by Nick Flynn
Get this in your great head at once!—I am a classic storyteller. A great writer. (1996)
These letters make their way to me, first via my mother, then via Emily, then I begin sending him change of address forms whenever I move. I begin noticing the weeks between his letters, even if I never answer them, wondering if he has finally died. I keep every one of those letters in a cardboard box. In most he speaks of his book (One of the three great books that America has produced). In most he tells me the writing is going very, very (underlined twice) well (exclamation point!). But never a mention of alcohol, though his hand shakes as he writes.
When I say I receive a thank you letter from Senator Ted Kennedy—it is true! A letter he typed himself! This is of vital importance in life in America! Who you know! How well do you know them! Vital! (1999)
flawless (how to rob a bank)
(1995) My father points to a name on a tombstone. Isaac Goose? What a name. We’re in Boston’s Old Burial Grounds, he stands before me, talking into my video camera. I’m here to ask him about my mother, anything he can tell me, but he doesn’t seem to be getting to the point. If I was still in the checking business I’d use that name. Who are you? Isaac Goose.
I’m making a video documentary of my mother’s ex-boyfriends, thirteen years after she died—the rotating cast of father figures who’d been her husbands, lovers, friends. I couldn’t tell you what I’m hoping to find—as one of her ex-boyfriends says into my camera, I don’t know what it is you’re looking for, and neither do you. By using the phonebook and directory assistance, by asking my brother what he remembers and the last time he saw each one, I’m able to locate nearly all of them. Ten men. Two I already know where to find. We’d kept in touch with Liam, her next-to-last, who’d been in federal prison when she died. The other was my father. It’s been nearly ten years since he’d walked into the shelter. I haven’t spoken to him since he got off the streets five years ago. Let me show you something, he says, taking out his wallet. He flashes a Bank of Boston ATM card. See that card? I robbed that bank of sixty thousand dollars. I’m proud of that card.
He wasn’t hard to find—the return address on his envelopes, an apartment building in Boston, his name on the bell. I videotaped the bell, taped my finger pressing it. He buzzed me in without a word, without asking who I was. I planned to ask him the same two questions I will ask each man—
How did you meet my mother?
How did you find out she had died?
With most these questions will be enough to get them to unreel the story of their relationship. Most seem grateful I’d asked, as if this were a story they longed to tell but never found the right ear. In the sixties Sam worked for the Concrete Pipe Corporation, the only industry in town. He tells me how she would come into this breakfast joint for coffee every morning, and that one day he ran out after her as she was pulling away and jumped into the front seat beside her. I just have to know your name, he blurted out. They stayed together for a year. Tim says they were more friends than in any sort of relationship, Just two lonely people who spent some time together for a while. I remember stopping by Tim’s apartment on my way home from elementary school, letting myself in. A pool table. 4711 cologne. The unknown world of men. I don’t know if he knew I was there, I might not have had permission. Don helped her buy her first motorcycle, hints that he doesn’t fully buy the story that it had been suicide—She was a lot stronger than that. Travis tells the story of the blueberry pie, remorseful that she’d used his gun, which may or may not be true, as she had her own gun.
Father figurines. Then there’s my real father. Lunchtime when I first stop by, I catch him on his way out. Each Monday, I discover, he eats the free lunch in the basement of a church on Arlington Street. He’s nicknamed it “the Dwarf’s Diner.” Some who eat at the diner are homeless; some, like my father, simply don’t have enough money to make it through the month. The first tape I have is of him walking to the diner down Commonwealth Avenue. Next on the tape he’s eating, sitting at a folding table with six other men. I ask him some questions, he looks uncomfortable. I keep the camera trained on his face, don’t let it wander to the others. My father introduces me as his son to a guy named Howard. Howard warms up—Why didn’t you say so? I thought you was just some student, making another documentary on “The Homeless.” It’s more like a home movie, I say. The Dwarf (she is diminutive, but not a dwarf) comes by. I can’t believe a handsome kid like him belongs to you. You sure it wasn’t the milkman?
