Under Morphine
ABOUT TWO AND A HALF MONTHS after the well-trained divisions of North Korea, armed by the Soviets and Chinese Communists, crossed the 38th parallel into South Korea on June 25, 1950, and the agonies of the Korean War began, I entered Robert Treat, a small college in downtown Newark named for the cityâs seventeenth-century founder. I was the first member of our family to seek a higher education. None of my cousins had gone beyond high school, and neither my father nor his three brothers had finished elementary school. âI worked for money,â my father told me, âsince I was ten years old.â He was a neighborhood butcher for whom Iâd delivered orders on my bicycle all through high school, except during baseball season and on the afternoons when I had to attend interschool matches as a member of the debating team. Almost from the day that I left the storeâwhere Iâd been working sixty-hour weeks for him between the time of my high school graduation in January and the start of college in Septemberâalmost from the day that I began classes at Robert Treat, my father became frightened that I would die. Maybe his fear had something to do with the war, which the U.S. armed forces, under United Nations auspices, had immediately entered to bolster the efforts of the ill-trained and underequipped South Korean army; maybe it had something to do with the heavy casualties our troops were sustaining against the Communist firepower and his fear that if the conflict dragged on as long as World War Two had, I would be drafted into the army to fight and die on the Korean battlefield as my cousins Abe and Dave had died during World War Two. Or maybe the fear had to do with his financial worries: the year before, the neighborhoodâs first supermarket had opened only a few blocks from our familyâs kosher butcher shop, and sales had begun steadily falling off, in part because of the supermarketâs meat and poultry sectionâs undercutting my fatherâs prices and in part because of a general postwar decline in the number of families bothering to maintain kosher households and to buy kosher meat and chickens from a rabbinically certified shop whose owner was a member of the Federation of Kosher Butchers of New Jersey. Or maybe his fear for me began in fear for himself, for at the age of fifty, after enjoying a lifetime of robust good health, this sturdy little man began to develop the persistent racking cough that, troubling as it was to my mother, did not stop him from keeping a lit cigarette in the corner of his mouth all day long. Whatever the cause or mix of causes fueling the abrupt change in his previously benign paternal behavior, he manifested his fear by hounding me day and night about my whereabouts. Where were you? Why werenât you home? How do I know where you are when you go out? You are a boy with a magnificent future before youâhow do I know youâre not going to places where you can get yourself killed?
The questions were ludicrous since, in my high school years, I had been a prudent, responsible, diligent, hardworking A student who went out with only the nicest girls, a dedicated debater, and a utility infielder for the varsity baseball team, living happily enough within the adolescent norms of our neighborhood and my school. The questions were also infuriatingâit was as though the father to whom Iâd been so close during all these years, practically growing up at his side in the store, had no idea any longer of who or what his son was. At the store, the customers would delight him and my mother by telling them what a pleasure it was to watch the little one to whom they used to bring cookiesâback when his father used to let him play with some fat and cut it up like âa big butcher,â albeit using a knife with a dull bladeâto watch him mature under their eyes into a well-mannered, well-spoken youngster who put their beef through the grinder to make chopped meat and who scattered and swept up the sawdust on the floor and who dutifully yanked the remaining feathers from the necks of the dead chickens hanging from hooks on the wall when his father called over to him, âFlick two chickens, Markie, will ya, for Mrs. So-and-So?â During the seven months before college he did more than give me the meat to grind and a few chickens to flick. He taught me how to take a rack of lamb and cut lamb chops out of it, how to slice each rib, and, when I got down to the bottom, how to take the chopper and chop off the rest of it.
And he taught me always in the most easygoing way. âDonât hit your hand with the chopper and everything will be okay,â he said. He taught me how to be patient with our more demanding customers, particularly those who had to see the meat from every angle before they bought it, those for whom I had to hold up the chicken so they could literally look up the asshole to be sure that it was clean. âYou canât believe what some of those women will put you through before they buy their chicken,â he told me. And then he would mimic them: ââTurn it over. No, over. Let me see the bottom.ââ It was my job not just to pluck the chickens but to eviscerate them. You slit the ass open a little bit and you stick your hand up and you grab the viscera and you pull them out. I hated that part. Nauseating and disgusting, but it had to be done. Thatâs what I learned from my father and what I loved learning from him: that you do what you have to do.
