My brother Eddie died of liver failure at NYU hospital in February 2002. He was fifty-nine.
My brother John died of a heroin overdose on his bathroom floor in San Francisco in January 2003. He was fifty-one.
My brother Bobby died of lung cancer in a Coney Island hospital in the middle of night, March 2008. He was sixty-four.
My mother died of congestive heart failure and Alzheimer’s in Florida in January 2010, one day after her birthday. She was eighty-six.
My father died in Northern California in July 2012, like his wife also of congestive heart failure and Alzheimer’s, at his assisted living residence. He was eighty-seven.
They are all buried alongside each other in a Catholic cemetery, overlooking Brooklyn.
•
Looking back over that cruel catalogue, I have a complicated reaction. On the one hand, life seems increasingly ephemeral. But on the other, I feel the opposite, too: that these lives my family lived will always matter, to me, of course, but to many others as well I could name—and in fact, people I have named in this book and in my previous memoir. So anything but fleeting, because look: there they are, memorialized on the page. Memorialized inadequately, to be sure, by me, using whatever limited resources of information and imagination I have at my disposal.
There are few extant narratives of their lives, fashioned by themselves, except for some letters, those trial transcripts, and my recollections of their words and deeds. If I shunt them into narratives of my own devising, because they for the most part left no written record, I stand vulnerable to the charge of misappropriation, for my own self-serving purposes. I might also be accused of expropriation, though given they are all gone, I wonder if that is logically feasible. In any case, my motivations may indeed be suspect. You may believe I am selling myself as an example of redemption, and this book is nothing more than self-promotion. To that criticism I would respond: I have never felt redeemed, not for a minute.
I remember them. Is that enough? No, not for me. I can hear the way they laughed, I can see the way they walked into a room, I can taste the food they cooked. I cannot legitimately suggest at every juncture that I am narrating pieces of their lives. All I can say is that these are my accounts of how I remembered them and what they meant to me. I don’t think I have treated them unfairly, though I may not be in the best position to know; that might be the task of my reader, if not my confessor or confidant. My complex relationships with each of them were sometimes painful, sometimes joyous, but they remain unforgettable.
As for that catalogue of the dead above, I also envision the one name missing, so far. I glimpse the gaping opening for one more, my own.
•
One time my three brothers and I went out together, a night on the town. Early seventies, I believe. I could say we were partying, but it’s impossible to remember the plan or who formed it. I remember sitting on the subway taking the GG from Brooklyn to Queens, then the L to Manhattan, heading to a club of some kind. I wonder whose idea the excursion was, or the purpose, beyond being together. It must have been a fall or spring night, because winter coats are not in evidence in my memory, but I recall I was in college at the time, an alien place none of them would experience firsthand. The recollection is so crisp, so luminous, and at the same time so blurred, like so many recollections of me with them. I do know for a fact that I was happy to be there with my brothers. I don’t know how the evening went or how it ended, but I was conscious in the moment that the occasion would never be repeated—and it wasn’t.
•
Monsignor Shane has been there for so many big events in the life of my family and me. Another way to put it: he has been there in the sacred moments, which is the functional definition of a sacrament. He’s celebrated Mass for us and consecrated the Eucharist. He baptized and confirmed Mario and served as his spiritual mentor, too, when he was a boy who converted, of his own volition, to Catholicism. Shane also presided at the wedding of Patti and me. He visited John in prison, which doesn’t qualify as a sacrament, exactly, but maybe it ought to. He administered last rites to my dad. By my count, that amounts to at least five of the seven Catholic sacraments. I could also probably add a sixth sacrament of Reconciliation, what used to be called Confession, because he has heard me out in my darkest hours. I was talking with him recently and reminded him. He laughed when he said, “True, but I never gave you absolution.” Then again, I never asked. Sometimes, you can’t get forgiveness from someone else.
What about my father’s religious inclinations—he who was tagged Pope for having been supposedly outed when he was caught strolling out of a church? And let’s stipulate that he did indeed make a visit. Did he light a candle, did he make his own confession, did he fall on bended knee and pray? I will never know what if anything he was seeking there.
A handful of times in his seventies he asked us to take him to Mass, but he might have merely wanted to hang with his grandson on a Sunday morning. He never addressed the subject of belief, or disbelief for that matter, around me. In this context, I have to note that there was a seventeenth-century French genius of probability theory who is famous for a certain formulation. Pascal argued it was on balance better to subscribe to God’s existence, because the risk of eternal damnation outweighs any possible benefits of concluding otherwise. As he put it: “If you win you win everything, if you lose you lose nothing.” For most of his life, my dad rarely passed up a chance to make a bet. Considering the infinite upside of this speculative opportunity, he certainly made worse bets than Pascal’s Wager. Why wouldn’t he bank on the possibility—Baby needs a new pair of shoes—he just might hit the ultimate jackpot?
•
As his days began to dwindle down I took him to the track whenever he asked, memorable moments for me if not him, because the Alzheimer’s was already eroding his brain. For one such excursion, we went to Golden Gate Fields in Albany, California, and he put his money down on a horse to win the 2010 Kentucky Derby. The horse went off nine to one. “Sounds right,” he said before he bet it, spitting on the favorite, who would ultimately finish out of the money. Unlike millions of other gamblers, and despite his cognitive deficits, he bet the winner, a horse named Super Saver. Great call on the part of this handicapper, but there was no saving him from Alzheimer’s.