After lunch we walk to the Old Burial Grounds. Late April, tourists pose before winged skulls on tombstones. I try again to ask about my mother, but first he wants to tell me his three-step process for robbing banks. Flawless, he promises. Animated for the camera, clearly this is a story he has told many times before.
Step One—
You need checks. Dippy-do Doyle knew someone who worked at John Hancock Insurance. They spirit out a check which has the official three-color sig on it. Dippy-do brings the check to Suitcase Fiddler, who forges the sig on a copy of the check—Suitcase is an artist, a master. The next day Dippy-do spirits the original back to John Hancock.
In the days to follow, when I meet with the other men, at moments I will feel the tables turn—now I am the older man, the father figure, and these men, telling about their younger selves, are lost, needing direction. Some take half an hour to tell their story, some three. My father takes days, weeks, years. He’s still telling it, whenever I stop off to see him. It seems like two simple questions, but I soon find there are no simple questions, not with my father. He never seems to want to know much about me, how my life has gone, what kind of man I’ve become. In front of a camera there is a lot he wants to say.
Step Two—
Open an account. Open an account. Where? Fall River and New Bedford. Classic American towns. A lot of money in those towns—in certain hands. It was this nation’s bicentennial—I’d go to a teller with a camera around my neck—classically dressed, even in Levi’s I was always classically dressed. Why did I have this insurance check? My father died, my mother got hit by a car, some bullshit story.
At the soup kitchen my father had said no to dessert. Howard teased him that it was the first time he’d seen him give up food. The kid’s got me nervous, my father muttered, he knows how successful his father is—Memoirs of a Moron, that’s my masterpiece. By the time we get to the cemetery he has transformed himself from moron to swashbuckler. Perhaps it’s the camera, his last shot at fame. He leans into the lens, his hand cupping his mouth, whispers:
One thing—always go to a female teller. Always go to a young female teller. A man would never work. Most of them are homosexuals and I despise homosexuals and they despise me because they can tell that I despise them. An African-American? Me? I’d have never gotten off base with an African-American. They had to be young, good-looking women. Some of them even slipped me their phone numbers, because they wanted to have a little…relationship, you know—I even wrote a couple from prison. Never got any reply—
By this point in the taping I’m experimenting with all the functions on the camera—the slo-mo, the fade, the stutter. I have been with him for almost four hours, and he has yet to mention my mother.
Step Three—
(holds three fingers in the air, thinking) Step One was getting the checks. Step Two was opening the account (pause). Oh, the cash. Step Three was withdrawing the cash. A week later I return. I had to have a story. Why cash? I was buying antiques, and they wouldn’t take a check. I’d say it indignantly. They say they need cash. By then the insurance check would have cleared, I had money in the bank, they gave me the dough. Always under five thousand dollars. Remember that. Anything over five thousand trips off an instant federal investigation.
Like an automated cowboy in a glass box at an arcade—put a dime in and he shoots his gun in the air, cackles. I let the camera stray, passing over tombstone and tourist, blurring. So that’s the whole plan. Absolutely, positively flawless.
Except he forgot the surveillance cameras. And he never answered my questions. The amount the scheme generated hovers between sixty grand and four million. During these years he never sent a letter, at least not to me. At least not one that was passed on. And no money ever came our way, not a dime of the thousands or millions ever landed in my mother’s hands. The bank job (his, not hers) transpired a few years after another brush with the law. That time my mother drove him to the Hingham Courthouse to answer some bullshit charge—what was it—something—Oh, I remember—it was nonsupport (laughs). That’s what it was (looks into camera). That’s where I escaped—. This was the years we were on food stamps, when my mother was taking home one hundred and twenty-seven dollars a week. As a bank teller. A young, good-looking woman.
I lower the camera. Tourists pass. They keep looking at me like I’m some kind of movie star, my father glows.
photogenic
For the next two years I will visit my father every few months, always with a video camera as a buffer. I will bring the tapes home and watch him, again and again. He writes me a letter after my first visit, says I can ask him anything about my mother, anytime, that his memory is 100% photogenic. “Photogenic”—his word, not mine. I imagine he tells me this to establish himself as a reliable narrator, someone I can ask about any aspect of his life, any minutiae, and he will conjure it, build that thing before me with words. This is what my father means, it seems, by photogenic.
