Once, in the 1990s, we were traveling in the drifting snow, coming up the mountains, heading for Lake Tahoe. I had a new, brawny Jeep, but my dad complained I was driving too fast. “Slow down,” he said, being an inveterate backseat driver including while riding shotgun. I reminded him I had four-wheel drive and was not close to an unsafe speed. He was unimpressed: “Yeah, but this ain’t no magic carpet.”
That trip was remarkable, to me, for another thing he said. When I was driving up to the hotel I did something—cannot recall what it was—he said I shouldn’t do. Then he reconsidered and realized what I did was all right. “Sorry,” he said. What’s noteworthy is that that is the one and only time I can recall he ever said to me he was sorry about anything. I did not feel vindicated or satisfied. It wasn’t some moment I’d been waiting for all my life. No, in the instant, I was a little bit astounded and—honestly—worried for him, as his apology was so out of character. If I were still in therapy, that incident might have made for a productive session. As for my mother’s apologies, she never caught up with my father in the “I’m sorry” department, because she never admitted being wrong in her life. Perhaps she couldn’t risk an apology, thereby revealing what must have felt, to her, like weakness.
•
As I reflect on my sociopathic and depressed and self-absorbed parents, now both buried in New York, it becomes clearer that truth and truthfulness were existentially contestable, or dismissible, propositions for them. All the same, they were larger-than-life, charismatic figures—at least so they seemed to me as a boy. Despite scuffling throughout their lives, they were so glamorous they might have been the once-upon-a-time Brad and Angelina of my Greenpoint neighborhood. But given their break-up, that’s already an anachronistic cultural signifier. Think instead Bogie and Bacall. You know how to whistle, don’t you? You put your lips together and blow.
My Polish mother was variously called Catherine, or Kay, or Caza (pronounced Ka-sza, short for her given name, Cashmera). Her sepia-tone photos show that she was quite the stunner and, by reputation in her own family, she was a party-girl flirt. She was also a liar of genius, a manipulator par excellence. She never backed down from a street fight, being someone who viscerally communicated that she may not come out victorious in a skirmish, but she would not circumvent conflict, and if she were to be vanquished, the winner would bear scorch marks for souvenirs.
My father’s catch-all counsel for living, passed down to me from the earliest days: Don’t take no shit from nobody. Into his eighties he would defend his wife’s combativeness by saying she was temperamentally a junkyard dog, and he was heartbreakingly good-looking in his own right and had his own longstanding challenges with fact. My mom said that he would lie even when the truth was on his side. Based upon my own experience, I can verify that was at least one time she was not lying. They were in many respects a perfect match, and theirs was a marriage made, if not in heaven, in the legendary Brooklyn of the dese and dose, fuggetaboutit, shut the fuck up fifties and sixties.
D. W. Winnicott once wrote an essay on “The Effect of Psychotic Parents.” I’m no shrink, but I’ve paid many a shrink’s bills, and I wouldn’t suggest that my parents qualified as exactly psychotic. He makes some sense to me, especially about my mother:
“Depression may be a chronic illness, giving a parent a poverty of available affect, or it may be a serious illness appearing in phases, with more or less sudden withdrawal of rapport… An infant in this position feels infinitely dropped.”
Infinitely dropped: there’s an image I will roll around in my mind. He goes on to theorize more pointedly:
“Children can deal, therefore, with mood swings in their parents by carefully observing them, but it is the unpredictability of some parents that can be traumatic. Once children have come through the earliest stages of maximal dependence, it seems to me that they can come to terms with almost any adverse factor that remains constant or that can be predicted.”
And I could do that, too. However adverse the home factors might have been, they did become almost predictable. Nothing seemed more unforeseeable, and paradoxically downright normal, than my father skipping town that summer. Beyond that, to be precise, daily life proceeded like clockwork: my father comes back from the track, busted, my mother goes nuts. My father’s depressed, my mother’s furious. My father disappears, my mother plots revenge. Winnicott continues:
“Naturally, children with high intelligence have an advantage over those with low intelligence in this matter of prediction, but sometimes we find that the intellectual powers of highly intelligent children have been overstrained—the intelligence has been prostituted in the cause of predicting complex parental moods and tendencies.”
I don’t know how high my intelligence is now or was at five or ten, but it was definitely overstrained, so hold that thought. Who knows, being overstrained might be a functional definition of a writer.
My good friend is a real-life rocket scientist. “Everybody thinks that rocket science is hard,” he once said to me. “You know what’s hard? Being a parent.” He didn’t need to mention the obvious corollary: same is true for a child.
Hold that thought, too.
•
The clouds immediately parted when I found in 2015, post-parental-mortem, those court records. I finally was in possession of some undeniable facts. Facts can be good. For one thing, they are facts. Even in this postmodern age, when facts and opinions blur and blend into each other on talking-head television shows or in political debates as well as in Departments of Philosophy, matters on the public record are, you know, on the public record. If I learned how to use the newly acquired information, I might be on my way beyond my parents’ deceptions and nondisclosures and secrets, and beyond the facts to the holy grail of the truth I missed as a child.
But Holy Grail? That might be exaggerating the goal. Growing up, I was unacquainted with fables or knight errant legends, but even ten-year-old Brooklyn kids have somehow already seen it all, or blithely convinced themselves as much. Therefore I might have intuited that quests for such a thing as a holy grail end up with nothing more than a junky, cracked mug. Funny how these new facts constituted the beginning of another, just as important, search into my own life.
It’s often been said that the great gift for a child who becomes a writer is a miserable childhood. I can see the point, though I never felt adequately grateful to thank my parents. One thing I did come away with as a child was that my parents wouldn’t tell me the truth or that they didn’t know or that they didn’t care or that it didn’t matter, and I’m not sure to this day which is preferable, or if these distinctions are worthy to be distinguished. I have made a very modest career of creating fictions of my own, in novels and poems as well as in my life. I used to spend many a fifty-minute hour in one talk therapist’s office after another narrating my story of my story. In actuality, long ago as an adult, I had my own run-ins with law enforcement and cultivated an addiction of my own, and so did my brother John, which in his case eventuated in a tragic conclusion. Now late in my own life, the jury remains out. I have been conducting a hunt for clues to my clueless family and to the origins of my clueless self, because where else do we first shape notions about ourselves if not in our families?
In childhood my Brooklyn world was not a song lifting up in the sunlit room, fields not rippling gold, skies not reliably big and electric blue. But that’s okay, because that was the gift, such as it was, in the end. I didn’t grow up in Downton Abbey, but let’s be clear, it wasn’t Game of Thrones, either. But Goodfellas, or Donnie Brasco, which was a movie shot not very far away in the old neighborhood? Maybe a little bit, with The Honeymooners thrown in.
From the first, I became intimately acquainted with shadows and darkness and rage and absence and chaos, awareness of which I perhaps somewhat perversely cherished. That awareness proved indispensable. I didn’t find peace and light and music and presence at home. I did find it elsewhere: in school and in my pious little boy’s religious faith. That’s where I plumbed the psalms and stories and rituals and parables in order to locate the coherence and integrity that I otherwise lacked—and yearned for. A destabilized childhood provides somebody who grows up to be a writer, like me, the opportunity, and the urgent invitation, to lay an imaginative foundation for one’s own life. If I didn’t do that, who would?
•
Watch out now, step lively. Here’s where Jesus crashes the party on the waterfront. That rabble-rousing, metaphorical-sword-swinging shit-kicker rides in—without my consciously registering as much—to rescue my small Catholic self. To quote chapter and verse:
“Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14: 26)
“Someone told him, ‘Look, your mother and your brothers are standing outside, waiting to speak to you.’ But to the one who told him this, Jesus replied. ‘Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?’ And pointing to his disciples, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.’” (Matthew 12: 47-50)
“Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have come not to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, and one’s foes will be members of one’s household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever does not take up the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and whoever who lose their life for my sake will find it.” (Matthew 10: 34-39)
Harsh, bracing stuff, if construed literally. Maybe He with a capital H was speaking elliptically—and when was He not speaking in parable and why would He bother to do otherwise? From early on, I grasped that Jesus was never fucking around. Theologians and saints universally agree on that point, though they usually phrase it somewhat differently. It’s all or nothing. When He says hate and lose the family, the Religion class teachers would doubtless qualify that Jesus is exaggerating for effect, yanking his audience’s chain, nothing more, because elsewhere He makes clear we should honor mother and father. Not sure I am buying that, quite. I have no recollection of ever reflecting on those scriptural verses as a child, or ever hearing them, but I’m not swayed that matters much. I swallowed whole the olive, pit and all. Jesus’ message was, yes, you need your family, but you need Me more. Maybe I could work with that, for a while.
•
Paging Dr. Winnicott.
“Artists are people driven by the tension between the desire to communicate and the desire to hide.”
“Tell me what you fear and I will tell you what has happened to you.”
“For the five children in a family there are five families. It does not require a psychoanalyst to see that these five families need not resemble each other, and are certainly not identical.”
Dr. Winnicott?
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As for truth-telling, and more importantly, truth-knowing, if not now, when?
My father might have enjoyed the mixed blessings of having the last word in his son’s book—though I doubt it, and besides, if he did enjoy something he would never explicitly own up to it. It might be the case that the most memoir writers can affirm, in good faith, about the story of their lives they are telling is that, for what it’s worth, when they get it right, it was true at the time.