This Land

by Dan Barry

  Three months after Tommy left the family apartment in Dyker Heights, three months in which mother and middle son never spoke to each other, Mrs. Femia broke her silence.

  “She invited me over for dinner,” Tommy says. “And it was like it never happened.”

  Helping his brother

  No discussion. No analysis. Just—eat.

  A graduate of the High School of Performing Arts, the setting for the musical “Fame,” Tommy worked for a while Off Off Broadway, taking any role that he could, no matter how wacky. He supported himself with a day job as a radio monitor for the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, listening to recordings of programs to make sure that members got paid for their work.

  Then, in the early ’90s, he teamed up with Hal Simons, a high school friend who did a mean Ann Miller, for a revue called “The MGM Society”—for “Miller Garland Maniacs.”

  It became a hit, first at Don’t Tell Mama and then at Rose’s Turn, in the West Village. Within a year, being Judy had become Tommy’s full-time job; soon, and with the support of his longtime partner, David Stevens, he was appearing regularly at Don’t Tell Mama and juggling gigs around the country.

  At first, Tommy says, “My mother was panicked: ‘You’re gonna typecast yourself as a drag queen!’” Now, he says, she has come to be his greatest fan and most pointed critic, never holding back in assessing his performance or his wardrobe.

  “You have great legs,” she tells him. “Do it up to the knees.”

  Every Friday, Bobby guards the Red Hook piers from 8 in the morning until 4 in the afternoon. He drives home to Bensonhurst, naps, eats a little something, then returns to begin a double shift—midnight to 4 p.m.—in his glass-encased security booth, where a television distracts from the long hours of nothing.

  But every other week, the knowledge that his brother Tommy is performing that Saturday night fills him with joyful anticipation and a certain air of responsibility. In his mind, he is part of the show.

  On these days, after working 24 of the previous 32 hours, Bobby drives home in his 1998 tan Toyota Camry—bought used—gets cleaned up, and then collects his parents in Dyker Heights. Cosmo is 83, Ann is 80, and both have some trouble moving around. But they never miss a show.

  They follow the same routine every time: over the Brooklyn Bridge, north on the West Side Highway, park in a lot on West 46th Street and get something to eat, either at Don’t Tell Mama or at a favored Japanese restaurant nearby. John sometimes joins them.

  The parents find those seats reserved especially for them along the cabaret’s wall, while Bobby heads downstairs, past the cases of empty beer bottles, to his brother’s dressing room. This is where he becomes hairdresser, confidant, all-around everything. Or, as Tommy says in thanks at the close of every performance: “Mr. Robert from Bensonhurst.”

  “I help him zip up,” Bobby says. “In case he needs anything, I’m there.”

  The metamorphosis begins again, as Tommy tries to strike a 50-50 balance between Garland and Femia. “I want to make her relevant, but I don’t want to do a Xerox,” he says.

  “It’s not a look-who’s-back-from-the-grave show. She never left.”

  Beyond the sequined outfits and pantyhose, the makeup and wig, this requires a kind of psychic immersion into the wounded artist who was Judy Garland: the vaudevillian childhood and early fame; the frailties and addictions; the exhaustion and self-doubt; that singular voice. And the almost supernatural ability to transform applause into the revitalizing oxygen needed to take a performance to its greatest heights.

  The boy from Brooklyn, then, becomes the little girl from Grand Rapids, Minn. He becomes the overworked and tortured star who died of an accidental drug overdose in 1969, at the age of 47. He is not campy so much as he is seen-it-all weary, though ready at a finger’s snap to sing the encouragement for everyone—his mother, his father, everyone—to come on, get happy.

  Before that takes place, though, two brothers, one in sequins, the other in a porkpie hat, stand near that door leading to the stage. Bobby conducts one last examination of Tommy as Judy before opening the door.

  “I grab his hand and he grabs my hand,” Bobby says. “And I say, ‘Go get ’em, kid.’”

  Steven Frazier

  Not Official, but Still a Wisconsin Pardon

  BOSCOBEL, WIS.—JUNE 4, 2014

  Aware of the awkwardness, the two men arranged to meet in the evening quiet of the local community center. Their only previous encounter, a decade ago, had ended with a thrown punch and a broken nose.

