The Pope of Brooklyn

by Joseph Di Prisco

  New York State Appellate Division

  RECORDS AND BRIEFS

  Q. Now, Mr. Di Prisco, do you have any aliases, any nickname?

  A. Yes, sir.

  Q. What is it?

  A. Pop.

  Q. Pope? Or Pop?

  A. P-o-p-e.

  Q. Have you ever had any other nickname?

  A. Well, I don’t know, some—maybe somebody called me “Shots,” but I—that is my nickname as Pope, that is the only one I know.

  Q. I’m not asking you whether anybody called you “Shots.” Did anybody call you “Shots” that you remember?

  A. Not that I know of.

  Q. In other words, you don’t know that your nickname is “Shots,” do you?

  A. No.

  Q. You have seen it on this yellow sheet, is that right?

  A. No.

  Q. But you never heard that that was your nickname, did you?

  A. No, as far as I know.

  …

  Q. Well, have you seen this recently? I’m showing you the yellow sheet. Did you see this?…

  A. Well, I’m just trying to think now.

  Q. Look at it?

  A. I think I seen it once.

  Q. You did see it?

  A. Yes.

  …

  Q. Do you actually remember the name of the police officer that arrested you, independently, do you remember this?

  A. Yes and no.

  Upon Information and Belief

  In case anyone’s bullshit detector is clicking like a gotcha Geiger counter, now’s when I’m going to mix my metaphors and hop off the high horse forthwith. Nobody looks good riding up in that type of saddle, and I am no exception. For one thing, and though this may be a low bar, my father never beat the crap out of me, we never ate cat food, and we never slept in a refrigerator-size cardboard box under the expressway overpass. He is not comparable to some insane patriarch drawn from the pages of a weirdly elegant Edward St. Aubyn novel, a sick, sadistic, predatory man. He did spend a little while in jail, but never served years in a state penitentiary—as my little brother eventually would.

  For another thing, he is not blameworthy for my questionable choices in adulthood. I’m not setting him up for a shakedown. Fact is, and I’m not proud of it, I myself was not always from the start a model father to my own son. That I was for agonizing stretches a semi-absentee father, similar to how my own father was, is not exactly false—though my deficient participation was sometimes the product of decisions my boy’s mother made, such as the time she secretly moved out of state and didn’t tell me where he was. Again, I’m not defending myself, and I am no innocent. And I’m not trying to assuage my guilt, either; that is one trick I never mastered.

  Suzanne and I lived together about two years and did not marry. In a delusional moment I sincerely proposed and was sincerely rejected, and she summarily kicked me out of the house before the boy’s first birthday. Given my track record, I’m not sure any rational person could fault her, but of course I did and vehemently. I was twenty-five and possessed of what would come to be called anger issues. It would take years for some semblance of domestic peace to break out, and for me to acknowledge she was on balance a good mom—what the venerable psychologist D. W. Winnicott calls a “good enough mother,” which, if you know your Winnicott the way I do not know Winnicott, you realize is the highest imaginable praise. Now that the boy has become by any measure a successful, balanced adult with his own stable and loving family, rapprochement lingers to this day on both sides of our sentried, mostly devoid-of-IEDs, mutually negotiated DMZ. We all make mistakes, and she and I made some world-class doozies, but few mistakes turn out half as well as ours: a wonderful child. Hindsight is both a bitch and a blessing, even if it takes a lifetime to savor.

  As a father I answered the bell in time, and before my son turned nine or ten, I was no longer absent and was continually on the job; after I filed suit to establish paternity and claim parental rights, his mother and I set about sharing joint legal custody. My lawyer said that the judge was impressed; he had probably never ruled on the case of a man suing to be the father and therefore to willingly provide child support. It was usually the mother going after a deadbeat whose swimmers had made a successful beachhead. My attorney did add that, since I made the tactical error of wearing a nice suit to court, my child support dollars probably ratcheted up a bit. I was relieved and thankful she never contested my paternity, and I never had the slightest doubt, either. I never had an interest in doing one of those DNA swab tests. I knew he was my boy from the moment he was born while I was wearing my delivery room green scrubs at Kaiser in San Francisco. And to be fair, I should add that she was nothing less than a champ during the strenuous, twenty-nine-hour labor, and I was nothing but the hapless so-called birth coach. My conviction was underscored when my son was probably nine or so, after he met a dicey associate of mine and offered his opinion: “I don’t trust him, he’s too sincere.” That’s my boy.

