by Elle Johnson
I wanted details about where our things had been found and how. I kept asking questions until my father told me that he had stolen them, robbed our house for the insurance money. He needed it to cover the tuition at the Lutheran parochial school my sister and I attended.
My father thought I’d be relieved and stop asking questions, stop telling everyone how great the police were for finding our stuff. Instead I stopped talking. I was angry with him. Not because I knew he had done something wrong and broken the law. My father did things like that all the time, breaking rules even as he was sworn to uphold them. He betrayed the system because he was part of it and said he knew the system was stacked against people like him—the little guy, the average Joe, the Black man. And my father’s way of thinking wasn’t so different from that of the other law enforcement officers we knew—Black, white, Latino, or Asian. They all used their discretion on the job and off. To deal with the inequities in the system, they developed their own rules and personal codes. I wasn’t angry at my father’s criminal behavior. I was angry because his robbery had robbed me of my peace of mind. I was stung that he hadn’t considered how what he had done might make me feel. I felt betrayed. Because of my father I had experienced a feeling I hadn’t known before: violation.
When we got home from Karen’s, my father blocked our driveway and idled at the curb, waiting for my mother and me to get out. I stood on the sidewalk and watched my parents through the windshield.
I could tell they were on the verge of an argument.
When my mother got out of the car she smiled at me and sang, “Okay,” as if nothing had happened. She wound her arm around my waist, walked me through the front gate.
My father pulled away. I wondered where he was going that was more important than being with us. I suspected he was headed back to the Bronx, to look for Karen’s killers.
My mother retreated to the basement. “To do lesson plans,” she said. “I have to get ready for school on Monday.” I heard her playing the piano. Practicing her favorite songs—“Que Sera, Sera,” “Malagueña,” “Besame Mucho”—in a halting, mournful way.
I turned on the light in my room and crawled into the boxy bottom bunk of my bed. Disturbing the cat, I buried myself underneath a wool blanket and the afghan of yellow, green, and pink flowers Grandma had crocheted just for me.
I lay on my back looking up at the slightly bowed metal bars holding the upper mattress over my head. I wondered if it would all come crashing down on me. I found comfort in the closeness of the space, held tight and cinched into the sheets by the hospital corners my father had taught me to make. I was grateful to be back in my room, safe. Alive. Surely nothing else bad could happen to my family.
Unless my father and uncle killed the boys who killed Karen.
My hands twitched into fists beneath the sheet.
Good. That’s what they deserve.
I wanted whoever had killed Karen to suffer. The heat of shame crept into my cheeks. I knew vengeance was wrong. “Vengeance is mine, saith the lord,” was what I had learned at my Lutheran elementary school. Only God can punish; the rest of us must learn to forgive. Except my father, who represented the law and rules even though he acted as if he were above it. I wished I could talk with my father about how I was feeling. I wanted to ask him, point-blank, “Are you going to kill those boys?” But I didn’t dare. I’d asked him once if he’d killed anyone in the war, on the job, in the streets.
“That’s a stupid question,” he’d snapped and ended the conversation.
I hated being chastised. I tried not to make him angry. I worked hard for his approval. But my father was unpredictable. He hid his deepest desires, real reasons, true thoughts. The only thing I knew for sure about my father was that I didn’t understand him.
Chapter Seven
I went into my closet and pulled out a rectangular box of shiny black plastic that had dulled over time. Inside were twelve cassette tapes of interviews I’d recorded with parole officers in 1990. After talking to Victim Assistance about Karen’s murder, I wanted to listen to those tapes again. I was hoping for insight, a better sense of my father on the job, so I could extrapolate his wishes in the matter of paroling Karen’s killer. I hoped that somewhere on the tapes someone had said something about my father that would make his intentions clearer to me.
I’d made these tapes when I was twenty-six years old. I worked for an independent film and television company housed in an old brownstone on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. The owner was a wealthy man—married to a socialite, living off their considerable trust funds—who could afford to make only socially relevant passion projects. I was hoping to elevate myself from development assistant with secretarial duties to paid writer by pitching ideas for projects the company could produce.
