The Pope of Brooklyn

by Joseph Di Prisco

  Thousands of years ago somebody wrote a book that is read by millions of people everyday. It is one of the most famous books of all time and it ends like this: “But there were many other things which he did; if every one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.”

  That book has a title that is very fitting. You will find it in the Bible. It is called the Gospel According to John.

  The world cannot contain all the stories that could be told: The Gospel According to Johnny. There were many Johnnys. Maybe too many Johnnys. Some of them were hard to take, some of them too beautiful to be believed. I don’t know everything you know, but I know there were Johnnys you never knew, just as there were Johnnys I never knew.

  Still, I myself can only begin by remembering the good times, the hilarious times, the sweet times. His great dogs—Thomson and Renzo. His Harleys. His generous Christmas presents. Trips to Tahoe. Thanksgiving Dinners. Working at Giovanni’s—where John was easily the best restaurant manager you could imagine. And what a cook and bartender and waiter. The best. And the football games. Blackjack. The parties. More than anything, the heartbreaking kindnesses he routinely performed for all of us.

  If he was your waiter—at Scoma’s, at Eugene’s—you would have given him a 30 percent tip or more—and asked for him the next time you came to the restaurant. If you were his nephew and two years old, like Mario once was, he would have put a big Raiders hat on your little head and big leather gloves on your tiny hands and set you on his Harley where you would be beaming with joy about being lucky enough to have him for your uncle. If you were any one of his loyal dogs, you would protect him against anything and everyone. If you met him when he was straight, which he was for eight precious years, he spoke to you from his heart and made you feel that you mattered—and you never walked away from him without knowing you had been in a rare presence. If you were his tapped-out graduate student older brother, like I was in 1975, he would have gotten you a job so you could pay the bills. And if you were his brother at five years old and fifteen months older than Johnny, as I was, you would be—I can see it now—side by side on the couch watching with hushed breath The Wizard of Oz and hoping along with him for a happy ending somewhere over the rainbow.

  Yes, a happy ending. I’m still hoping for John to have a happy ending. And as an old friend of his, Father Shane, said, “When I think of Johnny I see a beautiful wild stallion.” And then he added that Johnny is now enjoying his greatest thrill—the greatest high of all—in heaven, where his sufferings are now fulfilled.

  But I need to remember how much John suffered—and in ways I will never completely understand.

  Yes, a man of contradictions.

  We knew this day would happen, and that it would come too soon, as it did. And as clearly as we knew it, we still cannot believe it. Johnny broke our hearts while he was alive, he is breaking our hearts now that he is not. We are helpless before this experience—but maybe not.

  Maybe not. Maybe Johnny is leading us, but the problem is I can’t tell where. To be honest, I never knew where he was leading me when he was alive. Maybe there’s a chance he is leading me to a little bit of wisdom, maybe to a measure of peace. If you’re like me, you could use a lot of both right now.

  In Psalm 139, I find something I can use. This is the song that begins, “Lord, thou hast examined me and knowest me. Thou knowest all, whether I sit down or rise up.” And he goes on: “Where can I escape from thy spirit? Where can I flee from thy presence?”

  It’s an interesting question, and a strange one. I mean, why would someone want to flee from his presence, to flee from being known?

  But the answer is obvious. We all want to escape. Life is hard. We live in a vale of tears. And yet, of course, we also live in a world of wonders. What an ordinary contradiction.

  Here’s another one. We know we must die. Yet we find the idea personally incredible—how can we possibly die? So what is it? Are we crazy? Or are we immortal? Or are we both crazy and immortal?

  Reason I mention this: Doesn’t that sound like Johnny? Crazy and immortal. Crazily immortal. Immortally crazy.

  Johnny is all-too-human. He wanted escape—but he also wanted freedom and a new life.

  Let’s go back to Psalm 139: feeling sad and confused, the speaker in the psalm comes to an insight:

  “If I say, Surely darkness will steal over me,

  [and] night will close around me,

  darkness is no darkness for thee

  and night is luminous as day;

  to thee both dark and light are one.”

  To God both dark and light are one. To God both dark and light are one.

  That’s the sort of God who will welcome with open arms Johnny, a man of self-contradictions, a man acquainted equally with the light and the dark.

  I believe that Johnny did the heroic best he could with his life. And the best he could is far better than most of us can contemplate.

  We can lament the loss of everything that Johnny was, but let us not stop there. When we are honest with ourselves—when I am honest with myself—I know the existence of the deepest darkness even in the most dazzling light. And I know—I believe—I hope—I trust—that for Johnny that darkness somehow right now is shining with an unimaginable light. He was and is a world of wonders unto himself.

  When Johnny telephoned my office or house, he would guess sometimes I would be screening my calls, and he always rambled and rambled on and on till I picked up: “Brother Joe, pick up the phone. It’s your brother John. Brother Joe, pick up the phone.”

  Brother John, I don’t know how this happened, but I’m still here.

  New York State Appellate Division

  RECORDS AND BRIEFS

  Q. You are presently under arrest under a warrant charging you with forgery in Brooklyn, is that right?

  A. I guess so.

  Q. You guess so?

  A. Well, I’m here.

  [Flurry of objections.]

