ON THE THIRD NIGHT of my father’s self-imposed exile on the couch, I was sitting in bed before midnight reading about Teddy Roosevelt. I had amassed a large collection of trivia about the twenty-sixth president:
His first wife and his mother both died on Valentine’s Day, 1884.
At his inauguration he wore a “mourning ring” containing a strand of Abraham Lincoln’s hair.
He was the first president to fly, on a four-minute ride in a pusher biplane designed by the Wright brothers.
He was the youngest president, at forty-two, ever to serve, and he changed the name of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue from the Executive Mansion to the White House.
Unlike some of my past biographies, I found myself not so much skimming for trivia but actually reading entire chapters about Roosevelt’s presidency. Here was a guy who got things done, leading the charge at the Battle of San Juan, breaking up trusts and railroad monopolies, connecting the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, leading a “life of strenuous endeavor” as he cordoned off 230 million acres of land for national parks.
I was so absorbed that I didn’t hear the shouting downstairs. But I caught a glimpse of Cinnamon, half naked, throwing on a shirt as she rushed past my bedroom door.
By the time I’d made it to the first floor, Tino and Linc had formed a barricade between the hall and the parlor, Tino in a “fists for hire” position, looking like The Street Fighters Sonny Chiba, and Linc in an awkward semicrouch, holding a Louisville Slugger as if it were a fishing pole. Cinnamon locked the front door, and my father stood over a black kid who looked not much older than me, yelling, “What the hell do you want?”
Pinned on the sofa, the kid held up his palm to shield himself, as if preparing for my father to strike him.
“He was about to break in. He came right up to the porch and peeked in the window,” my father said to the rest of us. His eyes flashed white, like the Incredible Hulk thrown into a rage.
My mother and Molly had gone to the kitchen to call the police. The kid retreated to the corner of the sofa. “Let me explain.” “There’s nothing to explain. You robbed us, and now you’re coming back for more. Empty your pockets,” my father demanded.
The kid wore a metallic-green parka with a fake-fur-lined hood encircling his face. His black knit cap, pulled low on his forehead, might have looked menacing on someone else but on him seemed more like an ill-fitting shell. When he unzipped his coat and pulled rabbit ears from his dungarees I could see that he was a wisp under all that armor, with remarkably clear skin for an adolescent, and a piano player’s hands. Sweat formed a V on his brown velour shirt and along the top of his lip, where he had the vague trace of a mustache. Something about him—his starry eyelashes, his fine, almost pretty features—seemed familiar. “I’m here to return your stuff,” he said. “I live down the street, and I know who broke into your house.”
“What are you talking about?” my father asked.
“A friend of mine did it. He’s got a secret hideaway where he keeps his loot, so I know where your flags and TV are. I could get them right now if you want.”
Tino stepped out of his Street Fighter pose. “That sounds like a crock.”
“I’m serious,” the kid said. “Give me ten minutes.”
“So you can disappear? I don’t think so.” Tino took the bat from Linc and brandished it. “You’re not going anywhere.”
My mother sent Molly and me upstairs, but we stopped and crouched just below the landing, where we could watch the drama as if from balcony seats.
“You can’t keep me here.” The kid turned defiant. “I came over to do you a favor, and this is the thanks I get?”
My mother asked if he had actually broken in, and my father said, “Not exactly. He was snooping on the porch.”
“Snooping?” The kid’s voice cracked. “I was about to knock on your door, that’s all. Is knocking on doors a crime?” He lowered his hood and wiped the sweat from his lip with his coat sleeve. I concentrated on his face, trying to place him somewhere. Hill Street? Pierce Park? Was he a bagger at the Safeway?
My mother said, “He’s right. We can’t keep him here,” and though Tino protested and shook the Louisville Slugger—“I know what you’re up to. You can’t bullshit me”—my mother apologized to the kid and let him stand back on his feet and walk out the door, just minutes before the red lights of a cop car pulsed across our ceiling.
My father answered, and Officer Mazzocca walked into the parlor. He had a cop name, but didn’t look like a cop. He was small and wore Buddy Holly glasses. His well-muscled partner, in a uniform so tight it seemed part of his skin, leaned in the doorway, one thumb in his belt, the other hooked over the handle of his billy club.