I pitched my idea for a TV show about a homicide detective whose extended family comes apart when his daughter is killed in a robbery. The murder not only breaks the homicide detective’s heart, it destroys his marriage. His best friend, who is also his cousin, is a parole officer who becomes estranged from his own daughter when she starts acting out in reaction to the murder. And the murdered girl appears as a ghost guiding her tormented family through their grief.
My boss wasn’t interested in the cop-show-as-family-drama approach, but the parole officer intrigued him.
“So now, I don’t really—and excuse me for not knowing, maybe I should know—but, but, but I don’t . . . but what is a parole officer, exactly?” my boss asked me.
“The person responsible for watching over convicted criminals once they get out of prison,” I answered.
“Well, now that, that’s interesting. That’s something.” Instead of a scripted series, I decided to make a documentary about parole officers, even though I had no idea what a parole officer actually did. My father kept a pair of shiny silver handcuffs in the box in his top dresser drawer, from which I gathered part of his job was to arrest criminals. But he never explained how he made a living. I never asked. I was afraid he wouldn’t answer or, worse, would snap at me that it was none of my business.
All these years later I remembered the interview I conducted with the then chairman of the parole hearing board, Gerald Burke. An older white man who seemed more like a docile grandfather than the man who decided prisoners’ fates. At one point in the interview, he said, “Just because you’re sending a man to the electric chair doesn’t mean you have to smile as you tighten the noose around his neck.” I would soon learn that parole officers were full of mixed metaphors, malapropisms, and mispronunciations. He didn’t know my father but was willing to talk to me because my father had been a parole officer. He said I was in the family and he could trust me. I’d taken a train to Albany just to interview him, and he’d spent all day with me. Nothing ever came of my parole documentary, but I did come to understand my father. The idea of hearing these voices from the past brought up strong memories.
I could picture him. He would sit in front of the TV, shining our shoes with a horsehair brush or cleaning his gun with a kerosene-soaked rag. Sometimes he stretched out on the couch, his lanky frame draped in a silk robe, slippered feet dangling over the sofa arm. On the floor beside him would be a plate of swiss cheese slices on Ritz crackers and an orange juice glass filled to the brim with an inexpensive wine from the local liquor store. He liked to watch cop shows on TV. Kojak, Baretta, and Columbo.
I would fold myself into the wingback chair across the room and watch quietly, riveted to the screen. I didn’t care about the plot or the crimes, only the shows’ titular characters: bald-headed Kojak in a three-piece suit sucking on a lollipop; disheveled detective Columbo wearing a wrinkled trench coat and half-loosened tie with the butt of a cheap cigar smoldering between his fingertips; and Baretta, the down-and-dirty undercover, sporting a short-sleeve sweatshirt with a jaunty newsboy cap on his head and a bright white cockatoo on his arm.
They were tough guys and mavericks. Pains in the asses who didn’t play well with others
and went against their supervisors. But they were dedicated to doing the right thing, even if it meant breaking the rules. They were men of action. They spoke when others were silent. Especially if it meant delivering a well-placed zinger or to say their crowd-pleasing catchphrase, like Kojak’s “Who loves ya, baby?” Or Columbo’s “Just one more thing . . .” These TV cops were the center of attention, but they were also loners. Confident yet humble. Charming yet intimidating. Straight shooters who kept secrets and told bald-faced lies. Unique, yet all the same. Predictable and full of contradictions—like my father. And like these TV cops, my father also had a signature style.
He shaved every morning and splashed half a palm full of bay rum cologne onto his face. He filed his fingernails, clipped his nose hairs, and trimmed the one eyebrow that grew long and stray. My father favored dark tailored suits and starched white shirts with french cuffs and chunky gold or silver cuff links. He’d put a silk handkerchief in the breast pocket but kept monogrammed white cotton hankies in his pants for his allergies. His ties were classic, beauties in solids or patterns of saturated reds and blues with the occasional diagonal yellow stripe. His leather shoes, black black or dark brown, were always polished to perfection. He put metal taps on the heel and toe to thwart the daily wear and tear.
