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• "Satirist Joe Queenan's memoir makes for serious reading"
• Excerpt from Closing Time
• "War By Any Other Name"
• Mr. Queenan's bio

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Satirist says he thinks his mother only had kids because his Irish American parents were Catholic and didn't believe in birth control. (2:27)
 

Full interview. (15:50)
 

Tavis: Joe Queenan is a popular and widely read author, humorist, critic and columnist whose many notable books include "True Believers" and "Balsamic Dreams." His latest is one of the most acclaimed books of the year. It's called "Closing Time." Joe, nice to have you on the program.

Joe Queenan: Nice to be here.

Tavis: Good to see you, man. Let me start with this - how difficult to write a book that is - my word, not yours - that is an indictment of your father? Is that fair?

Queenan: That's fair, yeah. It's almost like I was taking him to court. Well, it was easier because he was dead, but I had written some of the things about him while he was still alive. I'm Irish-American and we're very tough. We're just not soft about these things, and so this was war.

My dad and I went to war when I was a little kid and that war basically continued until the day he died. And in a way, it's probably still going on now. So I wanted to give people an idea of what it was like to live in a - we lived in a housing project, but not just to show that my father created this bad situation but to indicate that he was created by being beaten by his father, by growing up in the Depression, by having all kinds of things. But it's not easy to do that.

Tavis: Lot of folk grow up in tough neighborhoods, they grow up in tough conditions, they have tough parents. If I - I am not, as you can tell, but if I were an Irish-American, do I have a right to be angry with you right now, to want to slap you upside the head for indicting Irish-Americans as being tough and that's the reason, the source of the drama you had to endure? Is that really fair to Irish-Americans, or is that a cop-out?

Queenan: I think a lot of Irish-Americans would say that they would recognize that. It's not unusual in an Irish-American family for the parents to be jealous of the children, not at all. There are certain ethnic groups where people work 100 hours a week so that their kids can go to college and they'll just say, "I'm not going to make it; my children will see the Promised Land."

It's not at all unusual among my ethnic group for people to say - they see that the kid's going to get the life that they want and instead of helping the child, they resent it. My dad was a very smart man who dropped out of high school in ninth grade. He was so bitter about the fact that he saw that his kids might get to go to college, might get to have the life that he wanted, and it just enraged him. And lots and lots of people that I know who read this book said that's exactly the experience that I had.

Tavis: It raises the obvious question for me, then, in that particular culture, the Irish-American culture - why have kids? If everybody's going to end up hating their kids or being jealous of their kids for doing better, isn't the goal of parenting to have kids who will do better than you?

Queenan: Not that generation. That generation, they were Catholics, okay? So they didn't practice birth control. They had children because that's what people did. My father came home from the Second World War; he was in prison for three years because he had a dishonorable discharge because he'd gone AWOL.

So he came out of the military prison, my mother grabbed him because he was a good-looking guy, he had some prospects, he was funny, and they had kids. And that's the only reason. They had kids because they had kids.

If my mother had lived today, she wouldn't have had children. She would have been a professional woman. She might have had one kid. She wouldn't have had four kids, because when they had two, they had a chance to make it. When they had three, four, they were finished. They couldn't make it financially; they just could not make it.

Tavis: One of the characters in this book for me, at least, is the city of Philadelphia.

Queenan: Yeah.

Tavis: Tell me about it.

Queenan: People who read the book in Philadelphia think the book is about Philadelphia, so they just ignore the stuff about my father.

Tavis: That's just how Philadelphians think, though. It's all about them.

Queenan: Right. And several reviews have said that I grew up in south Philly, which is just the worst thing to say to somebody who grew up in north Philly. Because south Philly was Italians and north Philly was Irish, Blacks, Polish, Jews.

So it's not offensive, but it's like saying somebody from the Bronx grew up in Brooklyn. It's just you have it all wrong. You don't know anything about the city of Philadelphia if you think that somebody who looks like me grew up in south Philly. You just don't know.

So in any case, Philly is a tough town. It's a blue-collar town. Best tippers in the country, according to "USA Today," because everybody's had crummy jobs. So people tip. It's not like New York. People in Philadelphia are envious of New Yorkers because they know that New York is a great city but they don't see why New Yorkers should get it, because they're awful. Everybody likes the buildings, but everybody hates New Yorkers.

So Philadelphians have a chip on their shoulder. And when I was growing up, the city was racially polarized to an unbelievable extent because we had a mayor named Frank Rizzo who had been the police chief. He was a monster, and it was a bad situation for everybody. It was a very, very tough town. But when you go to Philadelphia - I was in Philadelphia the night the Phillys won the World Series, with my two kids.

