Everybody gets two. The first one they give you when you’re born, so he doesn’t count. The second one you pick for yourself, when you’re Confirmed, which is puberty by any other name. I picked my Uncle Joe, who was the Chief Engineer of the Polaris, which was the last big project down at the Navy Yard. He had a solid gold tie clip in the shape of a nuclear submarine.
Uncle Joe graduated Drexel in 1941 and spent the war in uniform making mechanical drawings and hitting on my mother’s sister. After they bombed Hiroshima, he signed on down at the Navy Yard because my aunt finally said yes and she had no intention of leaving the parish.
Like all of my mother’s sisters, my aunt married my uncle because he reminded her of her father. In Joe’s case, he had a lot going for him. First, he was named Joe, which half the other brothers–in-law were named, including my dad. Second, he was very handsome. After that, he was a brainiac - left and right. Not only could he trace a circuit through a million switches, he was also a man of culture. He had a thousand books. I had none.
On the day before my Confirmation he told me to bring the wagon I used for delivering newspapers over to his house, which he filled with books - so many, I had to tie them in - beautiful things, bound in leather, embossed in gold, all well read and precious upon arrival. I had a library from one minute to the next. Tom Brown’s School Days, The Pickwick Papers, Germinal. It was like somebody gave me a super power, a fortress of solitude, a world in which to live. However my mother beat the shit out of me, however bullied at school and trapped like a rat below Snyder Avenue, there was always something worse happening in London. And the endings weren’t bad. Even if they were, at least they ended.
Sitting on the steps with the other kids, who were comparing the Dave Clark Five to Herman’s Hermits, I wanted to talk about Kafka. This didn’t go over too well at first but after awhile, the girls started to think it was cute. But that was only half the battle. The boys really wanted to kill me. A few of them nearly got away with it. One kid broke my tooth after I quoted Somerset Maugham. A reference to Ethan Frome once got me kicked in the nuts. But no matter the provocation, I got no quarter from my brother, whose idea of a good book included most anything from Classics Illustrated and who wanted to kill me more than anybody else.
You would think it was impossible to bully me at school. You couldn’t walk through the schoolyard without seeing one cousin or another. Every third kid was bound by blood, and any one of them would have leaped to my defense but for my brother. In fact, whenever somebody had me down on the ground, beating my face, my brother would stand guard, waving my cousins away. They’re just playing, he would say.
I took the problem to my Godfather, who presented me with the problem in the first place. I went there to give him our portrait on the church steps - me in my white suit, he with his tie clip, taken with my brother’s box camera. Uncle Joe laughed out loud and made me tell him all the bullies by name. When I told him about Armando Battalotta, he said that no one would believe it. I moved on to Angelo DellaMorte. Enough, he shouted. Then he handed me another pile of books and sent me home.