  Some people cannot believe the next part; sometimes I have difficulty myself. As it turned out, decades after Brooklyn I did publish a couple of honest-to-God parenting books with a respected New York publishing house, cowritten with a gifted psychologist friend and colleague, works on child and family development that people actually bought and read and referenced, mostly approvingly. (See under: irony.)

  •

  Looking back now many years, I think anybody would concur the old man nailed it. Whaddayou, writin’ a book? It wasn’t the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last, that he nailed it.

  I kept my father company very late in his transplanted California life, spending more time with him as he was approaching his final square-up day than I ever did as a child. I remained an irritatingly inquisitive adult. I didn’t let up. He wanted to know why I continued to bug him with my questions. I told him the truth, that I was trying to remember.

  “Yeah, well, I’m trying to forget.”

  Who could fault him for trying?

  Still: nice try, chief.

  •

  It’s not my task, and not my responsibility, to judge my father. It will be demonstrated that I already have a full-time occupation judging myself. Nonetheless, that’s an ultimately resistible side-benefit, what comes with the territory of being any man’s son, in my case a son who trades in words on the page. As I reflect and examine the clues littering the trails, I can also visualize the crime scene chalk lines of desperation that marked him, and I empathize. More surprising, I can also see, occasionally if not universally to my disappointment, unexpected connections between his life choices—and his afflictions—and my own. Similar to him, I have been broke more than once, I was a professional gambler, I took my share of dumb jobs, I was targeted by law enforcement, I’ve had my own nasty chemical dependency. Fun times. Not quite.

  As for being antisocial, unlike him, I have never been called that, not even by some exes, who could have been justifiably tempted. But I do have an insatiable appetite for separation and solitude. I’m no Zen master, either, and my solitary hours can be crowded as the morning commute train. That’s when my brain is bustling with those imaginary companions who populate my fictions and poems, figures who both resemble and are nothing like me, but they all talk my ear off. I also spent many years in that meta-public arena known as schools, taking classes or acquiring academic degrees or teaching, with some small if measurable success, it might be argued. I exhibited a curmudgeonish streak in faculty meetings, but later in life I learned to squelch that, after realizing that was a bad bet. And I was never cynical with or about my students. They more often than not made my day. So maybe not antisocial, more like a monk who gets around town a lot.

  •

  “It was true at the time.”

  Welcome to Downtown Joe Di Prisco, my father, whose street name was, as I mentioned, Pope, or Popey. Unlike
the Vicar of Jesus Christ and Supreme Pontiff and Bishop of Rome, his infallibility was never a matter of dogma, except perhaps in his own mind. He was a compulsive gambler and someone who may or may not have been a bookmaker himself, and he was a small-time criminal and, as previously stipulated, in the eyes of observers an “unsavory character.” (I’m pretty sure, unlike with antisocial, my exes would have voiced that last opinion about me.)

  As I would come to discover, he owned up to at least some of his crimes and the crimes of others for reasons that, on their face, sometimes indeed appear to be undeniably ass-covering, expedient, and perhaps ethically suspect.

  I think many of us could step up and take a number. I know I could.

  More pertinently, at least for me, and, as the billable-hour lawyers reliably qualify, “upon information and belief,” I set about the task of decoding the complex and compelling and profoundly mundane pressures bearing down on him—ones that stole us to California in the first place.

