Bandit

by Molly Brodak

  The letter describes him waking up sweating and screaming at night, things like “Oh no! Oh my God it’s a kid!” and “Get down, get down, incoming! We have to get them out NOW!” Two or three nights a week, she said, but he never wanted to talk about it in the morning. She was a wealthy widow, and explains he had access to her accounts but never touched them. He slept in a chair for a month in her hospital room while she recovered from a heart attack. After his arrest, she came home to find the FBI had broken down her door and were searching her apartment for the money. This was how she found out about his criminal past. She’s dedicated to him still, driving to Ohio every few months to visit him there.

  Here is my letter. I don’t know if he read it.

  Honorable Judge Battani,

  I hope you take this letter into consideration when you sentence my father, Joseph Brodak, in a few weeks. Certainly he is guilty of these crimes, but he does deserve some leniency in regards to his sentence. He is a peaceful man who I have never known to physically hurt anyone and I do hope you will not sentence him to reside among violent criminals. I am pleased he took a plea bargain instead of wasting taxpayers’ money on a trial. I know this took some humility for him. Furthermore, he is an old man with kidney problems, and I believe he should be placed in a medical facility if possible. I expect I will never see him again, and would be happy to know he is being taken care of in his twilight years.

  He was in holding in Detroit county jail after his arrest. A dirty, crowded jail, not far from where he grew up. My sister went to visit him. He refused to see her. Before she left she put a little money in his account, enough for toothpaste and extra socks and things they don’t give you there. She would have nothing to do with him going forward, and has kept this resolve since that day.

  58

  I always dismissed Dad’s claims of PTSD, assuming this was just another con, but I came back to them eventually. Maybe he did really have this, having actually been through Vietnam—I owed it to him to at least consider it.

  So I asked Mom at Christmas. After everyone had left I sat with her on the couch in the dark living room and just blurted it out. “I know it wasn’t your specialty as a therapist, but do you think my dad really did have PTSD? In your professional opinion? And personal one, too, I guess.”

  She knitted her brows seriously and squinted. I could see her immediate reaction was a giant, silent no. But, she liked being thorough and equitable, like me, so she considered it. She thought quietly for a moment.

  “There’s a lot about your dad no one knows.”

  It was a stunningly fair thing to say.

  “But, I’ve known him a long time. And lived with him for years and years. And I never once saw evidence of PTSD. The panic attacks, the fear, depression—none of that. And while it isn’t my specialty, I certainly would know it if I saw it.”

  It’s described as a “disease of time” in David J. Morris’s book The Evil Hours, a heart-wrenching investigation of the disorder by someone who suffers from it daily. Time loses its linear shape and the past becomes mashed with the present, spinning bits of horror into a normal day. Imagine: at your desk, at the checkout in the grocery store—war washes over you. And it’s more than just a memory, as you or I would remember some hurt from the past and cringe or buckle—it’s a whole experience come back. The body feels it. And the body doesn’t know the difference between real and imagined—it feels it either way. The body doesn’t know the difference. Heart rate soars, blood pressure and adrenaline spike, real fear courses through the body. Time loops unpredictably and uncontrollably.

  And it’s hard to hide.

  “But,” Mom added, looking hard at me now, “probably you’ll never find out the truth. No one knows your father. And he won’t say what is true.”

  I nodded slowly, looking down.

  “There you have it.”

  There I had it. Nothing.

  59

  Scrolling down through the PDF of documents in the sentencing memo from this trial, I have to stop when I get to his letter. It’s handwritten. His handwriting is pointedly emotional for me. All caps, thin pencil point, letters leaning on a forward slant. The voice loud and hard in my head as I read it.

  He starts the letter with a description of himself. How he sees himself, for the judge’s sake anyway. A “model citizen,” he says, who pays taxes, votes, buys homes, raises daughters, works, works. On paper it looks so true:

  The combination of PTSD and a serious gambling addiction caused my life to change. Moreover, my deeply rooted moral/religious values were particularly compromised whenever I was faced with financial chaos that threatened the status quo of my family life, which I value more than anything in the world.

