The Pope of Brooklyn

by Joseph Di Prisco

  Well, what somebody does is, he does the same so-called study at a restaurant solely owned by his backer. Totally legitimate, right? Suck on that, figure that one out. They film his meetings.

  Somebody throws out the typewriters and all the survey materials. What study?

  Not that any of that happened, of course.

  Because that would be really crazy, wouldn’t it? Who would believe it? Who would call that racketeering?

  New York State Appellate Division

  RECORDS AND BRIEFS

  Q. All right, now, did you call—call anyone in the City of New York and suggest that you would be willing to come back and testify in certain cases here?

  A. No.

  Q. Did anyone in the City of New York call you and ask you if you would testify in certain cases here?

  A. No, sir.

  Q. When you came back you made—you came back—

  JUDGE: Did anybody talk to you and ask you if you would be willing to testify in certain cases?

  A. In California?

  JUDGE: Anywhere?

  A. In California, I talked to nobody.

  Q. Anywhere, his Honor asked you?

  A. I didn’t talk—

  Q. (Interrrupting) Here, here in New York?

  A. Oh, in New York?

  Q. Yes?

  A. Then if what, if I—

  Q. (Interrupting) Anybody asked you, you would be willing to testify in certain cases here?

  A. No, I—I—I spoke to the District Attorney, and he asked me [sic] cooperation, but told me I would be given consideration for my full cooperation.

  Morning Bells are Ringing,

  Morning Bells are Ringing

  A silk red-and-green paisley bathrobe hangs upstairs in my closet. The label indicates it is from a tony department store. I don’t wear the garment. I haven’t worn it since—I cannot remember, could be twenty-five years, maybe more. I didn’t plan to wear it when I got it. People who organize other people’s lives and possessions for a living play a useful role, no doubt, but I will never hire them. I have a friend who does this professionally, but as much as I like her, I won’t retain her services. I might read organizers’ blogs, I might read their books, for the vicarious kick of feeling another’s endorphin rush before the spectacle of pristine closets and liberated shoe racks. I know if you have not worn an article of clothing for a year, you’re supposed to throw it out or recycle or donate. I would also say that probably the same principle applies to ideas you haven’t used for a year. But my disorganized library, books I haven’t cracked open since college? You’d have to pry them from my cold, ink-stained, manicure-begging hands. In my defense, not that I’m bragging, when last we moved, I did donate nine or ten heavy boxes of books to assisted living centers. I am indeed a hoarder of sorts, but that’s not the reason I am keeping the robe.

  The reason is that my brother gave it to me, or he sold it to me, I cannot recall, but either is possible. I am fairly certain, and was fairly certain at the time he presented it to me, that he boosted it—that is, stole it from that swanky store on Union Square, San Francisco. I bet it had a pretty price tag, and it boggles my mind that he was able to navigate the aisles of merchandise and escape the clutches of department store security: no easy matter given how he looked at the time, ponytailed and scruffy and tweaking, wearing wraparound sunglasses and bandana.

  Here’s the problem. If I get rid of the robe, I would be ridding myself of a piece of my brother. But why would it be valuable to me, given that it attaches to his lowest point in life as a junkie stealing to support his habit? Mine is a fairly indefensible position, it could be argued. I can criticize myself for contributing to his addiction by implicitly or tacitly approving of his crime, and deriving personal gain—even if I hardly ever wore it and therefore never derived sartorial advantage. Indefensible it may be, but it’s the position I am taking.

  Trying to be a good brother to my jonesing little brother perennially shoved him and me into switches like that. I watched him when he kicked a couple of times. Not that it stuck for him, but the vomiting and the weeping and the groaning were nightmarish to behold during his withdrawal attempts. They say it’s easier to suffer than to watch a loved one suffer, and that’s true. But coming off smack? I don’t know if I could do that. You say no all the time to a junkie, and push them away, because that’s tough love, supposedly a sound tack. Tough love is easier digested via TV documentaries, I believe, not for people you really love. In my opinion, tough love, which the detox programs insist upon, is finally no love. I loved him and he infuriated me. He’d say the same, if for different reasons. I kept the robe and I keep it for the same reason I kept a few of his prison letters, because these things are all that remain, all the existing physical evidence he once was alive.

  Here is where the story of my father converges, not only with my story, but with my brother John’s.

  •

  When my mother landed on a notion or a turn of phrase she approved, like an Everglades gator with a dam-building beaver in its jaws, she never let go till she killed it. She repeatedly observed that my father and his son John were “two peas in a fuckin’ pod.” Her conclusion infuriated her husband, who typically sputtered with outrage whenever she threw the bombshell accusation over the psychic fortress walls my father lived behind. My brother was similarly offended; he wouldn’t wish to be compared to his father, who, to him, was a liar and a con man, a chump and a loser who stole or borrowed money from him and never paid him back.

