No Ordinary Joe

It’s not easy growing up poor. Nor is it much fun growing up with an emotionally distant parent, or an aggressive alcoholic one. Joe Queenan experienced all three – the complete misery trifecta as recounted in his memoir Closing Time.

You’d think a book dealing with such dark subject matter would be a hard slog, and there are parts where Queenan’s experiences make for uncomfortable reading, but using his trademark wit and humour, Closing Time is also a story about the redemptive power of the written word, great art and great music.

Queenan senior’s alcoholism and concomitant inability to hold down a job meant that the family spent four years in a housing project, scraping by on welfare. One thing that gets his goat – and as anyone whose ever read his work knows, there’s quite a few of those – is the mythologizing of the poor.

“Two things I’ve thought about in the last year are Slumdog Millionaire and the new Bruce Springsteen album. I was really offended by Slumdog Millionaire. Poor and working-class people are useful as some kind of props but people always sugarcoat the reality, and the reality is that the pretty little kids in Slumdog Millionaire would have been brutalised by the time they were twelve, or they’d be dead. I didn’t find anything uplifting about that movie. I found it almost pornographic. And the Bruce Springsteen album – it’s another record about working-class people, and he sold that record originally through Wal-Mart, which is a union-busting company.”

Worse than poverty was Queenan’s father himself – a brutal drunk who beat his children frequently, on occasion using the buckle end of his belt, and whose continuous criticism meant that Queenan was never able to please him.

“Poverty didn’t bother me as much as my dad’s routine abuse. In the book, I didn’t dwell on that in great detail or it becomes pornographic. But I didn’t even mind that much. He was out of his mind drinking when he did that. What I really minded was that he constantly told us we’d never amount to much, and that is the worst thing you can tell a kid.”

Towards the end of his life, Queenan senior joined Alcoholics Anonymous (not very successfully) and following the twelve-step programme, offered apologies for his behaviour — an action Queenan found more offensive than anything else. An early column recounting his dislike for the programme caused outrage — hundreds of irate Twelve Steppers wrote to complain — but years later, Queenan’s feelings on the subject haven’t changed.

“I just hate hearing former alcoholics talk. To me, the classic alcoholic cannot stop talking about himself when he’s a drunk — and when he’s sober, every conversation comes back to ‘my sobriety’, ‘I have to go to my meeting’ or ‘I’ve been sober for forty-six days’. I don’t give a fuck. I don’t want to hear about it. It seems to me to be such a vainglorious sort of thing. When my dad would do that, when he would talk about his meetings — I don’t want to hear about it. If you’ve cleaned up your act, that’s great, but I don’t want to hear it. They think they’re better than you because they’ve conquered this vice. They talk about it as if it was conquering lung cancer. It’s a behaviour – if you want to stop drinking, stop drinking!”

Closing Time doesn’t deal in nostalgia, and it offers a very different take on growing up in the 1950s. Read a memoir dealing with the same period, such as Bill Bryson’s The Life and Times of The Thunderbolt Kid, and you’d be forgiven for thinking that fifties America was a golden period of peace and plenty.

“People think that the fifties was this very innocuous era and everybody had money and everybody had a car. That was true for a lot of people because there was an economic boom after the war, but it certainly wasn’t true for black people. It was horrible for black people in the South, because that’s when the civil rights movement started, and it wasn’t any fun if you were living in the project.”

Nor is Queenan likely to wax nostalgic about the sixties. A lifelong fan of music, Queenan missed out on Woodstock when he injured his foot on his part-time job.

“When it turned out that it rained the whole time, in retrospect it seemed like a good thing. There’s probably a hundred million people in the United States who’ll say they were at Woodstock, but I actually know people who were there and they say it was the most miserable experience because of the rain.”

“Y’know, the sixties were horrible, just horrible. People were being lynched; people were being assassinated; parents hated their kids; kids hated their parents; we were at war with Vietnam; the French were going to have a civil war; things were falling apart in England; the threat of nuclear war; the Russians going in to Czechoslovakia; all the tension in the Middle East started. People just remember the music — the music was the only good thing about the sixties.”

Closing Time: A Memoir is out now on Kindle Books