Me: “She’s nothing but a selfish drug addict.”
Dad: “Don’t you ever say anything like that about your aunt! You have no idea what she has done for this family!”
Me (eyebrow raised, head cocked sideways): “For this family? Or for you? What has she done for you, Johnny? Or, shall I say, to you?”
I’d be immensely satisfied at an exchange like that. After I got out of the hospital.
I had loved Rita, too, and didn’t want to believe that she could betray my mother the way she had. It was Rita who named me; when my mother favored “Joanna”—she had insisted on a J name, in honor of my father—Rita gunned for “Jennifer,” and won. Rita was like my third parent. During all those California visits, while Rita and my parents sat around reliving the good old days—while I eagerly hung on every word—did Rita or my father ever feel awkward because of what they had done? Did they ever lock eyes across the dinner table in secret acknowledgment of their intimacy?
If only my mother had opened her eyes! She must have been in utter denial when it came to both of them. But that was Mom—I remembered how she didn’t recognize me in the stairwell at Merle Place after the doctor called with my father’s cancer diagnosis. When the shit hit the fan it was like she erected a wall behind her eyes. I also remembered the vial my mother found in the pocket of my father’s suit, which she blamed on Rita. My mother didn’t consider for a moment that the vial, which is used to store small amounts of cocaine, could have been his. Well, how else would you explain why there’s a crack vial in the suit your father wore to his father’s funeral? But the more appropriate question was, why wouldn’t he have had drugs at his father’s funeral? I could probably look back upon every major event in my father’s life and feel pretty confident that he was doing coke.
When I packed up the apartment on Merle Place I’d found the letter granting my father parole in 1988. Did he sell drugs when he was still on parole? Would he really jeopardize the rest of his life this way, possibly die an old man in prison? According to my mother, my father hooked up with Rita to sell drugs around that time, but how? I could just picture it: Rita shows up at our house in California toting her Louis Vuitton luggage, delicate gold bracelets and chains, and perfectly coiffed hair, maintained weekly by stylists. We spend a week at Le Meridien in Coronado or the Bel Age in West Hollywood and she offers to pay for another few days with one of her limitless American Express cards. Having just lost the lucrative contract at Chapman College, my father watches Rita’s feats of spending with intense interest, wondering how she could possibly pay for it all. After she returns to Florida, leaving an Opium-scented cloud in her wake, my father pours a scotch on the rocks and faces a mounting pile of bills that a carpet cleaner’s salary—even a tax-free one—cannot possibly conquer. He stares at the phone and remembers all the drug money he must have cleared until he got pinched. He remembers that Rita’s daughter is dating a member of the Medellìn cartel, who supplies Rita with all the cocaine she can spin into gold, and he wants in on the action. He’s never committed a crime in California. Who would suspect a graying carpet cleaner of supplying coke to a handful of acquaintances, and more important, who would care? This was going to be small-time stuff. No body counts this time—no need. This was to be a friends-only endeavor. The more he thought about it, the longer the list of potential clients became. This was the eighties. Everyone dabbled from time to time, even in squeaky-clean Orange County. And so a gram scale appeared in our apartment and Dad began making his many trips back east.
I suddenly pined for the ignorant girl of an hour ago who didn’t have to carry her mother’s hurts until the end of time. Did I really want to know my parents’ secrets that badly? I thought of all I’d never know, all I’d never get to the bottom of because most of the witnesses were dead—like Paul Washington, my mother’s ex-boyfriend and my father’s onetime cellmate. Paul had died just a month before, a fact confirmed by a Times researcher who did some digging for me after I made some calls and found out his last name. Or Bobby Wyler, who I discovered had indeed died of lung cancer, just as my mother presumed. I was running a race I would never win because I’d always be twenty-five years behind.