  She had a point. Each was defined, each was eaten alive, by his own addiction beast. For my father, it was gambling. For my brother, smack. A simple, solid working definition of addiction: the compulsion to repeat injurious behavior despite being aware of the damage that is wreaked upon one’s life. Two peas in a fucking pod indeed. If you add me, that would be three, and that would be the case for me at some point; more about that later.

  •

  John did serious time in San Quentin and in Nevada State Prison, often in max; I estimate about ten years total. Inside, he was in and out of the hole, solitary confinement. He belonged at one stage to the Aryan Brotherhood, so he said, although he was no skinhead racist; he told me he needed to belong to a group to survive, and by his calculation he was outnumbered ten to one by the brothers in gen pop. He also claimed, when he was out of prison, some vague associate status with the Hells Angels, but I never understood what he meant. He had learned how to mix it up on the street as a teenager, long before he was sentenced, and he pumped up his body over the years, conditioning he couldn’t maintain when he was mainlining and ravaging himself. He told me about the beatings that took place inside prison walls that nauseated him. He was arrested dozens of times: drug offenses, boosting from department stores, burglaries, that sort of thing, and his rap sheet goes on for thirty pages. Probably his most serious crime was the armed stickup of the restaurant where he used to be the manager. He got away with that one, yet despite his wearing a ski mask, we all knew, including the restaurant owner, that he was the button.

  He was a heroin addict off and on, mostly on, for at least twenty-five years. He drove hog Harleys, he liked his dogs big and bruising, such as Dobermans and boxers, and he took care of them lovingly and they were loyal to him—and instinctively sweet to everybody in the family. Girls, and later women, unfailingly swooned around him. He married twice; once to a much younger and slippery biker babe, who struck me as being reliable as an under-the-overpass dime-bag dealer, and that union was over in a flash; the second time to an ex-junkie, a simpler, equally damaged and fairly good-hearted soul who loved him. They met in rehab and she had a teenage son, for whom John was a doting stepfather since the boy’s father was in prison.

  John was a charmer. He was funny, he was smart, he was sensitive, probably too sensitive. Every so often he would try to mend fences with his parents. My mother was all over the pla
ce on that subject, sometimes cursing him out, sometimes bailing him out, figuratively as well as financially. Junkies do that to people they care about. And on this score I cannot fault my mother. She was as confused as anybody, and she was his mother, and he was her baby, her youngest child, Johnny Cake, and she was continually devastated. My father’s position was less nuanced. I heard him tell my brother many, many times: “Your credibility sucks.” A constant refrain, admittedly not without foundation.

  By any measure, the old man was right, John’s credibility was—not. Like many a junkie, he had immense, practically unbounded capacities for deception, dissimulation, evasion. Whenever he worked me, for money, of course, always for money when not for a place to sleep or shower, he would spin elaborate stories and explanations. Whenever a story goes on too long, somebody is lying. Watchword for writers, too, now that I think about it. If you have ever had a friend or family member who is an addict, you know you spend a fair amount of time fending them off. They wear you out with their self-serving demands, their needs, their schemes, their rationalizations, their pleas for understanding, compassion, and cash. Everything ultimately boils down to a plea for money—and the need for money is as urgent as a heart attack, which, considering John’s numerous mainline-heroin-related cardiac diseases, was not a long shot.

  I’m on the OCD, that is, obsessive-compulsive, spectrum; to put it another way, I am absolutely non-ADD, I am hypervigilant, never permitting my attention to wander for a second—for if I did, the door would be unlocked, or the germs on my unwashed hands might kill me, or some other catastrophe would result from my failure to check and re-recheck the car, the oven, the front door, anything, everything.

  On the other hand, John and my father were both ADD. Beyond that, they were both the black sheep in their families. My father was often roughed up by his own brutalizing old-world Italian father, who probably saw no way of dealing with his out-of-control son other than violence and tying him up in the cellar and leaving him to sleep on the floor in the dark. My brother and father threw fists at each other more than a couple of times, but the abuse Johnny felt he received was more psychological than physical. He never felt loved by his father. He often said as much in so many words. This didn’t stop him from continually seeking out that love. As a practical matter, their attention spans rivaled a squirrel’s. For instance, I never saw either of them with a book in their hands. They couldn’t sit still, unless in front of a television set—and not with a cocktail in hand; neither of them really drank. In another age and if they were different people, I suppose medication would have been indicated. They both had the ability to seduce people, by which I mean strangers. My father had no genuinely close friends, as in somebody to go out with for a beer or to the game, and he was congenitally suspicious of others’ motivations relative to him. Everybody’s trying to clip you: words he lived by, possibly because they were not unrelated to his M.O. for working others. On the other hand, Johnny had many very loyal friends, to whom he was unfailingly generous, throughout the years of his addiction. Hundreds of heartbroken people showed up for his memorial service and wept for him.

