Hidden Falls, page 18
I held the key in my hand and wondered what I would really find at First Citizens’. What would I even do if there was over a million dollars in cash in there? Will Vinny and the guys be waiting for me after I get it? The anxiety was exhausting, constantly having to sort friends from enemies.
I needed to file another column, but I had already strip-mined all the sentimental gold from my personal Mt. Nostalgia—all that remained was the toxic heap of tailings that needed to be cleaned up, and nobody wanted to read about that.
The assignment forced me to look more critically at my life than I wanted to that morning. I’d become a stranger in my childhood home, an unwilling interloper. Maybe the truth doesn’t matter, I thought. Maybe I don’t possess insight. Maybe I just have the ability to make delusions seem credible—I have a gift for fabricating optimism.
Mary’s name appeared on my caller ID. Suddenly the feeling of caterpillars writhing in my gut turned to butterflies. The metamorphosis of love, I thought, and snickered at myself. I put down the key and grabbed the phone. The sound of her voice put me immediately at ease. Maybe the place I belong is not a place at all, I thought. I was too old to believe in soul mates. I wasn’t even sure I believed in the soul, but Mary and I shared something that I was having a hard time understanding—in a good way.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey,” she replied in the caring voice I was so desperate to hear. “Are you doing okay?”
“My body’s rebelling from a diet of diuretics and mollusks cooked in lard,” I explained wryly.
“You should market that,” she suggested after she was done laughing. “Do you have a name for it? The Tower Beach Diet?”
“Maybe the Clam-Up and Shit Your Life Away Diet, or the Suicide Diet, or maybe just the New England Diet.”
We laughed and then paused to make room for the pain. “Are you up for talking?” she posed, tentative.
“Yeah, I really am,” I assured her. “I wish you were here.”
“You’ll be back soon,” she said. “I can’t wait to see you. Do you want to talk about what’s going on? I’ve been worried about you.”
“Thank you. I do, but I don’t. There’s just so much that I don’t know how to explain it all. When I start unwinding it in my mind, I feel like I’m going crazy.”
“Well, maybe just start with your emotions.”
“I feel unhinged.”
“Give me a little more than that.”
“I’m scared. I’m disillusioned. I’m becoming paranoid. I’m feeling like I never knew my family. But on a positive note, I feel like I’ve been learning a lot about myself, and I feel like the past few days have brought me closer with Ben. But in the process, I’ve uncovered things about my family that make me question everything I thought I knew.”
“Things about your father, or more than that?”
“My father had a lot of secrets. It turns out that I never really knew him. All I knew was the façade he created. I used to come back to New Bedford to ground myself in what I thought was real, but it was all a lie.”
“What do you mean by that exactly?”
“Everybody knew things about my father that I didn’t. Um, I haven’t said this out loud yet, and I’m having trouble finding the words. It turns out he was pretty well connected in the mob …”
“Is that a joke?”
“No. A crime boss paid for his funeral. And there’s a plaque with his name on it in the bar the mobster owns and uses to launder money, or some such thing that I don’t really understand.”
“That’s, um, stunning, Michael. I’m sorry. I’m sure that’s, well, shocking. I’m shocked,” she stammered.
“I don’t know what to do with it. I mean seriously, I feel like it makes my whole life a lie.”
“But it’s not your life. It’s his. What your father did for a living, or didn’t tell you he did for a living, doesn’t make your life a lie.”
“It kind of does. People treated me differently my whole life and I never really realized that. I grew up in a tough neighborhood, but I never felt threatened. I’d go to the bakery and the owners would always give me free pastry. I just thought that was how life worked. I thought they just liked me. I never realized I was being treated differently because of who my father was. It’s no wonder I always felt so confident here. It’s because I was being protected by the mob and I didn’t even know it.”
“God, my head is spinning just thinking about it. I mean, your brother’s a cop.”
“Yeah, I don’t think he’s a good cop, and by that I mean I don’t think he’s an honest cop. No one seems to trust him. No one. I thought he just had problems with me, but he seems to have problems with the entire world.”
“I’m starting to see,” she conceded, and took a deep breath. “God, Michael, that’s a lot. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, and you know, I don’t want to believe any of it, but here I am.”
“I know this is hard, but still, I just need to reiterate that it doesn’t change who you are. You’re still the same guy I’m falling in love with.”
“Am I though? Are you trying to convince yourself or me? Because, I’m honestly struggling with it.”
“Your father hiding his other life doesn’t make you a different person. It changes your perception of him, but it doesn’t change you. Knowing about it can help you understand your upbringing better, I guess. And I’m not trying to belittle how you feel. It’s got to be really hard to learn something like this. I’m sure your father wasn’t trying to hurt you by keeping that part of his life a secret. I’m sure it came from a place of love.”
“I guess. And, you know, thank you, but I’m not sure you’re right. If I’m given this protection, or authority, or position, or whatever you want to call it, that I never earned but have always possessed, what does that make me?”
“A white man in America.”
I laughed. She caught me off guard. “So, in addition to my white male privilege, I just got a little extra privilege boost from the Mob. Well, that pretty much sums it up. You’ve just saved me years of therapy.”
