Last Words Read online

  imitations of people in the neighborhood. I did one Pat loved of

  Dottie Murphy kicking her grandson: "Take that, you little bastard!

  Just because your father's a bastard don't mean you can be a bastard too!"

  Once when he was home from the air force—he'd just gone in,

  so he would've been nineteen—I begged to go to the bar with him,

  though I was much too young. (You had to be eighteen in those

  days.) He said, "You can't get fucking served. You shouldn't be in

  there." I offered him a deal: "If I imitate Dottie Murphy talking to

  Charlie Mallon with Rudy Madden chiming in, will you take me

  then?"

  Rudy Madden was one of those guys with about fifty tattoos and a

  dark tan. Big on fishing and a voice like a backhoe. Charlie Mallon

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  THE ACE OF ACES AND THE DUDE OF DUDES

  was a younger brother of a guy named John Mallon, who was the

  toughest motherfucker in the neighborhood.

  I whipped these imitations on him—of Charlie talking to Rudy

  talking to Dottie Murphy; and I cracked Patrick up. He took me

  down to the bar.

  It was a very hip neighborhood if you wanted it to be—or you

  could just be a little stay-at-home square and clean house. I wasn't

  into that any more than Pat had been. I was too busy trying to score

  reefer off the Puerto Ricans. It drove my mother up the wall because she saw me following in Pat's footsteps. She did try to head

  me off. She got me a job in a swank New York men's clothing store

  called Rogers Peet that had been around practically since the Declaration of Independence. A place where rich business pricks felt

  secure enough while trying on fancy suits to leave their wallets

  in their pants pockets. Just begging to be stolen. I answered their

  call and raked in the stuff, but eventually got caught—the cardinal sin according to Patrick, perhaps the only thing he and Mary

  agreed on.

  It was probably good she didn't know what Pat was up to. By then

  he was down on the waterfront with his dudes stealing flare guns

  and first-aid kits from Liberty ships and selling them on Riverside

  Drive. That was a federal rap—ten years and a ten-thousand-dollar

  fine. Unlike me, Patrick never got caught. He used to say: "I could

  be looking at you and steal the boots right off your fucking feet."

  I had my own crowd and he had his but it was sometimes useful

  for people to know my older brother was Pat. When we'd go down to

  Columbia to steal the freshmen's beanies and the students dared to

  bother us, Pat and the boys would kick the shit out of them.

  We hated the Columbia students. It was our neighborhood—Irish

  Catholic with a lot of hostility on every corner. Out of every twenty

  Irish kids there were probably thirteen or fourteen getting their asses

  kicked regularly back home. They felt the need to pass that along.

  The students came in from Nebraska and Iowa and they'd run

  around like they owned the place. Patrick and his pals just devoured them. The students had this dumb song: "Who owns New

  York? Who owns New York? Some people say we do! Who owns

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  New York? Who owns New York, who? COLUMBIA!" So one night

  the guys kicked some students' asses for singing it. Pat said it was

  beautiful to see the Columbia assholes lying in the street while he

  sang the song back at them, but with his own words: "Who cleans

  the streets? Who cleans the streets? Some people say we do! Who

  cleans the streets? Who cleans the streets, who? WE DO!"

  From an early age, he and the guys would "hit up cars." They'd

  go up to the 120s where the Columbia dorks parked their cars without bothering to lock them. All you had to do was pop the doors till

  a handle opened, get in the glove boxes and strip them. Amazing

  what people leave in glove boxes. In the fullness of time I followed

  suit.

  Patrick has always shown the way and I've followed in his footsteps. I went into the air force, just like him, and between the two

  of us we amassed five court-martials. He had three. I had two. My

  mother really loved that.

  Over the years our relationship has shifted. Back in the sixties

  Patrick was still slogging away with Catholicism, getting his kids

  baptized and so on. He was a conservative Southern California car

  dealer in those days. Then he saw how much my Catholic rap on

  Class Clown and my attitudes toward big business upset our mother.

  And concluded I must be right.

  I encouraged him to write. Long ago when I heard him shooting

  the shit with the guys at the car dealership I knew he'd be great at it.

  And he was. I hooked him up with a terrific shrink, Dr. Charles Ansell, and he found out he wasn't fucked up. He was well. The world

  around him was fucked up.

  Patrick likes to say that the relationship has almost inverted: that

  I'm the main dude now. But it's subtler than that. Earlier on, Pat

  and I lived in different parts of the world—which is to say he lived in

  places like Vermont and Trinidad, while I lived in L.A. But over the

  last twenty-five years, we've spent a lot of time together. He's influenced me perhaps without even quite knowing it, enticed out of me

  very final and violent and harsh judgments. I articulate them better

  than he does and I'm obsessive-compulsive about getting them out

  where they can be heard. But for a long time now he's struck a deep

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  THE ACE OF ACES AND THE DUDE OF DUDES

  chord in me. He writes wonderful dialogue, great earthy stuff. Talk

  about the sledgehammer—this is a steam-driven pile driver.

