Cross Bronx: A Writing Life

PROLOGUE

One day I was an impecunious grad student who never wrote a speech. The next, I was in a cubbyhole in the Executive Chamber’s New York City office. A state trooper loomed in the doorway waiting for the governor’s text. It was too late to run.

Intending to spend a year at speechwriting, I stayed nearly thirty. I wrote for New York Governors Hugh Carey and Mario Cuomo, and five successive chairmen of the shapeshifting, ever-inflating, now-imploded Time Inc. / Time Warner / AOL Time Warner. I filled a wall of file cabinets with a modicum of memorable (so I like to think) and myriad utterly forgettable, already-forgotten prose.

When I began, there were no college classes devoted to speechwriting as there were for poetry or novels. I found a few here’s-how manuals. If they offered an abracadabra formula, it escaped me.

Speechwriting taught me how to write. It drove home that filling the empty page is a matter of persistence, not inspiration. It gave me the discipline I needed to become a novelist. It allowed me to pay the mortgage, educate my kids, and enjoy a generous pension. No small things.

Speechwriters have special access. The longer you’re at it, the more you’re around, the more you’re like an old, comfortable chair. People don’t notice you. People can sit on or in chairs. No matter, chairs might squeak but they don’t squeal. Same goes for speechwriters.

I went through an election and a trio of mergers. Except for blood and guts and artillery barrages, they’re like wars. Everyone’s priority is making it through. The sinking-ship rule of Women and Children First is first out the porthole. People you thought you knew do things you can’t imagine. It can go the other way. That callous, shallow cad turns around and offers the old lady from steerage his spot in the lifeboat.

Tell-all books by speechwriters and chambermaids are inflated with compressed air. Nobody knows it all. Tell-all books without sex, murder, or something juicy to tell don’t sell.

The last interesting tell-all I read was Procopious’s The Anecdota. After the Byzantine doings of the Emperor Justinian and the Empress Theodora, all the shocking, untold, soon-to-be-revealed secrets by Angela Merkel’s dogwalker or Joe Biden’s barber are fingernail clippings.

People who buy books to wallow in the latest exposé deserve what they get—a book by the toilet that’s out of date before the toilet paper. If you really care about this shit, you should get off the john and get a life.

I never planned to write a memoir. I’d reached a dead end on a novel I was working on and wasn’t ready to start another. The involuntary idleness brought about by the pandemic provided copious space for writing and rumination. With no ultimate purpose in mind, I jotted down random notes on what led me to speechwriting and what I found when I got there.

I was held back from giving a full accounting by fear that people I respect might feel I’m violating their privacy, and ones I don’t, a deepened animus. An increasing number are dead. De mortuis nihil nisi bonum. The more I wrote, the fewer my qualms. Every memoir is part confession, part betrayal.

Bad behavior isn’t illegal. I witnessed unbridled greed, treachery, mental cruelty but never a crime or felony, unless evidence comes to light that I’m not aware of, which I will not rule out.

If I wanted to write a book chronicling the crimes and misdemeanors of my employers, I couldn’t, unless I wrote a novel. I wrote three about crimes. I incorporated a lot of what I learned about people; the crimes were made up.

I worked with people whose everyday decency and generosity exceeded my ability to reciprocate. I’m indebted to speechwriting for the chance to share the company of writers who offered the solace and support—and laughter—I came to rely on. It’s the bad we’re likely to remember because the good can be such an ordinary part of our day that we take it for granted.

Has there ever been an insider tell-all book about people who do the right thing?

Speechwriting is like the vice presidency. It’s not a position anyone aspires to. Few stay their entire careers. The speechwriters I know fell—or, in my case, failed as well as fell—into the profession.

Jim K. wrote an iconic memoir of the student rebellion at Columbia. A book-writing lawyer and former staff writer for People, he’s a gifted, versatile writer, and a master of the deadpan. After months (or was it years?) of working together with company executives to compose a Time Warner Values Statement (unfortunately, that’s not a joke), Jim said to me, If you have to struggle this hard to come up with your values, odds are you don’t have any.