You'd never see anything like that in New York. You've never seen people go completely out of their minds the way they do in that city. That city is filled with passion, that city is filled with working-class people who feel it here. That is very different from L.A., very different from New York City, very different from Boston.

Tavis: When, for you, did your relationship with your father just go off the rails?

Queenan: When we lost our house.

Tavis: Exactly.

Queenan: We lost our house. Look, all this stuff about subprime mortgages and people in the "Wall Street Journal" saying we need to burn down a million houses and then that'll fix the housing market because it'll reduce the inventory - when you lose your house, you lose your heart, and when a man in 1958 lost his house and went to a housing project, he was finished. He was just finished as a man. It was emasculating, it was humiliating.

You couldn't support your - you had lost this thing that - housing, having a house, means something to people. All the dreams of people reside in their houses, and when you lose your house and you move to a housing project, you're finished.

So by the time I was eight or nine it had started to go really downhill. He started to drink a lot, he couldn't hold a job, and by the time I was nine or 10 I was looking around for another father, and I was just looking around for anybody else who was going to be a role model other than this guy.

Tavis: To your point, the book is as much about - it's as much an indictment on your father as it is about these two surrogate fathers, though, who do come into your life.

Queenan: Well, they saved my life.

Tavis: Exactly.

Queenan: Yeah. I went to work when I was eight for a guy who had been a Marine. He'd been on Iwo Jima, and he was a tough guy. He had the skull of the first man that he'd killed in a brown paper bag underneath the counter where I worked.

Tavis: Now, is that tougher or softer than an Irish-American?

Queenan: That was pretty tough. He was a German-American, okay?

Tavis: Okay. (Laughter)

Queenan: And the thing is that as a kid, you just see that - he just pulls out a skull and says, "This is Lieutenant Lito," and you just figure that's pretty cool, because adults are doing it. It's not like you react to it and say, "Oh my God, I'm horrified." No, that's what men do. He was a Marine.

And he taught me how to move the merchandise. He just said, "You have to go back there and sell shoes." So I was, like, nine years old and he said, "You have to sell those shoes, okay? So sell those shoes to that man." So I would go back there and I'd say to these people, I'd say, "Where'd you get these shoes?" And they'd say, "JC Penney's." And I'd say, "Well, did they give you a kiss when you got them? I can't believe you're wearing shoes like that. Look at these shoes." I said, "I'm doing you a favor selling you these shoes, okay? I had to have these shoes sent by cargo plane from Panama. Sandy Koufax wears these shoes and I lose a dollar on every pair, but the volume overcomes the loss." (Laughter)

And these men would be looking at me like, "You're nine years old." And he would just - he had this shtick and he said, "I have a shtick and now you have a shtick, and you sell that merchandise." So that builds up your confidence. It builds up your confidence so that later on in life you can sell your book or you can talk to men who are bigger than you who don't want to buy something.

But he saved my life, he really did. I worked for him for seven or eight years, and he taught me everything. He taught me how to box, he taught me how to look in a guy's eyes and see whether this guy is really trouble, and my father couldn't do any of those things.

Tavis: As I ran across that part of the book I thought to myself to ask you, as I will now, how it is that you didn't end up taking those skills that could have made you a very good hustler and yet you used those skills to do things that are legal, that are moral, that are ethical. You see my (unintelligible)?

Queenan: Because of the church, because we were Catholics. So there was a bad side to Catholics is that we're here because we're Catholics, but the good side was we knew the difference between right and wrong. And my parents - my mother in particular - were very religious, so you went to church all the time. And then I went to the seminary to study to be a priest and to this day I still think of myself as a Catholic.

My daughter graduated from Harvard, okay? So my daughter told me last year she's going to Georgetown to study neuroscience to get her doctorate. And I thought, well, great, at last we got you in a Catholic school. Now you'll be with the Jesuits and you'll learn something for a change. (Laughter) And it never goes away because being Irish or being Catholic or being from Philly or being a member of a political party, those are all things that are inside you and that stay there all along.

And the Catholic thing, the idea of what is right and what is wrong, is just a very - so it never would have occurred to me to go and be a hood, to be a hustler.

Tavis: So I mentioned there were two surrogate fathers; one named Len, one named Glen. Tell me the other story.

Queenan: The other guy was a pharmacist, and he was a pharmacist at a time that they got out their mortar and pestle and they made these weird potions and stuff like that. And then the drug companies took over and then it was just antidepressants - just count 40 Valium, 50 Valium, 60 Valium. So he didn't want to be a pharmacist anymore, so he said, "You fill the prescriptions and I'm going to do something else."

I'm a 16-year-old kid; shouldn't be filling prescriptions. But he's like, "I just don't want to do this. He would sit in the back and he would read books about Diamond Jim Brady and Jay Gould and the robber barons of the 19th century. He would read books about New York; he would talk to me about Fiorello LaGuardia, because he just loved New York history.