  Q. What do you mean when you say, “I’m here”?

  A. Well, I didn’t mean anything by it as far as that goes.

  Q. Well as a matter of fact where were you arrested?

  [More objections.]

  [Counsel for accused police officer]: Your Honor, it is not a question which will tend to incriminate or degrade him.

  [Presiding]: If it was outside the state you know as well as I do, that flight is an indication of guilt.

  [Counsel for accused police officer]: If Your Honor please, if he’s arrested outside the city, he could be here for a perfectly valid reason, I don’t say he fled, maybe he says it, I don’t say it.

  [Presiding]: I don’t see how it is material as why he was—where he was arrested?

  [Counsel for accused police officer]: As to why he’s brought back here, he is testifying here for a particular purpose, I want to show the purpose.

  …

  Q. You were arrested in California, weren’t you?

  [Objections, rulings.]

  [Presiding]: Anything that pertains to the particular act, flight after the commission of a crime is an indication of guilt and if the witness—I’m sorry [Counselor], you and I disagree, I will not order him to answer.

  [Objections, rulings.]

  [Counsel for accused police officer]: I say the question as to whether he called the State of New York to bring—that he was in California—to come back to New York, is not tending to incriminate or degrade him. Voluntary submission to arrest doesn’t tend to incriminate or degrade you.

  [Presiding]: I have already ruled on it.

  [Counsel for accused police officer]: On what?

  [Presiding]: I refuse to direct him to answer the question.

  Mysteries of the (Hair) Salon

  Long, long ago a fast-talking, lookame, bodybuilding, slic
ked-back, tank-topped Jersey Boy was the hairdresser of a serious girlfriend of mine in California. She was a highly entertaining companion for a spell, then a highly disastrous one after our relationship foundered. As the sages of Brooklyn might wisely weigh in, Whaddaya gonna do? I’m not implying I was capable of being philosophical about the turn in my romantic fortunes at the time, because I have never been philosophical when it comes to such turns. It’s too late, but now this whole salon sex derby setup sounds partway toward a viable reality TV show pitch. (Showtime, Netflix, HBO, whoever, have your people call my people.)

  Somewhere in the intermediate stage of this romance, or whatever the term for our connection, she told me she had a problem with Jersey Boy. No, he was a terrific hairdresser, whatever that meant, so that wasn’t the problem. It seems that he had been down on his luck and had been in need of a few bucks. She lent him $200. (We are talking around 1980, about $600 in today’s dollars.) She was a student, so this was not an easily write-offable number for her.

  Why the fuck did you lend this clown money in the first place? I must have tenderly sympathized, and she must have defended herself, and her explanation must have pivoted upon the persuasiveness of his Jersey Boy sob story and hinged upon his trustworthy pledge to pay it back soon, and she told me the truth because this was before she became bad news. I must have assumed he was not making a play for her. One, because, being an idiot, I probably assumed he was gay, since of course all male hairdressers were, despite the evidence mounted and mounted again in Warren Beatty’s Shampoo, which was a great movie in the theaters then and proving the opposite; and Two, how does a man’s liquidity challenge factor into a viable seduction trap? You can see how the mind of a man like me was working, or mostly wasn’t. In any case, the poser’s note was way past due, and she was strapped. I would see what I could do about it.

  I know. I’m a prince, right? If she needed some cash to buy groceries or something nice to wear or books for her classes, I would take care of it, because I was doing all right at the time, but that wasn’t the point. It was the principle. Nowadays, when I hear somebody say, It’s not the money, it’s the damn principle, I always think, No, it’s always the damn money. Much more to the point, somebody—some guy—was ripping off my girlfriend, and therefore some guy was disrespecting me. The things a man will do for love of a woman, or love of himself. It doesn’t come close to the insane things he does to maintain his own precious illusions of respectability.

  This sad and silly episode takes us back to Berkeley, the land that shining disco balls and Saturday Night Fever forgot, and before I was thirty. That is when I assumed solving problems for a pretty girl was a surefire route to her heart. Or some other, more desirable place. I have reason to believe that if I had read some columns in the women’s magazines littering Jersey Boy’s hair salon, I would have learned that women didn’t really want a man to try to solve their problems, and when was the last time in recorded history that a guy ever got some action by trying to solve a girl’s problem? Instead, when women related their problems, the advice columnists counseled, they wanted to be heard out empathetically, they wanted his ear. Or some other thing. At the time this advice would have sounded to me as irrelevant as science fiction, not that I read that stuff either, and not that our relationship was destined to go anywhere fast other than downward, so reading those gal mags was never destined to be on my To Do List.

  She gave me the salon phone number, which I kept for future reference, but I don’t think I called. Instead, I did drop in on Jersey Boy. I was amicable, or tried to be. He assured me he was good for the money, half-ass apologized for inconveniencing her and me. Sure OK fine whatever. He gave me a personal check made out to me, asked me to wait a couple of days till his payroll check cleared.

