“Jesus.” He felt so strongly about swearing that when he did fly off the handle, he would substitute the term “G.D.” for “goddamn,” as if such declamatory shorthand mitigated the impiety of the expletive. As for the villainous execration “motherfucker,” just to think about it in his presence was to run the risk of on-the-spot disembowelment.
Despite these sensitivities, he took no umbrage at his sister’s indelicacy; like many men who smile at the maledictions of irate women who have never learned to swear properly, he actually found it rather charming. What made Cassie’s trademark epithet so memorable was that it was the only crude remark that ever passed through her lips; it was the trick pitch she fell back on in the bottom of the ninth when she desperately needed an out. Whenever those two would come visit, I would sit on the edge of my seat waiting for the main event to get under way, the knock-down, drag-out slugfest that always involved Nixon and JFK and always ended with Aunt Cassie sneering, “Go ahead, Schwartz, go shit in your hat and pull it down over your ears.” Though employed in a profane, secular setting, these words were as solemn, ritualistic, sacrosanct, and inevitable as the exhortation “Ite, missa est” with which priests signaled that Holy Mass had come to an end. Once Aunt Cassie told her husband to go shit in his hat and pull it down over his ears, we all knew it was time to go up to Trenton for pizza.
A generation older than my parents, my uncle Charlie shared many of Jerry’s traits. They were both German American, a genuine rarity in our closed Hibernian circle. They both made their own hours. They both liked to spread their money around. They both smoked like chimneys. They were both fond of women, and not just their wives. Neither took any lip from anyone. Each, in his way, was larger than life.
Uncle Charlie, like Jerry, did not have a regular job. By day he worked in some unspecified capacity for the local Democratic Party, making sure that on Election Day the right people voted and the wrong people didn’t. By night he worked as an entertainer, or what was called a saloon singer. He was a self-taught musician who played a gorgeous midnight-blue tenor guitar. It was a Gibson, the top of the line. The tenor guitar, now obsolete, had only four strings, and while chords could be played on it—in an emergency—it gave off a shrill, tinny sound and was generally played as a solo instrument, the guitarist plunking out a melody while another guitarist or a pianist lent background support. Uncle Charlie, for whatever reason, had always flown solo. Like many musicians of that era, he had started out playing the ukulele before switching over to a less whimsical, less robustly Polynesian instrument. He could not read music, had no great gifts as a singer, and, ultimately, I came to realize, wasn’t much of a finger-picker. Guitarists short on talent usually played a six- or twelve-string guitar, because these instruments were easily mastered and, if thumped upon with sufficient verve, could produce just enough of a din to create the illusion that the person playing them knew what he was doing. This was especially true if he was performing in a bar filled with comatose lushes and loudmouthed floozies who were already three sheets to the wind.
Loading up his beautiful instrument, Uncle Charlie would saunter off to various North Philadelphia watering holes in the early evening and spend the next few hours croaking out adamant, demonstrative, but not terribly lyrical renditions of “Yellow Bird” and “On a Slow Boat to China,” accompanying himself feebly on that majestic Gibson. He was the sort of person who, though he could not actually sing, had learned how to “put a song over” by dint of moxie and flair. All the time he was bulldozing his way through a number, he would be chomping on a cigar. It was never a cigar in the humidor-stored sense of the word but,
Despite these sensitivities, he took no umbrage at his sister’s indelicacy; like many men who smile at the maledictions of irate women who have never learned to swear properly, he actually found it rather charming. What made Cassie’s trademark epithet so memorable was that it was the only crude remark that ever passed through her lips; it was the trick pitch she fell back on in the bottom of the ninth when she desperately needed an out. Whenever those two would come visit, I would sit on the edge of my seat waiting for the main event to get under way, the knock-down, drag-out slugfest that always involved Nixon and JFK and always ended with Aunt Cassie sneering, “Go ahead, Schwartz, go shit in your hat and pull it down over your ears.” Though employed in a profane, secular setting, these words were as solemn, ritualistic, sacrosanct, and inevitable as the exhortation “Ite, missa est” with which priests signaled that Holy Mass had come to an end. Once Aunt Cassie told her husband to go shit in his hat and pull it down over his ears, we all knew it was time to go up to Trenton for pizza.
A generation older than my parents, my uncle Charlie shared many of Jerry’s traits. They were both German American, a genuine rarity in our closed Hibernian circle. They both made their own hours. They both liked to spread their money around. They both smoked like chimneys. They were both fond of women, and not just their wives. Neither took any lip from anyone. Each, in his way, was larger than life.
Uncle Charlie, like Jerry, did not have a regular job. By day he worked in some unspecified capacity for the local Democratic Party, making sure that on Election Day the right people voted and the wrong people didn’t. By night he worked as an entertainer, or what was called a saloon singer. He was a self-taught musician who played a gorgeous midnight-blue tenor guitar. It was a Gibson, the top of the line. The tenor guitar, now obsolete, had only four strings, and while chords could be played on it—in an emergency—it gave off a shrill, tinny sound and was generally played as a solo instrument, the guitarist plunking out a melody while another guitarist or a pianist lent background support. Uncle Charlie, for whatever reason, had always flown solo. Like many musicians of that era, he had started out playing the ukulele before switching over to a less whimsical, less robustly Polynesian instrument. He could not read music, had no great gifts as a singer, and, ultimately, I came to realize, wasn’t much of a finger-picker. Guitarists short on talent usually played a six- or twelve-string guitar, because these instruments were easily mastered and, if thumped upon with sufficient verve, could produce just enough of a din to create the illusion that the person playing them knew what he was doing. This was especially true if he was performing in a bar filled with comatose lushes and loudmouthed floozies who were already three sheets to the wind.
Loading up his beautiful instrument, Uncle Charlie would saunter off to various North Philadelphia watering holes in the early evening and spend the next few hours croaking out adamant, demonstrative, but not terribly lyrical renditions of “Yellow Bird” and “On a Slow Boat to China,” accompanying himself feebly on that majestic Gibson. He was the sort of person who, though he could not actually sing, had learned how to “put a song over” by dint of moxie and flair. All the time he was bulldozing his way through a number, he would be chomping on a cigar. It was never a cigar in the humidor-stored sense of the word but,
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