The executive committee for execrable prose would occasionally send suggestions. A favorite was We are not false. As the company’s end time drew near, Jim suggested we change it to We are no longer in business.

A brilliant and battle-scarred veteran of the profession, Mike W. freelanced a well-received autobiography for a big-time CEO who went on a talk show claiming he wrote every word. Pressed if he’d really written it himself, he answered, Hiring somebody else to write my story would be like handing my clubs to a caddy and asking him to play for me.

Mike contemplated dropping him a note asking if he wanted his clubs back.

I did my best to make sure any names I drop are essential to the story, not my ego. When it came to identifying people, I followed no hard-and-fast rule. Where I thought people would prefer to maintain their privacy, I’ve used initials. Where people had a public profile that made them easily identifiable, or their identity was crucial to the story, I used the full name. I’ve tried not to betray any confidences.

Like us all, I’m eminently capable of rendering pleasing, semi-fictional, self-stroking versions of events, or telescoping or transposing them in what Joan Didion described as the imposition of a narrative line on disparate images. All memory is a matter of splicing.

In some places, I’m not certain of the chronology. Worse than forgetting what happened is remembering what didn’t. My wife calls it Plus-heimer’s Disease.

This is a book of personal reflections. Those expecting to find detailed instructions on composing a speech should proceed to the cashier’s counter to ask for their money back or contact Amazon Returns.

Depend on it, sir, Sam Johnson said, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind most wonderfully. The strange interlude of the pandemic provided the inspiration as well as the time to write this account.

In a moment of upended expectations and fear-prone uncertainty, the tolling of John Donne’s bells becomes perhaps not as faint as it once seemed. Before judgment is pronounced and sentence carried out, I want my chance to speak from the dock. Let no man write my epitaph. In the end, this is the best I could do.

PART ONE

The Bronx, Yes Thonx

WE CARRY THE PAST with us like a book. Whether we open it or not, it doesn’t go away. Wounds that heal or not, moments of grace and humiliation, are with us until the end. We never get over our childhoods because we never get out of them. The past is never dead, William Faulkner wrote. It’s not even past.

My father gave the first speech I ever heard. My twin brother, Tom, and I had just started the second grade. Our father took us to the communion breakfast of the NYPD’s Holy Name Society. My mother insisted. She thought he didn’t spend enough time with us. He was of the opposite opinion. He maintained we were too young. His relationship with us would never be the Sheriff Andy–Opie type.

We took the subway from the Bronx to Midtown. Before breakfast was Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Although I’m sure I was there before, this time it made an unforgettable impression. It’s the dull child who isn’t awed by vast and reverent spaces. Pew on pew of men in white gloves and blue uniforms made it even more memorable.

I can’t say I remember who said the Mass. I suppose the cardinal, but maybe not. When we stood for the reading of the gospel, I felt lost among giant sequoias. I know not every policeman could have been seven feet or taller. It only seemed that way.

Tom was on the other side of my father. I couldn’t see him. I glanced around to see if there were other squirrel-sized creatures. If there were, they were hidden among the tree trunks.

We walked from the cathedral to the Commodore Hotel beside Grand Central. In days far off, the hotel’s gut-job refurbishment would be the first venture into Manhattan real estate of a neophyte hustler who’d flimflam his way from penthouse to Pennsylvania Avenue.

The third most impressive thing that morning, after the cathedral and the police, was the hotel’s football stadium–sized grand ballroom. Midfield, on one side, was a long table atop a platform.

The men at our table had gold bars or silver stars (maybe it was the other way around) on their uniforms. The men were friendly to my brother and me in the condescending way adults are to small children. They asked perfunctory questions about what grade we were in, and did we like school? We most decidedly didn’t but lied. The rest of the time they paid no attention.

