“Yes.” That was longer than I thought: five years—from 1984 to 1989—as opposed to the two or three I’d presumed.
“And it stopped when he went to rehab?” I asked.
“Not exactly,” she said. My father started doing the drugs he was supposed to be selling, just like my mother had told me. Doing the drugs made him crazy, Rita said, and one day Igloo called to say that the package my father had sent him showed up empty. It was supposed to have contained ten ounces of cocaine. “Johnny kept saying he was going to kill him,” she said. “I begged him not to. It was the coke, the coke made him crazy.” I remembered a line from one of his coked-up letters to my mother: So, here I sit in a one-room apartment in Dana Point being reckless with phone calls and traffic. This must have been what he meant.
“Did he do it?” I asked.
“No, and I know because I ran into Igloo at an airport just after that, randomly. And he said, ‘Your brother-in-law has some temper. I’m going to fix him.’ So here he’s going to kill your father, and your father’s saying he’s going to kill him. It was a mess. Meanwhile, neither of them did anything.”
“Are you sure?” I asked.
She looked at me with wide eyes. “But I saw him at the airport.”
“But did you see him after that?” I asked. Her eyes got wider, until I said, “It’s okay. I don’t think he killed anyone in California. Don’t worry.” I considered what that sentence might sound like to an outsider and decided that no one else would ever really understand.
“But he did crystal meth, so he was going crazy,” she said.
“When he couldn’t get coke,” I said. “Yeah, my mother told me. But before he went into rehab he called Angie to apologize for bringing coke and packing materials into the house where her two-year-old daughter was living, and he also confessed to her that he had slept with you.”
She closed her eyes briefly. “Oh, why did he tell her that?”
“Maybe he was in a confessional mood,” I said. “She said she suspected for a long time, and so did Tina, because of the way you two acted together. You had great chemistry,” I admitted, praying my mother couldn’t hear this concession.
“We did,” she said. “I loved him. Like family, like a brother. He was my brother, practically. Jenny, your father and I sat behind locked doors cutting coke for years, and nothing ever happened between us. Nothing. Then you and your father came to visit this one time.”
“In 1989,” I reminded her. “Yeah, I remember.”
“Yeah, whatever,” Rita said. “I’m terrible with years, you have such a good memory. He was with Carmine the whole time he was there, doing business with him, selling him coke.”
“Carmine?” I asked.
“You know, Big Vinny’s son.”
“Carmine Cassese?” The same Carmine my father once advised to rat out his Mafia buddies, who was now a full-fledged member of the Bonanno crime family, I’d recently learned. According to my mother, he also knew about the hit on Tommy Palermo, the only one of my father’s victims besides Joe Fish whose name I knew. Since he was currently sitting in federal detention, I had a feeling I’d have to pay Celie a visit as well.
“Yeah, he was down here with his girlfriend,” she said. “Johnny was trying to help him get into the business, you know, teach him. So we went out to dinner one night, and Johnny went to the bar and Carmine’s girlfriend was in the bathroom, so Carmine said to me, ‘Johnny told me about you, that you’re real nice. I’m going to be down here for a while after Johnny leaves, if you’d like to hang out. He’ll never know, so don’t worry.’ I thought, is he making a pass at me?
“So when Johnny and I got back to the apartment,” she continued, “of course, he was high. I wasn’t, but I’d been drinking and I’d smoked some grass. And he sat down on my bed, just plopped down. And I said, ‘You know, I think Carmine made a pass at me,’ and I told him what he said, that Johnny didn’t have to know if we were together. And the look on your father’s face—it was rage, just incredible madness, then jealousy, all at the same time. Then he seemed to calm down, and he said, ‘Well, why not. If I wasn’t married, well, you know.’”
“‘Married to your sister’ is what he should have said,” I spat. I couldn’t believe I was hearing this. I was finally behind a door that had always been closed to me.
“But he’d been asking me for so long. I—”
“Asking for so long? How long, Rita?”