“Thanks for coming,” my father said, “but we’ve sorted it out. I heard some activity in front of the house and thought we were being robbed, but it was just one of our neighbors.”
Mazzocca took off his glasses and wiped them with a handkerchief. “Pete, right?” He turned to his partner. “Pete’s a member of the Neighborhood Watch.”
“I haven’t been on patrol much,” my father explained. “We’ve been kind of busy around here.” He introduced everyone. The hippies barely looked at the cops and kept their hands in their pockets so Mazzocca’s partner, Officer Trammell, couldn’t crush their fingers with his action-hero’s grip. I looked on from the landing, trying not to think of the marijuana plants in the side yard, Steal This Book and its opinions about the police (“Pigs have small brains and move slowly”) stashed in my tower, Cinnamon’s poncho hiding her morning’s cache of shoplifted over-the-counter drugs.
“You folks have a good night,” Mazzocca said and followed Trammell out the door.
The cops hadn’t been gone five minutes when the kid in the fur-lined coat rang the doorbell, this time carrying the stolen television and flags in his arms.
Sweat beading on his forehead, he poured through the open door like a river through a sluice and set the TV down heavily in the hallway. “Satisfied?” he asked Tino.
“And why should I believe your story?” Tino cocked his head back. “Who’s to say you didn’t snatch our shit in the first place?”
“Why would I bring it back?” The kid stuffed his hands into the pockets of his dungarees.
“To get in good with us.”
“For what reason?”
“Because we live in the biggest house on the block, and you think we’re rich. But take a look around.” Tino pointed toward the living room, where the pillows lay strewn about the floor and the only decorations on the walls were my mother’s Hopper print and Cinnamon’s hand-designed banner:
WELCOME TO
OUR HOUSE
ACT FIRST. ASK PERMISSION LATER.
My mother intervened and apologized for Tino’s rudeness. She asked the kid his name and where he lived. He said Quinn, and that his place was close to here, a little ways across 16th.
Tino asked, “And who’s this friend of yours, the amateur thief?” “I can’t tell you,” Quinn said. “He’s got it bad enough already. And I don’t dime-out my friends.”
Tino tried to press the matter, but my father told him to go easy on the kid. “The important thing is we know who broke into the house.”
“You’re looking at him.” Tino pointed to Quinn, who shook his head.
My father defended him, but did want some assurances that we wouldn’t be robbed again. “What’s going to happen when your friend finds out you’ve returned our things?”
The fur of Quinn’s hood surrounded his head like an aureole. “He left town for good a month ago. His folks split and he moved to Cleveland. He was going to get caught sooner or later.”
“And where’s this so-called hideaway?” Tino asked.
“Why would I tell you when you’ve been treating me like a criminal?”
Cinnamon took Tino’s hand and wrapped his arm around her shoulder. The freckles along her clavicle looked like grains of brown sugar falling into a cup. “Let’s go upstairs,” she said. On his way out of the room Tino glared at Quinn. “I know your scam. Don’t think you can fool a yippie.”
Tino and Cinnamon brushed past us on the stairs, her peasant skirt tickling the skin of my arm, her sweet tobacco and patchouli scent a fleeting intoxication.
My father dug for more about Quinn’s friend and their secret hiding place. “As a member of the Neighborhood Watch, it’s my duty to report unlawful activity.” But Quinn had no reason to trust us, and though my father had changed his tone, only a half hour ago he’d been teetering over the kid, his slugger’s arms tensed to strike.
Quinn said he couldn’t give away that information, and my father reminded him that even knowing about such a place made him an accessory.
“Don’t threaten him, Pete,” my mother put in.
Quinn headed for the door and zipped up his coat. “Some thanks I get,” he repeated.
Before he stepped into the night and walked away, I took one last look at his face and remembered where I’d seen him. He’d been a regular all summer at the Mount Pleasant Library, and always sat at the same table, near the military history shelves. More than once I’d seen him napping there, his head resting on a stack of books.
After Quinn had left, Molly and I climbed up to our rooms. I tried to return to Teddy Roosevelt, but couldn’t concentrate as my parents’ voices rose up to the rafters. My mother laughed at my father for claiming it his duty to report criminal activity, but he said he never would have joined the Neighborhood Watch if she hadn’t been so paranoid about where we lived. She blamed him for getting us a house in a dodgy part of town, and he blamed her for inviting the hippies. “You want to talk about criminal activity,” he said. “Most of it’s going on under our roof.”