He does eventually talk about my mother. He tells me the story of asking her out on a date for the first time when she was working in the coffee shop, how he finessed a car. She was beautiful, for chrissakes. He tells how Ray called him when she died. I guess your brother found her—Jesus Christ, that’s awful. Jesus Christ. The next time I see him he says that he’s figured something out. The reason someone commits suicide, he tells me, is because they don’t like themselves—self-hatred—I think it’s a very reasonable explanation.
Scotty, his buddy from Portsmouth, had a similar insight, though it was about my father—I always felt your father didn’t like himself a lot, that he had a self-destructive side wider than most. That he carried around a sense of failure. You kids were an important part of his life, he would read to me the letters he wrote you, yet it always seemed like he was punishing himself for his failures as a father. Eventually he made a business of being a failure—if he was close to success he would sabotage it. The one role he held on to was that of being a great undiscovered writer—it allowed him to lash out in anger, it became his job to straighten the world out, to point to exactly how he’d been mistreated. The art world allowed him to get away with extravagant and excessive behavior, it encouraged it. His life became a raging performance piece, scripted by Jonathan Flynn. This allowed him to stay in control of something in his life. It became all presentation.
One winter morning my father found me outside my gate in the Combat Zone as I was coming off the night shift on the Van—I’m not going to die out here, he hissed. I’m not your poor sensitive mother. I’m a survivor.
another way to think of fire
In making the documentary I find one of my mother’s ex-boyfriends in a retirement community in Florida—acre upon acre of identical attached houses, seemingly held together by golf. Vernon had been the carpenter she’d been with when our house burned down, married with a couple kids. He left his family for my mother, and all he will say about it when I meet him is that it had been wrong. A Roman Catholic led astray by a disbeliever. Vernon is the only one who won’t allow me to videotape him, or even record his voice. I got his address from his second wife. He’d become a recluse, she said, refusing to see even his own children. I remember he and my mother being together for five years, though he claims it was only two. I remember hanging off his neck, I remember watching him shave. He turned on the window washer in his car once and told me ours was the only car it rained on, and I believed him. Surprised to see me after thirty years, but he invites me in and we talk for three hours without a break. He digs out a photograph he took of me sitting beside my mother in 1965, the first photograph I’ve ever seen of the two of us together from when I was that young. She looks calm. I look like there’s a coiled spring inside me and I’m about to shoot off into outerspace. I tell him I remember how he rebuilt our house after the raccoons burned it down, and he laughs. Raccoons, Vernon guffaws, raccoons? Outside the white Florida sky bears down on hapless golfers. Raccoons didn’t burn down your house, he clucks, your mother did. He describes the house, before the fire, as even worse a ruin than I remember. All it needed was a match, he says. My mother had developed a flirtatious relationship with an insurance agent, Vernon claims, got the house covered for more than it was worth. The night of the fire my mother was wide awake in bed beside him at two in the morning. She smelled smoke before there was any smoke, he insists. Half an hour later smoke filled the downstairs. They ran into the room my brother and I slept in and carried us outside, the house now thick with it.
vodka, stamps, flowers
(1998) The corner of my father’s bed is the only surface in his room not stacked high with newspapers or books, pilfered reams of paper or tchotchkes. I take off my coat, sit where his body must have lain a few hours before, ask how he’s been. It’s still early in the month, so he hasn’t gone through his disability check yet. This means he’s drinking, good, Russian vodka, not that rotgut crap…. His background is, as he will often point out, Russian and Irish, so he’d be a little weird not to drink, if you get his point. So for the first ten, fifteen days of each month he drinks. Occasionally he takes himself out for a meal, somewhere other than a church basement, maybe he buys himself some shampoo. The remaining four hundred dollars goes to vodka, stamps and cut flowers. Cheap bouquets from the 7-Eleven. Stamps to send out letters to those few people with whom he keeps contact. The rest of the money goes to half gallons of Smirnoff’s, which he drinks with orange juice all day, days on end, until the money begins to run out, then for the last few days he drinks it straight. During this time he may have a friend crash on his floor, someone he knows from the streets—Mississippi Mike, Joe Kahn (I remember Joe from the shelter). My father points out the narrow passage on the floor, between his bed and a mound of clothes, where his visitors sleep, and it seems unlikely, though perhaps a relief from shelters or doorways.
