by Rob Sedgwick
We sized each other up: two scaredy cats who’d somehow wound up at the OK Corral walking toward each other by mistake. In two days, we’d gone from friends and partners to guys in opposite camps. Nobody drew. Anxiety levels high, we did a brisk “walk and talk” to thwart possible surveillance. Jordan spoke first.
“So. This is really bad. What are you doing? Hi, boy.”
He bent down to pet Tybalt, who allowed the pet but still seemed to be in his own world.
“What’s with him?”
“‘Flamenco Sketches.’”
“Smart boy,” said Jordan. “So what are you gonna do?”
“You mean now?”
“No, I mean...never mind. You’re cooperating, aren’t you?”
“What do you mean?”
“With the DA.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“What do you mean you guess? You either are or you’re not. Which is it?”
“Yes, I am, I—”
“Like fucking pulling teeth. Look, I understand we didn’t have anything in place like ‘in-case-of-fire-break-the-glass-and-pull-the-thing,’ but I got to tell you, Diego is really unhappy. He wants to dust you.”
“You mean for fingerprints?”
“As in he wants to take a contract out on you. I’m doing my best to stop it, but he figures he has to stop you from talking to the DA for his interests, my interests, and our mutual interests.”
“Okay, but if I get ‘dusted,’ don’t you think the DA and DEA are going to know who dusted me or killed me or whatever and that’ll fuck up your mutual interests?”
“I know, exactly—that’s why I’m trying to get it stopped. But Diego is a stubborn motherfucker. And here’s the thing: no one will ever know who did it. It’s going to be some Mexicans who come in, won’t speak any English, and pop pop pop, they’re out of there and back to Mexico before anyone even knows what hit ’em. Especially you. So, seeing as how it’ll just reflect badly on me and my current situation, I’m trying to get it called off.”
“Jesus Christ. I’m a moron, and now I have to die for it?”
“Relax, I’m doing the best I can.”
“Terrific, now I feel all peachy. I fucking kept asking you what if we got caught, and you always said it wasn’t going to happen!”
“I know, well…”
“Well what?”
He took a long pause to gather his thoughts as to why all this had turned out the way it had. Then, as if postulating a theorem, he offered, “Well, I guess there’s organized crime and then there’s disorganized crime. And I guess we were just disorganized.”
Tybalt relieved himself.
“Ain’t that the truth!” I was too wrapped up in my own anxiety and the possibility of my impending assassination to scoop it up. I continued with Jordan: “How’s everything else?”
“Not so hot. You know Nikko had the money counter and the safe, right?”
“The whole time? You never told me that!”
“Why should I? Everything was on a need-to-know basis. You didn’t need to know.”
“God, I knew something fishy was going on when I came to his house that day and you had the shopping bag filled with cash.”
“Yeah. Columbo you’re not. Anyway, he gave it all up, including the four hundred and fifty grand I had in the safe, and now I’m fucked. Seth even came to his house the night we were inside to try to get the safe, but Nikko was so freaked out he wouldn’t let him up. Now I’m out all my cash. Seth said he would pay for my lawyer, thank God—he’s such a gem—but this is all not good, Rob. It’s not a good thing.”
“No, it’s a very bad thing.”
“I’ll see you at the bar. Beware of Mexicans who look like they’re just coming for a quick visit. Bye, Tybalt.”
My cockles warmed, we hurried out of the park. I instinctively turned my head for what would be the first of about a million looks that year in search of suspicious-looking Mexicans.
—
A couple of weeks after Jordan’s stern warning, I was at Brats hanging out with an old friend, Roy, drinking and doing coke in the bathroom. Roy was Danny DeVito without the career. We were completely loaded, having a great time hanging out and shooting the shit with Moss behind the bar. Everything was hotsy-totsy until I looked up to see a group of very suspicious-looking Mexicans wandering into the bar, all moving together, part of the same herd.
What were they doing here?