“A while, but I always took it as a joke,” she said. “You know, he’d smack my ass and run away, that kind of shit.” He used to do that with my mother, too. I cracked my knuckles to relieve the tension. “But all of a sudden he wasn’t joking,” she went on. “It’s because he was high, I know it, because he never said these things to me when he wasn’t high. When he wasn’t high, we were just like brother and sister. The way I got along with Eleanor was the way I got along with him. But Eleanor and I, at this time … we weren’t getting along. I’m not saying it’s an excuse, but we weren’t.”
“You weren’t?” I asked, genuinely surprised. I couldn’t remember a time when they weren’t gabbing on the phone, and even more so after David’s death.
“No,” she said. “I was busting out my credit cards, and I gave her one of mine to use.”
“We were busting them out, too,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “We did it at the same time. And when she was done with hers, I gave her one of mine, because she wanted to buy more. And I called her one day and asked her to buy me a purse I wanted, since by then my cards were maxed out. And she said no. I couldn’t understand it—I had given her my credit card to use, and she said no.”
“She said no?” That seemed a little harsh. Why would she say no? “She loved shopping,” I reasoned. “She couldn’t stop spending money. That was her addiction, I guess.”
“Mine, too,” Rita said. I remembered our weekends at South Coast Plaza, and I couldn’t reconcile that person—the person she became around money—with the person she’d been toward the end of her life, who no longer cared about Vuitton purses, who would beg me in a panic to recount the mere thousands my father had left her, afraid a tide would come and wash it all away.
“And we borrowed so much money from you,” I said. “Where did it all go?”
“From everyone,” Rita said, echoing Donald. “Eleanor borrowed from everyone. And there’s something else. Before you came to Florida with your father to visit me, many months before, Johnny was doing coke and your mother was spending his money and it was breaking up their marriage. So she asked me to talk to him, you know, straighten him out. We spent hours on the phone, and he’d tell me about his problems.”
“Mom knew?”
“She knew, of course she knew, she asked me to do it,” she said. “I think she enlisted me to do her dirty work. So when Johnny came to Florida after we’d spent all those months on the phone, maybe he expected something.
“So he sat on the bed that night and got angry that Carmine had maybe made a pass at me, but then he changed. He said, ‘Well, why wouldn’t he want you? If I wasn’t married, maybe we would, you know, we would have something. We’d be together.’ And I said, ‘But we’d be hurting people, so many people.’ And he said, ‘Who would know? I wouldn’t tell anyone.’ And I said, ‘But Johnny, I’d know. What will I do when I see Eleanor again? When I talk to her? She’s my sister.’ And he said, ‘Do you want to know about your sister? You have no idea what she really says about you,’ and he told me all this shit Eleanor had said about me. And I said, ‘She said what?’ And he reminded me how she took the credit card and didn’t let me buy anything with it, she just spent it up herself, and he told me everything else she’d said about me. And that’s how he got me. He steamed me up.”
What an asshole. How could he do that to my mother, first betraying her confidence and then talking shit about her?
“And the next morning,” she continued, “I woke up and he was snoring. And I opened the door and
you were there, just standing in the hallway, and I looked into your eyes and, I swear to god, Jenny, you just knew. You looked at me with these wide eyes, like you knew what had happened. And after that I told him, never again.”
Now I knew she was telling the truth—it was the same snoring that had kept me awake on the plane ride over. But I didn’t remember the exact moment she described, as much as I longed to. I must have blocked it out.
“You mean to tell me that when you came to California the year before that and stayed with me and Dad when Mom was in New York because David was dying of AIDS, nothing happened?”
“Nothing,” she said, shaking her head. “Not a thing. He was at work most of the time, and I came there to watch you. I don’t even remember where I slept. So that morning,” she continued, “when I saw your eyes, I told him, ‘Never again. She knows, I think Jenny knows.’”
“Oh, my god. What did he say?”
“He said, ‘Don’t be silly, she doesn’t know anything.’”