“Is that my fault?”
“It’s not mine.”
“Did you have to pull him into the house and act like such a tough guy?”
“I didn’t lay a hand on him. He followed me in on his own.”
“You were being threatening, Pete, pushing your weight around. Would you have been so suspicious if he was white?”
The house went silent for a moment, just crickets playing their violins outside my turret window. “It was Tino, not me, treating him like a criminal,” my father said. “What would you do if someone in a big coat stood on your porch at midnight, peering into your house? And where do you get off asking such a question? You’re the one who made me put bars on the windows and extra locks on the doors, and who’s always telling Daniel and Molly they can’t cross the street into the black neighborhood. Have you forgotten the scholarship program at Lake Bluff, everything I tried to do for those South Side kids?”
“No, I haven’t forgotten. It got you fired. We’re in this mess because you got fired, Pete.”
“And what have you done besides complain? I slept on the couch for three fucking nights. Some thanks I get, indeed.”
That comment would put my father on the couch for three more nights, and drive my mother to look up her long-lost friend Linda Silvers, chief of staff for Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson. I was in the kitchen eating Cheerios while my mother thumbed through the white pages and wrote down Linda’s number. “Your father says all I do is complain. I wonder how he’d like it if I got off his back and started working full-time. You think this house is falling apart now. Wait till I’m not here to do damage control.”
But when she reached the main office of Senator Nelson, a secretary told her that Linda was in Milwaukee getting out the vote for Jimmy Carter during the final election push. Asked if she wanted to leave her name and number, my mother said she was a constituent and would try again later. But something in her voice made me doubt she would anytime soon.
It was also around this time that Tino announced at dinner that he’d convinced a pair of twins and two of their friends to sign on for spring term. “They’re stuck at a tight-ass prep school for now, but they’ll be ready to start full-time in January.”
“How did you find them?” my father asked.
We had eaten the last of the co-op and garden tomatoes a few weeks before, so I was struggling to choke down our dinner of roasted acorn squash buttered and salted in their skins and bulgur wheat so dry it parched my throat.
“Does it matter?” Tino shrugged off the question. “Gotta take what we can get.”
“I’m just curious,” my father said.
“I tripled our enrollment, bro.” When Tino ate, he held his fork in his fist, like a baby in a highchair. He put down the fork and wiped his mouth with his shirtsleeve. “The twins are the headmaster’s sons at that goose-stepping St. Sebastian Prep, up in Cathedral Heights, but they can’t take the mind control. They’re this close to blowing up their daddy’s school, so we’re doing everyone a favor. And you’ll get a kick out of this, Pete: their best chum is the bishop’s son, and he’s trying to blow up the cathedral.”
“Great.” My father topped his glass with red wine. “Just what we need, a bunch of baby anarchists.”
“They’re not literally blowing shit up. These kids are mellow in the right environment.”
Cinnamon, helping herself to seconds of bulgur, laughed and added, “You mean the right state of mind.”
My father swung an accusing look at Line, who had been minding his own business. “So you sold drugs to these kids? Is that how you found them?”
Linc dug into his OshKoshes for an after-dinner stick of gum. “A piece for peace?” he offered, and my father said no thank you, he was starting a school here, not a smoking circle.
“This isn’t my racket,” Linc said. “I’ve just been strumming my guitar. If you’re asking about the cannabis, I put it in pots for winter and donated it to my friends here. I’m out of the business.”
“It’s true,” Cinnamon said, with a disappointed lilt in her voice. “Can’t you see he’s Mr. Clean?”
My father looked at the bald, earringed icon on Line’s T-shirt and said he didn’t care who was selling the dope. It had to stop. “I don’t want another visit from Trammell and Mazzocca, let alone the DEA.”
My mother got up to clear the table. “The important thing is, they recruited four students.”
Tino licked the ends of his mustache, which curled over the top of his lip. “For the record, selling is a disputable term. Sure, I was enjoying some high-grade Hawaiian Indica, and the young men did pack a steamboat with me. And perhaps green paper exchanged hands, but I never named a price. The payment was voluntary, a suggested donation, as you’d find at any museum or church. It’s like trick or treat for Unicef. You don’t have to slip a dollar into the box, but you know it’s the right thing to do.”