“Look, I don’t mean to belittle your pain or your accomplishments, but yeah,” she laughed. “I mean, some people treated you differently in New Bedford as a result of your father, but it’s not like you’re George W. Bush or Mitt Romney trying to say you’re a self-made man when your father was the president or a governor, right? I mean, your privilege didn’t carry outside of New Bedford.”
“Yeah. I get it, but I’m talking about New Bedford. I’m talking about the foundation of who I am.”
“I’m just trying to say, are any of us who we thought we were as kids, or teens, or even when we were in our twenties? Are any of our parents who we thought they were?”
“But, if we’re not our experiences, then what are we?”
“We are all of our experiences. Even the things we never counted as being important. All of it matters.”
I knew there was truth in what Mary said, like I knew there’s beauty in a sunrise. I appreciated both, but I couldn’t say I understood the meaning of either. We talked for a while longer before we said “I love you” to each other as our goodbye.
I had three major things left to accomplish that morning: write a column, acquire camping gear, and check the box at First Citizens’ Federal Credit Union for a million dollars. I learned that having a key to a treasure chest makes it really hard to concentrate on anything else, especially writing a column. The bank, however, didn’t open until 10 a.m., so I broke out my laptop.
I felt resentful toward the Daily for pushing me to write about the loss of my father. Of course, I also felt a deep sense of irony, because I was being asked to do what newspapers usually do—what I usually do—find empathetic victims, colorful perpetrators, and interesting events and use them to tell our collective story. We tally up the dead and tell the stories of survivors. I just wasn’t used to being the empathetic victim.
I sat at the desk in my childhood bedroom where I had struggled with mathematics in all its forms and stared at the blinking cursor. The blank page had always represented new beginnings and infinite possibilities, but to me in that moment the empty page represented the abject fear that I had no self-awareness, and therefore, nothing left to write.
Everything I know about myself is already on the page, I thought. I felt eager to give in to despair. Trying is hard. I looked around the room for some kind of inspiration, for some toehold that would give my column a starting point. On the wall by the door were a handful of ancient trophies topped with basketball players taking hooks and two-handed-set shots. I should have thrown those relics away long ago, but they were still resting on the shelf my father built sturdy enough to hold a lot more hardware. Next to the shelf was a framed team picture of the 1978 Red Sox taken in the outfield in front of the Green Monster at Fenway Park. The headline I cut from the Boston Globe, now yellowed and brittle, still clung to the frame. It read: “The Boston Massacre.” I remembered cutting that out the morning after Bucky “Fucking” Dent hit the go-ahead home run—only his fifth of the year—to catapult the Yankees past the Sox to win the pennant. That game made me believe that the Sox were indeed inflicted by the Curse of the Bambino. There might be some material there, I thought. Eh, nah. Too cliché.
I turned in my chair to look behind me and saw the picture of my high school basketball team sitting on a bookshelf. There we all were, the whole team: Vinny, Matt, Bruce, Dexter, Jack, the Davids and the Kevins, Pete, and me. We were so young, and thin, and we all had hair. It was hard to imagine the boys in that photo having a life beyond New Bedford, and many of us didn’t. Four of us went to college, all firsts in our families, but only two graduated. More guys from our team went to jail than earned bachelor’s degrees. There was a column in that, but it wasn’t the one the Suits from Staten Island wanted. More frustrated than before, I turned my chair back around and let out a big sigh. The words “Always move toward your goals” were sitting on the desk in front of me. I’d come to hate that phrase and the compass on which it was etched. It represented all the lies I’d swallowed to feed my ambition. Well, the Suits aren’t going to get exactly what they want this time, I thought.
There was a line from my father’s letter that I couldn’t remember precisely, so I unpacked it from my bag and reread it. It was pithier in my memory than it was in my father’s handwriting, but the sentiment remained. “Decide how you want to be remembered by your friends and family and live everyday like it’s the only one they’ll remember. Be kind, be honest, be brave, and let that be your compass.”
So, I began to write. It was time for me to be kind, brave, and honest with myself and my readers.
I have always spent more time preparing for the life I wanted than I have enjoying the life I’m living. I spent a lot of time goal-setting, thinking proactively, envisioning my perfect future, and working toward it. All that preparation and forethought—along with a healthy dose of luck and privilege—landed me exactly where I am today. I always wanted to be a columnist for a major metropolitan newspaper, and here I am. My problem is that I don’t really like the person I became to get here.
Regular readers know my father died recently. Yesterday mourners packed the church, went to the graveyard, and then to Sully’s neighborhood bar. We drank and told stories late into the night. It was a true Irish wake. It was a great sendoff for my father and a tribute to what he meant to his community. I’ve thought and written a lot in the past week about family, memories, loss, and how to cope with living a continent away from the place your family calls home.
To anyone who has read my columns since my father died, I apologize. I’ve been misleading you, or more accurately, I’ve been misleading myself and I dragged you along with me. I created an illusory past that helped me project a romanticized version of myself into the world. The last few weeks, I’ve been writing about a history that was only partially real.