  Then the first crime: an unintended result from the “trauma” of a job loss, and then prison, during which, he notes, he “received no treatment for [his] real problems.”

  Then the next one, and he is sorry, and deeply regrets it, and wants nothing more than to return to his family, whom he misses dearly. His family life, which he values more than anything in the world. More than anything in the world.

  60

  “You writing this,” Mom said to me on the phone recently, “do you really think it’s wise?”

  “Wise how?” I asked, a little annoyed.

  “I mean, won’t he be pissed at you for writing a book about him? He might retaliate or something, or at least make it look like you fabricated it all …”

  “I’m just saying exactly what happened, Mom, and I don’t think that’s wrong. Besides it’s not about him, it’s about me. And besides … I think he’s a little different now. I’m not sure … he’d try to hurt me, really. I don’t know if he has the energy for all that anymore …”

  “Huh. I didn’t know you thought he was different.” She seemed bothered that I said that. “I guess men do soften up with old age. Still, you know him. He’d be totally pissed. He’d say you were making it all up. He’ll never talk to you again when he finds out.”

  “I know. That’s fine. Obviously I’ve thought about that and I’m fine with it if that’s what happens. It was hard for me to decide to do this … but I’m proud of myself … even though it’s kind of a … risk …” I sounded hurt and defensive, I knew. I wanted to feel supported in doing this. And she did support me, but shame and fear run circuits in families that are hard to undo.

  “I just don’t want him to ruin your life somehow.”

  I laughed.

  61

  I assumed the danger had passed. The crimes were done, Dad’s influence on us was gone—what was left? What is always left: the story.

  And the story is the most dangerous thing there is. Because the way we talk about what happened becomes what happened. Writing it down, not living it, was the greatest risk I’d take—the finality of a finished text, so whole, hiding its scaffolding, its messes, ineffable silences. How could I say what was true? A dad who was not the villain, a daughter who was not the hero, a story not of satisfying redemption but of discarding stories. There’d be no way to say it just right, and that was the thing I’d have to say.

  Prison affords families the opportunity to study their inmate. It freezes the inmate in a structured space, apart from variables, and ensures the power is always in the hands of the outsider. At this safe distance, I could pry the lid from Dad’s past, something he’d never once discussed with me when he was free. And his origin point, St. Albertus, was just a forty-minute drive from the suburbs where my sister and Mom now lived.

  I wanted to see it for myself so I could stand where he stood at the beginning of his life, as a refugee just landed in a city about to crash down around him. On a visit home in December in 2012, the year I started this book, I snuck away for the day and drove myself there. I took I-75 to the Warren exit, the same exit I took when I worked at the College for Creative Studies while taking classes at Wayne State. Instead of turning right on Warren, toward the Cass Corridor and the New Center area still hanging
on around Woodward Avenue, I turned left and continued down to St. Albertus Street, past train tracks and old factories.

  There are a lot of death holes in Detroit. Not poor neighborhoods—beyond that. I mean nothingnesses, forsaken places. Scattered plots, some whole blocks, sets of streets, in the middle of the city; just dead places. The place my dad grew up is dead.

  This area, around Mack and Chene just east of the central corridor, is one of the emptiest in Detroit. It is not the most dangerous; there just aren’t many people here at all. Only a few structures stand on each block, and rarely are those structures occupied. Sometimes you can’t really tell. Most houses are in different states of decay, some just piles of charred wood and ash. These are not the most picturesque ruins. They’re not the famous ones, the Packard Plant or the huge train depot or the ornate and decrepit Michigan Theater. They’re not the pretty ones, the derelict castles of Brush Park, raped over the years for their architectural embellishments and fireplace mantels, the unused skyscrapers downtown with wild trees growing atop them and floors full of artifacts, not the ones out-of-town journalists and photographers come to document, vaguely lament, then leave. These were plain poor houses to start with.

