The Pope of Brooklyn

by Joseph Di Prisco

  In his eighties my father once confided to his brilliant and kind care manager, who ultimately became a friend of mine, “I have lots of problems.” She tried to draw him out, so that he might expand upon what he meant, she reported, but all he came up with was, “I’m not too good at finding solutions.”

  My old school unschooled father never heard of Montaigne and nobody would ever be reminded of that melancholic French luminary of the Renaissance, but maybe somebody should be. It is irresistible to quote the author of classic personal essays when he writes, “If my mind could gain a firm footing I would not make essays, I would make decisions.”

  Testimony

  About my parents’ formal education: neither of them completed high school, if they attended at all; they never spun stories about the big game and the prom and student body elections, that’s for sure. My mother was the youngest of nine children born to her immigrant, Warsaw-born parents. She became pregnant at sixteen, married her first husband, and although she was exceptionally intelligent, going to school probably constituted a lost cause. But she and my father did send me and my brother to Catholic schools in Brooklyn and later in California. The financial cost must have stressed the budget, because they were hardly rolling in it. I have to presume, therefore, that they assigned some sort of high value to our education and deemed it worth the sacrifice. They kept my grade school report cards in shoe boxes and attended all my commencement exercises, including from graduate school at Berkeley. At the same time they conveyed ambivalence if not skepticism as to the virtues or advantages of being educated. Don’t be fucking smart, I heard all the time when I was perceived to have acted up. I enjoyed all the advantages of being the resident outsider, not an unpromising role for a writer in his youth to assume.

  I probably unconsciously determined soon enough that the most effective way to revolt against my family was to be an anti-James Dean, a schoolboy, a rebel on the honor roll. My parents and my brother and my two half-brothers, my mother’s sons from her previous marriage whom I looked up to, would, over time, have the other bases covered: rap sheets, gambling, drugs, reform school, prison, school dropouts. One of my half-brothers, Eddie, was closeted gay—and to be clear, I never thought of either of my half-brothers as half-anything, they were my brothers. His sexual status effectively rendered him an extreme outlier, at least in terms of our world, though everybody loved and admired him, touched by his kindness and generosity. Not that my parents directly acknowledged that he was gay, and they never voiced the word. No, toward the end of his life and even after, his partner of twenty years my mother called his roommate, somebody who to her way of thinking took advantage of the free rent—her terms. Once, after settling in California, I was stricken by guilt over my shoplifting career at a five-and-dime in Greenpoint. I must have been around eleven when I wrote Eddie a letter asking him to slip some money under the store door. I cannot recall if I sent him the cash, or if I assumed he would come out of pocket to alleviate my burden. I do know that years later he would tell me, laughing, that he never forgot Jo Jo’s letter.

  I would also be the devout little boy ambling down the street, off to Mass on Sunday by myself or with my little brother. Then when I was a teenager, I entered the novitiate of a Roman Catholic religious order, becoming for a while Brother Joseph, black robe, crucifix, and all. Later on I would have plenty of opportunity for my own battles with the law and drugs, and enduring money and career troubles of my own.

  Shortly after I joined the order in pursuit of my vocation, and was installed in the Napa Valley novitiate, I was assigned a task: to clear out some of the heavy underbrush on the beautiful, secluded grounds of rolling vineyards. There were always chores: lavatory scrubbing, rug vacuuming, window washing, chapel cleanup, and so on. Good work to do. Good discipline, too.

  On this occasion it was the middle of a sweltering summer day, and I took off my shirt and went to work, with resolve, on the unruly vegetation. I was an obedient novice, at that point, which could not always be said of me. Two problems occurred: I underestimated how swiftly and acutely my back and arms would burn beneath the Napa Valley skies, and I also didn’t identify the poison oak I was blithely handling. Results were predictably terrible. That night, or the next day, my skin blistered and I found myself in my cell (that’s what monasteries call individual rooms) hoping to die rather than to tolerate another minute. I would jump out the window into the vine rows below if it would give me momentary relief. In an attempt to distract myself (didn’t get any lotions or drugs), and because I was probably too embarrassed to tell anybody what I had done, all I could do was sit on the edge of my cot and read. It was a James Bond novel. Books were always my go-to escape hatch. This time, no dice.

