Bandit

by Molly Brodak

  On the back of the photo is his loopy cursive in blue pen:

  Nora,

  My first real, true love. You changed my life with your “crazy” love.

  I love you,

  J. B.

  When I read these words I began to cry instantly, in gusting sheets of tears. I took the photograph because it was the first object that ever made me cry.

  12

  They say the traits of a sociopath are incessant, sometimes even pointless dishonesty, lack of impulse control, and lack of remorse, accompanied by charm, narcissism, and studied manipulation.

  Skimming through the basic criteria for this personality disorder in the DSM-5 I was struck by how obviously this description suited my dad. I had to laugh a little.

  So how can I still doubt it? Somehow I do. Maybe a person can just be a regular man with problems, who just keeps making increasingly bad choices to cope with the messes from old bad choices, over and over. Does it have to be that he is a sociopath?

  Psychologists today describe disorders or pathologies with fuzzy borders, in more baggy categories than they used to be—spectrums, with a range of traits that may or may not present themselves in the sufferer, and with a wide range of intensities. This offers a more intelligent and nuanced view of psychopathology, and softens overly broad, black-or-white generalizations about the meaning of disordered actions, such as crimes or compulsions. But, it also, in a way, makes the categories of mental pathologies less meaningful—it puts everyone, in some way, on every spectrum.

  Certainly Dad falls a little farther along on the spectrum than, I don’t know, everyone else I know. He’s not a murderer, not productively domineering enough to be one of those successful, greedy, and coldhearted CEO types, nor is he reckless enough to have earned any other criminal convictions before the robberies. He’s just fundamentally dishonest. And I can’t say that of anyone else I know.

  Dishonesty is a deep taproot for a sociopath. It feeds the manipulative powers, obviously, and all the crimes stem from a kind of manipulation, a falseness of being, even to those closest to him, or especially those closest to him. Dishonesty is cumulative, building layers of masks upon the original self, useful for quick changes, for opportunistic shifts that cut straight to personal goals without the messy effort of considering others. Deceptive masks can become burdensome, exhausting. I hold out hope that he will drop his. I wouldn’t still be thinking about him if I didn’t believe there was something true under his lies.

  But lack of remorse. That one is hard.

  Dad shows remorse for his crimes, all the lying and stealing and cheating. I see it in the photo of him wearing his orange jumpsuit that pops up when I Google his name. It stabs me cold when I see it, and I have to look away. There is emotion in his eyes. But maybe it is just plain anger.

  His letter to the sentencing judge at his last trial was, honestly, convincing. But it is hard to know what I’m looking at when I read it. He really does seem to deserve leniency, with his bold moral regret, acknowledgment of misaligned priorities, clear reasons for his fogged judgment. Perhaps this shows growth, a maturity that came with age and genuine reflection on the consequences of his poor choices.

  But in a sociopath, what looks like maturity is often just a more sophisticated set of skills in manipulation.

  What is the difference?

  13

  After I was born Dad came across an ad for an attorney who hired women to be surrogate mothers and he became convinced this would solve my family’s financial problems. Nowadays paid surrogacy is more common, but at this time in the early eighties the process was new and still somewhat risky. He pressed upon my mom this idea, that this procedure could relieve them of their debt and provide a nice financial cushion for the family. She started to warm to the idea. After all, she loved being a mother, and the possibility of helping a couple have a baby felt kind and smart and wonderful. She said the couple met her in a restaurant, and she brought me and my sister along, “you know, to show you off, so they could see how healthy and happy you were,” she told me. We squirmed and smiled in the booth like the best roly-poly babies possible, and Mom beamed while the couple fell for her.

  The couple lived on Long Island, so Mom was flown out to New York to do the insemination there. It didn’t work. She was flown out again. It didn’t work.