It wouldn’t be long before Tino would carry actual Unicef boxes from house to house on Halloween, leading Molly and me around the same Wesley Heights neighborhood where we’d picked up the big TV some months before. Our parents stayed home that night to hand out candy corn, while Molly and I dressed up as hippies—I already had the hair, so to complete the look I wore one of Line’s dashikis and a matching headband. Molly disappeared under a Janis Joplin-style hat that she found in Cinnamon’s closet, a pair of moccasin boots and plenty of bead jewelry. Linc and Cinnamon dressed as they probably had on a typical day at the commune—overalls and an army jacket, floral dress under a shearling coat—and pretended to be our parents; it was nice to see them looking like a couple again. And Tino broke out his Father Guido Sarducci costume, playing priest and reformer to our ragtag band.
We filled our bags with candy, most of which Cinnamon would later sell to worker bees downtown, masquerading as a volunteer with New Dawn drug treatment center. By the end of the night we had knocked on enough doors to stuff six Unicef boxes full of bills and change. Linc drove the van home, with Cinnamon in the passenger seat and Tino in the back with us kids, counting up our earnings.
“A hundred and fifty-eight dollars and twenty-five cents,” Tino announced. “Take us to easy street, driver.”
“But it’s for Unicef,” Molly said.
Tino laughed. “That money’s ours. Unicef’s a bunch of wolves in sheep’s clothing. They skim that money for themselves.”
“But we said ‘Trick or treat for Unicef.’ That means we were lying.” Molly took off her floppy hat and fixed her hair.
“Oh, please.” Tino turned to me. “Tell your sister how the world works, bro.”
I remembered Abbie Hoffman’s chapter on “Free Money,” how he said that charities are one of the biggest swindles around, and something like eighty percent goes back into the organization, for fancy cars, big salaries, or tax write-offs for Jerry Lewis. “We need that money for rent,” I said. “We have to give it to my dad.”
"I didn’t see him trick-or-treating. We earned this bread fair and square.” Tino lifted his fake cross from his chest and shook it at me. “I could use a coat. They say we’re looking at a brutal winter.”
Cinnamon turned around in the front seat. “Come on, sugar. All for one and one for all. Put the money in the pot so everyone’s happy.”
In the rearview mirror I caught a glimpse of Line; the trace of a smile rustled his beard.
Back at home, we walked into the parlor startled to find my mother, father and Quinn in casual conversation. Quinn was dressed up for Halloween in an old-fashioned pilot’s outfit, complete with wings on his jumpsuit, a quilted flying cap and goggles.
“I’m William J. Powell,” he volunteered. “A pioneer of aviation. You’ve heard of Charles Lindbergh, but Powell could have crossed the Atlantic backwards. Too bad he was a black man.”
I was surprised to find Quinn in a talky mood and would come to hear he’d been at the house for a while. He’d gone out trick-or-treating alone, and my father had invited him inside, perhaps to make up for their first encounter. Once Quinn had gotten comfortable, he’d grown garrulous, as if no one had sat down and listened to him in a long time. He said little about himself, but he did tell a long story about his friend Anthony, the amateur thief who had moved to Cleveland, and who, in fact—and this was only half the story; the rest I’d learn months later—had lived in our house.
Anthony was six years old when child services took him away, after his mother died. She’d been drinking Cisco, and climbed up on the railing of Duke Ellington Bridge. He had been walking with her and witnessed it all, tried to call out but the wind picked up and she fell. Before long he was in foster care, and over the years would stay with six families, all but the last of them the same song: a dollar would turn up missing from someone’s wallet, and he’d be blamed all the way back to Horizon Foster Home to start over again. But one day when the city was trying to place him, the Kurtzman family called, and Anthony moved in with them, right here on the corner of 16th and Hill. So many years of waiting for a family, and it looked like Anthony had finally found one. They gave him the tower room, across the hall from his foster sister, Rachel, whom he adored. The rest of the Kurtzmans occupied the second floor. The kids—Rachel, Josh, Adam and Becca—called their parents by their first names, Sol and Joy.
