As If: An Autobiography

1. They and There: The Right Side of the Tracks

one They and There the right side of the tracks My father read the newspaper from back to front, as if it were the Talmud . He read every word of it (though let me not be misleading, he was skeptical about the Talmud), without worrying about origins or the sense of an ending. He was convinced that wherever it started, whatever it was, it couldn’t be trusted. No matter what was reported about it, there was nothing but thievery from beginning to end. But as though to con‹rm it again, the irrefutable, the inarguable, he read in reverse scruple, backing through the news, and if a story were continued, so what? he already knew the story, as he also knew the score, but he had to read it all, with headlines, subheads, captions, columns and other commentary, pro‹les, reviews, letters , stock listings and market statistics, the edgy ups and downs, as in the major-league standings or shifting decimals of batting averages, comic strips and cartoons, the schedule of ship sailings, obituaries, classi‹eds, everything from the editorials to the ‹nest print of ads, and in every section on Sundays. “They’re all the same,” he’d say, as he closed the paper with a hard crease, front page up. He didn’t care about a referent. They. The pronoun could shift all it wanted, he knew who they were. They were all the same. Hadn’t he seen for himself, daily, in The Daily News, biggest circulation in the country—well, maybe not then but soon to come as the other papers folded, the Mirror, the Journal, the Telegram, the Trib, only the Post left in the afternoon. You could hardly believe it today, but the Post—that virulent P tabloid of the smirking Right—was for the sympathetic Left, or what passed for liberals then (a word more scarce at the time) or for those too politically pantywaist to be thought of as Trotskyite. Whatever you called them, you couldn’t trust them. My father was a socialist, but he worried about them too, as he did about the unions, though he was a card-carrying charter member of Plumbers Union Local #1. Where we lived—with a Communist storefront in the neighborhood (and recruiting parties on Friday nights)—the Daily Worker was on the newsstand of the candy store downstairs, but you’d be hard pressed anywhere to ‹nd The New York Times. And why would you want to, “All the News That’s Fit to Print”?— which for my father was worthless too, and not a picture on the page. That’s of course changed today, and with color no less in the Times, a sort of plaintive washout of color, sometimes adorning atrocities that, as they replicate past the millennium, with no perversion, disease, horror, barbarity unimagined—serial killings, child murder, rape, ingenuities of abuse (not only familial and bureaucratic, but also priestly too), AIDS, genocide, jihads, and in the repertoire of the lethal (preserving virtue or power), amputations , stonings, machetes in the Congo and global weapons of mass destruction, biological warfare, and maybe even cyborgian, as well as the excruciating intelligence of torture never shown—recurrently makes me wonder how we read the news at all. Which I do with the Times every morning, like my father with the News, almost as compulsive, but going front to back, as if not wanting to escape the worst of it, or what we’re waiting for, like the inevitable news of a suicide bomber in a downtown shopping mall, and with the occasional feeling that in any direction my father had it easy. Still, the fact of the matter was that he had it grievously right; long before the Absurd, none of it made sense. Nor was that an excuse—no more than it was in Beckett, with his excruciating intelligence—for thinking it might get better. “Use your head, use your head, you’re on earth, there’s no cure for that!” That outburst, over the years, I’ve often quoted from Endgame. So, if that’s a revelation, what’s new? my father would say. As for the news not ‹t to print, you might have found some of it back then (more of it now, though it’s being printed) had you followed this direction: over the Manhattan Bridge, left off Flatbush onto Atlantic Avenue, then straight out toward East New York, to where the Long Island Railroad cuts below...