  New York State Appellate Division

  RECORDS AND BRIEFS

  Q. Did you remain inside the truck?

  A. Yes, sir.

  Q. What happened then?

  A. Well, we noticed a lot of people running around, and I noticed this one fellow, Bagooch, Mike Gallo.

  Q. What observation did you make of him?

  A. Well, he appeared on the scene, and then he got in this car, and he came by the truck, and he looked at the truck, just to see if he could see the driver, and then he went away.

  Q. Did Santa, did you see Santa do anything?

  A. Well, he hid his face with his hands.

  Q. Now, this fellow Bagooch, M-a-g-o-o-c-h, is he any relation to Cock-eyed Jerry?

  A. He was his partner.

  Q. Partner in what?

  A. Bookmaking.

  Q. Now, what happened?

  A. Well, I told Patrolman Santa that he better take me away.

  Q. And did he?

  A. Yes, sir.

  Q. And where did he drive you?

  A. Greenpoint.

  Q. Where did he drive to?

  A. Greenpoint Avenue and North Henry Street.

  Q. Was that the place of the meeting?

  A. Yes, sir.

  Q. And what happened there?

  A. Well, we waited, and about an hour or so later, Patrolman Peter Celentano, Frisher, and Gallagher appeared, and they told us they found the work. Patrolman Celentano said that he found the work, and they scored for a thousand dollars.

  Q. Did they say where they found the work?

  A. Yes.

  Q. Where?

  A. It was outside the toilet.

  Q. Did he say how it got there?

  A. Well, his mother went into the toilet.

  Q. Whose mother?

  A. Cock-eyed Jerry’s mother, and he didn’t hear the water flush, so she come out, and he went in, and he was looking for the slips.

  Q. Did he tell you anything else?

  A. Well, they scored him for a thousand dollars.

  Q. What did he say?

  A. He said, “We agreed to let him go for a thousand dollars.”

  Incriminations

  At the risk of sounding glib—and this is one risk I have no alternative but to take—my father’s experience does not seem totally unconnected to the small-time author of a memoir, his son, who shares his first and last name along with some related compulsions (if not his ecclesiastic street name). A memoir capitalizes on the repositories of memory, the moveable treasure chests locatable throughout multiple corners and nooks and crannies inside the circuitry of the brain, and it deals in disclosure, in risking confidences and self-exposure, in telling the truth about oneself and others as far as it can be known. The unexamined life may well be, as some wise guy once said, not worth living. But what about the overexamined life? If you’re not reckless enough, it might not be worth writing about.

  As for mundane pressure, a memoir writer registers that in spades. Publish a memoir, lose a friend or two, infuriate somebody, bank on it. And endure questions from strangers at book talks such as: “Who are you to write a memoir?” and “Why should anybody care?”

  In such moments, I always wish I could quote my serpent-tongued mother when she advised me during her pugilistic social life: You remember, sonny boy, rude is not funny. Then again, she never would have uttered much less subscribed to such an axiom.

  Memoir writers confess and they confide as they may or must, and what a world of difference between the two. As Emily Fox Gordon lucidly explains, the entity or person to whom (or which) one confesses has “the power to condemn, punish, absolve, or forgive.” Whereas “[c]onfidences are offered to equals, or at least the offering and accepting of confidences places the two parties involved on equal terms.” In any case, confessing and/or confiding as they do, nobodies have lives, too, and if they’re lucky, or unlucky, enough, have a tale to tell, which their memoirs will have the burden to prove one way or another.

  In Subway to California, published in 2014, I ranged around my childhood recollections in Brooklyn and its challenges through my adulthood missteps in California, my education and my teaching career, my experience as a professional card player, my time in a Catholic religious order, my failures in love and academia, my coming to terms (or largely not) with loss, my anxiety, my life as a writer and husband and father. It also prominently treats my unfinished relationships with family members, and the mysteries that persisted unresolved after, one by one, they died.

  When you publish a memoir as I did, unanticipated consequences routinely occur. As many authors of memoirs attest, the genre encourages personal boundary encroachment. Reviewers are one species, people you know, or don’t know, another. Those people will say anything. Often, if not always, to your face. Maybe that’s understandable, and that’s life in the big city.