For over a year, according to Quinn, his friend was “living The Brady Bunch, in black and white.” Quinn and his older sister, Angela, used to come over for dinner and for sing-alongs in the living room. The Kurtzmans grew wildflowers in the garden and sold them at the Eastern Market on Saturdays, and Anthony went out in Sol’s van on his first real job as a housepainter. He did the taping and sanding, Sol did the rolling and Josh and Adam did the trim. Anthony made three hundred dollars and worked through August as if it wasn’t hot at all, even painted the outside of this house and was getting ready to do the inside when school started up again. But winter came around and Sol had debts that made him slam doors and put cracks in the walls. Around Christmas Joy’s mom in Cleveland went into kidney failure, so Joy and the girls packed up for Ohio. And when the grandmother died, the boys went, too. Sol and Anthony stayed and held down the fort through January, February and March, and there was talk of the rest of the Kurtzmans returning to Washington by summer. But all that changed when Bailey sent a notice in the mail: they had thirty days to move out.
Now Quinn was helping himself to more candy corn. Molly and I showed our parents our Halloween take of Milky Ways, Hershey’s Kisses, Sugar Daddys, Mary Janes and SweeTarts. My mother confiscated the candied apples and pocketed a large handful of Smarties for herself, but we knew we couldn’t keep the candy anyway so didn’t raise a fuss. Linc handed my father the Unicef boxes, grabbed his guitar and headed for the back patio to practice. Shooting Quinn a Mephistophelean smile, Tino took Cinnamon’s hand and led her upstairs, where I pictured them stripping out of their priest and hippie clothes and frolicking like dolphins.
“Good news,” my father announced to Molly and me. “We have another recruit.”
And so it was that in the space of the few hours we’d been out trick-or-treating Quinn Simmons had gone from onetime suspected thief to our latest enrollee. Fed up with being the pestered freshman at Cardozo High, he seemed eager to join Our House, and right away.
“You’re sure it’s okay with your parents?” my mother asked again.
“They let me do what I want.”
In time I’d learn more about Quinn’s parents, and why he made all his own decisions, but for now I only cared that he was our newest student, our lucky number seven.
“Well, I ought to be getting home.” Quinn lowered his goggles over his eyes. “Time to ‘fill the air with black wings.’” He saluted us on his way out the door.
After he’d left, my father explained that Quinn would be our first scholarship student, on a work-study program. “I’m going to take him under my wing, so to speak. You should have heard him go on about flying machines. He’s obsessed with zeppelins,” my father said to me, and because I must have looked confused, having only heard of Led Zeppelin, often at high volume in the Lake Bluff dorms, he added, “You know, blimps.”
Not that my dad had a clue about aeronautics, but this was probably far from his mind on a night that would mark the beginning of our first good run.
We hadn’t had a trick-or-treater in the hour since we’d returned, but then we heard a knock on the door, and to my delight it was Cleo and two friends, dressed as Charlie’s Angels, with Factotum Frank their stolid Bosley. In Wesley Heights we’d passed several versions of “the eye-popping, crime-stopping trio” in the same getups. Cleo was tomboy Kate, with a sporty vest over a wide-collared shirt, jodhpurs and knee-high boots. Her friends, whom I didn’t recognize at first, had voluminous wigs—blond and brown—and carried cap guns in their silver-studded belts.
Farrah and Jaclyn took off their wigs, and we all had a good laugh when we recognized Dawn and Stephanie under the disguises.
“I didn’t know you were friends,” I said.
Cleo twirled her cap gun. “When the Townsend detective agency calls, we answer.” She waggled the gun at me. “Any funny business going on around here?” I was still in my hippie costume. “Illegal narcotics, perhaps?” she asked. “Come on, girls, let’s pat him down.”
I blushed and backed away while the Angels ran up and tickled me.
After I’d recovered from this most welcome assault, Stephanie reported that Sister Donovan was delivering four more students for the spring term who wanted to do special projects that weren’t offered at OLPH. “They’re mostly poets,” she said with a sneer. “They do rhymey, performancy stuff, not my cup of tea.” I didn’t mention that the only book of poetry I could recall ever opening was The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. My father had bought it for my mother, and inscribed it with the lines from “On Marriage”:
Love one another, but make not a bond of love.
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
“Oh, and I almost forgot,” Cleo said as she and the Angels dropped candy corn into their bags, preparing to leave. “My dad wanted you to have this.” She handed us an invitation. “We’re throwing an election party. Hope you all can come.”