He looked like a businessman, except he had the swagger and accessories of the streets. When he wasn’t smoking, an orange-colored, mint-flavored toothpick danged from the corner of his lips. He had three gold teeth, most noticeably a gleaming left incisor. Black wraparound sunglasses shielded his eyes from the grit and grime in the city air—although he wore his shades inside as well as out. And, depending on his suit and shoes that day, he would wear a bulky tan or black leather ankle holster with his trusted .38 for protection. But the coup de grâce was my father’s ghetto briefcase.
The ghetto briefcase was popular with Black and Latino men. I saw them on the subways and the streets of New York City. Plastic bags turned inside out—to hide the logo of whatever discount drugstore the bag had come from—and used as a kind of man purse. It was a place for my father to hold his temporary burdens—bills, bank statements, and whatever papers were necessary for the day’s errands—plus a good book. Usually a hardback, mystery or thriller. Something by le Carré. Sometimes sociology about the state of the Black man, but always wrapped in brown butcher-block paper like my elementary school textbooks. My father didn’t want people on the train to know what he was reading. He said, “That’s nobody’s business.” He was an intimidating son of a bitch. A six-foot-three Black man with a gun and a badge and a bad attitude.
My father was the archetypal TV cop.
Except he wasn’t a cop. He was a parole officer.
I visited my father’s office only once when I was a little girl, on the Friday after Thanksgiving. My father never took holidays off. He knew the office would be empty and the workload light. He could leave after half a day, no questions asked. He would go in on Christmas Eve and New Year’s Day, Good Friday, Easter, even the Fourth of July—especially the Fourth of July, because “this country never did anything for Black people anyway.”
The Manhattan parole office was a grimy ten-story building on 42nd Street, next to the Port Authority Bus Terminal. My father held my hand as we walked into the dingy white-walled waiting room. It was empty. Fluorescent lights buzzed overhead. We passed by rows of cracked plastic bucket seats, bolted to the floor and flanked by dirty metal ashtrays, and checked in at the reception desk behind a bulletproof glass window with a handwritten sign that read ABSOLUTELY NO TALKING. Behind the glass sat a middle-aged Black woman with a full mask of makeup on her face and red talon-like fingernails wrapped around a large Greek deli coffee cup—blue and white, with a Greek-key design at the top and bottom, and the words WE ARE HAPPY TO SERVE YOU printed in the middle. She smiled when she saw us and pressed the intercom to say, “Good morning, Officer Johnson. This your little girl? How you doing, sweetheart?”
I smiled as she buzzed us in.
We walked through the deserted bullpen. It was as vast as a city block with a skyline of vertical filing cabinets and chunky horizontal metal desks with steel rings welded to the side in case someone needed to be handcuffed.
My father had a corner office with a wall of windows that looked down on the backs of old buildings. A large metal desk the size of a small tank faced the door and barricaded my father into a corner. He didn’t want his parolees to know anything about him, so he concealed his vulnerability: his family. He never wore a wedding ring. There were no pictures of my sister or me, and none of our childish drawings or the sparkly paper plate or pipe cleaner school art projects made for Father’s Day. Instead he had thumbtacked up posters that said more about him than any family photo ever could: Huey P. Newton in a black leather jacket, holding a rifle and a spear, sitting in a peacock wicker chair that framed the black beret on his head like a halo; a thoughtful, bespectacled Malcolm X against a black background; Richard Roundtree as Shaft wielding a firing machine gun; and a white man’s hand with a sexy Black lady as the middle finger advertising Putney Swope, a film by Robert Downey Sr. about a subversive Black advertising executive. Then there was the poster of Che with his scraggly beard, face in profile next to the quote “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love.”
