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Pull
Me Up: A Memoir by Dan Barry Rating: ••• (Recommended) |
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Struggle Some of the finest memoirs touch the nerves of
our lives, trigger laughter and tears, and lead us to take a breath and
prepare for whatever life hits us with next. Dan Barry’s Pull Me
Up is such a book. The title refers to Dan’s Irish immigrant mother
asking for his help when she was dying of lung cancer. Barry presents
glimpses of her life, his father who suffered 20 years of debilitating cluster
migraines, and his own passage from a childhood on This is how it was: My father, a
tall, good-looking ringer for Nelson Eddy, hustling out at 6:30 every morning
to catch the Long Island Rail Road, known in our house as the “goddam train’ and often coming home later than other
fathers, his noose of a tie loosened, his suit a cloth wipe for smoke and
sweat. Many times his rumpled appearance was caused by the drudgery of it
all, commuting two hours to work in an unreliable, rolling sardine can,
hawking stocks and bonds all day on Wall Street, returning two hours back
squeezed between strangers. But sometimes he looked the way he did because he
had had a few too many, the result being a succession of train connections
missed. This required my mother to pack her four young children into the station
wagon and drive a mile to the Wyandanch train station every half hour or so.
Together we would hunt for my father among the men disgorged into the night
by the 6:38, the 7:08, or the 7:38 bound for Gene? What do you mean you fell sleep? Our mother’s words cuffed our ears,
sounded a warning. And where are you now? That meant my mother had to bundle her
brood into the family’s one car once again and drive forty minutes east to
the last stop on the line. Tension, like the smoke from my mother’s
cigarettes, filled our station wagon on those He infused our house with a defiant
city atmosphere, idiosyncratically shaped by a harsh childhood and an
insatiable thirst for the printed word—everything from the Mad magazines
of the Harvey Kurtzman era to the Encyclopedia
Americana volumes that he had bought at my birth. He sometimes explained
himself by quoting Rafael Sabatini’s description of
his swashbuckling character, Scaramouche: “He was
born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad?’ He rejected
most of what our neighbors in the 1960s bought into—the American value system.
He refused to let Brian and me join the Boy Scouts—”a little army’ as he
called it. He refused to let us play football—a blood sport and a risk to
developing bone structures. But he also refused to let us listen to the
Beatles, who he felt advocated drug use. Gradually, our value judgments were
shaped by what he hated, and loved. He hated Bob Hope; he loved Bob and
Ray. He hated Nixon; he loved Kennedy. He hated opera; he loved A Night at
the Opera. He hated “Strangers in the Night”; he
loved “Wimoweh.” He hated Liberace; he loved W. C.
Fields. He hated red beets, which tasted of the
depression, night after night, cheap red beets. But he loved red cabbage. He hated John Wayne. The only battles
that sonofabitch fought were on movie lots, while
kids were dying in My father seethed at the thought, his
hands gripping the frayed arms of his living room chair, his eyes slits of
contempt. Sonofabitch was too good a
term for John Wayne. He was worse; he was a motherless bastard. It seemed at times that my father hated
more than he loved. But there was one thing he loved above all else,
including his children. That was his wife, and everybody knew it; she was the
final piece to the Gene Barry puzzle, the piece in the center of his chest.
An attractive brunette, still slim after four children and two miscarriages,
his Galway beauty worked as a clerk in some cellblock office on Route 110 in
Farmingdale. At home she was the one who mowed the lawn, trimmed the hedges,
painted the rooms, hung the wallpaper, did the laundry, bought and cooked the
food. Maybe this was because my father couldn’t have been bothered, or maybe
because she was squeezing what she could from a way of life that she never
could have imagined just fifteen years before, when she was living on a farm
in My mother had her own distinct tastes,
of course. She preferred Schmidt’s beer to Budweiser, Scrabble to Monopoly.
She hated the movie Shane because she thought the kid was a whiner,
but loved to cry over the plight of the kids in The Sound of Music. She
became furious with me one Easter night for cheering when the quisling
boyfriend tells the Nazis where they might find the fleeing von Trapp family.