And he would cook. So he would be back there and I'd come in in the afternoon and he'd be making bouillabaisse. And people don't eat bouillabaisse in Philadelphia, so this guy was Swiss-American, okay? So I'd come in after school and I'd say, "Mm, that smells good." And my mother was a terrible cook, so this was great, going back there.

And he'd be back there and he'd say, "When you're finished filling the prescriptions, here, come back and have some bouillabaisse" or have some Welsh rarebit or something like that. And then he became a brewer. So then I'd come in after school and he's brewing mead, okay, which is what people were brewing in the Middle Ages. And he'd come in after school and he'd go, "Here.”

Tavis: Joe, you're 16.

Queenan: Sixteen years old - here, have a flagon of mead. (Laughter) And then make sure you count out the - but this so - these guys were eccentric, they were crazy. They both did something that was very interesting. They closed the store. They'd just close the story. First guy that I worked for had three parking lots down the street from Connie Mack Stadium where the Phillys played.

He'd just close the store in the afternoon - "No, you can't buy any clothes today." Wouldn't even put up a sign. "We're going to go over and park cars and go and watch the Phillys." And people would come in the next day and say, "I came here to buy some shoes." "Well, we went to the Phillys game." "Well, why didn't you put a sign out?" "It's my business. You don't like the way I run my business, go shop somewhere else." (Laughter)

And the guy in the pharmacy, he was pyromaniac and he belonged to an organization called The Second Alarmers. The Second Alarmers would go - they were firebugs, so they would go - they'd hear a three-alarm, four-alarm fire, they would go out and they would watch the guys put out the fire and they would give them coffee and doughnuts to make it look like they weren't firebugs.

But all the wanted to do was they just liked to watch stuff burn, okay?

(Laughter) So he would be back there and he'd be talking to me, having some mead and everything, and then he had this illegal fire band radio and he'd be listening. And the dispatcher's going (makes noise) and he'd say, "Shh - if that goes to four alarms, I'm closing the store, we're going to go over and see that baby." And he'd just close the pharmacy. He'd just close the pharmacy and put on his silly little hat, get in his car, and go over and see a building burn down.

They were crazy, but they weren't alcoholics, and they were fun to be around. And they saved my life, and the book is really a tribute to them as much as it is an indictment of my father.

Tavis: Give me the through-line - how does all of this, the making of Joe Queenan, help you become the writer that you are, they storyteller that you are? How does that - what's the connection?

Queenan: I'll tell you. People who grow up in housing projects in Philadelphia do not become freelance satirical writers. They become criminals or they become factory workers or they become cops.

I think that that happened because of my dad. Because my dad would dictate angry letters to the paper, and he would have me - he would just stand there and he would say, "Dear sir or madam, more in sorrow than in anger I take my pen in hand once again and issue this jeremiad." (Laughter)

And I was, like, wow, that sounds great. He's a ninth-grade dropout and he's talking like this, and he would get into this different persona. And he was enraged. He was really angry. And he would just fulminate - he'd just say, "Just as in the era of Herbert Hoover," and I'm thinking, Dad, Herbert Hoover died 35 years ago. And he would never let the Great Depression go.

And so I would listen to these words that he would use, these wonderful turns of phrases that he would use that he learned from Mark Twain and from Shakespeare, and I would just imitate them. And just imitating those rhythms and imitating the way he would - I learned that if you're poor, you don't have property, you don't have a car, you don't have a television, and you may not have a job, but you have words.

You have words. And if you use those words, you can make it happen.

Tavis: So quickly, what do you make, finally, of the fact, then, that for the indictment that his book is, by your own admission, on your father, that your father gave you one thing, but the one thing he gave you is what you make a living off of?

Queenan: That's right. He gave me a sense of humor because he was a very funny man and he taught me that if you didn't like the way the world was, if you wrote about it, you could change it. And that's what satire is. Satire is basically saying, "I don't like this guy, so I'll just ridicule him." And I learned to do that at a very early age.

When I was in high school, I learned that if you could talk in a certain way you could keep some of those big guys at a distance. People don't like being cut down. People are afraid of being humiliated, so if somebody has a sharp tongue you can change the way the world is. And I learned that from him.

Tavis: You pray that Joe never cuts you down in one of his pieces, because it ain't nice to be (laughter) subject to that. Thankfully, I have not been as yet and hopefully will not be.

Queenan: Well, not now, not after you having me on the show.

Tavis: Yeah, now that you've been on the show, exactly. (Laughter) His name, of course, Joe Queenan. His memoir, a wonderful read called "Closing Time." Joe, nice to have you on.

Queenan: Thank you.

Tavis: Good to see you.