  I share his feelings, his ideas and passions, but he kicks them up

  into a higher gear. Once upon a time, I would never have done stuff

  like "I Love It When a Lot of People Die" or "People Who Oughtta

  Be Killed." I didn't have a place in my garden for that stuff. His

  presence is a sort of reinforcement. It's less an inversion than that

  the wheel has come full circle. Almost like the old days: if my big

  brother feels like that, it must be okay. Not that different from when

  I graduated eighth grade and Mary wanted me to go to Regis just

  like she'd wanted Pat to. And I said forget it. Just like Pat.

  At the end of eighth grade you get this little eighth-grade book

  that everybody signs with things like "Happy Graduation George

  from The Girl Who Sat Next to You," the stuff of fond memories

  decades later. Patrick happened to be home on leave from the air

  force and I asked him to sign my graduation book. This is what he

  wrote: "Go to Cardinal Hayes and be a cool guy." Signed: "The Ace

  of Aces and the Dude of Dudes, Your brother, Patrick."

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  AIR MARSHAL CARLIN

  TELLS YOU TO GO

  FUCK YOURSELF

  George in uniform, circa 1954

  (Courtesy o f Kelly C a r l i n - M e C a l l )

  Weird how the military touches so many aspects of your life.

  It's like the Church in that way. You hate it but it forms you.

  It's a parent. Mother Church and Father Military.

  "Father" might seem a bit affectionate for someone who's on record more than once as having no respect for the business of war. But

  I don't. I don
't feel about war the way we're supposed to, the way

  we're told to by the United States government. A large part of which

  is the United States military, whose business is war. So the military

  is telling us how to feel about war—so they can stay in business.

  Something is fucked up here.

  But I confess, Father, to being conflicted about the military. I was

  four when we got into World War II. Its memory is precious to me, a

  central fact of my young life. The slogans, the uniforms, the newscasts, the songs: "The White Cliffs of Dover," "Don't Sit Under the

  Apple Tree," "I'll Never Smile Again." I can never hear them without being overwhelmed by nostalgia. Weirdly enough, the songs of

  war make me feel . . . safe.

  Then there were the blackouts. I loved the blackouts. They gave

  me a sense of danger: little five-year-old me fighting the war on the

  home front. The whole idea of blackouts was that if everyone turned

  their lights out, the Germans wouldn't be able to find New York

  City to drop bombs on it. Fair enough. The Germans were probably

  itching to fly three thousand miles across the Atlantic on one tank of

  gas and reduce us to rubble. They're crazy, those Krauts.

  Every week, we'd hear the keenin

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  g rise and fall of the air-raid

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  siren at 116th and Broadway, signaling air-raid drill and blackout.

  We'd turn off the lights and gather in the hall—no windows there—

  where Mary had put a single low-watt amber bulb. I'd wait hopefully

  for explosions and my mother would tell me how my father was far

  away in the Pacific, "helping General MacArthur win the war."

  The super, Andy Mclsaac, would prowl around the building's

  courtyards, flashlight in hand, wearing an official air-raid warden's

  hard hat, courageously checking to make sure everyone had turned

  their lights out so the Germans would be fooled into thinking New

  York City was just another harmless stretch of marshland.

  One time I slid up the window to steal a peek and catch the action of The World At War. Andy wheeled at the sound and blinded

  me with his flashlight. "George, get yer head back inside unless

  you want to get it blown off!" I hustled back to the dark hallway as

  quick as my jammie-clad little legs would carry me. The last thing

  I needed was to get hit by shrapnel and have a plate in my head for

  life.

  What did you do in the war, Daddy? I did my part. Like bringing

  the butcher the cans of hardened bacon fat my mother filled from

  the breakfast skillet. They gave us eleven cents a pound. I've often

  wondered, what did they do with it? Ship it to those lonely boys

  overseas? What did THEY do with it? Come to think of it, I don't

  want to know.

  And if everyone else in our front-line advance post had been

  wiped out by a direct hit, I was ready to serve. As a plane spotter.

  Thanks to the board game Spot-a-plane I could identify by silhouette any aircraft of any combatant nation, even Italy. Focke-Wulfs,

  Messerschmitts, Mitsubishis, Vickerses, de Havillands, Martins,

  Douglases, Boeings, I knew them all. No one could fool me. I could

  distinguish them from front, side, above and below. Some Kraut

  cocksucker in a Messerschmitt pretended to be a Spitfire by flying

  upside down: I'd have the artillery blast him to kingdom come.