She loved to play a silly game in which two people standing several feet
apart tried to flip a quarter with carefully placed bounces of a Spalding; we
would not know until years later that these contests, which had no name, were
a variation of an old Irish street game called Pitch and Toss. Generally, though, my mother did not
define her world in terms of likes and dislikes. Her upbringing on a farm, it
seemed, had taught her early on that life is not meant to be all bountiful
harvest. The rain sometimes falls too much, or not enough; cows die in
calving. This closeness to the ground, this acceptance of the impersonal
natural order, endowed her with quiet command. My father would rail from his
armchair, issuing edicts and delivering rants. But none carried the weight
of law until my mother had separated the wisdom from his bombast, as though
culling wheat from chaff. A carefully maintained detachment from
everything outside her family’s walls further enhanced my mother’s
authority. The neighbors knew, for example, that she had been in the We could be driving to the Food Fair
supermarket in the There was Brian, born in the Cold War
year of 1959. Lanky and blond, he was so smart that the family transposed the
vowels in his name to give him the nickname “The Brain.” He played the
guitar, the trumpet, the harmonica, and any other musical instrument placed
before him, and he could do a dead-on imitation of Rex Harrison’s solos on
the original Broadway cast recording of My Fair Lady. Brian was the
fearless one, the one who jumped from the ten-foot diving board at the town pooi, the one who let garden snakes coil around his arms,
the one who would strike a match just for the danger of holding a dancing
blue flame. He played endless games of catch with me; he was my best friend. There was Brenda, born in 1961, the
year the country witnessed the inauguration of its first Roman Catholic
president. Brenda was blond and cute and determined to collect stray animals
the way her brothers amassed baseball cards. Her First Holy Communion
portrait, with her mouth closed to conceal the tooth knocked out by an errant
playground swing, was so beatific that our parents framed it in silver and
set it in a place of honor—on top of the television. She worshiped Humphrey
Bogart. There was And there, face pressed against the far
window like a Labrador retriever out for a Sunday drive, her oldest, Daniel
Francis. Born in 1958, he was named after a maternal grandfather who died
years before Danny was born and a paternal grandfather who died three months
after. Look at him there, she must have wondered. What’s to become of him? I was tall for my age, gawky, with a
concave chest in which pools of water formed when I took a bath. I had
straight brown hair with a cowlick in the back. I had the first tiny marks of
acne flecking my chin, harbingers of roaring facial battles to come. I had an overbite so pronounced that I
could fit three fingers between my upper and lower teeth; it seemed that I
needed two spoonfuls of oatmeal to consume just one. My parents had no
choice but to take me to an orthodontist who shoved bits of metal, swabs of
cement, some rubber bands, and anything else he could find around the office
into my gaping mouth. When he finished, my lips became the gates to My poor coordination as a young boy
marked me for life. I had once fallen off my bicycle and banged my head hard
on the pavement, imbedding a stone the size of a Rice Krispie
into my forehead, about an inch above my eyebrows. My mother’s I loved reading about gangsters: Dillinger, Capone, Vincent “Mad Dog” Coll. I loved the
Dead End Kids, the Marx Brothers, the Little Rascals, and all the horror
films produced by Universal Pictures. I reveled in knowing that L.S.M.ET. stood for “Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco”; that W. C.
Fields used to threaten to sic a woodpecker on Charlie McCarthy; that Bing
Crosby won an Academy Award for Going My Way. I loved all these things
because they evoked the 1930s and 1940s, the period of my father’s mysterious
childhood, and I could run to him and say, Daddy, Daddy, come to the living
room, Billy Gilbert just showed up in a Laurel and Hardy short. And he and I
would smile because we were probably the only father and son who knew who
Billy Gilbert was—a character actor known for his magnificent sneezing
fits—or at least were the only ones talking about him at that very moment. Like my father, I came to crave
Entenmann’s: the chocolate layer cakes, the cupcakes, those raspberry
pastries with white “drizzle” frosting. That’s how he would describe them as
my mother left for Food Fair— and get an Entenmann’s, the raspberry drizzle.
The white Entenmann’s boxes, adorned with that elegant blue script, were as
essential as the oven to a I shared a bunk bed of Western,
wagon-wheel design in a room with Brian, who was eighteen months younger but
already stronger than me. This was our haven. We decorated the walls with the
covers of Mad magazine. We collected the blue-covered Hardy Boy
books—The Tower Treasure, The Missing Chums, The Mystery of the Chinese
Junk—and secretly wished for some dastardly crime to be committed in our
neighborhood so that, like Frank and Joe Hardy, we too could do some
brotherly sleuthing. At night, we turned on a transistor radio and listened
to the cackles and confidences of Jean Shepherd on his nightly broadcast. He
would begin spinning a yarn about his childhood in the Sometimes we fought in our sanctum.
During one brawl, one of us kicked a heel through the wall. It was hardly the
last hole to be punched through the walls and doors of that house, but this
particular hole became the heilgate of nightmares.
More than once I awakened in a sweat from having dreamed that trolls were
crawling out of it to take me away, like those child-snatching fairies of my
mother’s Most of the time, though, my brother
and I comforted each other. When our father barreled out of the house and
sped away, pressing the gas pedal so that the engine roared in final
exclamation to his last furious point. When there was nothing for us to do
except wait, sometimes for hours, until we heard the reluctant grumble of
tire upon gravel, meaning that he had returned; he always returned. Or just
when there was something a boy could not even articulate to his brother: the
embarrassment of wearing braces, or the hurt of a parent’s unwarranted cuff
to the back of the head. That was when we climbed together into the bottom
bunk and took turns caressing each other’s back in a gentle tickle. First came the argument over who would
tickle whose back first, for it was always best to be tickled last; that way
you could drift toward sleep with the sensation of fingers sliding across
your back and the knowledge that all your obligations had been met. Then came
the argument over the length of tickle time, which was measured by the one
doing the tickling: Onetwothreefourfive... You’re counting too fast! Go slower,
like I did. Then came the argument over technique: You’re doing it too hard! Do it softer. You’re a real jerk, you know that? Silence came next, with two tired young
bodies taut with the anger of the wronged. Then the anger faded, and the
desire to reassure—and be reassured—returned: Okay, let’s tickle in words. What word
am I writing on your back now? Fork? No. What’s the first letter? Pause. Jerk? A snort turned into a giggle, which
turned into two giggles, which encouraged outright laughter that shook the
bed despite the shooshes from one brother and then
the other, and the two young bodies were now shaking in silliness, and— Go to
sleep goddammit! Our father’s command seemed to fly up
the stairs, as we knew he would at the sound of the next peep. We knew that
things could quickly escalate, so we traded shooshes
and composed ourselves. Then one boy’s forefinger returned to his brother’s
back, looping figure-eights until, finally, it skated off the map of
consciousness. Pull Me
Up will have special appeal to cancer survivors, those of us with
immigrant parents, and those who came of age in the booming 1960s. The
messages about life will resonate for all readers, and Barry’s fine writing
will be appreciated for its lyrical qualities, and his ability to tell a
story so well. Steve
Hopkins, August 26, 2004 |
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ã 2004 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the September
2004 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Pull
Me Up.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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