  Both dressed as if for a Sunday service, in button-down shirts. The larger man, a piano mover by trade, sat on the floral-patterned couch, his tight haircut correctly suggesting ex military. The thinner man, owner of a floor-covering business, sat in an easy chair, his nose slightly bent to the right.

  The punch they shared had come out of who knows where, maybe Iraq, to still a long-ago liquid night. But its impact was still being felt by the former Marine, who threw the right jab just days after returning from a second deployment; the victim, who has not breathed the same since; and the governor, who chooses never to exercise an executive power of ancient provenance.

  To show mercy.

  The former Marine, Eric Pizer, seeks a pardon because he aches with remorse, and because his one-punch felony conviction means that he cannot possess or own a gun, disqualifying him from his desired career in law enforcement. He has only one smudge on his record. “This one night,” he said. “This one time.”

  On this one night, back in 2004, Mr. Pizer and two buddies headed in his mother’s Chevy for the small city of Boscobel, birthplace of the Gideon Bible. Their sole intention: to change the subject from war to fun.

  Mr. Pizer was two days back from Iraq. A straight-up Marine, he had committed to the corps even before his high school graduation in 2000, and was at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina a year later when an officer interrupted a class on sexually transmitted diseases to share the latest from Lower Manhattan.

  We got bombed, boys, the officer announced. We’re going to war.

  Mr. Pizer spent half of 2003 in Kuwait and Iraq, fueling tanks and trucks in a tense environment. He returned for seven more months in 2004, this time as a corporal who felt so responsible for the “newbies” on his team that he extended his tour by two months.

  Now he was cutting the September cool of a southwestern Wisconsin night, bound for Boscobel to hang out with a buddy’s cousin and two other women he had never met before.

  Eric Pizer

  The men and women drank and played cards in the cousin’s garage, then headed to Snick’s Fin ’N Feather to shoot some pool and drink some more. When they returned to the garage, two local men, one of them named Steven Frazier, stepped in to disrupt the free-and-easy night.

  Mr. Frazier believed that an out-of-towner—not Mr. Pizer—had gotten a little too familiar with one of the women: his wife. There soon followed beer-fueled shoves and shouts about straying hands and absent wedding rings.

  Mr. Pizer, 6-foot-2 and 210 pounds, and Mr. Frazier, 5-foot-10 and 140 pounds, both claim to have been trying to keep the peace. But Mr. Pizer says that he heard Mr. Frazier threaten to kill one of his buddies, saw movement and reacted with his right hand.

  “I just popped him once,” he said.

  That pop pushed Mr. Frazier’s nose nearly two inches to the right. He went to the hospital, while Mr. Pizer went to a bar nearly 30 miles away, where, he says, he all but held out his hands to be cuffed when the police found him.

  Mr. Pizer finished the last three months of his Marine hitch in North Carolina, then returned to learn the sobering news that his status as a first-time offender, just back from war, was not enough to convince the prosecutor, Anthony J. Pozorski Sr., to reduce the felony battery charge to a misdemeanor.

  Back then, Mr. Pizer did not fully understand the consequences of having a felony on his record. “I had never been in trouble before,” he said. “I wasn’t quite
prepared.”

  The former Marine worked as a construction laborer before getting hired to lug Steinways and Schimmels up stairs and around corners. He completed probation and paid off the $7,165.59 in restitution. He met a woman with a child, married, fathered a son, and received joint custody in the divorce.

  All the while, he remained a felon.

  Several years ago, Mr. Pizer contacted the prosecutor, Mr. Pozorski, to discuss the possibility of reducing his conviction to a misdemeanor. At the time, he was mulling whether to re-enlist or perhaps seek a job as a corrections officer. But nothing changed.

  “I was willing to look for a way to try to help Mr. Pizer,” Mr. Pozorski wrote in an email last week. “But since Mr. Pizer was not re-enlisting, he had no need to carry a gun. Since he had no need to carry a gun, I did not need to expend the state’s resources on trying find a way around the law.”