  Yes, Winnicott does have something to add; this is the concluding paragraph of his essay on “Aspects of Juvenile Delinquency”:

  “…if the child becomes able to manage himself and his relationship to grown-ups and to other children, he still has to begin dealing with complications, such as a mother who is depressed, a father with maniacal episodes… The more we think of these things the more we understand why infants and little children absolutely need the background of their own family, and if possible a stability of physical surroundings as well; and from such considerations we see that children deprived of home life must either be provided with something personal and stable when they are yet young enough to make use of it to some extent, or else they must force us later to provide stability in the shape of an approved school, or, in the last resort, four walls in the shape of a prison cell.”

  Winnicott is on to something. After all, I was the one who took refuge in a school, my little brother, in jail.

  Correspondences

  A small number of letters between John and me have survived all the moves and depredations of time and circumstance. Precomputer, preemail, as this era was, I have a few of my brother’s originals and, strangely, a couple of copies of my own letters. One of my missives qualifies as probably the longest letter I ever wrote in my life, about 2,800 words on ten yellow-line legal tablet pages. For some odd, to me, reason I thought to make and retain a carbon copy. It was dated April 14, 1980.

  The voice is mine, I can tell, and it’s by me in some early incarnation. At times, I come across a little bit preachy, if not sanctimonious—though I can also see that I am trying hard not to be: “I miss you, brother John. I want you not to give up. I want you to clean up and use this time in prison. Stop reading this if it sounds like bullshit to you.” But then I really go off the rails: “If you’re living in a hell, it’s only another version of hell that most people live in every single day of their stinking, useless, rotten lives… USE this time, don’t do this time, don’t let it do you.” I wrote it, and I’m not proud of it.

  I express my pained interest as to life inside. At the time I was a grad student, and I was under the influence of philosophers like Michel Foucault, who were all the rage in the academy I lamely aspired to inhabit. I might have been reading Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, which I thought brilliant. His insights into the panopticon and surveillance and the modern state system were provocative. But I was dealing with my brother, who knew the scoop firsthand.

  Mostly, I am curious about him on the inside, and him before he was on the inside. As ever, I afflict him with a lot of questions:

  It all seemed like whatever was happening to you was happening in the world you had been creating—for how long now? Months? Years? Since the time we were growing up in Brooklyn? Since the imaginative time you broke away from some thing—what was it?—the old man? Me? What I or everybody in our sick family represented? I don’t know when it all began. I tend to think that it had something to do with Kit [his best friend killed before his eyes in a motorcycle crash], or something to do with [the restaurant where he was the manager], or probably something to do with our father.

  Hey, did they tell you I tried to visit you a few weeks ago, on a Thursday? They wouldn’t let me, it wasn’t visiting days. Jerks. Barred. And then I got barred at the Park Tahoe. I was using Revere [a card-counting system]—not badly either but, damn it, the same pit boss that barred me at Caesar’s Palace in Vegas must have recalled me, because right after he noticed me I got the heave ho. The guy goes, “Please take this as a compliment, sir. You are an excellent 21 player, please don’t come here anymore.” Idiots.

  I will start writing to you very often if you want me to, & I hope that you do. Please write back soon, since I worry for you & care very much for you.

  With love,

  Your brother

  •

  John’s letter from Nevada State Prison, Carson City, Nevada; found inside an envelope postmarked 20 August 1980; composed by hand on lined paper, the cursive elegant; as with all his missives quoted below, usually no paragraph breaks and no margins, each page numbered consecutively at the top; spelling and punctuation are, as they appear below, various and inconsistent. He is weeks away from his twenty-ninth birthday. Other letters quoted below are from San Quentin or Santa Rita Jail.

  Brother Joe,

  Hows life in the fast lane? I got your letter. Its been the same old grind in the place. I havent been going to work lately. I guess my attitude has been bad. But I take as much shit as I can take from these pork chop eating mother fucken police. My close friend got stuck yesterday he aint hurt too bad Both his lungs got punctured. But they say he will be short winded for a while but will soon be good as new. He aint saying who hit him so it must be personal. I dont know who did it or I 'd
be knocking at his door myself. I cant say anymore about that cause I dont know if the crazy police read my mail or not. Hey, Brother Im gonna go to the Chow Hall right now I 'll be back in a flash OK! Here I am back to say the food stunk. Brother Joe this place is getting on my nerves. I am trying to keep my sanity but it goes deeper than you could imagine. Hey enough of that talk. I won a TV. in a poker game a few days ago so the time has been better for me at night. Now I can watch my own tube. I scored a radio and head phone 2 weeks ago So I guess you could say Im cadillacing or other words living it up. What a joke Huh? Right now Im listening to the Rolling Stones singing emotional rescue. Last night I watched that show about Rock + Roll. It was pretty good. I guess your wondering how Im scoring these luxuries. Me and a couple paissanos are running a black jack game Prison style. The house turns both cards up and the house wins pushes. You cant help but take everybody for what they got. So far things have been good anyway. We started backing the game on our ass (NO BANKROLL) but if someone would have stuck us for any bread I would have been all about boxing for it. But since then were in OK shape on the bread side. Well big Brother I love ya and miss you Say hello Father Shane for me OK