Looking back, I wondered what the other parole officers thought about my father’s choice of decor. His sympathy with Communists and revolutionaries was surely something his white counterparts might not have appreciated or understood. But they didn’t have to navigate the inherent racism of America and a justice system that, for instance, enforced Jim Crow laws and turned a blind eye to the widespread horror of lynchings. What was more curious was that racism hadn’t dampened my father’s desire to be a LEO (law enforcement officer) and part of that system. If anything, his sense of powerlessness contributed to his need to be in control, to subvert from the inside, to “stick it to the Man,” as the saying went, by becoming the Man.
I sat quietly in one of the two metal guest chairs, my legs dangling off the puffy green leather seat cushion, and watched snowflakes tumble out of the steel-gray sky. My father drank coffee with half-and-half while he sifted through mountains of paperwork on his desk. We ate the swiss cheese on rye sandwiches my mother had packed for us in a brown paper lunch bag. He smoked a cigarette. I drank milk from a coffee mug. Parole officers wandered by to say hello. They called my father Richard, Richie, Officer Johnson, or Dick, depending on their relationship with him. They leaned against the doorway and smiled conspiratorially, pleased with themselves for getting paid to do nothing.
“Come meet my daughter,” my father said, waving them closer. I shook hands with these men whom I had never heard of before, but who seemed to know all about me. They asked if I was still skiing. Playing the flute? Did I like that pogo stick my father had brought home for me?
By one o’clock my father and I were walking south on 7th Avenue to the Macy’s in Herald Square to buy Christmas presents for my mother. He picked up a gift set of Shalimar perfume, her favorite fragrance, that included a round of dusting powder and a small bottle of hand lotion arranged in a deep purple box lined with dark purple silk. I selected a collection of fancy soaps because they were wrapped in paper with colorful vignettes of a Spanish señorita sitting on a balcony, walking in the street, and holding a red fan with a tortoiseshell mantilla in her hair. My mother taught Spanish at a public school in an affluent district on the outskirts of Queens. Unlike my father, she talked about her job constantly.
My mother loved teaching Spanish. Everyone wanted to be in her classes. Students in the other Spanish classes clamored to be in her annual dance program. She choreographed it to feature traditional dances from all the Spanish-speaking countries and the South Bronx. She grew up listening to Tito Puente and Celia Cruz, wearing pencil skirts with three-inch heels, and her lips stained fire-engine red. She would spend months teaching her
students the merengue, rumba, and cha-cha. “That beat,” she’d say, taking quick staccato stabs at the air with her hands. “Feel that beat. I love that beat.” Elbows tight at her sides, she would tease out a rhythm with her hips, falling back on her heels, biting her lower lip to contain her excitement for every move. The school performance always ended with my mother being pulled onstage to a standing ovation. At Christmas and then again at the end of every school year, she was rewarded with extravagant gifts: 24-karat gold necklaces, real pearl earrings, silk scarves, leather handbags, and designer department-store chocolates that she was supposed to politely decline but never did.
My father was jealous. Teachers were beloved and admired. Parole officers were vilified and mocked. It seemed to make my father angry that my mother loved what she did and was thriving. I guessed it was because the opposite was true for him. Though I couldn’t be sure; I could judge only by the few stories my mother shared about my father’s job.
My mother said my father had embarrassed the department when he told a judge in open court that he wouldn’t recommend paroling a female inmate who had killed three of her own babies unless she was sterilized before she was released from prison. He angered his supervisors when he violated a parolee’s privacy by notifying the man’s wife that her recently released husband had contracted AIDS while doing time. He annoyed his coworkers when he refused to donate at the office to various charities, yet he kept grocery bags with milk, bread, and peanut butter in the break room fridge to give to parolees in need. He defied the system by befriending a parolee after he was sentenced to life in prison for killing a police officer because my father was convinced the parolee had been framed by crooked cops needing a patsy.
My father was a thorn in the side of his bosses, but he wasn’t any easier on his parolees, either. He marveled at their stupidity and frequently quoted their favored go-to excuse: “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” Then he’d laugh and shake his head. He didn’t trust them, so he didn’t leave any aspect of their supervision to chance. He was a master of controlling people. And that control extended to my sister and me.