The way I kept my love for my hometown alive was to remember a place more idealized than the one I left. Did I really not see the truth that was so obvious to everyone else, or did I simply choose to believe a story I liked better? This is the question that has been on loop in my mind the past few days. I wanted to believe in the things that I wrote but wanting doesn’t make them true. Turning my beliefs, my wishes, my desires into words gave me a sense of power over my life. It helped me create a world in which I truly belonged. When I felt adrift, I could always return in my mind to the place I was from, but that place, as it turns out, only existed in my mind’s eye.
My father arranged for me to get a letter after he died. It was a message that divulged secrets and regrets about his life, while making a few observations about mine. In sum, his letter said I had become too big for my britches. He was kinder in his assessment, more subtle at least, but that was the takeaway. He told me I spent too much time working to become my job. I didn’t expend as much energy on becoming a good person, husband, or father.
When I was a kid, my dad gave me a compass etched with the words “Always move toward your goals.” I took those words pretty seriously. That hunk of metal was one of my most prized possessions, but in the end it was something my father, and now I, came to believe was a symbol of poor advice. His parting words to me were “There is nothing you can hold in this world that is more important than the love of your friends and family.”
My dad didn’t care what he did for a living. He cared about supporting his family. He cared about being a man of integrity, a man of his word. Faced with my father’s circumstances, I suspect I would have made different choices, but perhaps it is exactly because of my father’s choices that I never had to face his circumstances.
After my father lost his union job in the ’80s, my brother and I got free lunches at school, and our family lived on government assistance while he looked for another steady job. He found work as a butcher and swore he’d never again put his hand out in need, and he never did. That was a humbling period in our lives, but it never hardened his soul. He remained a kind, thoughtful, and generous man until his very last breath. He always remembered those times and it made him grateful for what he had. I, on the other hand, worked hard to distance myself from all of it and forget.
My father didn’t want me to know everything about him. I saw only what he wanted me to see. It only occurred to me as I sat down to write this article that his hiding himself from me was an act of love. My father and I were alike in many ways, but different in that my father knew he was keeping secrets—I, on the other hand, was living a lie. My father knew himself, but I only knew what I wanted to become. My father understood his environment and found a way to be successful within it. I have been struggling my whole life to change my surroundings to suit my vision of a perfect life. My father was wise. I have been a fool.
It was enough for my father to know his own sacrifices. He wanted no fanfare or recognition. He only wanted a better life for his family. I don’t know if the word “irony” is big enough to encapsulate the fact that it took his death for me to know how much he cared about me in life. He had a remarkable and bizarrely simple existence. And he died a quiet death that left a tangle of complicated emotions to unwind. I feel closer to him now than I did while he was alive. His death has taught me what’s important in my life. I will spend more time in the present moment appreciating the life I’ve been given and less time imagining a future that will always be out of my reach.
After all these years of trying, I think my father finally helped give my life direction.
I uploaded the column into the queue, not caring at all what a single person would think of it. It was 9:35 a.m. and I needed to get ready to go to the bank before I went camping on the Kancamagus Highway with my son.
18
#18 DAVE COWENS, CENTER, COACH, BOSTON CELTICS
The whaling museum was just a few blocks from the credit union. I pondered bringing Ben there after clearing out the safety deposit box. It was weird, how normal it all felt. I’ll just grab the piles the ill-gotten cash and then do a little sightseeing, I joked to myself to calm my nerves. The fact that gambling was now advertised on TV didn’t make my father’s money legal, and I didn’t know who to trust less: Andrianov, Vinny, or Derrick. As far as I knew, they were all on the same team. I just need to see what’s in the box and then get the fuck out of town, I thought as I turned onto Union Street and looked for a place to park.
I found a spot a block away and shifted the SUV into park. I sat for a few minutes surveying my surroundings. I scanned for conspicuous people milling about, talking into their sleeves or pressing on their ear and talking to no one. I really had no idea what I was hoping to see. The only context I had for situations like this were from TV thrillers and ’50s noir movies. I opened the car door, looked over at the passenger seat, and imagined an oilskin hat seated there, waiting for me to tug it over my brow. There was nothing that said “I’m ready for business” like squaring your shoulders and pulling down the brim of a fedora. This is why I’m gonna get killed, I thought, trying to keep my anxious inner monologue lighthearted to keep from throwing up.
Cars passed, but there was no one walking on Union Street. The credit union had only been open for a few minutes but there was already a line for the tellers. I didn’t recognize anyone, and no one seemed to recognize me. I ambled by the desks of loan writers with eager eyes hoping to snag someone’s attention. A chipper young man with gelled hair and a gold tie chain asked me if I needed help. Unprompted, he told me it was his first month on the job, his name was Victor, and he was a graduate of Westfield State College. He went there to study criminal justice but changed majors during his second semester after learning how much of law enforcement was administrative and boring. He’d like to start a family one day and hoped “that the banking world would provide the stability a young family needs.” He didn’t want to be like other young people who rushed into things and needed the assistance of their families or, God forbid, the government.