Our store fronted on Lyons Avenue in Newark, a block up the street from Beth Israel Hospital, and in the window we had a place where you could put ice, a wide shelf tilted slightly down, back to front. An ice truck would come by to sell us chopped ice, and weâd put the ice in there and then weâd put our meat in so people could see it when they walked by. During the seven months I worked in the store full time before college I would dress the window for him. âMarcus is the artist,â my father said when people commented on the display. Iâd put everything in. Iâd put steaks in, Iâd put chickens in, Iâd put lamb shanks inâall the products that we had I would make patterns out of and arrange in the window âartistically.â Iâd take some ferns and dress things up, ferns that I got from the flower shop across from the hospital. And not only did I cut and slice and sell meat and dress the window with meat; during those seven months when I replaced my mother as his sidekick I went with my father to the wholesale market early in the morning and learned to buy it too. Heâd be there once a week, five, five-thirty in the morning, because if you went to the market and picked out your own meat and drove it back to your place yourself and put it in the refrigerator yourself, you saved on the premium you had to pay to have it delivered. Weâd buy a whole quarter of the beef, and weâd buy a forequarter of the lamb for lamb chops, and weâd buy a calf, and weâd buy some beef livers, and weâd buy some chickens and chicken livers, and since we had a couple of customers for them, we would buy brains. The store opened at seven in the morning and weâd work until seven, eight at night. I was seventeen, young and eager and energetic, and by five Iâd be whipped. And there he was, still going strong, throwing hundred-pound forequarters on his shoulders, walking in and hanging them in the refrigerator on hooks. There he was, cutting and slicing with the knives, chopping with the cleaver, still filling out orders at seven P.M. when I was ready to collapse. But my job was to clean the butcher blocks last thing before we went home, to throw some sawdust on the blocks and then scrape them with the iron brush, and so, marshaling the energy left in me, Iâd scrape out the blood to keep the place kosher.
I look back at those seven months as a wonderful timeâwonderful except when it came to eviscerating chickens. And even that was wonderful in its way, because it was something you did, and did well, that you didnât care to do. So there was a lesson in doing it. And lessons I lovedâbring them on! And I loved my father, and he me, more than ever before in our lives. In the store, I prepared our lunch, his and mine. Not only did we eat our lunch there but we cooked our lunch there, on a small grill in the backroom, right next to where we cut up and prepared the meat. Iâd grill chicken livers for us, Iâd grill little flank steaks for us, and never were we two happier together. Yet only shortly afterward the destructive struggle between us began: Where were you? Why werenât you home? How do I know where you are when you go out? You are a boy with a magnificent future before youâhow do I know youâre not going to places where you can get yourself killed?
During that fall I began Robert Treat as a freshman, whenever my father double-locked our front and back doors and I couldnât use my keys to open either and I had to pound on one or the other door to be let in if I came home at night twenty minutes later than he thought I ought to, I believed he had gone crazy.
And he had: crazy with worry that his cherished only child was as unprepared for the hazards of life as anyone else entering manhood, crazy with the frightening discovery that a little boy grows up, grows tall, overshadows his parents, and that you canât keep him then, that you have to relinquish him to the world.
I left Robert Treat after only one year. I left because suddenly my father had no faith even in my ability to cross the street by myself. I left because my fatherâs surveillance had become insufferable. The prospect of my independence made this otherwise even-tempered man, who only rarely blew up at anyone, appear as if he were intent on committing violence should I dare to let him down, while Iâwhose skills as a cool-headed logician had made me the mainstay of the high school debating teamâwas reduced to howling with frustration in the face of his ignorance and irrationality. I had to get away from him before I killed himâso I wildly told my distraught mother, who now found herself as unexpectedly without influence over him as I was.
One night I got home on the bus from downtown about nine-thirty. Iâd been at the main branch of the Newark Public Library, as Robert Treat had no library of its own. I had left the house at eight-thirty that morning and been away attending classes and studying, and the first thing my mother said was âYour fatherâs out looking for you.â âWhy? Where is he looking?â âHe went to a pool hall.â âI donât even know how to shoot pool. What is he thinking about? I was studying, for Godâs sake. I was writing a paper. I was reading. What else does he think I do night and day?â âHe was talking to Mr. Pearlgreen about Eddie, and it got him all riled up about you.â Eddie Pearlgreen, whose father was our plumber, had graduated from high school with me and gone on to college at Panzer, in East Orange, to learn to become a high school phys-ed teacher. Iâd played ball with him since I was a kid. âIâm not Eddie Pearlgreen,â I said, âIâm me.â âBut do you know what he did? Without telling anybody, he drove all the way to Pennsylvania, to Scranton, in his fatherâs car to play pool in some kind of special pool hall there.â âBut Eddieâs a pool shark. Iâm not surprised he went to Scranton. Eddie canât brush his teeth in the morning without thinking about pool. I wouldnât be surprised if he went to the moon to play pool. Eddie pretends with guys who donât know him that heâs only at their level of skill, and then they play and he beats the pants off them for as much as twenty-five dollars a game.â âHeâll end up stealing cars, Mr. Pearlgreen said.â âOh, Mother, this is ridiculous. Whatever Eddie does has no bearing on me. Will I end up stealing cars?â âOf course not, darling.â âI donât like this game Eddie likes, I donât like the atmosphere he likes. Iâm not interested in the low life, Ma. Iâm interested in things that matter. I wouldnât so much as stick my head in a pool hall. Oh, look, this is as far as I go explaining what I am and am not like. I will not explain myself one more time. I will not make an inventory of my attributes for people or mention my goddamn sense of duty. I will not take one more round of his ridiculous, nonsensical crap!â Whereupon, as though following a stage direction, my father entered the house through the back door, still all charged up, reeking of cigarette smoke, and angry now not because heâd found me in a pool hall but because he hadnât found me there. It wouldnât have dawned on him to go downtown and look for me at the public libraryâthe reason being that you canât get cracked over the head with a pool cue at the library for being a pool shark or have someone pull a knife on you because you are sitting there reading a chapter assigned from Gibbonâs Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, as Iâd been doing since six that night.
