The Pope of Brooklyn

by Joseph Di Prisco

  I dressed and got into my car.

  Walking into my home after spending eight hours in the ER, I could see I may have made a bad mistake not encouraging Patti to come to the hospital. I could tell she was very distraught. “Some kind of birthday,” she said. We plied free a few rogue EKG tabs clinging to my chest, my legs. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “It’s not the same without you.”

  No one had ever said such a thing to me before. I found the woman I was always looking for.

  New York State Appellate Division

  RECORDS AND BRIEFS

  Q. And what else did he tell you?

  A. He told me they scored for two thousand dollars.

  Q. Two thousand dollars!

  A. Yes.

  Q. Now, did you receive any money of this?

  A. Yes, I received about two hundred dollars on the first payment.

  Q. And was there a second payment?

  A. Yes, sir.

  Q. Now, and of that second payment, how much did you receive?

  A. Fifty dollars.

  Q. Fifty dollars. Did Celentano ever lend you money?

  A. Yes, sir, two instances. He sent me seventy-five dollars, once up in Lake

  George, and he advanced me about another fifty dollars.

  Q. And what was the other fifty dollars for?

  A. Well, to—I had—I was trying to get a line on a stickup, and I had to be with these people drinking, and things like that.

  The Truth, the Whole Truth,

  and Something Like the Truth

  For most of my college years I was in thrall to Not-Naomi. But I mean that in a good way. She easily deserves the less-than-coveted All-time First Girlfriend Prize. I could go on at exhaustive length to convince you how she qualifies, but this is the clincher for me: we’re still friends. At an early stage of our liaison, she passed along what her uncannily perceptive, professorial mother said about what you must know by now is a favorite subject of mine: me. Her mom made the observation that Joe obviously raised himself. When people raise themselves, she added, they often have a void they spend their whole lives trying to fill. Her brilliant, incandescently literate daughter had witnessed that chaotic project firsthand for herself. Who knows? Maybe Mom was not so subtly suggesting to her child that she ought to run for the hills.

  Whaddayou, Not-Naomi’s mom, writin’ a book?

  I took the point. Did I have a choice? I had taken it before, and since then I have never stopped taking it and I expect I always will. For a long while I had been intellectually infatuated with the concept of the void; the whole madcap gang of once-upon-a-time fashionable existentialists and nihilists and relativists and anarchists spoke to me in a language I thought I could access. Saint John of the Cross’s “dark night of the soul” probably did not amount to the void, but the distinction was as a practical matter missed by me. And Camus and Nietzsche and Heidegger and Kafka and Beckett? Common sense.

  I think most of us have some sense of the void’s existence. Many of us have been at least accidental tourists or unenthusiastic visitors passing through, some of us are resident aliens, a few of us connoisseurs or citizens, reluctant or otherwise.

  So yes, indeed, the void. Dot dot dot.

  My brother John attempted to fill the void in his own fashion, mainlining smack and committing crimes required to sustain his habit, struggling to survive his years in prison and on the street. He was a wounded soul. But in other ways and at other times, he also filled it with his abiding friendships and loyalties, and the spillage of an overflowing big heart. One way he was never able to fill that void was with the love of his parents: either the love they had for him, or his for them. Whatever they offered him in the name of parental love wasn’t adequate. I can hold them accountable, and I often have, but that doesn’t seem justified, quite. Drug addiction is merciless. Sooner or later, it crushes everybody in its purview, if given a chance. I do know for sure that the void swallowed John up.

  I could say something similar about my dad. He tried to fill his void with gambling, with the thrill of the action, with the excitement of his criminality, with taking untenable risks. Later he attempted something comparable with his dedicated union work. I do think he valued, in some primitive sense, his family, but we weren’t up to the task. I am confident when I say that in his mind we all let him down. His marriage made him miserable, but it was the best he could do.

  I’d like to put in a few paltry semi-good words for the void.

  As for me, well, the void got the best of me sometimes, I cannot deny or dispute it. There are those nights when emptiness can seem almost beautiful and bracing. Other nights, not so much. What’s more, I don’t know that people like me can ever perfectly or permanently fill the void. The emptiness and the darkness have their allure, which is not the word, for a depressed person. It certainly had such sway over me. I have spent the greater part of my life filling that emptiness with whatever I could, hoping for something to stick. In the past, with manic romantic entanglements or with drugs. More productively and sanely, and more recently, with my own work, reading and writing and teaching. A class that goes well, working with a student who is touched by self-understanding, those are fulfilling experiences. And finding the right words, shaping a poem or a novel, those are fine, lasting things. Not to mention marriage to a loving mate—who has proven to be a lifesaver. And a connection with a loving son, and his family, including grandkids. And friendships that I cannot imagine being without.

