  father he'd been a good boy.

  Patrick Senior comes sailing in from work and/or Maguire's

  Chop House. Sure enough, his first words are: "And how was my

  little man today?" Patrick Junior looks him in the eye and repeats

  the words he's learned at his father's knee: "I called Leone a nigger

  son of a bitch."

  And off they go into the bathroom, father and son, to continue

  the grand American tradition of beating the shit out of someone

  weaker than you.

  My mother subscribed to the same parental tradition, but she

  knew how to delegate. When he was only seven, she sent Pat away to

  Mount Saint Michael boarding school so that the Marist Brothers

  could provide "male discipline": a euphemism which translated as

  a hope that the brothers would "beat the rotten temper out of him."

  Wonderful logic. Five years of beating by his father had produced a

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  little monster, so more violence, this time at the hands of strangers,

  ought to straighten him out. Ah, the Irish.

  Not surprisingly my brother saw my mother as a big zero who'd

  failed to protect him from his father and had now given up on him.

  Mary made no bones about it: "You've got your father's dirty, rotten

  temper and you always seek out the scruff. You'll never amount to

  anything." And so my big brother set out to do exactly that: in her

  eyes at least, not to amount to anything.

  Pat had his own way of dealing with all this antagonism, of embracing it, of enjoying it almost, so that the bastards never had the

  satisfaction of grinding him down. He would say he had no hard-on

  for those dedicated men of the cloth, the priests and brothers of

  Mount Saint Michael. Every time one of them whacked him it was

  for good cause: he'd looked the guy full in the face and made some

  subversive comment.

  Patrick spent four years with the men of the cloth so I'd only see

  him on Easter and Christmas vacation. But we were good pals. The

  age discrepancy actually worked to my benefit, especially in the allimportant area of words. One time right after he came back from

  boarding school—I would've been about four at the time—we were

  doing something together and I said, "That dirty cow-sucker!" I had

  heard it somewhere and it made sense to my little mind that you'd

  suck a cow. Being a grizzled veteran of nine, my bro knew better:

  "Not cow-sucker, George. Cocksucker!"

  In a good Irish neighborhood we were into bad shit. If there was

  a rule, Patrick's religion required him to br
eak it. Anything I did

  wrong he would encourage. We both resisted our mother because

  she had these delusions of grandeur: she was determined to make a

  couple of geniuses out of us. Or fruits. The way Patrick puts it is concise: Mary wanted two Little Lord Fauntleroys. What she got was a

  pair of hardened dog turds.

  Nothing made him prouder than the fact that I was always getting kicked out of schools (though Corpus Christi had to take me

  back in eighth grade because they wanted me to write the school

  play). I was going down the road he'd already blazed. My mother

  wanted Pat to go to a school called Regis on the East Side which was

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  for bright kids, but of course he balked. He wanted to go to Cardinal

  Hayes High in the Bronx: THE cool school. He was more interested

  in football and dances than "a goddam book report."

  Even at Cardinal Hayes he was the same old Patrick. He most

  admired Brother Philip, the littlest guy in the school and the best

  hitter. He used to hit Pat right in the nose with a full fist. "Just fucking beautiful," my brother used to say.

  He'd be sitting at his desk with his algebra book open and Brother

  Philip would ask: "Carlin, you know how many homeworks I've assigned this year?" "No, I don't, brother." "Thirty, and you know how

  many you've handed in?" "No, I don't, brother." "None—and why

  is that?" Patrick would say, "Because I ain't got no book." Bop! He

  hits Patrick full in the nose. His nose bleeds easily so to fuck with

  the good Brother, Pat holds his nose over the algebra book so it can

  catch the drips. Bam! Bam! Bam! The bantamweight hits him three

  more in the back of the neck and says, "Go wash up! Don't make a

  martyr outta yourself!"

  We didn't get to do as much together as I would have liked because of the age difference. Still, I knew his buddies and he knew

  mine. It was a tight neighborhood. Sometimes he'd be going to some

  party uptown and his friends would say, "Bring Georgie and tell

  him to bring his tape recorder." My mother had given me a tape recorder for my eighth-grade graduation and on it I'd record all these