  When my parents dropped me off that first Sunday afternoon to begin my stay at the Mount, they were taciturn as usual. Their clearest, most eloquent demonstration of emotion was revealed not through words, but as they drove down the hill away, when I could see my mother wiping her eyes. I had disappointed them again. And that was all right by me. I was seventeen and God was calling me to a life of poverty, chastity, and obedience, so I bellied up to the hallowed bar, for a while. I have no complaints about the Brothers and my spell being Brother Joseph in the novitiate. I mean, I did at the time, which is why I left, but when I look back, I realize this was never the life for me. Even so, I cherish the memories.

  •

  Winnicott might have something to contribute; he usually does. “For as children grow they like to copy their parents, or to defy them, which is just as good in the end” (“A Child’s Sense of Right and Wrong”). Or:

  “Finding the framework of his life broken, [the child] no longer feels free. He becomes anxious, and if he has hope he proceeds to look for a framework elsewhere than at home. The child whose home fails to give a feeling of security looks outside his home for the four walls; he still has hope, and he looks to grandparents, uncles and aunts, friends of the family, school. He seeks an external stability without which he may go mad.” (“Aspects of Juvenile Delinquency.”)

  If you define yourself up against your family, that means your family continues to indirectly define you. So the anti-rebellious rebel label both does and does not quite fit me. I would not be pigeon-holed a suck-up punk-ass poetry-writing pious pussy, even if I was as a matter of fact a suck-up punk-ass poetry-writing pious pussy. Likely because I was overcompensating, I managed to be suspended from all the schools I attended (hooky, fisticuffs, major crimes of that order). One upstate New York wintry dawn, I came to be expelled by the president of my university. That’s what happened when I was one of the anti-war-protesting leaders of the college admin building takeover; he eventually rescinded that decision because he was a magnanimous and Machiavellian fellow who ran circles around us sleep-deprived, snow-booted, ponytailed radicals. In general I never had trouble succeeding academically. I had a lot of trouble feeling that getting good grades was ever good enough, ever exciting enough.

  As for defining myself up against my family, here is one glaring problem: I believe I never quite grasped the very notion of family, or harbored some conception of an ideal family or, for that matter, a so-called normal family. This also sounds strange to me, too, but I didn’t get it. It was the sound of one hand clapping. As one of the first great psychologists of child development, Harry Stack Sullivan, proposed long ago: the principal adolescent project is the avoidance of loneliness and the pursuit of the impossible-to-define normal. My fragmented, contentious family bestowed upon me a fractured sense of what a family is, or could be. I may have been a father at twenty-five but I didn’t marry till I was forty-one, and that wasn’t to my son’s mother. I consciously set out at that late stage catching up on making a family, whatever that could mean, and I am still making up for lost time and opportunity. I’ve been married twenty-five years now, and my wife and my son have both taught me through their open-hearted example what family could be.

  • />
  As my father said that time to his caremanager, “I have lots of problems.” His statement sounds somewhat self-reflective, if not quite philosophical. In that encompassing sense, these are the words of a man I never knew or spoke to in his lifetime.

  Whenever with reference to my father I write “testify” or “testimony,” I automatically summon up Saint Augustine, whose Confessions has long been one of the central texts of my life. I hold Garry Wills accountable for this strange tic of mine. In his short, trenchant book Saint Augustine, Wills explains that Confessions is not quite the correct title. He proposes that the more accurate title is The Testimony. He isn’t making an academic argument or a purely etymological distinction, either. The name change doesn’t look as if it will stick in the public consciousness anytime soon, but maybe Wills will win the day eventually. For as he argues, Confessions implies more than what we take to be “confessions.” It also implies praise of God and profession of faith. In this sense, it means to corroborate, to confirm, to acknowledge, so that even inanimate things can testify:

  Augustine was not confessing like an Al Capone, or like a pious trafficker of later confessions. In fact, his use of the term is so broad, one can ask why he bothers to insist that he is testifying, since everything, whether it knows it or not, testifies to God. Even demons “confess” (acknowledge) God by their opposition to him.

