Back to Blog
Closing time by joe queenan5/13/2023 ![]() Queenan père, his son recounts, was brutal and mean, no credit to any 12-step program. He became a man of letters, but even after he achieved his dream (“to make a living by ridiculing people”) he was still haunted by a lifelong enemy-his father. ![]() Scrambling out of the proletariat, Queenan discovered art, music and Paris. Further forming his persona were various part-time jobs, including the midnight shift at a bubblegum mill. He found surrogate fathers, first in a colorful dry-goods merchant who ran a kind of urban emporium, replete with picaresque clientele, next in an oddball apothecary. So it was on to Catholic high school, then a Catholic college. At 13, the besieged lad believed he had an ecclesiastical vocation, but after one year at Maryknoll Junior Seminary he abandoned the cloth. ![]() ![]() Queenan and his sisters couldn’t wait to vacate their hostile family encampments on the wrong side of the Schuylkill River. The youngster’s life was one of ongoing deprivation and off-brand merchandise in various tatterdemalion parishes. Mom was a terrible cook, and Father was a terrible drunk. The Queenan family, never in the chips, had a hardscrabble life in the scruffy Irish-American precincts of the City of Brotherly Love. The waggish blue-collar Philly scribe ( Queenan Country: A Reluctant Anglophile’s Pilgrimage to the Mother Country, 2004, etc.) ornaments his tough-childhood memoir with the sort of fancy writing natural to authors of Hibernian extraction. ![]()
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |