When I wrote Subway to California, I had an incomplete picture of my family. Of course, I still do and perhaps to some extent always will. I still have an incomplete picture of myself. But I knew I didn’t have all the pieces in place, and that was my burden to read between the lines, make a few guesses. My father never held dinner company spellbound by his stories. There was never much in the way of company around, at dinner or any other hour, and nobody touted him as the Italian Frank McCourt. Yet my hunches, based upon my father’s rare and truncated and oblique disclosures, were occasionally in the ballpark, as it turned out.
The details surfaced unexpectedly and fleshed out the history when I lurched upon the transcripts of three of my father’s trials that Google posted in January 2015. Google may be richly deserving of the privacy- and copyright-protection criticism leveled against it, but these materials were a godsend. I am neither a consumer advocate nor a legal scholar, but I know what I like. And no amicus briefs in support of the tech giant will be forthcoming from me. I have written some books, however, and I taught for a long time, and I had my own dustup with the FBI when I was a young man, so I could read the testimony and I had a personal stake in the findings. Nobody in my family besides me ever graduated from high school, and there were no book discussions or bedtime readings in my Greenpoint home, but I think it’s probably not the worst upbringing to grow up with a father who was a criminal and a snitch, a fabricator and a world-class evader who internalized the street maxim that nobody was ever hanged for something he didn’t say, and he didn’t say much—at least before those trials. Probably not terrible DNA for a novelist, poet, and memoirist.
This book of mine begins with an assertion: I am not my father.
And with a question: how would I know one way or the other?