I confidently hypothesize that, if my father never explicitly addressed the allure of the criminal life, he glamorized it. If he didn’t, he would have been different from everybody else in the neighborhood.
For instance, all of us kids knew of the hit man who lived on the block. He had a name, but it’s lost to me. He resided five or so houses down from mine, and the whole world would come to a spooky standstill when he opened his door and hawkishly surveyed the street, left and right, for a moment. On the lookout for drive-by shooters? No idea. We fell into a hush and studied him at a safe distance as he walked down the steps of his stoop, slow as destiny, ponderous as inevitability. He was a huge and meaty guy, with arms like legs, and legs like tree trunks. His puffed, pallid face was absolutely expressionless, as we imagined to be the requisite mien of conscienceless killers. He moved with a graceless purposefulness, wasting no effort, again as we imagined to be consistent with a hit man’s remorseless efficiency. From a distance he appeared ageless, but I feared making eye contact, which might lead to unpleasant consequences. He never acknowledged punks like us or uttered a single word in our direction. We observed him when he was leaving his apartment, which means we only saw him at dusk, the hour we must have concluded that killers punch in for work. We were in awe. He was one of us and deadly. He even lived with his mother. Not that anybody ever saw her. My brother Bobby, who feared nobody and was a pretty tough guy himself, signaled this was nobody to mess with. When we trick-or-treated on Halloween, nobody’d be crazy enough to knock on that guy’s door. How’d we determine he was a hit man? This is stuff you simply know when you’re a Brooklyn kid. He didn’t scrawl HIT MAN where his name should have been beside the doorbell, which, again, you’d be out of your mind to think of ringing.
Was he in reality a hired assassin? Odds would be against his sporting such a CV, I suppose, but I have no idea. In our boyhood conception of mythologized reality, he cut a menacing figure, and of that I am as sure as I am of anything. He never amounted to our version of Boo Radley, Harper Lee’s recluse and the vessel of Scout’s childhood mystery, the familiar stranger who materializes to reclaim innocence and goodness for the town. Yeah, on every single level, that wouldn’t have sufficed for us. And maybe he was nothing but a big fat mama’s boy who had no life and washed dishes at an all-night diner. Nobody was going to tug on his coat sleeve or trail him to find out.
Then there was my mother’s best friend who lived in the nicest house by far on the block. She had a boyfriend who favored flashy clothes, such as red blazers and black shirts, and he drove a white Caddy, and his face was so crimson that I assumed he was holding his breath—either that or he was drunk again. Nice guy, but we gave him wide berth, too. Rumor was he was a mobster. My dad indicated he was unimpressed by the man, and that position impressed me. (Curiously, this fellow, Mike Gallo, appears in cameo in one trial transcript, the partner of a bookmaker my father fingered and the dirty cops popped.)
When I think of my dad’s past, I may, of course, be romanticizing him, or myself. I may not be in the past at all. As Augustine proposes: “If we could suppose some particle of time which could not be divided into a smaller particle, that alone deserves to be called the present, yet it is snatched from the future and flits into the past without any slightest time of its own—if it lasted, it could be divided into part-future and part-past. So there is no ‘present’ as such.”
“And yet,” Wills glosses, “we know that past only as a present memory and the future only as a present anticipation. There is, then, no real present and nothing but a real present. The mind brokers this odd interplay of times in a no-time.”
That’s where and when I find myself here and now: in this “no-time.”
•
Did my father have internal crises? A crisis of consciousness? Ever? Did he have an internal life? Who doesn’t? That last one is not a rhetorical question.
On this score, I summon up an odd, somewhat trivial image pertaining to me and him. Once he took me to the San Francisco airport when I was heading back to college. On the way to the departure gate (back when you could do that), we ventured into the bookstore, and he bought me something to read for the trip, a skinny hardback I badly wanted. This was a famous book by probably the most controversial psychologist of the day. The author published it when he was thirty-three and an international celebrity, and it treated the subject of schizophrenia, not that I shared this intel with my father, who merely wanted to do something nice for me about to board a red-eye bound for New York. As I view it now, the book adopted a psychologically questionable approach, if not morally bankrupt, and not that I saw it that way when I was in college; that was when I looked for every opportunity to name-drop the author in footnotes to my papers about anything, poetry, history, politics, anything. I think it’s fair to argue that the author essentially valorized schizophrenia, viewed it as a species of liberation from convention, and as a result he clinically failed patients, who needed not fancy cheap psychedelicized theorization but medical care and treatment. It is a wildly irresponsible book, finally, but when I was in college this point of view entranced me, feeling unbalanced as I did at the time, and feeling split within myself all day long. The author was R. D. Laing, whose star has probably permanently sunk, and the book my unsuspecting father gave to me was The Divided Self.