  Wait, a check? To the guy doing collection on your deadbeat ass? Did I puff out my chest and demand to see ID, his driver’s license? Some kind of tough guy, me. And remember checks? Me, either.

  I must have been suspicious, so the hell with waiting for some supposed payroll check to clear. I left his salon and immediately drove to his bank branch, determined to play it all out. Remember bank branches? Anyway, that’s when the teller advised me that this checking account was closed. Therefore Jersey Boy and I were about to have a much bigger problem. What I mean is, the masculinity stakes seriously ratcheted up. He thought he could play me? I guess he was so desperate he had no choice. Either that, or he had no fear of me. I was going with the second possibility. My move now. I would soon find out if I was a poser, too, which was something I have intermittently half-suspected my entire life. And here’s the whole reason why I bring up this story, and what I have been leading up to.

  I must have spoken to my father about what was going on—and this is a development whose outlines I barely recall and cannot explain at all. It was not the kind of thing I did as a matter of course, seeking out his fatherly counsel and wisdom, so I cannot recollect the circumstances, or how or why I imagined it would have been constructive to talk to him, or if we had a conversation in person or on the phone. I do know for certain that he offered to be of assistance. The guy’s from Jersey, huh? he might have wished to reconfirm. I must have told him about the bum check. Give me the guy’s number, I’ll talk to him, he must have said. I do recall I said his debt changed. It was now $220. It wasn’t the money, it was the principle, and the money.

  A day or so later, my father said the guy told him he had the cash and was ready to square up that night. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he offered to ride along, but I probably would have said no thanks. A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. And so do posers like me.

  That night, as promised and on schedule, Jersey Boy and I had the briefest of conversations before he handed over the paper currency. He looked a bit shaken, or so I remember, and he said something like he didn’t expect to get a phone call from somebody like that, which I took to mean that the old man had subtly intimated that it was in the guy’s best interests to pay up, and that there would be unnamed consequences otherwise. And that’s my clearest remembrance of my father’s participation in—no, not really—the shakedown, because Jersey Boy was legitimately on the hook. My father must have been hardwired as to the right buttons to push, perfectly attuned to the right bells to ring. And no doubt a man who had been convicted of check forgery had at his disposal a few choice morsels of information on the subject of bank regulation.

  Jersey Boy was full of himself, so he also remarked it was illegal for me to charge interest. I didn’t know about that, but I reminded him, if that was true, so was drafting a fraudulent check. After that night, I never ran into the guy again, and my girlfriend was made financially whole, and I suppose she found another hairdresser. To this day, I do wonder if I gave her $200 or $220. I could have made a case either way. Any poser could.

  More than anything, I realized if Jersey Boy hairdressers and questionable girlfriends with poor judgment were predictable, that was one thing I could never say about my old man. He still had game.

  She Don't Lie, She Don't Lie,

  She Don't Lie

  Scene: Pretty people of a certain age dressed in white, flowing, imminently disposable clothes, ambling at sunset on the otherwise solitary California shoreline, hand in hand; rascally little bonfire sending up sparks; hey-there-now flutes canoodling in the come-hithery air.

  Smoky voiceover by a woman, oozing simultaneously power and submissiveness:

  “Cocaine is not for everyone. Ask your doctor if you’re unhealthy enough and if cocaine is right for you. If you experience the impulse to make middle-of-the-night booty calls, seek psychological help or, better yet, spiritual guidance. Do not use if you have high blood pressure, low blood pressure, or any blood pressure period. If after ingesting cocaine you have an erection lasting three hours, seek immediate medical attention—for your poor partner. Also notify the Guinness Book of Records. After an eight ball, you’ll be fortunate to hav
e an erection lasting three minutes…”

  •

  Old joke. Guy does a line and somebody asks him why he does coke. Guy says, “To see God.” “What does God tell you?” “God says don’t do coke.”

  •

  “It was love at first sight.” That is the sentence that opens Catch-22. I loved that book and I loved this drug that also opened my eyes, and not in an optimal way. More accurately, my toothpick-propped-open coked-up peepers were unblinking as a hawk’s when the dehooded raptor’s talons grip the falconer’s glove. As few of us were aware in the lost decade of the eighties and everybody knows now that love at first sight threatened to obliterate many a bank account, family, career, romance, and life. I could relate. Four for five; I hit for the cycle.

  In those halcyon days, coke was widely considered a “recreational” drug. We should have seen through this marketing ploy. For “recreational” would have been an appropriate characterization if your idea of recreation was stabbing yourself in the neck, jabbering all night and not remembering a thing you or anybody else said, feeling like your skin was curling up like seared wallpaper in a red-tagged dwelling. Not right away, of course not. The first hit, a spoonful or a razor-chopped line, was like coming across a fabulous oasis in the middle of the endless desert. The fiftieth hit, later that night or more often the next morning, like trudging headfirst into a blinding sandstorm. I was stretched for rent money, grocery money, gas money, money money, and I was dealing. Intent to sell: trafficking in weight that could earn somebody many years in the slammer. Nonetheless, small time. Nobody called me El Jo Jo. Practically every day I committed a felony. Good days, a couple. I know, I know, I know. I was lucky.

  •

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