They had never seen a situation that bad turn around that completely. Think about that the next time you need God’s help.”
Soon after this my father moved the stairs from the center of the house to the back, between the bathroom and the big glass door, so that now the stairs did not descend in a single flight but instead turned twice on the way down. They were covered as well in a thick shag carpet, such that a newborn might have tumbled down them without coming to any harm. Indeed, in the course of our childhood in the house, Paul and I used to trip or hurl each other down these stairs on a regular basis. However, they were so padded and safe, the effort was mostly wasted.
This moving of the stairs signaled the beginning of a larger remodeling project that soon saw the entire basement finished. When I asked my father, years later, what had guided his thinking in finishing the basement, he paused a moment, then replied, “Well, I had all those materials from Urban Renewal I wanted to use. The other part of the plan was to make the basement nice enough that you kids would stay down there and leave the upstairs to your mother and me.”
He succeeded in both of these objectives. The new basement’s wood paneling, ceiling tiles, door to the outside, and the pool table that was its most prominent and (in my eyes) most important feature had all enjoyed previous lives on Front Street in the years before the demolition, and there was no question the basement was an attractive place to hang out. More than half the square footage was given over to a carpeted TV room and an adjoining rec room housing the pool table and the family’s new 8-track tape player. On the other side of the rec room were two dorm-like bedrooms, one green and one red, each featuring bunk beds along with built-in cabinets and desks. Rounding out the floor plan at the base of the stairs was a small bathroom with a tiled shower and the aforementioned door to the outside, a feature I came to appreciate fully only during my teenage years, when the ability to sneak in and out of the house without my parents knowing became such an all-important thing.
Once finished, the basement was ruled over by my older brothers, who soon instituted many arcane and (to my eyes) arbitrary rules concerning it. The first rule was that anytime an older brother wanted the use of a chair or any other piece of furniture being used by a younger brother, all the older brother had to do was to say the words “Pass down,” and the younger brother was required to move at once. As you might expect in a family of seven boys, the free exercise of this law created many a musical chairs–like moment, as the oldest in the family kicked the next oldest out of his chair or couch, and that brother responded by invoking the pass down rule on the brother just beneath him in age, and so on, until finally all of the furniture in the room was occupied and those of us at the bottom of the pecking order had to lie on the carpeted floor to watch TV. Similar rules concerned the selection of TV shows (the oldest brother in the room always decided what we would watch), what music could be played on the 8-track and at what volume, and, most devastating to me, who was allowed to use the pool table.
“The felt on this table is brand new,” one of my brothers intoned. “Do you think we want you ripping it up, or spilling juice on it, or anything like that?”
Needless to say, I ignored the rule regarding the pool table every chance I got, dragging a chair next to the table to stand on while I practiced my shots. My one desire in life was to become a billiards expert on par with my heroes Minnesota Fats and Willie Mosconi, who later took part in the legendary $15,000 “Great Pool Shoot-Out” announced by Howard Cosell on ABC’s Wide World of Sports. However, short of this lofty goal, I would settle for beating any of my older brothers at a game of eight ball. I had noticed that as soon as one of my brothers got old enough to play in pool halls like the Golden Ace downtown or Duffy’s in South Dodge, they quickly lost all interest in our table, and this was a weakness I planned to exploit. Finally, I got good enough to beat the next brother above me, Steve, and I began to set my sights even higher. However, I was disappointed to find that none of my brothers older than Steve would play me.
“You’re all scared,” I taunted them.
“That’s not why,” my brother Tom said with a laugh.
“Why then?”
“You’ll find out, one of these days.”
“Yeah, sure,” I replied, thoroughly disgusted.
However, it turned out he was right after all. I did find out. As soon as I was old enough, I headed downtown and sneaked into the Golden Cue, where I challenged a middle-aged feedlot cowboy to a game of eight ball.
“How much you want to bet?” the cowboy asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “How much do you want to bet?”
“How about five dollars?”
This was far more than I had been expecting, but I had the money on me, and by now it was impossible to back down. “You’re on,” I said.
Nothing about the table on which we played felt remotely like our table. The ball rolled much more slowly, and the action off the cue ball felt different, too. None of my trick shots—or even my regular shots—worked. After taking a licking in that game and one more, I headed home, tail between my legs, and found my brother Tom in the TV room, eating popcorn and watching a rerun of Hawaii Five-O.
“What’s the deal with the pool table?” I asked.
“You’ve been playing at Duffy’s, haven’t you?” he observed with a smirk.
“The Golden Cue.”
“And let me guess,” Tom said, smiling broadly. “The table felt a little different.”
“That’s right. Why?”
Here Tom paused, obviously savoring the moment. “The tops on those tables are granite, fool.”
“And our table?” I asked.
“Plywood.”
“Plywood! What the hell! Why?”
“The top was broken when Dad bought it,” Tom answered, shrugging. “That shit’s expensive, so instead of granite, we used plywood and then had the whole thing covered with new felt so no one would notice.”
Why do we have to be so different from everyone else? I remember wondering. As always, no answer to this important question was forthcoming.
* * *
I had just started school at Sacred Heart Cathedral when my parents decided it was high time to remodel the upstairs of the house. The decision was made over dinner one Friday night, and by Saturday afternoon, my father and older brothers had ripped the kitchen cabinets off the wall and tossed them unceremoniously into the front yard. The violence and finality of the action shocked me deeply. It was as if some kind of madness had come over these people I thought I knew, and they were behaving now as men possessed—as zombies or something worse, not to be trusted. I remember sitting on my bicycle in the middle of Cedar Street, which was then little more than a dirt road, watching the chaos and destruction unfold. First the cabinets flew out the side door, then the sink, followed by huge chunks of linoleum flooring that sailed through the air like wounded Frisbees. Then one of my brothers—I think it was Alan, the second oldest—came outside, sledgehammer in hand, and started to break apart the wooden porch on the north side of the house.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Dad said to,” he answered in his zombie way. “We’re gonna get rid of this whole doorway and expand this side of the house into the yard and make a sitting room for Mom.”
“A sitting room?” I asked. “What’s that?”
“I don’t know,” Alan replied. “But that’s what Dad is calling it, so I guess that’s what it’s going to be.”
Unlike the Move to Town and the finishing of the basement, neither of which I was old enough to remember in any detail, this round of remodeling was something I experienced directly, the way refugees in a war-torn country experience war. It was my turn now to understand what it meant to “camp” in the basement, sleeping on fold-out cots and cooking dinners of macaroni