  Meanwhile, Dad’s gambling debts were secretly accruing. He had started thinking about the $10,000 they were set to receive as soon as the baby was born, and he revved up his spending and reckless gambling. Mom didn’t know about the gambling yet, but its effects were becoming obvious. The kind old woman who lived upstairs came down one evening to offer Mom some homemade bread and soup—a regular event, since the woman could see we didn’t have quite enough food to go around. “Oh, and your brother-in-law was here this morning looking for you,” she told Mom.

  “Brother-in-law?” Mom asked. She did have a couple of brothers-in-law, but why would one come down to Auburn Hills?

  “He seemed real nice, kept asking about you and the girls. Asked where the girls go to school now. He asked what they looked like too, how big they are now and all that.”

  Mom froze. She buckled over and begged the woman to say she hadn’t told the man anything about her girls. The woman brought her fists to her mouth and began to cry lightly, realizing now that the man had not been a brother-in-law, stammering out that she had not told him much, had not known the name of the school we attended.

  Mom recounted the scene to Dad once he arrived home. He laughed gently and said he was sure it was nothing. But then he fell serious. “Anyway,” he instructed her, “ignore knocks at the door.

  “On second thought,” he corrected, “hide under the bed when someone knocks.”

  Mom carried on in this apartment in terror. The phone rang incessantly during the day when he was gone. Afraid to leave the receiver off the hook in case she needed to be reached, she hid it in the closet. Only once did she pick it up and respond to a strange man on the line. He told her he was calling from Vegas. “Your husband,” the man said, “is a scumbag. A fucking deadbeat. Did you know that?” She unplugged the phone. That night, the living room windows were shot out.

  It was Dad’s ideal moment to convince her to move. She was afraid now, and tired of living off beans and handouts from the neighbors. Dad said he had a prospect of a better job—and it just so happened to be on Long Island, closer to the couple, how ideal.

  We moved to a cramped basement apartment on Long Island. In photos of us from this era, atop a cheap swingset or feeding ducks by a weak pond, there is a kind of stressy child anger in our eyes. But Mom kept up her focus on us. Free from his debts back in Michigan, Dad returned to gambling. She never knew how bad things were until something turned up missing. A car, for example.

  One morning, Mom was cleaning us up from breakfast as Dad was leaving for work. He came back into the house after a minute. “Forget something?” Mom asked absently.

  “No, uh, my car …”

  Mom looked out the window. It was gone. “Where’s your car?”

  “Oh … I let a buddy of mine borrow it.”

  “He just came in the night and took your car? He had a key to your car?”

  “Yeah, it was an emergency, no big deal. I’m gonna borrow yours today, OK?” He grabbed her keys and left.

  How could he resolve this one? Weeks went by and his “buddy” didn’t return the car. Eventually he just came home with a new one, an old beater with green upholstery that smelled like dogs. He told Mom he’d just decided to sell his buddy the car, but she’d already seen the repo notice. She wasn’t surprised anymore. She shuffled her rage into resignation, and focused on us instead.

  The insemination attempts continued. One night, after returning from a long trip to a casino, drunk and tired, Dad forced himself on Mom. She said she screamed and fought him. But he was strong. Sex violated the contract they had with the couple, for obvious reasons.

  On a hunch, she t
ook a test a few weeks later and discovered she was pregnant. Now, though, she wasn’t sure whose baby it was.

  She felt totally lost. She took us to stay with her aunt in Baltimore for a few weeks. And there, without telling anyone, she decided to abort the fetus. She hadn’t spoken to Dad for weeks, nor did she return the calls from the couple. Eventually she returned home, with us in tow, to find Dad having just returned too, from Atlantic City. He had gambled away everything; their savings, his car, his wedding ring, every penny he could find. Mom packed our clothes again and whatever small things would fit into her powder blue Caprice Classic, and took us back to Michigan that same day. She filed for divorce and moved back in with her parents, again. It was while living with my grandparents that I first started to know my life. I remember Goodison preschool. A salt-dough Christmas ornament I made there that I tried to eat. Playing red rover in the sun. My bossy sister teasing me, other young children around, and a stress around us all.

