A few years ago, I attended the memorial of a school friend. He had become an undercover cop in a rough part of the Bay Area, and he had made his rep by infiltrating the Hells Angels. We had talked about his experience a few times over the years. It was clear he didn’t escape without paying a serious psychic price. Big, tough guy, but a sweet man, and a beloved dad, too. I always liked Carlos. He died after an extended bout of excruciating physical suffering.
His older brother approached us, school alums gathered together reminiscing about our old classmate. He thanked us for being there, many of whom he hadn’t seen for forty years.
“Rich,” somebody said to him, gesturing toward me, “you remember Joe Di Prisco?”
He studied me. “I sure do. But who’s this guy?”
•
So of course, we may change, by choice or by chance, and sometimes it isn’t pretty. I conceive of my own life as having an arc or two or three, along with a swoop and a crash and a whoosh or two—or ten. How come my father’s life didn’t? I can only conjecture. Am I striving to think in terms of what I presume to be his fixed ideas, or am I assigning to him my fixed ideas and preoccupations about him? And what if I flipped the basic storyline? Instead of his being a small-time criminal who cleaned up his act and went (comparatively) straight in his late-thirties—what if he, as a teenager and a young man, made some mistakes that endangered him and put him in hot water, from which he eventually extricated himself, transforming himself into a solid citizen in the process?
Good guy, bad guy. Sinner, saint. Hood, hero. Scammer, searcher. All simplistic paradigms. Nobody’s life can be usefully viewed in black and white. And experience is not linear. More like circular, or parabolic.
I could have a tiny clue as to a possible life-changing moment he experienced in 1961. Being cross-examined, he is asked about how he came to remember precise, crucial details as to a crime he alleged to have witnessed.
A. I just came back from California.
Q. Anything in California to refresh the memory?
A. I left the family behind.
Q. Now, how does it refresh the memory?
A. At the time it did.
•
Could it be that he finally registered, long after the deeds he committed, how much he had jeopardized himself when he engaged in his criminal activities? Is it possible that for conceivably the first time in his life he was grasping how much he was going to lose—or how much he had already lost—namely, his freedom and his family, whatever that was, whatever it meant to him? And did this recognition dawn upon him once he was “safe” in California and therefore in greatest danger of seeing himself as he truly was?
In the moment of being on the stand, when he curiously and awkwardly reached for a different narrative link to explain the functions of his mind and the acts of his will, was he attempting to conceptualize his life as a series of disastrous choices that might be rectified? Perhaps unconsciously, was he framing his decision to appear in court as a type of affirmation of some value or principle beyond himself?
A. I left the family behind.
Q. Now, how does it refresh the memory?
A. At the time it did.
There is a chance he was making a play for sympathy, as a dad and a husband seeking reclamation and rehabilitation, and that possibility should not be gainsaid. But equally likely, to me, there stood a chance while testifying that he was caught in the act of actively fashioning meaning, fresh meaning in what had thus far been the senseless catastrophe of a young man’s life. It would have been easy, for instance, to see the futility of his flight from justice, but that is precisely what he resisted. This recognition, if real, would relate to his bookmaking and playing the horses. Nothing feels emptier than the vacancy of gambling and losing. And as for his small-time criminal life, at some juncture at least he must have seen how utterly pointless that all was. Not that he possessed the language to express this thought, but Popey never gave in to the siren call of nihilism. If anything, he might have viewed himself as a type of hero questing for something beyond himself: I left the family behind and I’m trying to do right now. More than anything, I am not a victim, I am willing a free choice. Self-serving? Who knows, but judgers gonna judge anyway.
Similarly, when the cross-examining lawyer pressed him elsewhere by asking if he gambled for a living, my father adamantly disputed the accusation:
Q: You didn’t tell him, “I’m working as a stonecutter, but I’m really a big gambler,” did you?
A: Well, he knew I gambled.
Q: Well, was that your business?
A: No, it was a vice.
Q: It was a vice? You put bets on horses, is that it?
A: Yes, sir.
Q: You went to the track?
A: Well, I went to the track and bet with bookmakers.
Q: Is that all you do, bet on horses? Is that your specialty, your vice?
A: Gambler.
Being a gambler, he said in effect, was not a career choice; his gambling was, in essence, his “vice.” That is, he declined to view his gambling as a failed profit-seeking business venture. On numerous other occasions at home, during those knockdown drag-outs with my mom, he heard her call him a fucking degenerate, but the charge stiffened his spine, and he didn’t buy that label, either. As he states above for the record, he viewed his gambling as a moral failing and his falling. Admittedly, his singularly ready frame of reference for a defect on this order was not philosophy or medical diagnosis or mental disorder. If anything, the context for admission of vice was something like morality, or at least some pale sense of religiosity. His gambling might have been incurable, he couldn’t take a pill for that. And yet, maybe he was merely bullshitting, and it wouldn’t be the first time if he were. His language suggests his conceivable, diffuse awareness of an overarching ethical spectrum. And though he was no moral theologian or ethicist, a man named Popey who owned up in public to personal degradation might feel not blame so much as guilt. I don’t want to overstate this case, but maybe I am doing so anyway. A man who calls his gambling compulsion a vice also might catch sight of a hopeful glimmering of the flip side of the damnation caused by his wickedness: salvation. Again, did this move constitute an implicit, calculated appeal for sympathy? After all, who among us is not a sinner? he might have added. Then again, in the company of cops and criminals, he didn’t need to.
•
The older and frailer he got, the more helpless and the more dependent he begrudgingly became. His one-word routinely invoked mantra was family. This was understandable, and strategic. In his burgeoning anger and flickering dementia, he swung it like a truncheon to urge me to pay attention to him. It sounded like a foreign language, and I did my best to speak it.
Am I conducting a sort of dialogue with my deceased parents? And to what end at this point in my life? But wait. Do we ever stop conducting conversations with the dead? And the dead? Are they truly, absolutely dead? Maybe they in some sense exist in the present because there is nothing but a present time for them—in our imagination.