There was no way out of this bar except through the front door, which they now happened to be sitting in front of. Or really right next to. But there were so many of them, the gaggle spilt over with about one and a half of them blocking the door. I looked at them as if I had X-ray vision to see whether they had concealed weapons or vendettas against rat-squealing white boys with severe alcohol problems.
Were they about to execute a hit?
One guy, straight out of the cast of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, was giving me the serious hairy eyeball. I met his glance for too long, then looked away. When I turned back, he was still staring at me.
At the bar, Moss and Roy were yakking about nothing, oblivious to my situation.
Now the guy’s stare was a laser beam right at me. He looked like a serious badass.
I saw the bar’s layout in my head: no way out. Not through the basement or the bathroom, no beam-me-up-Scotty stuff. I was fucked.
I turned to Moss and quietly described the Mexican situation. He had already noticed it.
Taking the bat from behind the bar, which was there to beat ass if necessary, he strode up to the group, Mickey Mantle ambling to the plate in a World Series, bat resting on his shoulder, relaxed and ready to save the day.
“Can I help you ladies?” he asked, low and rough.
Consternation. Umbrage.
“I not a lady!” the badass said. “Why jour frien’ stare at me and scaring me and my friens so much? Why he look so mad with me? I just here to drink with my friens after work.”
“Where’s work?” barked Moss, readying the lumber to blast some Mexican skull.
“Bahama Mama. En de keechen!”
“You guys are dishwashers?”
“Si,” said the badass.
The tension vanished as if it was never there. For the rest of the night, we drank for free: me, Moss, Roy, and our new friends, the Mexican hitmen.
19
“I can’t believe this!” my father said.
My dad and I were meeting for lunch at Sarabeth’s on the Upper East Side. This was the first time I had seen him since I had gotten out of the Metropolitan Correctional Center. My father wore a bow tie, blue blazer, and tortoiseshell glasses.
I was hoping Mexican hitmen wouldn’t find me at this restaurant.
“I cannot believe you would do something like this. I mean a drug dealer, for God’s sake,” my father chastised. “You should have stayed at Westminster, should have gone to Groton,” he said, referencing his prep school and the prep school founded by my great-grandfather Endicott Peabody (whose nickname was “Doo Doo”) and attended by the likes of FDR and people called Biddle. “I should have made you go to church and dress better. You’re a Sedgwick, for God’s sake!”
The Sedgwicks all hail from Stockbridge, Massachusetts. This is the destination and crucible of all things Sedgwick. There you will find the Sedgwick name (which looks very cool when it’s spelled out in capital letters on a SEDGWICK gravestone), the Sedgwick House, nay, the Sedgwick Compound—there are three houses on about ten acres in the center of town—and the Sedgwick Pie, which is actually the family graveyard. It’s called the Pie because all the Sedgwicks are buried there, in concentric circles around the founder of the family, Judge Theodore Sedgwick and his wife Pamela. The design is so that come Judgment Day, when we all rise, each Sedgwick will see nothing but other Sedgwicks. Once my fath
er, who liked to walk us round the Pie, overheard some tourist say, “It is odd how they’re buried in circles like that,” and my father blurted out, “Yes. We like it that way.”
—
Most graveyards are spooky to kids, probably to anybody, but as young teenagers, my cousins and I hang out and party in the Pie until the wee hours, our rationale being that all the folks buried there are our relatives, so if some ghost happens by and decides to join us, it will be fine because they are family. And it really is pretty cool. All those gravestones from the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century, and these great old immensely thick pines that isolate our proud Sedgwickian plot. Judge Theodore Sedgwick and his wife have big tower gravestones you can climb, and when it is cold out, the sky is so clear.
—
Mom always said the great thing about Dad when they were first married was that she could take him anywhere and he’d fit in: Harlem; the HB acting studio, where she worked in Greenwich Village; wacky parties at George Plimpton’s on the East River, where food was never served, just boatloads of booze that Mom liked but Dad barely touched.