âSo there you are,â he announced. âYeah. Strange, isnât it? At home. I sleep here. I live here. I am your son, remember?â âAre you? Iâve been everywhere looking for you.â âWhy? Why? Somebody, please, tell me why âeverywhere.ââ âBecause if anything were to happen to youâif something were ever to happen to youââ âBut nothing will happen. Dad, I am not this terror of the earth who plays pool, Eddie Pearlgreen! Nothing is going to happen.â âI know that youâre not him, for Godâs sake. I know better than anybody that Iâm lucky with my boy.â âThen what is this all about, Dad?â âItâs about life, where the tiniest misstep can have tragic consequences.â âOh, Christ, you sound like a fortune cookie.â âDo I? Do I? Not like a concerned father but like a fortune cookie? Thatâs what I sound like when Iâm talking to my son about the future he has ahead of him, which any little thing could destroy, the tiniest thing?â âOh, the hell with it!â I cried, and ran out of the house, wondering where I could find a car to steal to go to Scranton to play pool and maybe pick up the clap on the side.
Later I learned from my mother the full circumstances of that day, about how Mr. Pearlgreen had come to see about the toilet at the back of the store that morning and left my father brooding over their conversation from then until closing time. He must have smoked three packs of cigarettes, she told me, he was so upset. âYou donât know how proud of you he is,â my mother said. âEverybody who comes into the storeââMy son, all Aâs. Never lets us down. Doesnât even have to look at his booksâautomatically, Aâs.â Darling, when youâre not present you are the focus of all his praise. You must believe that. He boasts about you all the time.â âAnd when I am present Iâm the focus of these crazy new fears, and Iâm sick and tired of it, Ma.â My mother said, âBut I heard him, Markie. He told Mr. Pearlgreen, âThank God I donât have to worry about these things with my boy.â I was there with him in the store when Mr. Pearlgreen came because of the leak. Thatâs exactly what he said when Mr. Pearlgreen was telling him about Eddie. Those were his words: âI donât have to worry about these things with my boy.â But what does Mr. Pearlgreen say back to himâand this is what started him offâhe says, âListen to me, Messner. I like you, Messner, you were good to us, you took care of my wife during the war with meat, listen to somebody who knows from it happening to him. Eddie is a college boy too, but that doesnât mean he knows enough to stay away from the pool hall. How did we lose Eddie? Heâs not a bad boy. And what about his younger brotherâwhat kind of example is he to his younger brother? What did we do wrong that the next thing we know heâs in a pool hall in Scranton, three hours from home! With my car! Where does he get the money for the gas? From playing pool! Pool! Pool! Mark my words, Messner: the world is waiting, itâs licking its chops, to take your boy away.ââ âAnd my father believes him,â I said. âMy father believes not what he sees with his eyes for an entire lifetime, instead he believes what heâs told by the plumber on his knees fixing the toilet in the back of the store!â I couldnât stop. Heâd been driven crazy by the chance remark of a plumber! âYeah, Ma,â I finally said, storming off to my room, âthe tiniest, littlest things do have tragic consequences. He proves it!â
I had to get away but I didnât know where to go. I didnât know one college from another. Auburn. Wake Forest. Ball State. SMU. Vanderbilt. Muhlenberg. They were nothing but the names of football teams to me. Every fall I eagerly listened to the results of the college games on Bill Sternâs Saturday evening sports roundup, but I had little idea of the academic differences between the contending schools. Louisiana State 35, Rice 20; Cornell 21, Lafayette 7; Northwestern 14, Illinois 13. That was the difference I knew about: the point spread. A college was a collegeâthat you attended one and eventually earned a degree was all that mattered to a family as unworldly as mine. I was going to the one downtown because it was close to home and we could afford it.
And that was fine with me. At the outset of my mature life, before everything suddenly became so difficult, I had a great talent for being satisfied. Iâd had it all through childhood, and in my freshman year at Robert Treat it was in my repertoire still. I was thrilled to be there. Iâd quickly come to idolize my professors and to make friends, most of them from working families like my own and with little, if any, more education than my own. Some were Jewish and from my high school, but most were not, and it at first excited me to have lunch with them because they were Irish or Italian and to me a new category, not only of Newarker but of human being. And I was excited to be taking college courses; though they were rudimentary, something was beginning to happen to my brain akin to what had happened when I first laid eyes on the alphabet. And, tooâafter the coach had gotten me to choke up a few inches on the bat and to punch the ball over the infield and into the outfield instead of my mightily swinging as blindly as I had in high schoolâI had gained a first-string position on the tiny collegeâs freshman baseball team that spring and was playing second base alongside a shortstop named Angelo Spinelli.
But primarily I was learning, discovering something new every hour of the school day, which was why I even enjoyed Robert Treatâs being so small and unobtrusive, more like a neighborhood club than a college. Robert Treat was tucked away at the northern end of the cityâs busy downtown of office buildings, department stores, and fa...