•
After he settled into his assisted living residence, he seemed to enjoy coming over for supper to our house, a thirty-minute drive away. We picked him up or arranged for a ride in a car service he had championed long ago, chauffeured by an Indian woman who treated him gently and respectfully. He always wanted the same dish for Sunday supper: Patti’s spaghetti Bolognese. She is a great cook, and he ate with deliberate gusto and in monkish silence, as was his custom, before his appetite permanently wandered off. And it soon became progressively more challenging for him to be away, even for brief spells, from his residence. A proud man, he was occasionally bushwhacked by the betrayals of his own bodily functions.
Otherwise, we regularly visited my dad as his final descent began, virtually daily. Sometimes he was shuttled outside in a wheelchair into the lovely gardens to spend some time with a hospice dog. These outings became increasingly rare for him. It could be tough to sit up in a wheelchair. When he stayed indoors and we entered his apartment, he would usually be lodged in his easy chair, staring into the middle distance in the quiet and curtained shadows, which he preferred. When he noticed us, he invariably greeted us the same way each time:
“Oh, shit.”
This made us always laugh; how else could we respond? Was Oh, shit an exclamation of surprise, a complaint, a smack? I don’t know. It was the signature exclamation of my old man from Brooklyn.
He and I battled before dementia and we battled after, when it wasn’t a fair fight. I confiscated car keys; he was a danger on the road. He was always demanding more razor blades (he had a stock pile) or more toothpaste (the cabinet overflowed). Personal hygiene was always a major consideration for this fastidious man, even toward the end. The TV remote vanquished him. I commandeered credit cards, paid his bills. He loathed that I had financial control, though conceded: “Guess you’re an honest guy.” High praise from a man like him.
He didn’t speak at length or coherently, and when he talked at all he seemed to be struggling to get his bearings. One fairly recurrent question emerged:
“Have you talked to my wife lately?”
And that’s the way he phrased it, not have I talked to my mother. Once or twice in the past, I had tried to tell him that his wife was not here anymore, which I know now was something I shouldn’t have done. That was when he looked at me like I was an idiot, or that I was pulling one over on him. It had been a couple of years since she had died, but what did that matter to him?
We would pass the hours together, our conversation, such as it was, disjointed, haphazard, minimalist. After a while, I ceased responding to the literal content of his statements and queries, and I listened, even to the silence, tried to be present, till that, too, became excruciating—for me and perhaps for him.
He had round-the-clock care on the part of a team of Tongan helpers, a concierge doctor, at some point hospice nurses, as well as other nurses and caremangers at the residence, along with his loyal care manager. And also my wife, Patti, who was a trooper and who faithfully showed up, often bringing fresh changes of clothes. She and my dad genuinely liked each other.
We sensed one day that the death watch had, almost without our awareness, already sneaked upon us. And we also sensed that, no matter how many of us were looking after him, we were outnumbered by the singular specter of dying.
I was leveled one day by a new question, one I had never anticipated and one that he would never repeat.
“Is John coming by?”
It had been almost ten years since my father and I embraced by the side of my brother’s casket. But yes, that was indeed a crucial question a dying father like him, and a brother like me, would wish to have answered.
•
So what is, finally, the truth about my family and me? How do I make sense of his life and how I grew up and who I became?
My father’s experience contributed to the making of who I am, for better or worse. I see traces of him everywhere—in my own domestic life, and in my own work. I think I understand better now what I dimly grasped as a little boy: that my journey from Brooklyn made me feel like I didn’t belong anywhere, certainly not California. But maybe that is one key to being a writer, at least one like me. My father had this in common with me: we always conceived of ourselves as outsiders.
These family traces can appear to be indistinguishable from scars, but scars can be eloquent if not always beautiful. At least they have their own stories to tell. My sometimes turbulent early home life necessitated the development of my own self-reliance, even as it richly colored my experience—and made the world seem risky and dramatic. Resisting my mother and father’s suspect values helped me create my own, or discover others that were more useful or profound for me. My internal life deepened. I found myself drawn, intellectually and emotionally, to the realms of literature and art. That didn’t mean that the darker realms didn’t hold their appeal at various times, and that demons similar to my dad’s wouldn’t have their way. Could I have spoken of such matters to my parents? I suppose I could have, although I cannot say I did, and I doubt my ideas would have made much sense to them. Does that matter? To me, it does, which is why my family reminiscences, including the happier ones, are tinged with regret and disappointment. I don’t blame them, let’s be clear, for their choices. They were who they were. And without them, I wouldn’t be me. Again, for better or worse.
As for my father, he will always be my dad.
My dad compulsively betting the horses.
My dad in the wind.
My dad testifying in trials.
My dad under indictment.
My dad who dragged us, without a plan beyond his immediate survival, to California.
My dad who had moments of pride and moments of incomprehension. My dad who couldn’t fathom the bottomless pain he felt when John was an addict and died alone on a bathroom floor. My dad who was the adoring, faithful grandfather of my son. My dad who was dominated by his gambling “vice,” and swallowed up by his insanely loyal relationship to my mother, his wife. Also my dad who in his thwarted way loved his boys and couldn’t do much about how they grew up.
Complicated man, Joe Di Prisco. All things considered, that’s maybe not the bleakest epitaph in the world.
His death is simply one final stage of our never-ending relationship, and there’s no simply about that. I will always be Popey’s son. And yet he remains a question mark. Maybe I did not know him while I was growing up, but then in the end we came full circle: as he was dying he couldn’t recognize me at all.
My whole life I tried to read him. I came to see how I had to write him for myself. I guess he was correct from the beginning when I badgered him with my childhood questions. I was always writing this book, my book about the Pope of Brooklyn. That was true at the time, and it still is.