They chattered with my father. A judge and former congressman, he seemed to be enjoying himself. I knew he wasn’t. The stiff way he held himself was a tipoff to his discomfort. Always cordial to strangers, practiced in the art of politics, he wasn’t naturally outgoing. Several times he did a quick scan of the room. I guessed he was trying to see if other wives did unto their husbands what his did unto him and saddled them with two small boys.

The room went silent. A priest in a blue uniform—I presume he was the department chaplain, not a desk sergeant—said grace. There were brief remarks by the commissioner and some of the brass. My father was furiously rubbing his hands under the table. I thought I heard wrong when his name was called.

He stood and walked, shoulders back, to the raised platform. I looked at Tom across the space where my father had been. The panic in Tom’s eyes was a mimeograph of mine. The seconds my father stood silently at the microphone felt like two or three hours.

In time, I learned that this was a tactic of his. Never start talking immediately. Take a deep breath. Look around the room. Let the audience focus on you. That morning, I had no idea.

The men were all turned in his direction. A current of fear and abandonment ran through my bewilderment. How could my father have left us like this? I wanted to reach for Tom’s hand. I was afraid one of the men might notice. I bowed my head so low I could’ve pulled the tablecloth over it.

And then the laughter started, wave after nauseating wave. I felt about to throw up my fruit cocktail, scrambled eggs, buttered toast, and bacon. Tom had his hands over his eyes. The waves crested, fell, and crested again, until they stopped. The loud applause sounded like appalling mockery.

I couldn’t look at my father until we were on the train home. If we had the kind of relationship we didn’t, I’d have tried in some way to let him know that, whatever the audience thought, we were proud of him. I was afraid he might blame my mother when we got home for making us witness his humiliation. They chatted in a friendly way, and that was it. Tom and I consoled each other that no one we knew had been there. We stayed mum.

I’m not sure how old I was before I came to full realization of what had happened. I never brought it up to my father, not even in a humorous way. It’s not true that the more you do difficult things, the easier they become. On the occasions when I’ve walked up to a lectern to speak, the awful sensations of that morning flood back. I have to fight to stop them from overwhelming me.

My father never encouraged us to get into politics. It was never part of my life plan because I didn’t have a plan. I knew I wanted nothing to do with politics. I knew I’d be compared to my father, and not to my advantage.

My first week as a speechwriter in Albany I was introduced to Dick Connors, a member of the Assembly since the days of Tom Dewey, or maybe those of Grover Cleveland.

He grilled me. Are you a son of Pete Quinn from the Bronx? My father had left the Assembly thirty-five years before. I confessed. He told me the Assembly used to wait to hear my father speak. Even the Republicans enjoyed listening, except when his remarks were aimed at them.

If you’re half the speechwriter your father was, Connors said, consider yourself lucky. I refrained from thanking him for ruining my open -ing day.

My friend Joe Wells worked for the New York State Council of the Arts. Generous, urbane, wickedly funny, he died of AIDS. The last time I saw him, he was in NYU hospital. He preferred not to talk. I’m watching my childhood, he said. It’s all there. I remember everything.

When I think back to my early childhood, most of all I remember brick. My mother pushed the baby carriage with Tom and me through canyons of brick. Learning to walk, I held her hand and looked up at walls of brick.

Our building was thirteen stories of red brick. All the buildings in Parkchester, a planned community in the Bronx of 12,000 apartments and 40,000 tenants spread across 171 red-brick buildings of seven to thirteen stories, were identical red brick.

We competed to see who could loft a pink rubber ball—a Spaldeen—highest against brick walls. On my way to school, a woman stopped me and said she was trying to find an address but was bewildered by the overpowering uniformity of brick facades.

Parkchester rose out of the flatlands of the East Bronx like a mighty fortress, a red-brick bulwark, an Art Deco Stalingrad crisscrossed by Metropolitan Avenue and Unionport Road, with a landscaped oval of frolicking, water-spitting mermen at its center.