  Mr. Pizer pushed on. Taking classes part time, he earned an associate degree in criminal justice. He also found allies in two Madison lawyers, David D. Relles and John R. Zwieg, who agreed to help him seek a pardon.

  One problem: The governor of Wisconsin is Scott Walker, a possible Republican contender for president who, since taking office in 2011, has declined to exercise his power of pardon, granted to him by the Wisconsin Constitution.

  With the Pizer case emerging as a cause celebre in Wisconsin, the governor has defended his no-pardon policy, saying that he sees no reason to “undermine” the criminal justice system—no matter that pardons were frequently granted by at least the last five governors before him.

  In December, Mr. Walker told a reporter from WKOW-TV in Madison that there were thousands of convicted felons “who probably have a compelling case to be made that we don’t know about.”

  In pardon-free Wisconsin, though, “compelling” cases go unheard. The state’s Pardon Advisory Board remains “inactive,” according to the governor’s press secretary.

  Mr. Relles, a former prosecutor, and Mr. Zwieg, a former prosecutor and Vietnam-era veteran, say that Mr. Pizer has suffered from bad luck and poor timing. The initial case should have been tried as a misdemeanor, and, if it had occurred today, would most likely have been diverted to a veterans’ treatment court. Lastly, Mr. Pizer’s governor does not believe in pardons.

  “For some reason, forgiveness is not in vogue,” Mr. Relles said.

  Two years ago, Mr. Relles reached out to Mr. Frazier on behalf of Mr. Pizer, but the victim did not follow up. “I wasn’t quite ready,” Mr. Frazier recalled.

  “Broken nose” is almost too flip a term for the damage done. Mr. Frazier says that his nose had to be broken and reset twice, but it remains a bit crooked, aches in the cold and feels constantly congested. “Migraines pretty much daily,” he said.

  More time passed. Then, a few months ago, an organization called Ridge and Valley Restorative Justice asked Mr. Frazier whether he would meet with the man who broke his nose. After a month of “sorting it out,” he says, he agreed to meet one February evening.

  Now, in Boscobel’s community center, next to the Art Deco movie theater, two nervous men in their early 30s talked at length about one night from their early 20s, while two representatives from Restorative Justice mediated.

  Mr. Pizer explained that Iraq had probably wound him up. He said that he liked to make people laugh, and usually avoided fights at all cost—except on this one night. Mr. Frazier said that, well, this one night had affected his looks, his breathing, and even his children.

  “I don’t think I said sorry more times in my entire life,” Mr. Pizer said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It was never my intention to get into a fight that night. I never meant to.” They talked some more. Then Mr. Pizer asked for forgiveness.

  About 85 miles to the east, in the Capitol in Madison, the power of forgiveness goes untapped. But here in Boscobel, Mr. Frazier studied the penitent man before him, and then said it:

  “I forgive you.”

  Mr. Pizer felt a release, and stuck out his right hand. It was received in a good, firm grip.

  Finding Independence, and a Bond

  EAST PROVIDENCE, R.I.—OCTOBER 5, 2014

  A Sunday wedding that was months away, then weeks away, then days away, is now hours away, and there is so much still to do. The bride is panicking, and the groom is trying to calm her between anxious puffs of his cigarette.

  Peter and Lori are on their own.

  With time running out, they visit a salon to have Lori’s reddish-brown hair coiled into ringlets. They pay $184 for a two-tier cake at Stop & Shop, where the checkout clerk in Lane 1 wishes them good luck. They buy 30 helium balloons, only to have Peter realize in the Party City parking lot that the bouncing bobble will never squeeze into his car.

  Lori, who is feeling the time pressure, insists that she can hold the balloons out the passenger-side window. A doubtful Peter reluctantly gives in.

  “I’ve got them,” she says. “Don’t worry.”

  Peter Maxmean, 35, and Lori Sousa, 48, met five years ago at a sheltered workshop in North Providence, where people with intellectual disabilities performed repetitive jobs for little pay, in isolation. But when a federal investigation turned that workshop upside down last year, among those tumbling into the daylight were two people who had fallen in love within its cinder block walls.