  St. Albertus sits next to homes like these amid empty grassland. Across the street is one occupied house, and a heavily gated, new-but-cheap apartment complex, where a convent and girls’ orphanage used to be. Behind the church is the school, a three-story sturdy brick building with a stone façade, “ST ALBERTVS,” carved across a neoclassical frieze above four faceted pilasters between the doors. The school is a ruin, like any other building here. Windows are broken or still boarded, man-high graffiti covers the dark brick exterior, and the yard is well overgrown, with dumped TVs and furniture in the grass. I looked at the building for a long time. This was where my family first lived in America. This was where my dad learned English. I watched a solidly fat black squirrel climb the brick effortlessly, pause to eat a small thing on the windowsill, then disappear inside.

  It shut me out like a secret. I wanted in.

  On the front steps I pulled shyly at the boards over the three doors, but they were still nailed tight. It would be easy enough to climb up into any of the glassless first-floor windows but I was alone and it seemed unwise. I took some photos with my phone and just looked for a while at the building. A rind of green copper wound weakly around the roof, the rest of it having been pulled off by scavengers. It would be very unwise to go in, I thought. I am just a girl by myself. There could be squatters here, especially now that it was winter. Other times I had explored abandoned structures as all kids do who grow up around ruins, but never alone in such a desolate place. Still, here I was. I had come this far. I looked up and down the street, worried to leave my car out of sight, but there was not a soul around. I walked quickly to an inner corner and hoisted myself up on the ledge, then into the same glassless window the black squirrel had disappeared into.

  Broken glass and soft piles of crumbled plaster. Cold dark. The smell of old wet wood and dead animals. I dropped down into a classroom, mottled white and brown with gritty gray floors. But there was some maintenance here, by the church people; I could tell the floor had been swept occasionally. I walked as if I was stepping on someone. The boards shivered and the sound of a steady wind hushed me.

  A dark wooden door led to the hall, lined with more classrooms. All of the doorknobs were stolen. The next room was sweet sky blue, paint peeling at the top, with a chalkboard but no furniture. There was a red fire alarm box. Very nice wood, rotting, carved oak and maybe walnut. Powdery plaster made the ground soft. Every surface peeling. The next room was pale acid green, with a patch of exposed cinderblocks where the chalkboard was. It’s hard to imagine my father as a boy, although I suppose that is normal. He was a star athlete, he’d told me. Captain of the football team in high school. He would’ve been a fun boy. Quiet but brave and strong, like me. I kicked lightly at some planks on the ground and the sound of scurrying claws in the walls moved away from me.

  I went slowly down the hall, feeling ridiculous for using the flashlight feature on my expensive phone but glad to have it, since the floorboards poked up and warped unevenly, with odd piles of glass, nails, and splinters. The bare rooms felt heavy and full. I came to a stairwell. Plaster dust had been swept into loose mounds against the wall, and footprints marked a center path up the steps. I wanted to see the upstairs, the large auditorium where they lived; maybe there’d be more left up there, furniture or books, interesting things maybe. I didn’t feel bad for trespassing. I deserved to be here, somehow, to be a person who wanted to see what was good here and come to know it. Being in an empty building in an empty city feels like a pit within a pit, airless, a tomb.

  On the second floor I turned toward the front of the building, to see the entrance room. The windows were heavily boarded and it was dark. The front room was nothing but a wide staircase leading to the three boarded entrance doors I pulled at. Thin cracks of blue daylight under the doors. Strange half-columns flanked the stairs, but no railing. Blackness at the bottom of the stairs; it looked like a boat landing, like dark water down there. The ceiling was bare above. The sight of the stairs shook me. I saw my dad running up these steps.

  I backed out and saw another staircase going up, to the large room above. Some corny graffiti here and there, some beer cans and food trash. Swatches of paint peeled away from cracks in the walls, snaking leafy fronds of paint chips to the ceiling. The hall opened into the auditorium. The windows were not boarded up here and the room was bright, open, and cold. I stood astounded. On one end, a gaping black stage was framed with pale peach and jaunty blue leaf patterns, deco style, and flanked by two doors topped with Greek urns and vines of plaster. Straight across the stage hung a very small, gold-fringed, pale blue curtain, painted with mounds of red and orange flowers with wispy grass behind.