CHAPTER 19
May 2007
• • •
LIVE IN NEW YORK LONG ENOUGH AND YOU END UP RUNNING into your past on every corner, where a memory lies in wait—drunken nights, public breakups, crying jags in full view of ten thousand pedestrians. I wonder if it was like this for my parents when they moved back here. Something tells me it wasn’t; they had the habit of leaving the past in the past and never looking back, probably developed during their years living as fugitives. But I especially wonder about what it was like for my father. Did he peer down the lazy streets of Gravesend or Bay Ridge and see a drug deal, a mistress, a robbery? Did he ever go back to Owl’s Head Park and come face-to-face with 1963?
Where was Owl’s Head Park, anyway? One night over penne norcina at Al Dente I posed the question to Jeff, who was giddy over his impending wedding to a Londoner named Paul. That’s right, my gay ex-boyfriend was getting married before I was. The union meant Jeff would have to surrender his marketing job at Verizon and relocate, as civil partnership is legal in Britain; after a few months he’d get a green card and work authorization, which was more than the United States was prepared to offer. I was thrilled for him, but as Jeff’s departure loomed I tried not to think about yet another loss in a lifetime already filled with so many.
“Owl’s Head Park?” he asked, reading one of the Daily News articles from 1963. “Are you kidding? Jen, I grew up there. I played there as a kid. This was right by my house. My father grew up around there, too. Your dad killed that guy there?”
I nodded. No wonder my father had liked Jeff so much. They were from the same place, albeit separated by three and a half decades—and half a dozen cadavers.
“I can’t believe he just did it, right there in the park,” Jeff marveled, reading the article. “I bet the guy deserved it, but,” he added. A true Brooklynite, Jeff always used “but” at the end of a sentence instead of “though.”
“So a junkie’s life is worth less than a non-junkie’s?” I asked.
“Regardless, the people your father killed were criminals, you know what I’m sayin’?” he argued with his trademark nervous smile.
“So you’re saying it’s okay because he killed them for a reason?” I asked sarcastically. “Like, he retained his humanity because he wasn’t a serial killer who preyed on random people?”
“They were dirtbags, Jen,” he said. “Trust me. He did what he had to do. It was a business.”
Words that would warm my mother’s heart.
I SPENT THE NEXT morning and afternoon at 111 Centre Street—after three years of stubbornly ignoring certified letters I was forced to succumb to jury duty, a privilege I was prepared to resist until I received a notice threatening to cart me off to jail unless I showed up at 9:00 A.M. So it was off to SoHo to alternate between fighting sleep and reading every newspaper published in the tristate area.
After an informative video narrated by the late Ed Bradley and three jury pool lotteries I was called into a room with eighteen other unlucky souls. I recognized an anchor from ESPN among the miserables and realized my rehearsed excuse—“I couldn’t possibly serve, my sincere apologies, I answer phones at The New York Times”—wouldn’t exempt me. After we sat and raised our right hands, one of the court officers began polling the prospective jury pool, and I was surprised at the number of people who claimed they couldn’t be objective when weighing the burden of guilt in a slip-and-fall case on a street corner in Washington Heights. They didn’t even have to give a reason, they just had to raise their hands! As much as I couldn’t afford to surrender my salary to spend three weeks listening to tiresome testimony, I wouldn’t allow myself to go out on that note. I had scruples! But when the officer asked whether we had either (a) sued or been sued, (b) been accused or convicted of a crime, or (c) known some
one who had been accused or convicted of a crime, I knew I had my Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card.
“Number 13,” the officer said, pointing to me, “what do you do for a living?”
“Um, I’m an editorial assistant on the Metro desk of The New York Times,” I said, praying that my proximity to the daily news cycle was enough to grant a waiver.
“Oh, nice,” he said. Damn. “Have you ever sued anyone before?”
“Yes, actually,” I said. “I sued my former restaurant company because the owner made us share our tips with managers and never paid us overtime.” That was the Redeye Grill. I’d initiated a suit right before my mother died that eventually attracted more than two hundred plaintiffs, and after two and a half years of protests and litigation we won a $3.9 million settlement. Never hire journalism students to work in your restaurant.