  About some interested parties you do unambivalently care for and about, you wonder if you struck the grace notes you intended. I should qualify. You wonder, that is, if you’re somebody self-mortifying like me. And wonder’s not the word, more like obsess. Then, of course, there was the distant relation who posted nasty stuff about me and my book on Facebook, so I obviously hit the pitch perfect note there, and he was satisfyingly bug-be-gone zapped into cyberspace, and that’s more than enough airtime for the sourpuss. Some of my droller friends demanded to know how come they weren’t in the damn book they paid good money for, but as another friend and graduate school colleague wrote, “This is finally the guy we knew we never knew.” I don’t know how to defend my choices (for starters it wasn’t an autobiography), or what to tell them, except this: take a look at the dedication page of this book in your hands. All in all, reactions on the personal front ran the gamut. For instance, my Catholic boys’

  high school blood rival told a mutual friend I never respected him because he wasn’t Italian. (Here I thought my best friends in school were named Fredotovich, Gray, Hooper, Marmolejo, and Reed.) And then this: a most significant ex, with whom I shared a long-term, volatile if life-defining relationship that unraveled insanely and cinematically, rocked me. “We remember such different things,” she wrote me in an out-of-the-blue email. Fair enough, if chilling. She didn’t come off as tarnished as I did in that book of mine, but nevertheless: that was stunningly gracious on the part of somebody who, though her identity was concealed, might have wanted a piece of me. (If by the off-chance you are reading this, and you know who you are, please don’t sue me.) Her kind appraisal of the book shook me and continues to resonate. And I also heard from many former students, and theirs were often the most moving, gratifying messages. But there was my college girlfriend, too, first-love and all, who didn’t talk to me for a couple of years. I can explain, and as you will see, she will play a major role in this story.

  •

  Once those court transcripts materi
alized, I was nourished with manna from Google. As we know, it was manna that unexpectedly fell from the sky to sustain those wanderers in the desert looking for the Promised Land. As for me, I didn’t know from promised lands, which as far as I understood did not exist along the bus lines in Williamsburg, and I would have needed a guide dog to wend my way to la de dah Park Slope or the Upper East Side.

  Equipped with those transcripts, I did set out to uncover the central mystery that had dogged me my whole life. Gradually, I inched closer and closer to unveiling the heretofore concealed predicate for our exile out of Brooklyn as well as the untold story of my father’s life—and its connections to my younger brother’s as well.

  As is often the case, the unknown has a way of leading to other unknowns, secrets to more secrets.

  Following the map of my father’s steps from the past, I am by turns alarmed, horrified, astonished, intrigued, baffled. Sometimes I am entertained, and sometimes impressed. From Brooklyn hustler to somebody who held respectable blue-collar jobs for thirty years in California: that bare bones summary does not tell the whole story. And some jaundiced types might suggest that his last full-time position, elected leader of a Teamster union local, was borderline respectable at best. The FBI itself was skeptical and they launched an investigation into his activities. More later.

  •

  F. Scott Fitzgerald writes in the opening to The Great Gatsby that Gatsby “…turned out all right in the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams…”—that’s the intuition that moved Nick Carraway to tell his story, or so he claims. Carraway begins by remarking that he has been turning over in his mind his father’s advice: to never forget that other people haven’t had his advantages. In my instance, I myself have been turning over in my mind things my father said but, somehow more, things he never said.

  My old man didn’t own a mansion on West Egg, Long Island, didn’t cultivate Gatsby’s grand romantic designs or wear “such beautiful shirts” (he religiously stuck with his racetrack standard-issue polos). Carraway of New Haven and I probably don’t have much in common either, though we both seem fascinated by the shadow lives of criminals, but no, as far as I know, my dad did not attempt to fix a horse race or the World Series. True, he was chased by cops into the woods of East Islip, Long Island, but he never gravitated to the Hamptons, never put on so much as a little cocktail party, and his dreams were sometimes as impenetrable for me.