Free Closing Time by Joe Queenan

wooden nickels,” an exhortation he never bothered to explain, also used to endlessly repeat a nonsensical rhyme:
    As I was walking down the stair,
I met a man who wasn’t there.
He wasn’t there again today,
I wish that man would go away.
    That was my family to a tee. We were there and we were not there. We were in the fifties but not of it. And though I would not come to fully understand this, or even think about it, until many years afterward, a great many other people were not of it, either: Things were infinitely worse for black people living south of the Mason-Dixon Line, who were being raped and lynched and generally treated like animals while the rest of the country was chuckling at the latest pickle Lucille Ball had gotten herself into. The idea that the mythical 1950s encompassed an entire nation is cretinous. But this is a country that has never been in any danger of running out of cretins.
    No afterglow accompanies these experiences. Nothing good ever came out of living in that project. One might argue that the degrading experience of poverty taught me to be ambitious and self-sufficient, but it would be more accurate to say that it taught me to be ruthless and cruel, indifferent to other people’s feelings, particularly if I was writing about them. I never had any warm memories of the project; it gave me nothing, it taught me nothing. The rich old men who run Hollywood have long been smitten by the romance of indigence, zealously manufacturing life-affirming cultural pornography that appeals to middle-class people who quite fancy the poor but only in an innocuous celluloid incarnation. Up close and personal, the poor are less appealing: They wear bad clothes and use bad language and do bad things, and have guns. They make excellent fodder for films but even better fodder for cannons. They are fascinating when seen from a distance, less fascinating when they move in next door. They make unsatisfactory dining companions; they are too busy being desperate to be idiosyncratic or clever. My sisters and I understood this perfectly. We knew that there was nothing poetic or ennobling about our plight. We could not understand why we had been subjected to it. We were the odd men out, and we did not know why.
    Throughout those long years of mandated misfortune, I felt, perhaps with the genetically transmitted aloofness of my mother, that our predicament was a momentary aberration that had been visited upon us due to a mix-up in paperwork down at the Municipal Building. Soon it would be all sorted out and we would be restored to our rightful place in the social firmament. This exemplifies mankind’s ability to unearth wheat among chaff, diamonds amid rust. For even though we were living in the proverbial “run-down neighborhood,” infested with creeps, lushes, petty criminals, the functionally insane, women of ill repute, and a wide swath of social misfits who fell under the general rubric of “fuckheads,” my parents, and my mother in particular, never stopped reminding us that things could have been worse.
    They were right. None of us ever got stabbed, shot, or raped while we lived in the project. We never experienced the devastating horrors that black urbanites were subjected to in subsequent years in the public housing developments of America’s worst neighborhoods, because we never had to deal on a daily basis with violent crime. Our poverty was economic, spiritual, and psychological, but we were never in fear for our lives. We were never as badly off as the children in Cabrini-Green or Compton or North Philadelphia. We were simply badly off.
    Other housing projects—those situated in the epicenter of the urban wilderness—would have been worse, certainly from an aesthetic perspective, as they were isolated, completely cut off from parks or rivers or creeks, and far more dangerous. But this was hardly cause for jubilation. We never went to the parks or the rivers or creeks near our home; they were entirely