  For Augustine, when “the tongue and the heart are at odds, you are reciting, not testifying.” Augustine’s book is autobiography and the prayerful meditation of a once-upon-a-time spectacular debauchee and libertine reclaiming his life for God, a work famous and influential not solely because he wrote, “God, give me chastity, but not now.” Still, what a handy little prayer under proper, or not so much, circumstances.

  In a much-discussed moment in his autobiography, Augustine tells about the time as a boy he raided an orchard and stole pears. He makes a great deal of the fact that the pears were not beautiful or delicious and that he and a “band of ruffians” took the pears “not to eat them ourselves, but to throw them to the pigs. Perhaps we ate some of them, but our real pleasure consisted in doing something that was forbidden.” It’s a primal and complex life-changing moment for him. Among other things, he says that he knows he wouldn’t have committed this wanton act if he were alone, but he did so because he was with the others. His love was not so much for the pears as for his companionship of his peers. He draws conclusions about the right relationship to God, the twisted path he was following, but Wills makes a connection between the fruit and Augustine’s analysis of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, in his City of God. Eve falls for the serpent’s lies, writes Wills, but Adam is the less deceived: “Adam committed his sin deliberately in order to maintain his ‘bond of company’ with Eve.” As Augustine explains:

  After Eve had eaten from the forbidden tree and offered him its fruit to eat along with her, Adam did not want to disappoint her, when he thought she might be blighted without his comforting support, banished from his heart to die sundered from him.

  By this reading, Adam discards paradise and the promise of eternal bliss—here comes the bombshell—so as not to disappoint his wife and because he could not bear to live without her. He might have been the first but he would not be the last spouse to enact this strategy. Though my father could conceive of his and his wife’s banishing themselves from Brooklyn, obviously no Eden, he could not tolerate, for all of the never-ending marital warfare, the possibility of his wife’s banishment from his life. And she undoubtedly would have concurred. Throughout my childhood, and beyond, she railed against him and threatened divorce. It was upsetting to hear her denunciations, but on another level I could tell she was bluffing. As they say in poker, don’t call unless you are prepared to raise.

  For the truth is, my parents were in psychological terms absolutely enmeshed, which was the diagnosis of his geriatric psychologist caremanager. That is, these were two people so closely intertwined as to be unable to determine where one of them ended and the other began. There is no better way to conceptualize what held them together in their bonds of mutual misery for almost sixty years other than that they could not envision an alternative. The trite term codependent barely scratches the surface, it is much too cautious. Their connection was more visceral and violent than that. They survived on the same oxygen; when one exhaled, the other breathed in. They tenaciously held on to the opposite ends of the same rope. As Augustine writes in summation about his desecration of the orchard: “Can anyone unravel this twisted tangle of knots?”

  Divided Selves

  I confidently hypothesize that, if my father never explicitly addressed the allure of the criminal life, he glamorized it. If he didn’t, he would have been different from everybody else in the neighborhood.

