by Molly Brodak
It seems as if criminals, once confronted with their crimes, almost universally blame external factors for their behavior, and my dad did just that in both his first and second trials. It was the war, it was PTSD, it was addiction, and anxiety from childhood. The causes were always so remote. The more remote, the less he could be expected to have control over them. It is a strategy for absolution of responsibility.
Of course, criminals do often have sad stories of abuse or trauma that certainly do imprint their psyches for all time, like many noncriminals do too, but what seems to be a strong tendency to identify external loci of control is a hoax. It seems as if it is just the thing to say when one is caught. A criminal like my dad, a liar, has the most certain internal locus of control out of anyone; it is upon this that he relied unconditionally. A liar convinces himself first. That’s the hardest part. But if it works, then convincing others becomes easy. Manipulation is opportunism in its fullest realization: it is directing that erases itself, even to the director. An opportunist is not waiting for conditions to align for the crime to work, he is making the crime work in conditions as they are. The circumstances of self change to fit. That is power.
I could never understand, even after having played, how any reasonable person could consider gambling, especially blackjack, as a winnable game. It looked like a closed situation to me: the house has the edge. But some inlet must be discovered, or more like manufactured, when a person feels intense self-control, especially one who looks for risks. It is a way to pry open any action that seems closed. Perhaps especially the actions that seem most sensibly closed, like a table game at a casino, which for the average player is unwinnable in the long run. Or, a bank full of secured, private money. A marriage, a family. Fixed things, things closed to interlopers, things he uprooted for himself.
To project one’s values onto the world itself, in order to function agreeably within it, is everyone’s life work; it is the criminal who takes no responsibility for anything but this. It is what Sartre called “bad faith,” unencumbering oneself of effective messes, the trash that falls away from the missiles of the will. My dad’s crimes seem hopelessly reckless, especially in their repetition, so much so that I had decided when he robbed again, after seven years of living normally with his family, that he simply wanted to go back to jail. After all, it could not be a mistake; he could not have thought he would get away with it. It looked like a choice.
I see him making choices rather than mistakes probably because I have a similar internal locus of control. So does my sister. Generally it is empowering, certainly, but frustrating when error does happen, when self-discipline breaks down or unlucky events can’t be changed.
I don’t know. I don’t know if he is a sociopath. I do know he cheated at everything. He lied to everyone, kept us all away, and resisted every regular structure of civilization: work, family, entertainment, economics, love. If he thought he truly could get away with all the cheating, and an entire life of lying—and he did get away with it at first—then yes, there is something persistently demented in his thinking. But if he did it all, knowing the consequences, who and what he’d lose, and went ahead anyway—that seems like something else, like actual evil. The picture is really all of it at once. It is irreducible. And that seems true, truer than I am even saying here.
On a recent visit to my sister’s house I found myself in her basement, using the exercise equipment down there instead of going for a run just because it was so cold out, and I have lost my tolerance for cold since moving to the South. I wandered over to a corner of the room where I recognized Dad’s tools and stuff from the garage of their last house. After his arrest, my sister just let the house go into foreclosure since it was so behind on the mortgage. And she seemed happy to abandon it. I was sort of surprised to find his stuff there then. The good tools made sense to keep, I guess, but some of these other things seemed weirder. It was all the stuff he’d taken from work. I started opening boxes and drawers.
Trays of hundreds of “wood-handled 2” paintbrushes, wrapped stacks of paper cups, small boxes of gold-wire braids and silver-wire braids, cut tacks, screw eyes, hook eyes, drill bits, silver washers and nuts, packs of dust masks, plastic S hooks, bags of black zip ties, green, red, blue, and yellow wall anchors, black screws, bags of flat silver triangles, coils of nylon rope, coils of snakelike hose, a bucket of white cotton gloves, hundreds of incredibly tiny light bulbs, twist ties, razor blades, metal hollow-handled paintbrushes, a box of tape rolls, and a box of small plastic boxes. An enormous hoard of little things. Stolen things. She kept them. Perhaps they’d be useful, like he thought they might be.
75
Artifacts, maybe, I needed artifacts to hold in my hands. I tore through my small apartment, emptying desk drawers and pulling boxes and photo albums from their shelves. I have things he gave me, I thought, surely I do.
I found notebooks of poems, old planners, school papers, graded essays from college or even high school, printed with teachers’ praise that I could not part with. I found photos, small toys, childhood drawings: things everyone has.
Nothing from him, nothing. I sat on the floor and thought. Fresh out of prison, he bought me a used car, but I no longer have that. For one childhood birthday he gave me a porcelain figure of a blond woman in a blue dress, skirt spread out into a wavy cone, one arm holding a bouquet of flowers finished with blue rhinestones. It came with a little folded card printed with a birthstone rhyme, the one for March:
Aquamarine means courage,
I’m brave as I can be,
and never let anyone say
I’m afraid of anything I see!
Her head had broken clean off once, and was glued back on. I don’t have that anymore either.
