Incriminations

At the risk of sounding glib—and this is one risk I have no alternative but to take—my father’s experience does not seem totally unconnected to the small-time author of a memoir, his son, who shares his first and last name along with some related compulsions (if not his ecclesiastic street name). A memoir capitalizes on the repositories of memory, the moveable treasure chests locatable throughout multiple corners and nooks and crannies inside the circuitry of the brain, and it deals in disclosure, in risking confidences and self-exposure, in telling the truth about oneself and others as far as it can be known. The unexamined life may well be, as some wise guy once said, not worth living. But what about the overexamined life? If you’re not reckless enough, it might not be worth writing about.

As for mundane pressure, a memoir writer registers that in spades. Publish a memoir, lose a friend or two, infuriate somebody, bank on it. And endure questions from strangers at book talks such as: “Who are you to write a memoir?” and “Why should anybody care?”

In such moments, I always wish I could quote my serpent-tongued mother when she advised me during her pugilistic social life: You remember, sonny boy, rude is not funny. Then again, she never would have uttered much less subscribed to such an axiom.

Memoir writers confess and they confide as they may or must, and what a world of difference between the two. As Emily Fox Gordon lucidly explains, the entity or person to whom (or which) one confesses has “the power to condemn, punish, absolve, or forgive.” Whereas “[c]onfidences are offered to equals, or at least the offering and accepting of confidences places the two parties involved on equal terms.” In any case, confessing and/or confiding as they do, nobodies have lives, too, and if they’re lucky, or unlucky, enough, have a tale to tell, which their memoirs will have the burden to prove one way or another.

In Subway to California, published in 2014, I ranged around my childhood recollections in Brooklyn and its challenges through my adulthood missteps in California, my education and my teaching career, my experience as a professional card player, my time in a Catholic religious order, my failures in love and academia, my coming to terms (or largely not) with loss, my anxiety, my life as a writer and husband and father. It also prominently treats my unfinished relationships with family members, and the mysteries that persisted unresolved after, one by one, they died.

When you publish a memoir as I did, unanticipated consequences routinely occur. As many authors of memoirs attest, the genre encourages personal boundary encroachment. Reviewers are one species, people you know, or don’t know, another. Those people will say anything. Often, if not always, to your face. Maybe that’s understandable, and that’s life in the big city.

About some interested parties you do unambivalently care for and about, you wonder if you struck the grace notes you intended. I should qualify. You wonder, that is, if you’re somebody self-mortifying like me. And wonder’s not the word, more like obsess. Then, of course, there was the distant relation who posted nasty stuff about me and my book on Facebook, so I obviously hit the pitch perfect note there, and he was satisfyingly bug-be-gone zapped into cyberspace, and that’s more than enough airtime for the sourpuss. Some of my droller friends demanded to know how come they weren’t in the damn book they paid good money for, but as another friend and graduate school colleague wrote, “This is finally the guy we knew we never knew.” I don’t know how to defend my choices (for starters it wasn’t an autobiography), or what to tell them, except this: take a look at the dedication page of this book in your hands. All in all, reactions on the personal front ran the gamut. For instance, my Catholic boys’
high school blood rival told a mutual friend I never respected him because he wasn’t Italian. (Here I thought my best friends in school were named Fredotovich, Gray, Hooper, Marmolejo, and Reed.) And then this: a most significant ex, with whom I shared a long-term, volatile if life-defining relationship that unraveled insanely and cinematically, rocked me. “We remember such different things,” she wrote me in an out-of-the-blue email. Fair enough, if chilling. She didn’t come off as tarnished as I did in that book of mine, but nevertheless: that was stunningly gracious on the part of somebody who, though her identity was concealed, might have wanted a piece of me. (If by the off-chance you are reading this, and you know who you are, please don’t sue me.) Her kind appraisal of the book shook me and continues to resonate. And I also heard from many former students, and theirs were often the most moving, gratifying messages. But there was my college girlfriend, too, first-love and all, who didn’t talk to me for a couple of years. I can explain, and as you will see, she will play a major role in this story.

Once those court transcripts materialized, I was nourished with manna from Google. As we know, it was manna that unexpectedly fell from the sky to sustain those wanderers in the desert looking for the Promised Land. As for me, I didn’t know from promised lands, which as far as I understood did not exist along the bus lines in Williamsburg, and I would have needed a guide dog to wend my way to la de dah Park Slope or the Upper East Side.

Equipped with those transcripts, I did set out to uncover the central mystery that had dogged me my whole life. Gradually, I inched closer and closer to unveiling the heretofore concealed predicate for our exile out of Brooklyn as well as the untold story of my father’s life—and its connections to my younger brother’s as well.

As is often the case, the unknown has a way of leading to other unknowns, secrets to more secrets.

Following the map of my father’s steps from the past, I am by turns alarmed, horrified, astonished, intrigued, baffled. Sometimes I am entertained, and sometimes impressed. From Brooklyn hustler to somebody who held respectable blue-collar jobs for thirty years in California: that bare bones summary does not tell the whole story. And some jaundiced types might suggest that his last full-time position, elected leader of a Teamster union local, was borderline respectable at best. The FBI itself was skeptical and they launched an investigation into his activities. More later.

F. Scott Fitzgerald writes in the opening to The Great Gatsby that Gatsby “…turned out all right in the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams…”—that’s the intuition that moved Nick Carraway to tell his story, or so he claims. Carraway begins by remarking that he has been turning over in his mind his father’s advice: to never forget that other people haven’t had his advantages. In my instance, I myself have been turning over in my mind things my father said but, somehow more, things he never said.

My old man didn’t own a mansion on West Egg, Long Island, didn’t cultivate Gatsby’s grand romantic designs or wear “such beautiful shirts” (he religiously stuck with his racetrack standard-issue polos). Carraway of New Haven and I probably don’t have much in common either, though we both seem fascinated by the shadow lives of criminals, but no, as far as I know, my dad did not attempt to fix a horse race or the World Series. True, he was chased by cops into the woods of East Islip, Long Island, but he never gravitated to the Hamptons, never put on so much as a little cocktail party, and his dreams were sometimes as impenetrable for me.

Did the borderline-okay Di Prisco turn out all right in the end? Again, the answer is yes and no, and besides, Who wantsta know? Maybe in the end Pope and I both “beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”—much like every writer of a memoir. And maybe like everybody else.

It could be that I am overthinking this. I’ve been accused of that, and much worse, before. Perhaps it’s simpler in my case. Everybody knows what Joan Didion notoriously and perceptively wrote: “Writers are always selling somebody out.” Maybe selling out oneself and others runs in a family fathered by an informant.

Whaddayou, writin’ a book?

When my father testified, he occasionally invoked his Fifth Amendment rights, so as not to incriminate himself. I don’t believe such rights are available to the writer of a memoir.