“I see,” he said. “And do you think that would prevent you from being impartial in this case?”
“Well, I admit, I have a dim view of big corporations who take advantage of their workers, but I suppose that doesn’t apply to this case.” Light laughter.
“Have you ever been convicted of a crime?” he asked me.
“No,” I said. Here it comes:
“Do you know anyone who has ever been accused or convicted of a crime?”
“Why, yes,” I responded, almost a bit too cheerfully.
“And who is that?”
“My father,” I said.
“And what was the charge?”
“Murder.” On cue, every head in the dismally lit fluorescent room swiveled my way.
“Really. And was he convicted?”
I had to think how far I really wanted to take this. I decided that announcing unsolved murders revealed during a deathbed confession wasn’t enough to build a bulletproof case. “Yes,” I said. “He did twelve years.” I addressed the curious eyes now trained on me. “And yes,” I added, “my last name is Italian.” Nervous laughter from the crowd. I didn’t have to do jury duty that day, or for the next two years. Crime, it turns out, really does pay.
Later that night I decided to indulge my nostalgia, so I opened my bottom dresser drawer and began combing through the visual remainders of our past. I got a camera for Christmas when I was ten, but my own enthusiasm for snapping pictures was nothing compared to my parents’. For fugitives, they certainly weren’t shy about showing our faces to the photo developers at Thrifty’s. But then, my father wasn’t exactly on the Ten Most Wanted List.
I paused and studied my communion picture, the one where my parents and I are standing outside the church after the ritual, and I realized I’d never examined it closely. My mother, in her $300 jumpsuit and new Vuitton bag, looks thrilled that’s she’s living her sunny California life; my father looks distracted and a little irritated, like he’s thinking of his next score; and my eyes are closed, thanks to the blinding sunlight. We were living three different versions of the same life under that roof. Metaphorically, it’s perfect.
My first communion, May 1986.
Just then an idea occurred to me. I began searching for my father’s gray phone book, the only one he ever kept, which my mother had dutifully preserved after he died. It wouldn’t have held any interest for me before, but perhaps now it would.
The binding was sealed with clear packing tape, exposing the fatigue it had weathered in its quarter century of use. On the inside front cover my father had listed every one of his relatives—parents, cousins, nieces and nephews, siblings—and their birthdays. I found my letter from 1994 pressed between the back cover and the last page, the one I had written as I cruised around the hills of Laguna in the Camry, trying to find a way to say goodbye. I unfolded it and recognized my small lettering—how many nights had I stayed up as a child copying and recopying my father’s neat, boxy printing? How I wanted to write like him, draw like him. The paper hadn’t yellowed in thirteen years but it was difficult to read, mainly because I didn’t seem to have believed in paragraphing at that tender age. I couldn’t believe he’d saved it. Then again, this was a man who used my puffy-painted bookmark until the end of his life.
I reread my letter, dated May 31, 1994, and its sincerity floored me, as did my unwavering belief in him. “A girl looks up to her father and worships him like a God, and that is what you have been for me.” I cringed, mindful of all I didn’t know then. Calling him “courageous and admirable” for running away from his failure—and his family—struck me as heartbreakingly naïve. “It’s us who have failed”? “We really didn’t do our part”? I may have been a little jaded by the values in Orange County, but I didn’t make their financial decisions for them. Reading my words, written nearly half my lifetime ago, I realized that you can still love someone without deifying them. I wondered why my mother never got that memo.
On the inside front cover my father had written what looked like my mother’s Social Security number, except it wasn’t—it was a fake, and right next to it he had written “Real #” followed by her actual Social. God, how I missed them, with their penchant for larceny. They made it seem like so much fun. On the inside back cover a dozen names and phone numbers were etched into the gray leather in pencil. I recognized the phone numbers’ prefixes—Dana Point. I was, in all probability, staring at my father’s client list from when he sold Rita’s cocaine. It had been there all along but I hadn’t known what to look for. I was disappointed that there was no Robert Wyler, no Anthony Piracci, no Tommy Palermo—no remnants of my father’s former life.