  What about my spiritual life, if such a hallowed term could be applied to my endless search and riddling doubt? Good question, and fair. That’s harder to talk about. And potentially an invitation to utter cringeworthy admissions. For one thing, I am disgusted by the endemic religious posturing in American culture, which is most glaringly in evidence on the part of politicians seeking votes by piously stipulating Jesus is Lord. If you’re like me, when you hear these clowns, don’t you want to punch them in their hypocritical noses? On this score, I have a dream. My dream is one day to throw in with a presidential candidate who replies, when interrogated about his or her religious convictions, “None of your business.” A candidate reminiscent of the acerbic basketball coach genius Greg Popovich. Either somebody like that or an atheist who can understand the Constitution of this secular nation. For all the culturally dated piety about “one nation under God,” the game-changing experiment that is the United States of America is founded not only upon the separation of church and state (or is it church and taste?) but equality, and it’s built upon the rock of religious tolerance, specifically tolerance for un- and non- and disbelief. Amen.

  Since I have referenced throughout how my little boy’s faith mattered so much to me—should I say saved me?—I feel an obligation to follow up here with an account of my adult take. Here goes, such as it is. My Catholicism works for me, a fair amount of the time. When I was a tyke clutching at straws, that was one thing. Now, it’s decidedly different, though the continuum between then and now is real. I’m no proselytizer, but I think Pope Francis might be up to something pretty good. We’ll see what is his whole plan, though he has made a terrific start on climate change and on his full-throated emphasis upon serving the poor. (With your blessing, Your Holiness, were I you and I’m obviously not, I would push the Church to get over itself immediately on contraception, on gay marriage, on female clergy, and on priestly celibacy. As you said, “Who am I to judge?” Just saying, with respect, and thank you.)

  I recognize that some worthy Catholics may not regard my Catholicism as Catholicism at all. I almost wish I possessed their self-gratulatory assurance. To them I would say, with all the charity I can muster, fuck the fuck off, please, and take your Jansenistic baggage with you as you deplane. (Jansenism is the namesake heresy attributed to the seventeenth century ultimate wet blanket of a Bishop Jansen who held no party spellbound hyperventilating the message that grace is av
ailable to the select few, the kind of guy who hides the IPA away from the mitts of nothing nobodies.) And as for those who find allegiance to any type of Catholicism intellectually indefensible if not comically naïve, I am comforted that these critics have figured out their lives. Yes, the pedophilia scandal is no mere blip on the screen. The all-too-human political institution of the Catholic Church crushed children, ruined families, failed itself. It will take generations to recover, if it ever does. I am able to make the skeptics’ case—I have in fact made their case—but it doesn’t ultimately hold water for me. I almost wish I had command of their depthless certainty.

  Beyond that, I have not much more to add. In general, I feel I have a long way to go before understanding what this all means, but here’s what I do know, and it’s the only leg I have to stand on. The rituals have power for me. The days, the moments, when I feel the presence of something sacred in my life make the mystery and confusion and yes, the void, for a minute anyway, tolerable.

  “The road of excess,” wrote William Blake, “leads to the palace of wisdom.”

  Tell me about it.

  No, really, somebody please tell me about it.

  Blake also wrote in the same poem, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” “You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.”

  •

  In some sense, a work of memory aspires to escape the past in order to illuminate or somehow inform, if not quite authenticate, the present. At least the author of such a work aspires as much. A memoir aspires to inhabit history so as to wrest meaning not merely from the past but to discover it in the present. But what does the present mean? To what extent is it knowable? The tricky part is that the one way to begin to understand where one has been before is to see where one is now. Only that now is a treacherously slippery place upon which to gain footing. Sometimes it’s an oil slick, and you take a messy, grease-monkey tumble. Sometimes it’s a frozen pond, which is melting beneath you in the springtime. Maybe you keep skating, oscillating between the past and the prospect of the future, all to the end of understanding the now. That’s why the facts and the recollections, however conceptualized, are in service of a narrative, which is an account, a version, a selection, a myth. But perhaps curiously, there’s a way in which crafting a fiction—a novel, a story, a poem—makes it less of a trial to tell the truth, because it’s all made up. To some extent the experience of one’s so-called real life informs an author’s fiction—as how could it, to some significant degree, not? Memoir is not for the faint of heart, and neither is ordinary existence.

  Does my dad’s life amount to nothing more than a cautionary tale for me? That feels patently ridiculous. He had his own life, access to which is mine at best provisionally, partially, incompletely. I may be nothing but the wiseass, superior-sounding, full-of-himself punk who thinks he knows how to throw around uptown terms like “cautionary tale” with reference to my Brooklyn dad. He may have left the borough and the East Coast to save his own skin, but Brooklyn never left him. I could conceivably say the same about myself. And if there is any cautionary tale to be told, it might be this: my life constitutes the only cautionary tale I need for myself.

  So what do I see in him? Was he a quester from Greenpoint, some smack-talking knight errant, viewed through the filter of my experience, my books, my memoirs? I could say yes and I could say no.

  Did he determine the outlines of my life? Again, yes and no—and also maybe.

  I have heard people say life is about making memories to treasure. But what if memory makes us who we are? Myth is a memory that never dies. Who am I then in the family myth, or the myth of myself?

