Last Words Read online

  I had several disgusting tricks I could do: I could bend either thumb backward till it lay flat on my lower forearm. I could crack every one of the twenty-eight finger knuckles officially recognized by the Knuckle Institute. I could also control each eye independently. First both eyes left, then keeping right eye left, move left eye right, then right eye right. Done at high speed, with the right girl, this will definitely make her vomit. But I was outclassed in this category. Ernest Cruz could turn his upper eyelids inside out. Wow. Even I would heave. “Don’t do that, Ernest, you look like a devil, man!”

  My class clown arsenal included all the standard weapons: weird faces, fart sounds, belching, mimicry, random wisenheimery and sickening physical contortions. I had an unusual additional talent: blowing small bubbles of saliva about a quarter inch in diameter off the tip of my tongue. (Pat taught me this.) Here’s how you too can be a bubble blower: With jaw slack, tongue relaxed and mouth open you form the bubble by drawing the tongue away from the floor of your mouth and quickly wedging your tongue under the bubble. Once the tongue holds the flattened, nascent bubble, you exhale gently, releasing the bubble in an eccentric little arc. It will usually travel anywhere up to three feet, making it hard for anyone in front of you to ignore. The flying spit bubble’s virtue is stealth. Unless the student sitting in front of you takes exception to the mounting layer of saliva on the back of his or her collar, it goes undetected—until it’s too late.

  Making faces had the same silent power. I was gifted with a rubbery face and took pride in contorting it in the most revolting ways. The trick here is to identify students with minimal self-control and loud or goofy laughs. This goes to the heart of being a class clown, because class is one of those places you’re not supposed to laugh—like kneeling in front of a casket—so it’s the one place the urge to laugh is uncontrollable.

  First you get your target’s attention with a rubber-band-powered paper clip to the neck. When you have their attention, you whip some interestingly twisted face on them. They explode in giggles, you relax your face into a mask of innocence and they get reamed out. You’re off the hook. You’re ready to strike again. This time instead of depriving only one child of his or her education, you can stunt the development of the entire class. Welcome to the world of revolting sounds—a symphony of bodily functions, pre-eminent of which is the fart.

  Class clown was always the first to discover the artificial fart under the arm. You place your palm vertically in your armpit (under the T-shirt and against the skin) and snap your elbow sharply downward against your side. The air escaping from the armpit pocket erupts in an impressive blatt. (I’ve never understood why this action, which involves no actual bodily fluid, results in such a deliciously liquid-sounding fart.)

  The fart sound is an important sound when you’re a kid, so you find as many ways as possible to make it. You can do it in the crook of your arm or by blowing against your forearm. I didn’t need any of the fancy ones because I was into the bilabial fricative. In plain English, I could blow a fart with my mouth. I was so glad when I found out it had an official name. “Raspberry” and “Bronx cheer” never made it for me. It was always the bilabial fricative.

  I had competition. There was John Pigman, Grandmaster of Gross-out, who could belch at will and for what seemed like five or six seconds at a time. He had a large oral cavity and so the belch would resonate and gather force inside his mouth before making its majestic exit. There was something about the texture of his throat that gave the impression of little food particles rattling around down there. As a bonus he would recite as much of the alphabet as he could while the belch lasted.

  Sometimes John would be in the movie theater and you didn’t know he was there. If anyone on-screen opened their mouth without saying anything—John provided the dialogue. John was an artist. He taught me something about guerrilla theater long before there was such a thing. I once saw him sneak up behind two old ladies who were walking arm in arm on our block. He got behind and between them and pulled back each one’s inner shoulder so they were both facing him, then loosed a horrific, interminable belch right in their faces. They were so stunned I’m surprised they didn’t drop dead on the street.

  They should’ve. Because he pulled another, even better stunt. (John Pigman, as natural a performer as ever lived, knew how to top himself.) Same scene, same two old ladies, same buildup. This time instead of belching, he unzipped his fly, pulled out one of those gray-white wieners and cut it in half with a pocketknife. Is it any wonder I idolized this man?

  Probably the most disgusting thing I could do I learned from Pat. Here those of you who are parents might want to exercise that ageold method of sheltering children from the real world: as they read 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—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 win 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 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 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.

  4

  THE ACE OF ACES ANA THE DUDE OF DUDES

  Patrick Carlin Jr. and George

  (Courtesy of Kelly Carlin-McCall)

  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 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 gra
nd 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 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 all-important 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!”