Stores lined the avenues. We got our clothes at Cornell’s, a father–son shop. My mother always asked for Ira, the son. His father was saturnine and grumpy. Gaunt, sweet, helpful, Ira was the saddest man I ever saw. I constantly expected him to burst into tears.

Years later, my Jewish therapist told me that if you want to make sure a Jewish boy ends up in psychotherapy, have him work for his father.

Alfred Eisenstaedt took pictures of Parkchester for Fortune magazine. In one, a traffic jam of baby carriages crowds the sidewalk. To avoid impassable tangles of baby-bearing vehicles blocking building entrances, white lines demarcated parking spaces. Some residents laughingly referred to Parkchester as Storkchester.

The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company conceived, financed, and built Parkchester on the eve of World War II. A scale model was displayed at the 1939 World’s Fair.

Despite its actuarial acumen, even Met Life couldn’t foresee the eventual return of an army of sex-starved, baby-breeding GIs. Its investment proved prescient. The postwar city was desperate for housing. In the middle of that desert, Parkchester’s supply of desirable apartments turned into a precious oasis.

Parkchester was built on the site of the old Catholic Protectory (full name: The Society for the Protection of Destitute Roman Catholic Children). Spread across 150 acres, the Protectory was founded in 1863 by John Hughes, the Ulster-born hierarch-cum-Irish tribal chieftain who established Fordham University, initiated the building of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and wielded the New York Irish into a political as well as religious constituency.

The Protectory housed orphans and abandoned children, mostly Irish, whom the Children’s Aid Society had begun shipping out west on Orphan Trains to be settled among God-fearing, Anglo-Saxon Protestants, an urban variation on the assimilationist model wielded so cruelly against Native Americans.

It’s possible an ancestor of mine spent time in the Protectory. When it comes to my ancestors, lots of things are possible. I continue to discover things, many of which are less than felicitous.

When my father was a boy, a common admonition was, You better mind yourself or you’ll end up in the Protectory. To put it in the nicest way, kids weren’t coddled. Mad Dog Coll and Joe Valachi—the latter of Peter Maas’s The Valachi Papers—spent time there. I don’t know whether their lives of crime began before, during, or after the Protectory.

I lived in One Metropolitan Oval from birth through college. My mother lived there for forty-four years. Our apartment looked down on the Oval. In the days of the Protectory, the Oval served as a ball field. It was where the Negro League’s Lincoln Giants often played Sunday doubleheaders.

On hot nights, the windows wide open, I heard water splash. On warm evenings during the High Holy Days, Yiddish voices echoed from the benches around the Oval and drifted into our apartment.

The days the garbage was incinerated, ash swirled and descended like gray snow. Windows were tightly shut, and curtains drawn. Beneath the buildings were large, gloomy, dungeon-like storage rooms. Also intended as bomb shelters, they were filled with bikes, baby carriages, and machines whose functions weren’t immediately apparent.

Parks and open spaces were strategically placed. The grass was for admiration, not recreation. Carefully spaced islands of green were guarded by knee-high iron chains. The playgrounds and ball fields were asphalt. We played punchball and softball. Nobody attempted to slide into second.

I never doubted Parkchester. At Mass, kneeling between my parents in our tan-brick Romanesque-Byzantine church, when I heard the words and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it, I thought of Parkchester and the Bronx, not Catholicism.

Parkchester’s residents were overwhelmingly Jewish and Catholic (Irish in the main). We lived separately together. I had no Jewish friends and no acquaintance with Jewish girls, except one. We rode the Bx 20 bus together, she to Walton Girls High School in Kingsbridge, me to all-male Man-hattan Prep in Riverdale. I sat in the back with my school buddies, she in front with her classmates.

The first time I saw her, I was smitten by her thin and graceful figure, clothes loose and flowing (the style then was tight), thick black curls (the fashion was long and straight), an early blossoming flower child.