  •

  My dad played the horses every day possible, borrowing money when necessary, paying it back after booking a winner, or borrowing money elsewhere to pay it back when he booked a loser. Back in Brooklyn, he had borrowed from loan sharks, “shylocks,” as he called them. A vicious cycle. He was addicted to what I presume to be the rush of the wager and the dream of the payoff, which I have to imagine sometimes, or rarely, got him back to square one, at which point the cycle played out again of borrowing and hoping to pay it all back if not being able to stiff creditors. He borrowed a few hundred from me a couple of times when I was fresh out of college, my first teaching job, pulling down a princely salary of $4,900 a year. He always paid it back, not that I was blasé about the risk I took. I am sympathetic. Well, now I am, when it is an abstract proposition. Back then, he induced a fear of impoverishment—his and my own.

  At some point in California he started making much better money, and if he borrowed money ever again I have no idea. He gambled about every single day, and he lived his entire existence in California a mere few miles from Golden Gate Fields in Albany, to which he continually repaired. My mother railed against him without cease, to me, my brother, my wife, to anybody who was in the vicinity.

  “The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil” (1 Timothy 6:10).

  “The lack of money is the root of all evil” (Mark Twain).

  I wrote my dissertation at Berkeley on Mark Twain, specifically the period of his career when he himself was tap city, the 1890s, publishing and barnstorming and striking business deals, chasing bad money with good, doing anything to keep the wolf from the door, taking one commercial risk after another. It didn’t work, and then it worked, big time, because out of the ruins of his terrible business judgments, and his tragic family experience, he built the empire that was the public image of Mark Twain, great writer, great man, great American in his glorious white suit. This is a great country, which Samuel Langhorne Clemens, the first great anti-imperialist critic, took pains to excoriate.

  •

  Ever since Aristotle’s Poetics we have cultivated a notion of the tragic figure. As we remember the definition, some star-crossed people, through some characterological failing or moral flaw, combined with the force of circumstances beyond their control, or via the handiwork of their personal demons, plummet to their inevitable doom. For the classical philosopher, the dramatization of this tragic flaw, if done masterfully, produces in the audience a catharsis. Catharsis is Aristotle’s biological metaphor, referring to a kind of psychic, emotional purgation, analogized to other sorts of purgation, use your imagination. Catharsis for the audience is a welcome if wrenching release of pent-up emotion in response to the spectacle of the ruined tragic hero.

  Nobody’s life can be usefully examined, finally, as a work of art, though my father was more than once called a piece of work, with the attendant pejorative connotations. And everyone who watches the unfolding of another’s life, from a close vantage point such as from within his family, hardly constitutes a theatrical audience. The theater is one or more removes away from family—though Oscar Wilde once called the Public an aggravated form of the family—and it takes a great artist to implicate a stranger in the drama of another. But it’s more complicated than that. For there is a way for me to understand my old man as somebody with genuine flaws. He was a dark and tortured soul who felt powerless before his ingrained desires and designs—what he called his vice. But that, I think, trivializes the issue, and him. The vice stood for something, a desire for meaning, and the thrill of taking risk, and the hope for self-validation.

  •

  I’m the last one standing in my family.

  There was a time when I would have claimed this was no big deal, that I’d felt like an outlier for as long as I could remember.

  Now, I am not too sure. Death clears the decks.

  For whom, besides myself, am I writing this book? Who wantsta know? as the old man would say.

  Death clarifies. It’s often observed we mourn someone we have lost, but also the loss of the connection we never had, the loss of the person we never knew. It’s a commonplace observation, but there it is. There’s nothing more commonplace than mortality. Mortality applies to the inevitably in everyone’s l
ife. My death is mine, however, and it’s personal.

  The things that might have happened—my mother happy, my father free of debt and money worry, my brother John content enough to survive in his own skin—never will happen because they never did happen. But to bring to mind the failed possibilities is important. Important to me, if nobody else, and perhaps to you, if you care for a minute or two.

  I have a friend who is a building contractor, an excellent one. He’s a complex, smart, hardworking, principled man. More than anything, he’s a good man and, like many a good man, his life story is thorny: domestic turmoil, personal demons haunting him. He doesn’t talk much about that sort of thing, but sometimes you can catch a glimpse of the pain behind his eyes, not that he’s seeking your approval. He doesn’t need my sympathy, but I admire him. I could call him stoic, but that sells him short. He has vulnerabilities and emotional depths, and those depths may contribute to the excellence of his work.

  Once I asked him, as he was completing the punch list during the last days of his work for us, what drove him. Was it seeing the pleasure, the satisfaction in others who benefited from his skill and dedication? He did not hesitate. No, that wasn’t it, not at all. It was all fine and good that his clients appreciated his work, but what pleased him was seeing for himself that he had done good work.

  The question of the audience for a memoir, or any work of writing, is hard for me to answer. Who’s the audience? You got me.

  •

  Who’s going to win the Super Bowl, the NBA championship, the World Series, the Stanley Cup, the Kentucky Derby?

  Say you have an idea. Say you pick your team, your town, your horse. That’s an opinion. This thought process of yours has absolutely nothing to do with taking the risk called making a wager. Yes, gambling on a game begins with a point of view, but that’s only the beginning. You have to calculate the odds, analyze the situation, study the matchups and so on. Either that, or take a flyer.