He left Mom to have an affair with a stewardess and then dated a parade of twenty-year-olds. The real kicker was when, at forty-eight, he dated an eighteen-year-old second cousin whom he was supposed to be chaperoning. I was fifteen at the time. She was incredibly hot. A peach of a pear. In spite of the taboo, women were jealous because they wanted to be her, and men were jealous because they wanted to be with her. I was fed up, because here was a hot chick who was ridiculously close to my age that I wanted to fuck, but my dad was doing that instead. It was horribly confusing.
Ultimately, he longed for the stability he wouldn’t find until his third wife, Meadow. Immediately after their marriage in 1986, Dad’s hair went from longish and free-flowing to a Prince Valiant cut, from well-dressed and stylish sexy to bow ties, blue blazers, and high-rise corduroy. His body went stiff.
Dad opened the Sarabeth’s menu, looked at it for some moments, then squinted microscopically and pronounced the Ch, as if utterly perplexed:
“Challah bread.”
“Huh?”
“What is this Challah bread?”
“Dad, what are you talking about?”
“Here, under ‘Breads and Such,’ it says Challah bread. What is that?”
“Dad, you know Goddamn well it’s pronounced ‘Hallah bread’ with a guttural H. It’s Yiddish. You’ve lived in NYC for the last forty years. You know this. Why do you act like you don’t?”
“I’ve never seen it before in my life.”
“Oh c’mon, Dad. Just because you wear bow ties now doesn’t mean you can renounce your knowledge of all things Jewish.”
“So funny you say that, because I was thinking the other day that before I met Meadow, I just dated short Jewish women. What was I thinking? Amazing.”
“Dad, my mom is a short Jewish woman. I really don’t appreciate that.”
“Sorry, tiger, you’re right. I didn’t mean your mother. Your mother is a queen, and I’ve always said so.” Then he asked with real concern, “Why would you do something like this?”
“I needed the money, I guess. I needed something to do, to feel better about myself. It was stupid, I know.”
“But it’s against everything you are, how you’ve been raised. You were raised on the Upper East Side, and now you’re a common criminal.”
“I guess I am. I fucked up. I’m sorry.”
“You were raised around money and privilege. All those tennis lessons!”
“Yeah, I really blew it.”
“What will Meadow’s friends think if they find out? What will my friends think?”
“I don’t know…but I thought you dumped all your old friends after you married Meadow.”
“Well—”
“So they’re really her friends.”
“No, they’re my friends, too.” He paused. “They’re her friends and they’re my friends.” He had a bright epiphany. Then, with a fervent, prep school resolve, he determined, “They’re our friends!” He relished a satisfied pause before continuing. “And why didn’t anyone call to tell me what was going on? I was a district leader. I went to Harvard; I know people.”
“I thought Mom did call you.”
“Not until the next day.”
“Why didn’t you show up at my bail hearing?”
“Meadow had something very important going on, so we couldn’t make it.” Dad looked over the top of his tortoiseshell glasses to really take me in. “Jesus, tiger, you look like you went some rounds with Dempsey. You smell like a brewery. Why are you so angry? You remind me of a tackle I played against at Dartmouth. Poor old Dartmouth…”
His eyes opened wide as he prepared to rhapsodize about his youth. He was in a land by himself.
“I was at left tackle, and it was the only time I ever scored a touchdown. Poor Dartmouth didn’t win a game that year. Their halfback fumbled at their own twenty, the ball leapt into my hands, and I ran for my life, cradling that ball with everything I had, dashing amazed at my good fortune toward the goal. I crashed through an imaginary barrier that had kept me from glory for my entire life, and in for the touchdown! The entire stadium roared. Such ecstasy. I was so happy. I couldn’t stop laughing.”
He was so happy and so far away, in another era. It was an irritating, sad, and beautiful thing to behold. He was looking off to the side, smiling broadly at a crowd that was not there. But looking at him, you’d think it was. I didn’t want to dampen his mood.
The waiter showed up. Dad scanned the menu again, looked down his nose, pointed at a particular item, and asked, “I’m sorry, but what is Challah bread?”