It was part of growing up in the Bronx to figure out, as quickly as possible, a person’s tribe. I identified her Jewishness in the same way; if she bothered to notice, she perceived my goyishness. We never spoke. And then, one September, she was gone, off to college I presumed. I spent months bereft.

Protestants were regarded with curiosity. On Sundays, octogenarians Carl and Clara Bock quietly shuffled their way to St. Paul’s Lutheran church. The Flynns went to Quaker meetings and were quiet about their faith.

Anytime I went past the stony, ancient-looking façade of St. Peter’s Episcopal church, the doors were locked. Our Boy Scout leader told us that George Washington had worshipped there, which was unlikely or miraculous since it wasn’t built until 1853.

African Americans were free to apply for apartments as long as they knew they wouldn’t get one. The Lincoln Giants were the last African Americans to be welcomed to the Oval. Until the 1960s, Met Life enforced the same Jim Crow rule at Parkchester’s Manhattan twin, Stuyvesant Town. This was of a piece with the intransigent injustice of residential apartheid that prevailed (and still prevails) across large swathes of the city (and country).

Met Life built Riverton in Harlem for middle-class Blacks. A scaled-down version of Parkchester, Riverton was conceived as a sop to the critics of Met Life’s racist practices. The residents of Harlem weren’t fooled. They watched Riverton be built, wrote James Baldwin, in the most violent bitterness of spirit.

Desperate to increase the supply of middle-class housing—at least for whites—New York’s progressive mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, didn’t make a public fuss. Integrated developments couldn’t be profitable, Met Life claimed, which it proved by not building any.

The main means of transportation were subways and the city’s extensive system of bus lines. Our subway line was the IRT Pelham Bay line (the one Hollywood hijacked in the 1974 movie The Taking of Pelham One Two Three).

Parkchester was an experiment in Americanization, a step in and up from the immigrant’s continental toehold. Watching the drooping crowd shuffle up Metropolitan Avenue from the subway at the end of day, it was impossible to tell Gentile from Jew. If we didn’t always get close, we mostly got along.

The southern terminus of the IRT local was City Hall. The express ended somewhere in the Orient, in Brooklyn, a destination I wondered about but never visited. When I was five or six, I was on the subway with my sister Sheila. She was nine years older than I. I read aloud a name I saw on a train across the platform: Canarsie.

To me, it had a musical sound, foreign, exotic. I asked where it was. Sheila waved her hand in no specific direction. Out there, she said. Somewhere.

I was intrigued by her explanation—or lack of it. Canarsie was the world I didn’t know—big, wide, unexplored. Out there. Somewhere. I’ve never been to Canarsie.

All writing is work. Ass power, Mario Cuomo once told me. Others see it as a day at the beach. I remember an ad in which a shirtless, bronzed surfer-type, his face stylishly stubbled, sits at a typewriter, the portable vintage kind, and stares at the sea. A woman in a white bathing suit is emerging from the turquoise water.

It could have been an ad for watches, whiskey, or whatever the latest male fetish. Or maybe women’s bathing suits. There was a single blank page in the typewriter. If intended to sell the writing life, it was for the life that nonwriters imagine writers live.

I never learned to type until late in the game. I wrote speeches, novels, essays, and student papers all by hand. Handwriting is also something that’s acquired a romantic tinge. The hand–brain connection supposedly stimulates the mind in ways typing can’t. This might be true, or it might be a Luddite fantasy.

I wrote by hand because I went to a school in which we were graded on penmanship. Once a year a Christian Brother, specially designated to the task, came around to inspect our copybooks. The class with the best penmanship won a banner. It was a big deal.

In high school, there were no typing courses. We took Latin instead, lots of Latin. It hasn’t proved as useful, but it allowed me to impress acquaintances by translating quotes incised on stone pediments of courthouses and colleges.