I tried, but couldn’t remember anything else. I don’t have anything from him. I don’t have any possessions of his, not even accidentally.
I only have the square photo of himself he’d inscribed and given to Mom …
Nora,
My first real, true love. You changed my life with your “crazy” love.
I love you,
J. B.
… in which he is smiling so honestly. Which I had stolen.
76
Cleaning out my closet recently I found the big businesslike purse deep in a corner. It was worn now, and not as classy as I remembered it. In its only pocket, the clump of the three shoplifting tools.
I felt an old desire for something free, a present to myself. And it’s so easy! I thought. So, so easy, not like a risk at all.
I dressed up and took the purse to the mall, jacket over my arm, clicking the long corridors with that assured absorption, false, but convincing, and so easy to snap into again. I dallied at less-expensive stores, like a real shopper even, I thought, and walked into the one I’d been waiting for, the best store in the mall. The air was clean and still, and salesgirls smiled, pointed out the new arrivals. I drifted to the table of the just-in cashmere sweaters, my old favorites, so sharply folded and bright as Christmas presents under the perfect store lights. I tossed over my arm a vivid blue, a baby pink, a salmon, and a striped, grabbed a suit jacket and jeans on my way to the fitting room, and met the girl there with a plain smile. I laid the items out on the stool in the tiny room. All of this was brought in just so I could have the vivid blue sweater. I knew the salesgirl didn’t even see it under the pile of other things on my arm as I brought it in.
I lifted it to my chest and looked at myself in the mirror. It was perfect, thick and soft as a dream blanket, in a blue that made my blood ache. My skin glowed next to it.
I opened the bottom of the sweater to cut out the sewn-in sensor tag on the inside seam and shoved the tag into the back pocket of the jeans I’d brought in. I pulled apart the clump of magnets, placing half on either side of the pin-tab sensor, but nothing.
No little clicks, no release. The magnets snapped back together and pinched my fingers cruelly hard.
The sensors were a new design: mo
re plastic around the heart of its internal magnet, and in an odd teardrop shape that was difficult to keep the magnets around. They didn’t stick. Not at all. They just found each other and closed back together defiantly.
I looked at myself in the mirror again. I smiled, cheered her up. I dropped the sweater back into the pile of things I didn’t want, relieved.
77
I see you, Dad.
You think no one can see you, as if the lights on you are out.
You know, you’re not wrong: the lights are out on all of us. We go on in our dark fogs. Unless someone else turns to look your way and lights the light.
78
Fifteen years after divorcing Dad, Mom got married in her hiking boots, to a steady, supportive man, the one she’d been looking for. It was just a few of us with them in a sunny park as they said their vows. A large dragonfly settled on Mom’s shoulder like a brooch and stayed there until they turned to walk back to us as husband and wife. They live in a small home on a strip of land where Mom grows a giant patch of strawberries and my stepfather practices his bow and arrow on a homemade target. They go camping as often as they can.
And my sister married too. She never released me from the promise never to talk to Dad about her, where she lived or worked, or what her life was like now, so I never mentioned the wedding in my emails with him. But he found out from his siblings, who must have told him about it in their letters. Twice his recent emails mentioned it, in a slyly hurt way, saying he heard the wedding was fun and beautiful out there on the golf course, and he wished he had known about it sooner, a passive-aggressive jab at me. I recognized he was trying to manipulate me. Just as Mom said he would, and for no other reason but to make me feel a little bad, to seed our relationship with an imbalance of guilt.
But I had learned this weaponizing of pride; it had no effect on me. Instead I thought of him alone in prison, enjoying his daily distractions, but without progress, suspended in the timeless nowhere space of punishment. Suspended in betweenness.
I saw myself suspended too. My family has changed and I’m so glad for them, having evolved past him, past even his invisible reach that hung over everyone but me. And now it is everyone but me who is finished with him.
79
He loved to pretend to crash the car. We’d be driving anywhere and he’d swerve it clownishly, jolting us side to side, and we’d laugh and shriek. He’d slam the breaks and pump them twice, thumping and yelling “OH NOO, FLUFFY!” to make like he’d just run over a cat. He’d do a Donald Duck squabble and tears would stream down my face from laughing so hard.
“MOLLY LOVES YOU” he’d yell out of the car window at any random boy walking on any sidewalk as we drove by. I’d squeal and hit him and whine “Daaa-aad!,” honestly embarrassed when the boy would look back at us, a classmate sometimes. I’d sink into the car seat, blushing, angry but laughing. He’d just lean again out of the window and yell louder, “MOLLY LOVES YOU!”
80
Twenty-one years went by since the first robbery and I never talked to him about it.
I saw what happened when Grandpa asked him about his motives and I assumed that would happen to me too, if I brought it up. And I didn’t really want to hear what he had to say, because I didn’t want the feeling of watching him lie to me ever again. He’d say the sort of stuff he said at his trials, use the logical explanations, put me on that side of things, put an official story between us.