After insisting I shake his hand properly, deep and firm, he launches into a familiar flurry of hate speech, paranoid fist-to-palm gesticulating, racial invectives, this time something about ten-year-old white girls getting raped night after night outside his window by the blacks. This tirade causes me to have trouble focusing, and I consider leaving quickly, but will myself to stay. I look at the one cleared chair, turned vaguely toward the snowy television, take in the disorder—every wall, every chair, every countertop, deep with worthless junk. My inheritance. The television, donated by Tommy the Terror, his pal from the Portsmouth days, is always on, even if the volume is down. A one-panel comic strip pinned over my desk passes through my mind—a king holds an ice pick up to a boy and declares, Someday son this awl will be yours.
My father negotiates the passageway between where he sleeps and the kitchen, keeping up a constant patter, pouring more orange juice into his vodka cup. I imagine Joe sitting in the one cleared chair, drinking the beer he’s brought, nodding, maybe wedging a story of his own in between my father’s endless stream. I tell my father I spoke with Tommy a few weeks ago. He answers that Tommy was sitting where I am, on the edge of his bed, not three days ago. But I know it was seven years ago, Tommy told me this, told me he’s given up on my father. Even Ray no longer writes, no longer visits, and Jonathan is not welcome to visit him. I excuse myself, pick my way to my father’s bathroom. The bathtub’s jammed with more magazines and clothes, so much so that to bathe must require a considerable investment of time and energy. I ask him if he uses it.
Of course, he snorts.
It’s just that it’s loaded with stuff, I point out.
His stovetop too is thick with unopened cans of food, arranged in aesthetic patterns and pyramids, but never touched, as evidenced by the ever-thickening layer of dust over it all. The canned food is a relief, for it seems he’ll never starve. His refrigerator, unopened for years now, is barricaded by the ever-growing towers of saved magazines and newspapers. Even his bed’s mostly covered during the day, stacks of magazines which must be moved onto the one empty chair before he can lie down.
It’s a form of generosity that my father invites a street person, a friend, up for the night. He’s even offered it to me, or my brother, anytime we need a place, something I never offered him when he was living on the streets. But in his room there is no place, unless I sat upright in a straight-backed chair all night, or stretched out on the bit of floor beside his single bed, in the path to the bathroom. Or, the horror, crawled in bed with him. I would first sleep on a bench, or under a bush. I would risk rats and mayhem before I would spend a night in his room.
twelve doors (the devil’s arithmetic)
When I ask my father the story of how he met my mother he tells me the story of how to rob a bank. I ask him about his years sleeping outside and he tells me about scamming a room at the Ritz. Can I see your book? I ask, every time I see him. He feigns shock, indignant at my doubts, points to a corner of his room, to a box buried beneath his piles of unread newspapers. It must be there, it’s the only place untouched. I offer to dig into it with him. He’ll ask how much time I have and if I say a couple hours he’ll say it’ll take ten, if I say a couple days he’ll say a week. Of course there’s a book, the book he’s been working on his entire life, The Button Man, though sometimes it’s called The Adventures of Christopher Cobb. Letters from Little, Brown and Viking are framed on his walls. He walks to these framed letters and points to them as proof. One describes the book as “a virtuoso display of personality,” but, unfortunately, “its dosage would kill hardier readers that we have here.” At the bottom of one my father has written, “Ann Hancock and I are still close friends. She loves my work. The Adventures of Christopher Cobb!—It shall be an American classic! I never quit! I never give up!” Yes, I say, I can see the letters, you’ve sent them to me a hundred times, but can I see the book?