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Web-Exclusive Book Review
Closing Time: A Memoir
By Joe Queenan
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Class differences, of all things, kept Queenan from experimenting with the harder drugs his father suspected him—nay, accused him—of taking. "He never realized that no matter how much I wanted to belong to a loftier economic class," he reflects, "working-class values were so ingrained in my psyche that I would never dream of using drugs like acid or cocaine or heroin. Peer pressure alone precluded this: Working-class boys, meaning virtually everyone I knew, drank liquor, which proved that they were men, while middle-class boys smoked reefer, which proved that they were beatniks or hippies or pussies or liked jazz."
For assorted reasons, a career in a cassock was not to be. Queenan loved the Catholic Church enough to deplore the "bevy of mutton-headed attempts at modernization" that had been launched in the early 1960s, yet he never developed the bedrock belief vital to a man of the cloth. This despite having assured himself that "God's existence would manifest itself to me, though perhaps not in Philadelphia." (W. C. Fields, please pick up a white courtesy phone!)
The most insightful passages of Closing Time reveal Queenan in the act of forging his identity from tailings cast off by adults he admires. With his father out of the running as a role model, Joe looked to his first two employers instead. From clothing-store owner Len Mohr, for example, the future writer learned how to tell stories, "piling up detail after detail, occasionally taking a brief parenthetical detour, always making listeners wait for the big payoff—though because I was Irish American, I already had a head start on this sort of thing."
Queenan's other surrogate father during high school was the local pharmacist, Glenn Dreibelbis. Balding and tubby, sporting Hush Puppies and a goofy mashie hat, and driving a baby-blue Volkswagen that the prototypical teen deemed the height of mortification, Glenn put Queenan to work in his grandiloquent "apothecary." He also introduced his impressionable young employee, in person, to the blandishments of modern Manhattan. "The day I saw New York," Queenan recalls, "was the day I saw the future."
The author puts Glenn to work, too, using him (and a few other key characters in Closing Time) to personify a sweeping social trend. In Glenn's case, it's the vanishing corner druggist of the 1960s. Back then, Queenan reminds us, pharmacists enjoyed near-parity with doctors: "It was not unheard of for druggists to ring a physician immediately after receiving a prescription and question the dosage or even suggest an alternate medication." By the time Joe began counting out sedatives in Glenn's apothecary shop, by contrast, pharmacists were ceding their authority to the pharmaceuticals: "With the audacious scumminess that is their calling card, drug companies had seized control of the health-care industry, seducing crass, easily manipulated doctors into becoming robotic shills who were only too happy to prescribe the same high-markup medications over and over again."
The Lord works in alphabetical ways
At his graduation ceremony from Cardinal Dougherty High School, where his class of 1968 numbered 1,453 students, Queenan, Joe finds himself lined up next to Orsini, Susan, a captivating viola player whose beauty is born of vivacity. "If she could not be the prettiest girl in the room, she would act as if she was." Susan "came from a better economic class than I did," Queenan explains, so their summer romance featured a heavy dose of cultural remediation, mostly in classical music, as the violist steeped the electric-guitar player in Mozart, Beethoven, and Shostakovich. Thank God the musical mentoring flowed in one direction only: Queenan had little more to offer Susan than the "Bar Mitzvah Acid Folk" pioneered by his garage band.
You can practically hear this duet coming untuned, right?
On the eve of leaving for college in Washington, D.C., Susan drops the bomb—and Joe—informing Our Hero (over coffee, no less!) that "she had big plans for her life, and that none of them included me." Though devastated, he possesses enough self-knowledge by now to admit that "her grand strategy was better thought out than mine… even if I was going places, I wasn't going there as fast as she was."
Queenan rallies and enrolls at nearby Saint Joseph's College, on the western edge of Philadelphia, thanks to financial aid made possible by "the federal government, under Lyndon Baines Johnson,… spreading a fair amount of cash around in those days." To Queenan, the irony is irresistible: Even as the recipients of LBJ's largesse strove to drive the man from office, "we didn't mind taking his money."
One whiner's beginnings
Fans of the creative process—by which I mean anyone who has read this far—will be fascinated by Queenan's conflicted disclosure of the roots of his trademark vitriol. His childhood poverty, he would have us believe, taught him "to be ruthless and cruel, indifferent to other people's feelings, particularly if I was writing about them."
But we never really buy that, because the author also credits Father Ratermann, his favorite teacher at the Maryknoll Seminary, with setting him on the path to punditry. "Crotchety varmint" though he was, Father Ratermann taught Queenan Latin and Greek; urged him to read Martial and Juvenal; and modeled yet another identity from which Queenan freely scavenged the shiniest bits and pieces. "He was gently abrasive, caustic, fun to be around… he was the first person in my life to describe me as a cynic, an observation I may have incorrectly interpreted as praise."
Thus by the time Susan Orsini washes her hands of him, Queenan claims, "My dream was to make a living by ridiculing people, and it didn't seem to matter all that much where I got my degree, as you couldn't major in satire or invective." Yet that's precisely what we find him doing a mere six pages later at Saint Joseph's, where the one class he never cut was devoted to Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson, and "all the other acid-tongued misanthropes [who] thrived in the early 1700s." Joe Queenan, you missed your century!
Having contracted a virulent case of Francophilia from a random viewing of the movie Beau Geste with his father at age 11, Queenan the college graduate idly applies for an Alliance Française scholarship to study in Paris for a year—and wins it. (The competition, he sniffs, was a gaggle of perky Swarthmorites "smitten by the nuances of the future anterior tense.") His parents greet his triumph with a shrug, confirming Queenan's book-long view that reverse schadenfreude is a congenital bane of Irish Catholics: "[M]y parents… were charter members of an ethnic group that lacked the capacity to enjoy anyone else’s good fortune."
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