But what did I really have to lose? I had tried everything else, everything except directly asking him to explain himself.
I wanted the real version. But I felt like the last person on the list who should be asking him about his crimes. After enough time passed I started to think he just couldn’t say the real version, and who was I to deserve it anyway. And after even more time passed I started to think I already have the real version.
What was left to know? His choices are plain. Still, I wanted to know which parts were real and which parts were fake. For example, did he love Mom? It mattered to me somehow; it has something to do with the way I think about myself. If I were hurt more, I’d write him off like everyone else and just assume it was all fake, and that book would shut.
Now I’m first on the list to ask him, because I’m the only one left. I see a future where he appears again and I am there, and I don’t know why. I might be the only one there. Also, I know a liar wants to be known. I know a criminal wants to be caught, because it is the only way of being known. I think a person who feels mortality sidling up wants to be known. Besides, he might be different now.
So I started there. I labored over an email to him that began with normal pleasantries and then something about getting older, and how I felt as if I was so different now from when I was in my twenties. Gingerly I transitioned into asking him about getting older, too. I asked if he felt different from before. If he ever thinks about the crimes, and if he sees them differently.
Open, nonjudgmental, baggy questions. Invitations to talk more than questions, really. I hoped with all my will he’d talk.
I checked my email every other day for weeks—no answer. A month went by, two months, three months. I figured I was cut off.
Then, a fat envelope in my mailbox. A six-page letter from him.
In the end, I don’t know what I owe him. The layers of my feelings toward him seem to have no conclusion, however much I peel and dig. I don’t want to say anything about this letter. It’s the least I can do now, to let him speak for himself.
81
Dear Molly,
Instead of using the computer I decided to sit down and write a letter. There’s a charge for email service and a half-hour time constraint. Most of the time, too, there’s a waiting line for computer use—only four PCs are provided for about 150 people. I try to email early in the morning or when its mealtime and most guys are at the chow hall.
First of all, I’m glad you received that Christmas gift that Carol sent. As far as your sensitive question is concerned, I am a changed man.
My crime sprees (1994) (2009), although financially motivated, happened for different reasons. What I understand now, however, is why I acted impulsively and without regard to the law. At the time I also compromised my religious beliefs.
Back in the spring of 1994 I was apprehended for possessing a company car and, subsequently, GM fired me. The labor union made a deal and I was going to be rehired after spending a year away from GM. At the time I was renting a condo and had credit card bills to pay. I tried working at a couple of tool and die shops but quit promptly—these places offered less hourly pay and much less comfortable work conditions.
So, I decided to rob a credit union.
I got the idea of a demand note and a toy gun from witnessing a robbery, at that same credit union, by a young man who quietly pulled the caper and just drove away.
When I was about to rob that Royal Oak credit union, I told myself that I was on a paramilitary mission and my plan had to be completed. This attitude provided the daring and lack of conscience that were required for committing the crime. I believe that this attitude resulted from my combat experience.
Since the take from the credit union robbery was small (a few thousand), I had to continue robbing banks in order to maintain my lifestyle—I had custody of your sister and paid support for you. Thus, my greatest fear was losing custody of my daughter.
After a few months I decided that I was going to commit one last crime—I had a good job offer and the winter months would be perfect to work at a small shop before returning to GM. But, I was caught, and for the first time in my life, I was locked in jail.
This experience was frightening and very uncomfortable but I hung in and was finally released in 2000. A few months after settling in at GM and in a nice apartment with your sister, I met Carol. She was different than the women I had as girlfriends. Carol was financially independent, had old-fashioned values, and most significantly, reminded me of my first wife.
When I met Carol I was
not the least bit interested in meeting any women. In fact, I attended a singles dance at a church, in order to speak to a friend who had a good position at a bank and who I was hoping would help get your sister hired there.
The reason I was not interested in having another girlfriend was my criminal past—no decent woman would accept me for a meaningful relationship. Nevertheless, I pursued Carol and never told her of my crimes. She was satisfied with my response that the past is irrelevant.
Before long I was able to get a mortgage and move to that other house with your sister. Meanwhile, at work, the plant I worked in for many years closed and I was moved to a building that had very little security. As a condition of being rehired by GM I worked the afternoon shift. But now, at the new facility, I worked the day shift and, like many of my coworkers, I snuck out of the plant for hours at a time. The Detroit casinos were opening at this time, so I found a fun place where I spent most of my work day.
Since I had a mortgage I was able to get new credit cards and quickly ran up charges. Eventually I used the cards to offset gambling losses at the casinos.
At the same time, my relationship with Carol blossomed and I wound up moving in with her. My GM income was healthy but it was all used towards a high mortgage payment, an auto loan, multi-car insurance, and a number of credit cards. Not to mention what I gave to you and your sister.
In the end I fell behind on my mortgage and car payments and misappropriated your sister’s credit card account, so I decided to retire from GM.