  Columbia had a Naval Officer's Training School where college

  graduates attended a ninety-day course before being shipped overseas as ensigns. On Sunday evenings, after supper hour, the midshipmen, assembled in separate ranks of Catholics, Protestants and

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  AIR MARSHAL CARLIN TELLS YOU TO GO FUCK YOURSELF

  Jews, marched through the streets to the local churches and synagogues for evening services. Us kids used to march along beside

  them for several blocks and they sang as they marched. I can still

  hear their voices bouncing off the buildings:

  Farewell and goodbye

  There's no need to cry

  Sally and Sue don't be blue

  We're comin' right back

  We're comin' right back to you

  The Protestants had a longer march than the Catholics and

  Jews—down to Riverside Church—so they got my attention more

  often. Many years later I found out that one of the midshipmen I'd

  marched alongside was a young guy fresh out of the University of

  Nebraska—Midshipman Johnny Carson.

  Then there were bombs. I've always had a thing about bombs and

  they were a big part of my childhood. By the last year of the war, I

  was eight and already riding downtown on the subway by myself;

  often to the Chrysler Building on 42nd Street where the army had

  a permanent display of military hardware: jeeps, artillery pieces, a

  tank, uniforms, insignia, all sorts of good stuff. But the centerpiece

  was a huge five-hundred-pound bomb called the Blockbuster. It sat

  vertically in a rack, in its falling orientation, packed with explosive

  possibilities.

  I imagined the rising high-pitched whistle as it screamed to

  earth—perhaps from a B-17 my uncle Tom had worked on—falling

  down, down, down, onto the heads of those German people I'd

  seen in the newsreels. But what I remember most vividly is that

  previous visitors had scratched their names on the bomb's casing:

  "Vito—Brooklyn," "Gloria & Eddie," "Sonny USN." Anonymous,

  powerless people trying to associate themselves with the bomb's vast

  impersonal power.

  Why not? Everyone should try to scratch their name on the bomb

  of life.

  A few hundred yards from my house in Columbia's Pupin Physics

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  Labs, another bomb—the Big One—began its charmed life. That

  same year our own homegrown bomb was tested on a few hundred

  thousand Japanese and came through with flying colors. We all

  went down to Times Square to celebrate V-J Day: the end of one

  war and the beginning of the next—the Cold War, which would last

  ten times as long and cost a hundred times as much. But which we'd

  win also. Damn, we're good at war.

  In due course the time came for me to do my part in winning the

  Cold War: the draft. One problem with the draft in a large population like New York City was that they had so many volunteers, you

  often didn't get a draft notice until you were twenty-one or twentytwo. That was more disruptive than getting one at eighteen, so guys

  often joined up earlier. A lot of them didn't want to be in the army so

  the chic way to get out of military service was to go into the air force.

  The air force seemed a pretty good deal. You could be part of

  a group whose job it was to go out and drop bombs on brown and

  yellow people, then come home, take a shower and catch a movie.

  Plus my brother was in it and they had cool blue uniforms—not that

  pukey khaki shit—and a lot of off-base privileges. The way it came

  down to me the air force sounded a lot like a country club.

  But mainly I joined the air force with a clear goal: using the GI

  Bill to train myself as a disc jockey at disc jockey school. Funny

  how a teenager thinks: I had it all mapped out. I'll become a disc

  jockey someplace and I'll be so good in
that town I'll get famous

  enough to appear in a nightclub. I'll become a comedian there and

  get funny enough to be a comedian on Broadway and after that I'll

  be in movies! Piece of cake.

  In August 1954, in I went. My mother had to sign me in, because I was only seventeen. My fiancee, Mary Cathryn, and I went

  down to 39 Whitehall Street at five in the morning for reporting and

  swearing in. They put us on a bus for a three-hundred-mile ride to

  Sampson Air Force Base near Rochester, New York. Weird again:

  what's running through my head is "Off we go into the wild blue

  yonder!" I ' m on a fucking bus going into a dark hole called the Holland Tunnel.

  Right from the get-go in the air force, I gravitated to the black

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  AIR MARSHAL CARLIN TELLS YOU TO GO FUCK YOURSELF

  guys. On that bus, I struck up a conversation about black music with

  a guy from Staten Island named Bishop. He clued me in about the

  cha-cha-cha versus the mambo, which I thought was the in dance.

  He told me: "Nah, the mambo's out. Watch for the cha-cha-chá.

  That's coming next." The first lesson I learned in the military.

  Basic training was grueling but I was prepared. You've always

  got to weed out the amateur slackers and leave the field to professional, dedicated slackers like me. I volunteered for an experimental

  flight of seventy men used as medical subjects to track the spread of

  germs. We didn't live on the open base but in our own section, in

  real rooms. Every so often the medics came around and swabbed

  our throats with long Q-tips. The first time, they said, "We're trying

  to see if there's any colds in the outfit."

  Later we found out from Flight Sergeant Vanelli what they were

  really doing. They took cultures from the throats of all the men,

  marking what room they were in and where they slept in that room

  so they could track the spread of colds and viruses. So along with

  the swabs that went in to take stuff out, there were swabs with germs

  from other guys they put in. Not on the same Q-tip, but still. Disgusting!

  We got out of a lot of duty. We didn't even have to get up in the