Free Closing Time by Joe Queenan Page A

outside our range of experience, as were swimming pools, ice-skating rinks, arboretums, zoos, aquariums, and museums. None of us ever learned to swim or ice-skate; the idea of mastering these skills never occurred to us. We were poor, and as poverty ground us down, we began to acquire the self-flagellatory skills at which the poor are so adept.
    My parents never understood that just because things could be worse, that didn’t mean things weren’t already bad. For even though my sisters and I were unsophisticated, impressionable children, we were not imbeciles, and it soon became apparent to us that there was something down-market about our new living arrangements. One indication was the fact that we had to walk a considerable distance to reach the closest grocery store, which meant we were never allowed to go shopping alone at night. Back in Saint Veronica’s, there had been stores of one sort or another on every other corner. Not here. The owners of the nearest grocery kept a ferocious Great Dane in the backyard, locked behind a fence, frothing and glaring, where everyone could see him. We assumed that this display of canine menace was intended to deter shoplifters living in the adjacent project. One day the dog attacked a beautiful young girl who worked in the grocery, ravaging her face beyond repair. There was some sort of out-of-court settlement, but none of us ever felt comfortable entering that store after that, nor, presumably, did she. It was a cautionary tale for potential thieves. I lived in East Falls for four years and never once went into that store without reconnoitering to make sure the Great Dane was locked up in the yard.
    The only retail activity in the project itself was an illicit operation run by a family of extravagantly uncharismatic albinos, who sold candy, batteries, lightbulbs, cigarettes, and sundries out of their living room. People who could not afford a pack of twenty cigarettes could instead buy individual smokes from these most unlikely of merchants. The albinos overcharged for everything, making them the target of immense antipathy in the community, but two cigarettes were better than none, so customers learned to grin and bear it. My father would sometimes send me over to buy a couple of cigarettes from them, thereby introducing me both to the underground economy and to a world where nicotine served as a vaccine against reality.
    I went to school with the two albino children, neither of whom could be called sugar plums. No one seemed to like them, not other children, not their teachers, not even the nuns. At the time, I could not understand why they did not make more of an effort to be cordial toward their classmates, but in later years I would see the glaring faults in my logic. These were poor albinos, the children of unemployed adult albinos, condemned to life in a housing project, where they had been abandoned to the tender mercies of the children of the poor. It’s hard to see how being nice could have helped.
    After a while, my sisters and I began to suspect that there was something disreputable about our situation, because no one who lived outside the project ever invited us over to play with them. I lived in the project from 1959 until 1963 and never once stepped inside the home of anyone from outside it. Perhaps my classmates’ parents feared that kids from the project would heist their jewelry or geld the schnauzer or dismantle the plumbing and sell the fixtures to Roscoe the Fence. Whatever the official explanation, we now sensed that we were persona non grata.
    My family literally had no money when we arrived in the project; we were on what was then called public assistance, or, as it was more commonly known, relief. “Relief ” was a surgically precise term in that era, though it would later be replaced by the coy euphemism “welfare.” Being on relief was mildly shameful for women and children, but it was an out-and-out disgrace for able-bodied men. It meant that you