  Working with the Department of Justice’s civil rights division, the State of Rhode Island agreed to help the workshop’s clients find employment and day services in the community—an agreement followed up this year by a landmark consent decree that requires similar integrated opportunities for 2,000 other clients around the state, completely transforming Rhode Island’s sheltered-workshop system.

  The decree has put the 49 other states on notice that change is coming: that in the eyes of the federal government, sheltered workshops can no longer be default employment services for people with disabilities—most of whom can, with support, thrive in the workplace.

  Mr. Maxmean and Ms. Sousa are among dozens of Rhode Island residents who are seeking their place beyond the safe but stultifying island of a sheltered workshop. At the moment, though, these two are pulling away from Party City with wedding balloons bobbing out their car window.

  The first balloon slips Ms. Sousa’s grasp as soon as Mr. Maxmean begins to drive. Then another escapes, and another, and another, floating beyond reach. By the time they pull up to their subsidized apartment building, a deflated Lori is clutching just six balloons.

  “That was a bad idea I had,” Mr. Maxmean gently tells her, even as he quietly calculates the loss of 24 helium balloons at 90 cents apiece.

  But the two have no time to fret over lost balloons. Invitations went out weeks ago for the wedding of Lori Sousa and Peter Maxmean at the Harbor View Manor, East Providence, Rhode Island, at 5 p.m. on Sunday, the 17th of August.

  Today.

  “THAT’S MY SOUL MATE”

  With an hour to go, Ms. Sousa fusses into the white gown purchased for a good price at Gown Town in Warwick. But her white high heels, bought for $15.99, already hurt; she wonders about wearing socks.

  Soon she is sitting with eyes closed on the couch in the couple’s one-bedroom apartment, two Special Olympics medals displayed on the wall behind her, as a family friend with a cosmetics bag enhances and conceals.

  “You’re looking gorgeous,” the friend coos, as cellphones ring, people shout and Buddy the cat hides. But in this moment, Ms. Sousa seems to have achieved inner calm.

  “My day,” she says to herself.

  Four floors below, Mr. Maxmean is setting up in the community room, where the wedding and reception are to be held. With his sleeveless T-shirt revealing the “Lori” tattoo on his left biceps, he is a wedding-day whirligig, pushing aside the bingo machine, testing the half-frozen lasagna in the oven, unboxing the tilted wedding cake—and, most important, double-checking the D.J.’s playlist. It is vital that when Ms. Sousa makes her entrance, a particular song by Journey is playing: “Don’t Stop
Believin’.”

  Ms. Sousa remembers when this new guy at the workshop, tall, brown-haired and with glasses, joined the repackaging of remote-control devices for a contract with Cox Communications. She was removing the batteries, he was testing the remotes, and something just clicked.

  “I said, ‘I’m gonna marry that guy,’” she says. “That’s my soul mate.”

  Ms. Sousa was a workshop veteran by then. Born in Portugal and raised in Providence, she had spent the 25 years after high school commuting to the Training Thru Placement workshop, a squat, ugly building hidden away in a residential neighborhood.

  She and the other clients would work at their own pace to fulfill various contracts: packaging heating pads; recycling television remotes; jarring Italian specialty foods. The pay averaged about $1.57 an hour.

  Federal law allows authorized agencies to pay subminimum wages to people with disabilities, based on their performance when compared with that of a nondisabled worker. But the Department of Labor later revoked the workshop’s authorization after finding what it called “willful violations” of the law, including the failure to record and pay employees for all the hours they worked.

  Also problematic was the general absence of encouragement to improve one’s skills; to see oneself moving up, and on.

  “I’d be, like, ‘I want to go out,’” Ms. Sousa says. “I want to be trained for a job. Put me out there! I can do it!”

  At one point the workshop did help her find a job at an Italian restaurant in Cranston. But she clashed with co-workers, stopped going to work—and back she went to that hidden-away building, packing, wrapping, answering the telephone.

  Then Mr. Maxmean appeared one day, and he was different. For one thing, he listened to her.