How dare he underestimate me! “Yeah, he always told my mother that I didn’t remember him getting arrested in front of me,” I said. “But I did.”
“He probably wanted to believe you didn’t,” Rita said. “He tried to convince me that we could continue, you know, start an affair. He said, ‘I’ll make up reasons to come here, I’ll say it’s because of our business.’ And I said, no, it can never happen again.”
“Did it?”
“No, it was just that once. But we did it all night.” Opiates made her honest. She’d already popped at least three Percocet since I’d walked in, and it reflected in her slurred speech.
“Well, cokeheads can go forever, right?” I asked her.
“I’ve been with cokeheads before, but this … every time I’d tell him we couldn’t do it again and try to go to sleep, he’d start up again—”
“So how was it when you saw each other after that?” I interrupted, not especially eager to hear more about my father’s sexual prowess. I’d already heard about my mother’s rape fantasies, and all of this intimate knowledge was enough to make me never want to have sex again.
“Very bad. We stopped talking on the phone, our relationship was over. Eleanor would ask why, and I told her it was because the coke was making him crazy. It was that, but also this. And the one time I did come back to visit, he was insane. Crazy. Your mother and I were downstairs, and he was upstairs, and he was yelling that he was going to kill us both.”
“You know he wouldn’t have,” I said. “He never hit my mother, ever.”
“I know,” she said. “But he’d had a whole bottle of liquor, and he was grinding the deering, looking for coke. Do you know what a deering is?” I shook my head. “It’s one of those things you use to grind coke. And he was grinding it up, insane, but he didn’t have any more coke in there, so he was frantically looking for any residue he’d left behind. And Eleanor and I walk in, and he’s up there talking to himself, and he screams at us to shut the fuck up. I went up there to try to talk to him, but he was just … there was just no talking to him. After I left, Johnny and I didn’t speak for years. Except when I came to dry out, you know, kick the coke habit—”
“When he had cancer,” I said, remembering the Jell-O stain, the massages, the OxyContin.
“Yeah. He and your mother were so good to me, they did everything they could, they were so wonderful. And there was a point when your father and I went out on the balcony to talk, and it was just like before. We talked like brother and sister again.”
“Well, it was eleven years later,” I reminded her. “It was long enough to start over.”
“Yeah, and we did. I put it out of my mind, and so did he. And when he dropped me off at the airport, we hugged goodbye, and he went to kiss me goodbye, and I turned and gave him my cheek, and he kind of did the same thing. It was like, there was nothing there between us anymore, you know?”
“Hey, Rita,” I said, remembering something, “during that visit, did you—and you can tell me, it really doesn’t matter, I won’t be mad—but were you by any chance doing coke or smoking crack and stuck the pipe or glass coke container into the pocket of one of my father’s suits?”
“What?” Her expression told me that the possibility was preposterous, and as I found myself explaining it I began to agree with her.
“Mom was going through his clothes after he died and found one of those glass bullets, you know, the kind that holds coke so you can do it on the go.”
“No way, Jenny,” she said. “How would I get it? Bring it on the plane?” She started laughing. “I certainly didn’t know any dealers in New York, and I know your father was clean then—he had cancer!”
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “It sounds so silly, but my mother thought it was yours.”
“Mine? She did?” I almost felt bad that Rita hadn’t gotten the chance to correct that impression, but then again, maybe it was better my mother didn’t know—about the coke, or any of it.
“She thought you were doing coke in her bedroom and someone was about to catch you red-handed so you reached for whatever you could find to hide it in,” I explained. “Because he hadn’t worn that suit since Grandpa’s funeral in 1996.”
“Well, there you go,” she said. “He probably did coke that day.” The more I discovered about my father, the harder I had to look for redeeming qualities. If it was anyone other than my dad, just some random coke dealer/adulterer/murderer, I’d have given up on him already. I never expected my love to be tested this vigorously, and so long after his death.