In a bar in Albany that’s no longer there (one of many), a drink-sodden, ink-blotted former newsman slurred, Pencil, typewriter, a goddamn crayon, what the fuck difference does it make? All that matters is what you write, not what you write with.

I didn’t know any writers growing up. Bronx neighborhoods were short of them. Don DeLillo, among the country’s most accomplished novelists, was raised in the Belmont section. He went to high school at Cardinal Hayes on the Grand Concourse—where Martin Scorsese went and George Carlin was kicked out of—and to college at Fordham, a short walk from his neighborhood.

Edgar Allan Poe lived in Fordham for a period in the 1840s. His teenage bride died there. He made friends with Jesuits at the nearby college. He described them as highly cultivated gentlemen and scholars [who] smoked, and drank, and played cards, and never said a word about religion.

We had a writer in our neighborhood, Elizabeth Cullinan, whose first novel was the critically acclaimed House of Gold. She grew up right outside Parkchester, across Tremont Avenue from St. Raymond’s, on Poplar Street. Her novel was an intimate account of the tangled emotions and memories left behind in the death of the family matriarch.

My parents knew her parents. My mother recognized the close resemblance between the real and fictional families. She was aghast at how a family’s intimate hurts and sorrows were made public.

After college, Cullinan started out as a secretary. She worked at The New Yorker for novelist and fiction editor William Maxwell. He recognized her talent and went from employer to mentor.

She wrote two books of short stories, many of which appeared in The New Yorker, and another novel. She taught writing at Fordham and faded from the literary scene. In the way of the world, after her recent death she’s been recognized as an important figure in the development of Irish-American literature. I admire her work. I never met her.

Through eight years of high school and college, I made the two-buses, hour-long, borough-spanning, etched-in-memory odyssey down Tremont Avenue, through West Farms, along 181st Street, onto Southern Boulevard, past the Bronx Zoo, across traffic-clogged Fordham Road to Kings-bridge Avenue, past Poe Park and the poet’s landmarked, ill-treated cottage where he lived with his teenage bride, down to Marble Hill and 225th Street, and west under the Broadway El to 242nd Street.

When I started high school in 1961, the area around West Farms was heavily Jewish. On the High Holy Days, streets were flooded with worshippers going to or coming from synagogue. By the time I finished college, the population was overwhelmingly Puerto Rican and Black. Incremental change in the borough’s ethno-racial composition had turned tidal.

My rough estimate is that, over eight years, I annually made around 250 roundtrips of at least 15 miles. That comes out to more than 30,000 cross-Bronx miles to acquire an education. I traveled the circumference of the Earth and then some without leaving the Bronx. It’s amazing what you can learn by staying home.

We never owned a car and my father never learned to drive. There was a taxi stand close by our apartment building. When we went as a family to Sunday Mass, my father whistled for a cab by inserting his pinky and forefinger into the sides of his mouth. The fierce, piercing pitch made us wince and drew the attention of the neighborhood.

I asked him to teach me, but when it came to things he thought I should master on my own, he didn’t have much patience, so I never learned. To this day, I’ve never heard anything quite like it.

My mother regularly took us to a dentist in Midtown, in the Fuller Building on 57th Street. Mostly we went by train. One heat-seared September afternoon, she decided to spare us an air-conditionless subway ride home and take a cab instead. She gave the cabbie our address.

He said he didn’t go to the Bronx. She said we weren’t getting out. He said he wasn’t moving. She said her husband was a judge. He said he didn’t care if she was married to the pope. She said she’d report him to the Taxi Commission. Go ahead, he said. Report me to the FBI. I’m not going to the Bronx.

She saw a cop and called him over. She demanded he intervene and instruct the cabbie he had a legal obligation to take us where we wanted to go. He shrugged, Whattaya want, lady? I should arrest somebody for not going to the Bronx?

We took the train home. She kept her head high and stared at the opposite wall. I tried not to notice as her lips quivered with indignation and humiliation.

An educated, independent woman, she retained an