Thing of Beauty Read Online Free PDF Page B

itself might have been the most corrupting influence of all. The impressive stone house, wrapped in ivy and set back on one of the largest and lushest residential plots in the area, had once been a fitting symbol of how far Joe Carangi had come. He was a man who still basically made a living selling sandwiches in a smeared white apron and a T-shirt. Yet he lived in what anyone would describe as “a beautiful home,” where his children had large bedrooms of their own, his prized pool table had a separate room with plenty of space for tricky shots, and, for a time, his wife had plenty of space to decorate and redecorate as she wished. Now it was, in every way, a broken home. Andbecause Joe was rarely there, it was also becoming the big hangout spot for his sons’ school friends.
    In almost every residential community, there was a handful of houses where all the kids hung out after school, in the evening, on weekends. Some were supervised playhouses where parents purposely created youth-friendly environments—even if it meant feeding everyone else’s kids—so they could keep an eye on their own children. The others were houses left unattended for such long stretches that anything went. These were the homes where adolescent rebellion was being pushed beyond even the thresholds dared in the sixties—when at least there had been some modicum of reverence left for the physical power of drugs, some residual respect for the emotional potency of sex. These were the homes where seventies kids would remember first trying marijuana, first vomiting from cheap jug wine, first acting upon sexual feelings. These were the homes where the minimum age for certain rites of passage had gone from twenty-one to eighteen to fifteen to thirteen in a matter of years, where high school kids were suddenly having college and postgraduate fun. These were the homes that were the epicenters of the quakes that were beginning to crumble the dream of the Great Northeast.
    The Northeast section of Philadelphia—or the “Great Northeast” as it came to be called in the fifties, when its first major department store, a Gimbels, emblazoned those words in twenty-foot-high stainless steel letters on its facade—was the ultimate creation of the city’s burgeoning middle class. It was far more than just another faceless suburban development, another destination for white flight. Located just north of the center of Philadelphia, the Northeast was serviced by Philadelphia’s public transit system, educated by the city’s school system and policed by city cops, many of whom lived there to satisfy residency requirements for municipal employees. The area offered the inexpensive single-family homes and drivable streets of the bedroom communities, the ample parking and access to modern shopping. But, confined by the city limits, it eventually became relatively crowded for a suburb—mostly a sprawl of tract homes and twin houses with tiny yards. And it came to develop its own industries, its own class system and its ownethos. It even had its own accent, a loud, nasal singsong that was instantly recognizable.
Gia
was one of those words most altered by the Northeast dialect. It came out something like “Jay-ya.”
    Unlike a prefab, residential Levittown, the Northeast was really a whole world unto itself—or really two worlds, one predominantly Jewish, the other predominantly Catholic, roughly divided spiritually and physically by the sprawling sixteen-lane Roosevelt Boulevard. But in the Northeast, these particular Jews and Catholics somehow found they had more in common than not—adherence to middle class values, fear of blacks, dedication to an ethnic dream of prosperity. And they created something so attitudinally different from mainstream Philadelphia and its more traditional suburbs—it was a suburban city, a superburb—that local politicians were continually proposing that the Northeast should secede from the city, and maybe the state as well.
    But,