20
It’s a magnificent summer day—brilliant sunshine, wisps of clouds here and there, but the rest of the sky an excellent and calming blue. The ocean lifts me up high, then, as if jumping out of a window, I drop down only to be saved by the roiling, bobbing surf. The waves are significant, but not massive.
At thirteen, I can bodysurf pretty well, but right now I’m having too much fun just treading in the ocean swell with my amazing father. He’s such a great dad; he’s come to East Hampton just to see us kids for the day. We’re so happy together that the whole beach is looking at us. I copy his every move.
Summers in East Hampton pre-booze and drugs are pretty shitty. The people are incredibly rich, not kind, and aside from a little tennis, I don’t do too much. We’re alone most of the time, like a dog being let out to run freely in the backyard but it just sits instead and waits for its owner to show up so they can do something together. Nikko, Kyra, and I often bike up to the main highway, hoping that Mom and Ben will be back from New York soon.
But on this day, I am serene. On this day, I am important. Dad is here and he surfs the water like a golden champion. One can’t help noticing that he looks kind of godlike, whereas everyone else on the beach his age looks blubbery and cumbersome. He is so happy to be near me. I am so happy to be near him. Our closeness is infectious. Ben Heller, who is gracious in all matters concerning my father and allows Dad the use of his house as if it were his own, puts an arm around my shoulder. “Son, I must say that it is beautiful to watch you and your father in the water together. It is a joyous thing to behold.”
I am bursting with pride because my father and I are so close. There is a bond between us that everyone sees, and I want them to see it, to know that such a remarkable love can exist in the world. That it can never be broken.
—
At ten years old, right after Mom marries Ben, I call my father every day. He tells me about his new girlfriend, who is always many years younger, but that’s okay. I’m his shoulder to lean on. Part of the job. People blame Dad for divorcing Mom, but now Mom is set with Ben and Dad is alone in the world, so I back and protect him. He may not be parental, but he shows up and is always
fun and happy in a teenage way to see us.
He says, “Right on, man!” He wears his hair long. He takes us to cheap but sometimes exotic restaurants. One is on the ground floor of a brownstone, run by a Haitian family. The wife and daughter wear these high turbans on their heads and walk from their hips. Everything in them sways to a gentle breeze. The food is home-cooked curried chicken with coconut and chutney. Candles light the dark. At other restaurants, if the waiter ever asks Dad what we are having because he or she doesn’t want to be bothered with hemming and hawing children, Dad always says, “I don’t know what they’re having. Ask them.” Then he always asks us what is going on with us and we take our turns and talk.
When we go running together on Central Park West and kids throw rocks at us, he yells wild threats at them and throws rocks right back.
He dates a vegetarian for a while, so there is never any meat around, just these dog-bone-tasting, fibery crackers and cheese. It doesn’t seem grown up. We are kids and have to eat real dinner. But at least he thinks he is happy, so that’s fine by me.
When Dad gets engaged to another one of the young girlfriends, I am surprised and nervous because I don’t think they belong together. Dad always points out her pillowy furniture and says, “These pillows and softness means she is a soft person.” And he smiles big and thoughtful. I don’t think he is right. I think she is lost, hard and angry, and the soft is just a front for the hard.
After they get engaged, I ask Mom, “Do all people who get engaged get married, or can the engagement get broken off?” Mom says it could be broken off. I know this will happen to Dad.
When the woman breaks off the engagement, he is devastated. He calls me up and asks me to meet him at the diner around the corner. I sprint down to Columbus Avenue. He tells me to order some dinner because it is dinnertime. I order lamb stew. He can’t stop crying, but he says he has hay fever. The lamb stew comes. It is a sick pale brown color, and I try to eat it so he doesn’t feel badly that we go to shitty diners all the time. Then I say things to make him feel better, but I don’t believe any of the things I am saying, things like: “It’ll be okay, Dad. Things will get better, you’ll be fine.”