“Look, Jenny, please don’t hate him,” Rita implored. “He was a good man, so good to you, and he really loved your mother. He loved me, too, but like a sister. He really, really loved Eleanor.”
“I know. He was her soul mate,” I said, remembering what she’d told me before I slammed the car door on her confession. “And she knew what he was, how he had a mistress during his first marriage, that he killed people.”
“I didn’t know about the killing,” she said; she’d claimed the same when I first asked her about it in the week following my mother’s death. “But the waitress—he took her everywhere. For six months! I think he was definitely fucked up on drugs. I mean, he’d have to be to take up with her, right? And then he fell off the ladder when he was painting and broke his arm and the waitress came to see him. He told her he was leaving your mother for her.”
Now this was news. My mother told me my father had had an affair while on the road, but she never said that he promised the woman anything, or that he took her everywhere. A real mistress, just like the old days.
“Your father confessed everything to your mother one day,” Rita explained, “you know, ‘I was stupid, I was lonely, it means nothing,’ and then the buzzer goes off downstairs. And the waitress is there! She was there to confront him about leaving your mother. And he said, ‘I’ll deal with this,’ and raced downstairs, and I don’t know why your mother didn’t go after him, but she said she saw the little skank from the balcony and she was a mess, real trashy-looking.”
I was shocked. Our bedrooms were separated by a single wall and I never knew. They really did a good job of hiding things from me. At that point my mother was sixty-two years old. I couldn’t imagine her having to mark her territory at that age, doing battle with a twenty-five-year-old at the tail end of her marriage.
“Why did Mommy stay with him?” I asked Rita. “Why, when he did all this? It’s like she blinded herself when it came to him.”
“She didn’t want to see,” Rita said.
“So you really did help him out a lot in his life—you paid for a lawyer when he needed one, and gave him a part of your, um, business,” I remarked. I told her how, right after she had visited to “dry out,” my father admonished me for calling Rita a drug addict, telling me how much she had done for us but not telling me what.
“Really? He said that?” She thought for a moment. “Well, I did. When you were going to go to Houston, after the ar
rest, I bought you a car to leave with.”
“Wow,” I said. How had my parents accepted all this from her? Her financial aid was like a Band-Aid for a much more deeply rooted problem that they never cared to solve. “You know, ever since I was a kid,” I said, “all I wanted was to be your age so I could be a part of your gang. You all seemed to be having so much fun.”
“Oh, we were,” she said. “We did.”
Unfortunately that era was lost to time. I glanced at the clock: It was almost five. I would be late for my plane if I stayed another minute. I stood up and gathered my things and Rita limped out with me.
“Hey,” I said, “she never knew, you know.”
“I thought she did, once,” she said.
“No way,” I said, remembering how Arline told me that my mother said she’d mutilate Rita if she found out about an affair. “She didn’t know, trust me.” Why was I comforting her? Maybe because my mother should have known better than to trust my father.
“Please don’t hate him,” Rita said again as I got into the car. Why was everyone so concerned that I might hate this man? It said a lot about Rita, though, that she seemed more concerned that I’d end up hating my father than her. And here I had gone to Tamarac expecting to loathe her.
“I don’t hate him,” I assured her. “Don’t worry.” I started the engine of my rented Trailblazer and rolled down the window. Since Rita wasn’t one for proper goodbyes, she left me with, “I hope his penis shrivels up and falls off.”
I hit the brakes. “Rita,” I said, “he’s dead.”
“Ghosts can have sex,” she deadpanned.
“RITA DID THE right thing,” Jeff said over spinach and artichoke dip at Houston’s the next evening. “She cut it off. I forgive her.”
“So do I,” I said. “She fucked up, but she wasn’t the backstabbing slut I thought she was. And I believe her. When she was talking to me, there wasn’t that lag time between the truth and the lie, you know, when someone is trying to think up a story. She was high on Percocet, though, but other than that she sounded truthful. This affair they had, it changed her relationship with my mother, with all of us.”
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