truck.
None of these jobs ever lasted very long; he would get tired of them, grow despondent, start missing work, get himself fired. Then we would be back on relief. Things around the house would start to disappear: The TV would get hocked to a pawnshop, then the radio, then the clock radio. He unloaded these items not to buy food but to buy liquor. Because he liked to drink in taprooms, and because my mother would not allow him to bring whiskey into the house, the money never lasted very long. We hated to see him start drinking, because as soon he opened that first bottle of beer we realized that he had already given up on the day. As time went by, he started throwing in the towel earlier and earlier. He was only in his middle thirties, but he knew that he was already playing out the string. In an oft-heard idiom of the era, which described many adult males of our acquaintance, he’d had it.
The section of the project we lived in was organized in a peculiar, modular fashion. On each of a series of adjacent cul-de-sacs, a row of four attached maisonettes sat perpendicular to the street, with another four units facing them across a narrow pathway. At the end of each path stood a twelve-foot-high fence topped with barbed wire, sealing off the railroad tracks plied by local commuter trains. On the other side of the tracks, up a steep hill, sat a middle-class development of top-notch two-story, redbrick houses that were always referred to as the New Homes. They, too, were sealed off by barbed wire. Because of this wrong-side-of-the-tracks arrangement, which may have been inadvertent but probably wasn’t, we could catch glimpses of the good fortune and respectability that lay just outside our reach merely by turning our eyes north.
Proximity to mild affluence did little to inspire us, for even though the New Homes were less than fifty yards away, as the crow flies, we were not crows. To reach them, we would have had to walk all the way to the back of the project, where the barbed-wire fence ran out, then hack our way through a “jungle” teeming with weeds that never got tended, then make our way up a narrow road with no sidewalks, and finally climb up a steep hill to arrive at a neighborhood we had no business being in. I never visited the New Homes until forty years after we’d left the project, and when I did, I still felt that I did not belong there.
The houses we lived in were designed in an unconventional way, fusing intimacy with anonymity, despite the fact that behind each home stood a virtually identical unit. In fact, the houses were grafted together jigsaw-style, with the kitchens of the rear units jutting out into the living rooms of the front units and vice versa, and the bedrooms interlacing in an identical pattern. At the end of each block, a four-foot-high chain-link fence separated the eight units on one cul-de-sac from the eight units on either side. This largely cosmetic barrier discouraged fraternization between people living in adjacent cul-de-sacs. In fact, it discouraged any intercourse whatsoever with the people who lived just a few feet away on the other side of the walls. Due to this socially prophylactic layout, we could hear the people whose living quarters intersected ours, but we never actually saw them. They were our neighbors, but then again they were not our neighbors. They lived right next door to us, but we never felt that they lived right next door to us. It was as if the walls were swarming with gigantic squirrels.
The gimcrack architecture and weird, arbitrary boundaries disconnected and desensitized everyone. One day, a little girl living directly behind us set herself on fire while playing with matches. This was in the early sixties, an era when children still wore flammable pajamas and often perished in them. The firemen were summoned, but the child could not be saved. The rest of us could see some sort of creature lying on a blanket on the ground beside the house when we came
None of these jobs ever lasted very long; he would get tired of them, grow despondent, start missing work, get himself fired. Then we would be back on relief. Things around the house would start to disappear: The TV would get hocked to a pawnshop, then the radio, then the clock radio. He unloaded these items not to buy food but to buy liquor. Because he liked to drink in taprooms, and because my mother would not allow him to bring whiskey into the house, the money never lasted very long. We hated to see him start drinking, because as soon he opened that first bottle of beer we realized that he had already given up on the day. As time went by, he started throwing in the towel earlier and earlier. He was only in his middle thirties, but he knew that he was already playing out the string. In an oft-heard idiom of the era, which described many adult males of our acquaintance, he’d had it.
The section of the project we lived in was organized in a peculiar, modular fashion. On each of a series of adjacent cul-de-sacs, a row of four attached maisonettes sat perpendicular to the street, with another four units facing them across a narrow pathway. At the end of each path stood a twelve-foot-high fence topped with barbed wire, sealing off the railroad tracks plied by local commuter trains. On the other side of the tracks, up a steep hill, sat a middle-class development of top-notch two-story, redbrick houses that were always referred to as the New Homes. They, too, were sealed off by barbed wire. Because of this wrong-side-of-the-tracks arrangement, which may have been inadvertent but probably wasn’t, we could catch glimpses of the good fortune and respectability that lay just outside our reach merely by turning our eyes north.
Proximity to mild affluence did little to inspire us, for even though the New Homes were less than fifty yards away, as the crow flies, we were not crows. To reach them, we would have had to walk all the way to the back of the project, where the barbed-wire fence ran out, then hack our way through a “jungle” teeming with weeds that never got tended, then make our way up a narrow road with no sidewalks, and finally climb up a steep hill to arrive at a neighborhood we had no business being in. I never visited the New Homes until forty years after we’d left the project, and when I did, I still felt that I did not belong there.
The houses we lived in were designed in an unconventional way, fusing intimacy with anonymity, despite the fact that behind each home stood a virtually identical unit. In fact, the houses were grafted together jigsaw-style, with the kitchens of the rear units jutting out into the living rooms of the front units and vice versa, and the bedrooms interlacing in an identical pattern. At the end of each block, a four-foot-high chain-link fence separated the eight units on one cul-de-sac from the eight units on either side. This largely cosmetic barrier discouraged fraternization between people living in adjacent cul-de-sacs. In fact, it discouraged any intercourse whatsoever with the people who lived just a few feet away on the other side of the walls. Due to this socially prophylactic layout, we could hear the people whose living quarters intersected ours, but we never actually saw them. They were our neighbors, but then again they were not our neighbors. They lived right next door to us, but we never felt that they lived right next door to us. It was as if the walls were swarming with gigantic squirrels.
The gimcrack architecture and weird, arbitrary boundaries disconnected and desensitized everyone. One day, a little girl living directly behind us set herself on fire while playing with matches. This was in the early sixties, an era when children still wore flammable pajamas and often perished in them. The firemen were summoned, but the child could not be saved. The rest of us could see some sort of creature lying on a blanket on the ground beside the house when we came
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