  My mouth hung dumbly and I started to cry. The peeling colors and the light of the room, the flowered curtain and the darkness, the piles of plaster powder, the good wood, the still air. It was beautiful in a way I recognized in the oldest part of me. I felt like I was seeing something true for once. Indisputable. I walked the thin boards of the floor to the center of the room, past a large blue “A” painted inside of a circle, like a tidied-up anarchy symbol. Bird shit covered the floor, concentrating under vents. The cooing and wheezing and claws of pigeons echoed blindly. Above the center of the room, on the high ceiling bowed up like a coffin top, was a trinity of large pale blue medallions, the center one probably once surrounding a light fixture that was now gone. Scallop-edged circles wound around it, along with a rim of curled endless wave shapes. The two outer medallions merged edges with the large center circle, both with hard-edged, spiny, weblike grates in their centers and finials on the outside edges. My family slept on cots in this room for months. They looked up at this. My dad as a child, scared and silent, packed in with the other refugees, looked up at this ceiling and thought about the future, this future I am in now. I was pinned to the spot by this useless beauty, grateful. It was there for them, this silent, mindless pattern; it had hung like love over the empty room.

  I could hear two voices below. I went to the window and saw two men on bikes talking on the sidewalk; one went on while the other lingered slightly, near my car. I wanted to see more but I had to go back the way I came. The halls seemed darker now and the space shorter now that I knew it. Without thinking I returned to the window I’d come through and stopped, standing very still and staring. I guess I didn’t want to leave. I liked it here. A flock of grackles outside squeaked like rusty scissors. I felt sorry for my dad. He was scared here, and angry. He felt the same as he grew and watched this place become empty and ruined.

  I hopped up and out. The men near my car were gone. The yard was once covered in concrete but plants had eaten through it completely. Still, it was not natural; no emptiness is natural here. It is not empty. Hollows are full of bodiless feelings, networks of lives missing,
invisible. Abandoned meanings. The feeling of a whole world having just been lifted up and away from the ground. What’s here now is wild. But “urban prairie” sounds a lot nicer than it is—what’s growing is tamped with trash. Chairs, televisions, couches, car parts, clothes, burned wood, ominous rusted barrels, some full of unknown liquid, drifts of food packaging, of paper and Styrofoam, and tires, lots of tires. Sick city trash. Rats, raccoons, wild dog packs, and yes, pheasants, as is reported; I have seen a few myself, but no foxes or deer, as some claim.

  Many plants here are abandoned ornamentals, once purchased and planted by the property owners, now weird, out of place and overgrown, like the beds of feathery common reeds in the wetter areas that mass over native plants in huge swaths, or crazily hunchbacked Japanese maples that used to flank front steps or paths. I walked slow through bony chicory stems and dried-out Queen Anne’s Lace, still tough to pick, even dry. Mostly tall plain grass, dead stiff and upright, clubs of a grass I didn’t recognize, some dry purple loosestrife. Burrs. Weeds. A lot of plants people hate, left in peace here.

  The sky can be solid gray in Michigan, like wet concrete, churning without breaking for days. Under it, my home, sinking into the earth, the earth digesting its own paradox, in silence.

  62

  I walked to the front of the block, to the church. Unlike the school building, it was surrounded by a heavy black gate that was locked in all places except for the very front. I walked through the gate. The church loomed tall up close. The bright green copper roof and red brick were bright in the ash sky of December. It is light Gothic revival style, built in 1885, the oldest Polish church in Detroit, with a clock on each side of the steeple, all stopped at nine o’clock. The stained glass windows had been fitted with plain exterior windows for protection, but some were bowed and warped or missing. Only the two flanking entrance doors still had their elaborately branched wrought-iron hinges; the main doors had only ghost images of where the iron had been. I approached the doors and pushed the cold black thumb latch down. The enormous door was soundless.