Asked the circumstances of his breakthrough theorem, French mathematician Henri Poincaré was reported to have said, “As I stepped up to get onto the bus…” In similar ways, recovering alcoholics and drug addicts, when asked to describe the turning point that led them into sobriety, more often than not talk about some seemingly disconnected, mundane occurrence. “I reached in my pocket to buy a bottle and thought, I don’t want to do this anymore.” Or, “I was brushing my teeth one morning and…”
The exact moment of the minor shift, the microscopic movement of the tectonic plates of my life, came on the morning of the day after my seventeenth birthday. Standing in the misery of a beer hangover at my cash register in the check out lane of the A & P on Fifth Street, I began to get just the faintest flicker of a recognition that my life was not preordained to continue along the self-destructive path I’d so passively been following.
I don’t remember there having been any special commemoration of that particular birthday. I had to be in work at four in that afternoon, and with what was going on in my life at that time, I wasn’t on very solid ground at home. When the store closed at nine that Friday night, Freddy Krug was waiting for me in the parking lot. With him in his ‘40 Ford two-door were “Tough” Tony Somik and “Dippy” John Nerze. I climbed into the back seat with John and waited for Freddy to do his classic testosterone exit on to Fifth Street. The tires screeched, the flathead V-8 screamed at the limits of the lower gears, and the dual, steel-packed mufflers roared a badass anthem through eight-inch, chromed echo cans. We were cool. We knew how to piss people off.
Our first stop was Jimmy’s Tomato Pies across from the Olney Foundry on Duncannon Avenue. Before cell phones, you had to physically check in to find out what was happening. At nine-thirty on a Friday night, the sidewalk in front of Jimmy’s was uncharacteristically deserted. Aside from a few adults going in and out for pizzas, the only person hanging out was Bull Moose. None of us knew his real name. Bull Moose was a bullet-headed mental defective who wandered the neighborhood stopping and standing around, and just as unpredictably moving on, going from one to another of the corners where teenagers congregated. I don’t ever remember him threatening or bothering anyone, but instinct and common sense kept anyone from hassling him. His name fit his face and his impressive physique. Like most of the guys, I would nod and say, “Hi, Bull.” Bull would nod back and grunt. The few times I heard him try to do more, all that came out was a chirping kind of gibberish. What went on inside his head was as incomprehensible as his attempts at language. I think he lived somewhere near Fourth Street, but that was all anyone seemed to know about him.
None of us paid much notice when he arrived on the corner one night earlier that summer. He stood, as he usually did, off to the side of the crowd. A causal observer would have assumed him to be a part of the gathering. Up the street, Eileen Harshaw and Babs Mulvey were coming toward the corner. Both were considered fast and trashy. Both were just unhappy, unattractive kids, “disadvantaged” by today’s terms, who gravitated toward places where they weren’t always so disadvantaged. As they got closer, I watched Bull Moose begin getting agitated, adjusting his shirt and belt. He then quickly pulled a comb from his pocket and ran it over the stubble on his pointed head. Just before the girls, who didn’t even see him, got to where he was standing, he had gotten himself back into a pose of studied nonchalance.
Freddy Krug, who had a reputation as a madman, was one of the few people who was overtly nice to Bull Moose. Several times over the course of that summer, if we were piling into Freddy’s car to go get hoagies or to look at a car somebody was thinking of buying, or just going cruising, Freddy would invite Bull Moose to join us. “Hey Bull! Wanna go for a ride?” Bull’s face would go into a big-toothed smile and he’d do his rolling swagger walk over to the car. Bull Moose of course had no money, and Freddy would treat him if we stopped for sodas or ice cream. I once split a hoagie with him.
The night of my birthday, we hung around the corner for a half-hour or so with nothing going on. The ever predictable Tough Tony Somik suggested getting some beer and going for a ride. I had just been paid and had about fifteen bucks in a small, brown A & P pay envelope. I volunteered that I could kick in for gas, and we each gave Freddy, who could get served at a dumpy bar on Second Street, a buck for beer. As we headed for the car, Freddy turned back and asked Bull Moose if he wanted to go with us.
As the soft, warm early September night wore on, I found myself once again half drunk in the back of another old car, this time seated between Bull Moose and Dippy John, each of us now nursing our second quart of Ortliebs. Dippy John wasn’t really all that dippy. He had a pronounced speech impediment and some residual effects of what might have been birth defects. But John, unlike Bull Moose, was in no way mentally impaired. John worked as an automobile mechanic in a greasy shop on Mascher Street, having dropped out of Olney High at sixteen. Early on, Johnny Nerze had been assigned his part, “Dippy John.” He didn’t like it, and there was a sad, angry edge about John, an edge that I intuitively felt was within his rights. My not dealing with him as if he were dippy didn’t make him any nicer to me. In fact, he seemed to resent me more than the guys who treated him like Bull Moose. John had grown up next door to Freddy Krug who had taken on the role of his protector. But Freddy also could be merciless in making mean fun of John.
At every turn that night, the clanking sound of empty beer bottles arose from the trunk behind us. Freddy had tried to wire a rear shelf speaker for the car’s radio. He and Tough Tony had stolen a speaker from a drive-in movie but couldn’t get it to work in the car. The hole left in the shelf became a convenient drop for the disposal of empties. By the end of my second quart, I was wasted and headed toward an internal crying jag. The mess I’d made of so short a life was laid out before me like a dog’s breakfast, whatever that was. Here I was on the night of my seventeenth birthday, a world-class loser. Half or completely drunk; no real money and no prospects of ever getting any; no car; a lousy, dead-end supermarket job that I hated, and the prospect of not being able to go back to school for my senior year. I had just flunked summer school. And while I feigned indifference to my academic fate, I knew that I really didn’t want to have to drop out of high school. On top of all that, I was coming off a disastrous and painful summer romance. I looked around as the old Ford took a corner and threw me up against Bull Moose and then back over into Dippy John. Is this what it comes to? My mother’s words poured into my head, “show me your friends and I’ll tell you what you are.”
The next day, trying to get through a busy work shift at my checkout counter on three hours of alcohol-disturbed sleep, I stumbled my way through the motions of working while my head pounded, my eyes itched and my digestive system pumped noxious green beer farts into the atmosphere around me. Two different baggers jumped ship on me to work at other counters. Somewhere deep in the unconscious prehensile reaches of my jumbled brain, I began to grope ever so slightly in the direction of thinking that just possibly it might be time to change the course of my life. And ever so slowly, from that day on, I did.
Nothing happened immediately except that through the twin miracles of good luck and Christian charity, I was allowed to return, on probation, to school. I did not distinguish myself academically in any way, but I passed. I graduated, if not dead last, then just ahead of a couple of well-connected vegetables. I continued to drink until there was none left or until I passed out, but the frequency of those occurrences began to decline. And then I met a girl. I met a girl who became more important to me than what anyone thought of me on any of the corners in the neighborhood. I didn’t know it, but I think I had decided it was time for me to start growing up.
Tags: 1940 ford, 1945-1955, a & p, alcoholics, beer hangover, disadvantaged kids, drive-in movies, drug addicts, duncannon avenue, henri poincare', hoagies, mascher street, memoir, olney, olney foundry, olney high school, philadelphia, summer school, testosterone, v-8