  Eventually Mom was going to have to call the couple to tell them what happened. She says she still remembers that phone call, their voices on the other line, warm, but quiet and shocked. They were crushed. They said they would have taken the baby either way, and loved it completely. They had come to trust and care for her, and she failed them in the worst possible way. Listening to my mom reveal this story crumples my guts coldly.

  14

  My first memory happened on a stairwell, and stairwells have had special resonance as meaningful sites for me ever since. I was three years old, maybe. The stairs were wide and thin, the kind with no back to the steps, just floating slats. It was sunny and the room was white and yellow, the stairwell of an apartment building. Mom was ahead of me, on the steps above, holding paper bags of groceries in both arms. I fell. I was belly down on the steps, and I could see through to the emptiness behind and under us. I can see it now. Just a column of pure air. I was afraid I would slip through, into space, even though I wouldn’t have fit through the slats. I looked up at Mom, who kept climbing the stairs strongly and calmly. “Get up,” she said. “Come on.”

  15

  Such a short part of their lives really, this marriage. Just a few years.

  Dad moved back to Michigan too, following us a few weeks later. Now it was 1985. We had moved, on average, every year and a half and would continue this pattern until I hit middle school. Mom and my sister and I returned to Grandma and Grandpa’s house. Dad was living in a hotel room in Centerline, near the GM Tech Center where he worked.

  We would be dropped off there, and walk the Astroturf-lined hotel walkways to the room while teenagers screamed and splashed in the pool. Latin music blared and faded from within the rooms we passed, some with open doors, some with eyes following. It seemed like a party. Dad bought us huge bags of candy: Skittles for my sister, Raisinets for me. There were always cold cuts and a shrimp ring in the fridge. During the day he’d often leave us alone there, and we were OK, watching movies, eating candy, puffy painting giant, cheap sweatshirts and playing Nintendo—Super Mario Bros., Mega Man, and Rampage, all day.

  My sister took care of me when we were alone. She directed me to eat from the plate of crackers and ham she’d arranged and to drink a glass of milk when I was too absorbed in a game to eat. She knew how to pull out the sofa bed when we were getting tired. I’d watch her tiny body rip the creaky metal frame out of the nubby brown couch like some industrial conjuring trick. She’d straighten the sheets around the lumpy mattress and drag the comforter from Dad’s bed onto ours, nestling me into the uncomfortable mess wordlessly.

  She’d check to make sure the front door was dead bolted, then flip the lights off and tuck us in. The puffy paints, bags of candy, half-consumed glasses of milk, and plates of ham would be scattered on the floor around the sofa bed, and we’d just lie there, listening. The rush of cars on 12 Mile Road below and the garbled living sounds from the residents in nearby rooms would lull us to sleep. We imagined different versions of where Dad was; a cool movie, on a date with a hot lady, at a nightclub, at a concert. Sometimes we’d compare ideas, sometimes we’d just let them play out in our heads as we fell asleep.

  During the day I’d poke around his stuff when he was gone as I always did when I was left unattended. Shoved under towels in the linen closet were Playboy magazines and a few tiny baggies of green and white drugs. Sometimes money. Under the bed, in a shoebox: a heavy, greasy-looking gun. Just once.

  I didn’t really miss him when he was gone, but I knew that couldn’t be right. I wanted him around, but when he was I felt awkward near him.

  I wanted to have the fun he wanted us to have. He’d take us to kid things, like water parks or Chuck E. Cheese, places Mom would never take us to because she insisted on productive activities, like hikes or art museums. Regularly he’d take us to a golf dome with a bar and a dark arcade attached, then hand us both a roll of quarters to spend in the arcade while he was in the bar. For hours we’d feed the machines, Mortal Kombat, Rampage, and Gauntlet. When our quarters were gone we’d gingerly shuffle through the bar and find him alone, glued to a sports game usually. He’d hand us more quarters or say it was time to go. It was fun, but thin fun. I felt lonely. He’d put something in front of us—a sports game, an arcade, a movie, or a toy—but he was always on the other side of it … far on the other side of it. I kept it that way too, I know. I didn’t like to go with him. I didn’t like to have to answer his perfunctory questions about school or interests. I didn’t even like to hug him.