But while my parents left mysteries, they also left clues, and if I walk through the rooms of my past with open eyes and ears I know just where to find them. If, for example, I want to know how my mother felt about my father—I mean really felt about him, not the “he turned his life around for us” line—I can travel back to 1984. It’s early evening and my mother and I are snuggled together on the soft brown leather chair watching TV. A commercial for a Beatles compilation album comes on, with short melodic snippets playing behind the song titles unspooling on the screen. “Strawberry Fields,” followed five seconds later by “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,” followed by “Hey Jude.” Then there’s “Nowhere Man,” a song I’d never heard.
My mother nudges me. “That’s your father, Jenny,” she says bitterly. “A real Nowhere Man. Going nowhere, doing nothing.” It was a rare moment of candor. In later years she’d revert to the Johnny-Is-a-Saint routine, even after she revealed that he had sold drugs after his parole had expired and killed people without getting caught.
Did she expect more from her ex-convict husband? He had just spent nine months in prison fighting his parole violation charge, and he had returned to California to once again take tentative steps toward a legitimate life. That evening in 1984, did she really believe Johnny would come home after a long day of carpet cleaning and announce that he’d decided to take the MCAT? Her opinion of him must have brightened considerably when he and Rita started selling. That’s when we began spending entire days at South Coast Plaza, prompting me to develop a lifelong aversion to department stores. My father fulfilled my mother’s expectations as long as he was making money.
In lieu of answers from my actual parents, I now had their letters, which I’d recently retrieved from the basement of Merle Place. As I suspected, the box had wilted away into pancake batter, and I’d dumped its contents into the biggest garbage bag I could find and set it down in my living room, where I studied the detritus of our lives, laid bare on the floor. There were moldy books, the shoe box of letters my California friends had written to me right after I moved to New York, my baby shoes and my first pair of pointe shoes.
I turned my sights to a set of letters, the first of which was a white envelope with “Eleanor—open after I enter the hospital” written on the front in my father’s script. “The hospital” meant detox, and I was pretty sure I had found this letter several years earlier, though the fact of my parents’ deaths had suddenly renewed its meaning.
There were actuall
y four separate pieces of correspondence in the envelope, three on yellow legal paper and one on wide-ruled white. I started with the white paper. It was from me. A soon as I saw what was written at the top, I felt the heat rise in my cheeks. I LOVE DADDY CASSESE MASCIA, it read in my five-year-old handwriting. Below that were two Hello Kitty stickers, and below that a crudely drawn man with enormous hands and feet standing next to a brown house with a blue door. Unlike my father, I was a terrible artist.
I cried, hyperventilating big gulps of air. Daddy Cassese Mascia. I was both touched and heartbroken at how a child had blended her father’s alias with his actual surname without even understanding what it meant.
The next three letters were from my father to my mother, and they were angry, accusatory, recriminating—all the hallmarks of their marriage during that time.
Eleanor
It is 2:24 A.M. My bottle of scotch is almost empty and my small bottle of poison has one last toot and it is gone. I feel a sense of panic and I want to sneak upstairs and look for the packages made for Donald, but I know I won’t—I can’t!
Donald? My mother’s friend from high school, David’s best friend? He bought cocaine from my father? Oy. I read on.
I am in pain, and I must endure! Eighteen months ago I made the biggest mistake of my life. A bad winter left the business without funds needed to pay business bills, and to save the business and the life you and Jenny enjoyed I called Florida to buy time, hoping the business would stabilize and we would survive. I should never have called Florida! I should have let the business go under and we would have left California together as a family, for New York, Florida, or wherever.
Never Tell Our Business to Strangers Page 36