  For instance, all of us kids knew of the hit man who lived on the block. He had a name, but it’s lost to me. He resided five or so houses down from mine, and the whole world would come to a spooky standstill when he opened his door and hawkishly surveyed the street, left and right, for a moment. On the lookout for drive-by shooters? No idea. We fell into a hush and studied him at a safe distance as he walked down the steps of his stoop, slow as destiny, ponderous as inevitability. He was a huge and meaty guy, with arms like legs, and legs like tree trunks. His puffed, pallid face was absolutely expressionless, as we imagined to be the requisite mien of conscienceless killers. He moved with a graceless purposefulness, wasting no effort, again as we imagined to be consistent with a hit man’s remorseless efficiency. From a distance he appeared ageless, but I feared making eye contact, which might lead to unpleasant consequences. He never acknowledged punks like us or uttered a single word in our direction. We observed him when he was leaving his apartment, which means we only saw him at dusk, the hour we must have concluded that killers punch in for work. We were in awe. He was one of us and deadly. He even lived with his mother. Not that anybody ever saw her. My brother Bobby, who feared nobody and was a pretty tough guy himself, signaled this was nobody to mess with. When we trick-or-treated on Halloween, nobody’d be crazy enough to knock on that guy’s door. How’d we determine he was a hit man? This is stuff you simply know when you’re a Brooklyn kid. He didn’t scrawl HIT MAN where his name should have been beside the doorbell, which, again, you’d be out of your mind to think of ringing.

  Was he in reality a hired assassin? Odds would be against his sporting such a CV, I suppose, but I have no idea. In our boyhood conception of mythologized reality, he cut a menacing figure, and of that I am as sure as I am of anything. He never amounted to our version of Boo Radley, Harper Lee’s recluse and the vessel of Scout’s childhood mystery, the familiar stranger who materializes to reclaim innocence and goodness for the town. Yeah, on every single level, that wouldn’t have sufficed for us. And maybe he was nothing but a big fat mama’s boy who had no life and washed dishes at an all-night diner. Nobody was going to tug on his coat sleeve or trail him to find out.

  Then there was my mother’s best friend who lived in the nicest house by far on the block. She had a boyfriend who favored flashy clothes, such as red blazers and black shirts, and he drove a white Caddy, and his face was so crimson that I assumed he was holding his breath—either that or he was drunk again. Nice guy, but we gave him wide berth, too. Rumor was he was a mobster. My dad indicated he was unimpressed by the man, and that position impressed me. (Curiously, this fellow, Mike Gallo, appears in cameo in one trial transcript, the partner of a bookmaker my father fingered and the dirty cops popped.)

  When I think of my dad’s past, I may, of course, be romanticizing him, or myself. I may not be in the past at all. As Augustine proposes: “If we could suppose some particle of time which could not be divided into a smaller particle, that alone deserves to be called the present, yet it is snatched from the future and flits into the past without any slightest time of its own—if it lasted, it could be divided into part-future and part-past. So there is no ‘present�
� as such.”

  “And yet,” Wills glosses, “we know that past only as a present memory and the future only as a present anticipation. There is, then, no real present and nothing but a real present. The mind brokers this odd interplay of times in a no-time.”

  That’s where and when I find myself here and now: in this “no-time.”

  •

  Did my father have internal crises? A crisis of consciousness? Ever? Did he have an internal life? Who doesn’t? That last one is not a rhetorical question.

  On this score, I summon up an odd, somewhat trivial image pertaining to me and him. Once he took me to the San Francisco airport when I was heading back to college. On the way to the departure gate (back when you could do that), we ventured into the bookstore, and he bought me something to read for the trip, a skinny hardback I badly wanted. This was a famous book by probably the most controversial psychologist of the day. The author published it when he was thirty-three and an international celebrity, and it treated the subject of schizophrenia, not that I shared this intel with my father, who merely wanted to do something nice for me about to board a red-eye bound for New York. As I view it now, the book adopted a psychologically questionable approach, if not morally bankrupt, and not that I saw it that way when I was in college; that was when I looked for every opportunity to name-drop the author in footnotes to my papers about anything, poetry, history, politics, anything. I think it’s fair to argue that the author essentially valorized schizophrenia, viewed it as a species of liberation from convention, and as a result he clinically failed patients, who needed not fancy cheap psychedelicized theorization but medical care and treatment. It is a wildly irresponsible book, finally, but when I was in college this point of view entranced me, feeling unbalanced as I did at the time, and feeling split within myself all day long. The author was R. D. Laing, whose star has probably permanently sunk, and the book my unsuspecting father gave to me was The Divided Self.