  I see my little self standing awkwardly next to him. I had wanted to be hugged, for sure. I had wanted him to ask me questions. Maybe it’s my own fault that I couldn’t figure out how to love him like my sister did.

  And once again, he pursued Mom relentlessly. I didn’t know this until later, when Mom told me. I often wonder why he pursued her. He could have easily walked away from us, and perhaps he didn’t only because that was the more obvious thing to do. The only thing that makes sense is that he wanted to be with us. Or, he felt like he was supposed to be with us, an obligation he couldn’t shake.

  I can’t feel my way toward a sharper picture of him. Nothing really matches up. There are fragments of a criminal alongside fragments of a normal dad, and nothing overlaps, nothing eclipses the other, they’re just there, next to each other. No narrative fits.

  16

  No, I did see it, once. On a softball field, in the evening, when the sky was turning dark pink. Mom had brought me to see my sister’s after-school softball team play, a team that my dad coached. I had wandered away out of boredom to sit in the grass, probably looking for interesting insects or rocks, and from some distance I saw my dad approach my mom at the edge of the bleachers where she stood. The sun was behind them, but I could see their gray shapes in a nook of the gleaming silver bleachers and the matching fence. Perhaps the game was over. He was talking close to her face, and she was looking away at first, arms crossed. I edged to the other side of the bleachers to hear. He had his hand on her shoulder; she was starting to smile. I could hear him say, “I need you. I need you,” in a steady, pleading voice that I can still hear in my head. I was surprised at this sound, and memorized it. Then he lifted his knee and softly and childishly kneed her thigh, still saying “I need you” and now drawing it out lightly and funnily with each jab, “I kneed you. I kneed you,” and she was really smiling now, looking down sweetly and smiling.

  17

  And so it all started over. Mom and Dad were getting back together and I should have been happy. Mom should have been happy, but she wasn’t.

  Mom and my sister and I piled into the Caprice Classic and left Grandma’s house in the fall of 1986, pulled by Dad’s spell. Mom sobbed as she watched Grandma’s house shrink in the rearview mirror. She turned her face away from us, but I saw her crying. I felt guilty. Even now I don’t think Mom would have gone back to Dad if it weren’t for us kids.

  Dad rented half of an old duplex on Laurel Street in Royal Oak, then still a lower-working-cl
ass suburb before it gentrified in the late nineties. At Mom’s request, Dad agreed to go to Gamblers Anonymous, but quit after a few sessions, just when, according to him, the group started to “pry” into him. “I’m not that bad,” he told her. “These guys, they’re crazy, I mean really stupid, how they gamble. I know what I’m doing.”

  Mom kept pushing him to go back, but he threw himself into working instead, picking up all available overtime at GM. Mom had finished her graduate program and was working steadily. We had a year on Laurel Street—and it was a big year for me. I was five years old, and my world was starting to solidify whole around me and become readable.

  The duplex had an angled stairwell set in its center like a spine and a musty basement smell. On the middle landing of the stairwell there was a door that led nowhere, just outside, straight down. Mom told me that there was probably once a porch there; surely there must have been a porch there, although you couldn’t see any evidence of it from outside. The dead bolt on the door was kept locked, but when I was bored I would quietly unlock it, turning the knob so slowly that no one would hear. I gently pulled the door open, hoping to quiet the sucking sound of it opening. I stood at the edge and looked down at the flat lawn. It was not high, not even on the second floor yet, but still it was terrifying. I loved that door. It made me feel like things could be insane and senseless in any regular home and it was just going to be like that; it was built like that in fact.