The Pope of Brooklyn

by Joseph Di Prisco

  You’re still not close to gambling. Because when you finally put your money down, something takes place deep inside. It’s akin to fear. And also anxiety. And exhilaration, too. Your self-worth is at stake along with your cash. Only idiots lose bets, right? Wrong. And I can prove it. When you bet and you lose, that doesn’t tell your whole story. You hold a job, you enjoy some status in your world, you have people who love and need you. You don’t have soup stains on your shirt or cigar ashes on your lap—that describes the idiots who bet the farm. You’re simply losing. The waves of nausea overwhelm you. Are you a loser? How did you go from having an opinion about a game, or rooting for your hometown team to win, to feeling the humiliation of losing your money? No, you are not your money. It’s more complicated. But you are your money when you make your play. And then after the final score, when you rip up your betting slip and limp away from the betting window, there’s less of you than before.

  •

  Jesus is manhandled and scourged and brought up before the kangaroo court conducted by Pontius Pilate. Upon being questioned, Jesus says he has come into the world to testify to nothing less than the truth. “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

  To which the son-of-a-bitch imperial functionary says: “What is truth?”

  This might have been a good question had a better man asked it and asked it honestly—by which I mean unrhetorically. And though he finds no fault in Jesus, he does not let him go. Instead, insofar as it is the custom to free somebody on an occasion such as this, he asks the rabble what they want. In one voice, they cry out that they want a bandit named Barabbas to be exonerated and freed, and Pilate accedes, washing his hands. The world has not been the same since.

  •

  For a while, in my forties, I was the associate head and academic dean of a Catholic high school. In fact, this was my alma mater, where I was once student body president and from which my brother had been expelled—to his great delight, I might add. It was not the best job I’d ever had, but the finest moments for me involved dealing with students who had committed acts of academic dishonesty, like plagiarism and cheating. As the culture of the school had devolved into a disaster, I had about one hundred cases land on my desk in my first year—this in a student body of fewer than four hundred.

  This may sound surprising, but my conversations with kids in such straits were almost universally moving and deep, prying open, as they did, windows into their hearts, their minds, their souls, not to mention their families. The talks could go on for hours, and over multiple sessions. And there was never a dull moment. Ninety/ninety-five percent of the time, the results were positive. Most kids ultimately took responsibility, though usually not at first, and they began to understand what drove them. I haven’t worked in a school for a long time now, and every school year with regularity appear articles and studies that purportedly show that cheating is suddenly an epidemic. I think it probably always has been and always will be. Until kids learn to reflect upon their own integrity—that is, until they’re explicitly “invited” while undergoing some sort of crisis to reflect upon who they are—cheating is hard to resist.

  Some kids walked into my office defiant, threatening legal action. Some kids, terrified, fearful some black mark was going to “go on their record.” But no two cheaters—and no two teenagers—are the same. If you work with adolescents and fail to grasp that truth, you probably won’t last long—they will eat you alive. If, that is, a vice principal like me doesn’t scope that out and counsel you into another profession.

  Kids cheat for all sorts of reasons besides getting a better grade, though of course for some that seems to be the whole plan. Some kids cheat to please their parents, to live up to an idea their parents hold up for them, to increase their GPA in order to get into a “better college.” Some kids cheat because teachers give them impossible assignments, or because they don’t have the skills to manage the academic demands of the class. But since teenagers usually fake that they know more than they actually do, cheating feels like a natural opportunity.

  The conversations eventually pivoted, if they did at all, when I saw my opening to say something like, “It’s hard to be honest all the time.” I am not suggesting there’s a script I devised and followed, because there wasn’t and I didn’t. But in the moment, when an adult in my position owns up to the challenge of being honest, I found that a teenager gives himself permission to acknowledge he has made a mistake. “We all make mistakes. I made mistakes I have always regretted.” I never told them this next part, but I cheated once in school, and didn’t get caught, but I have never forgotten the whole sordid deal. I didn’t tell them as much, because teenagers have practically zero tolerance for adult disclosures along those lines, when the old people were drunk or dishonest or stupid. A parent might get away with that once during high school, twice at the most, but it’s mostly a non-starter, and here’s why. Teenagers feel they are the exception to every rule. You might have learned from your mishaps, but it has nothing to do with your children; they are unique. Just ask them.

  This goes to the next big moment. What the academic dean gets them to acknowledge is that, in their value scheme, there is almost nothing more important than being yourself. What follows from that is a question that blows up the conversation:

  “So if being true to yourself is so important, then misrepresenting yourself in a paper or a test doesn’t help you, does it?”

  I’m probably being crudely schematic here, but teenagers know what the truth is, and it’s valuable to them, too. I don’t care what those surveys show.

  As for parents, that’s another story. Some families failed that test, they barged in blustery and threatening litigation or a punch in my nose (which did indeed happen), and as a consequence missed the opportunity to help their kids get through the ordeal. And they also missed the gift the school gave the whole family. Now that your child has cheated, and been caught, he has the opportunity to learn from that, and never do it again. It’s hard to be honest all the time.

  Of course, a few psychologically borderline kids didn’t ever rise to the occasion, but many fewer than you’d expect. One sign of the proof: not very many of my students were repeat offenders. But there was one exception I remember.

  Brian was a two-time offender. He was small of physical stature, even for a ninth grader, gentle of temper and clearly bright, and was popular enough not to qualify as an obvious candidate for being bullied. His dad was rock solid, too. He grasped what his son was going through, and he stood by the school, which was standing by his son. But now Brian was in significantly deeper trouble, having been caught again—I cannot remember the exact circumstances, but I believe it involved improperly sharing his work with another student on a test. He was an A student, by the way, and if you think A students don’t cheat, you would be kidding yourself. As for Brian, consequences needed to be real for him, and they were about to ratchet up considerably now.

  I think I might have given him a one-day in-school suspension for his first offense, to get his attention. And now I put him on notice: if there were a third violation, expulsion was the next option on the table. He thanked me for another chance, and said he would keep the bargain and never cheat again. He would tell his friends who were pressuring him for answers to tests that he was on a short leash. He believed that, given the stakes, they wouldn’t put him in a bind again.

  A week or so later, Brian knocked on my office door, downcast. He told me that he’d advised his friends what his situation was—and they were still pressuring him. He could not believe they were putting him in this spot. He was practically in tears when he realized, not that I can recall his words, he was now on his own. He could come to me any time he wanted and we could talk, but I couldn’t help him make his decisions in the moment he was being tested. He looked bereft, and I did my best to tell him that, finally, that’s all there is, being on your own when it came to becoming an ho
nest man. It isn’t easy being honest, ever.

  As far as I am aware, Brian never got in school trouble again, and I have every reason to hope he has been living a good and full life, yet I think about him—and I can visualize his crestfallen face—and hope that he was not permanently disillusioned. Then again, what did I know? Well, if I knew anything in the world, I did know it was hard to be honest all the time.

  •

  My best friend since the seventh grade, someone behind whom I sat at my desk in our Catholic school in Berkeley, and who later became my son’s godfather, tells a story. When his son was six or seven, the boy was mixing it up with a chum, boisterously talking trash in the backyard. From inside the house, Bernie eavesdropped on them going at it. They were doing the my-dad-is-better-than-your-dad dozens. My dad is stronger than your dad, my dad can run faster than your dad, my dad can hit a baseball farther than your dad—that sort of thing. Finally, Bernie’s son had had enough:

  “Yeah, well, my dad has a bigger penis.”

  And Bernie said to himself, “You tell him, Joel.”

  •

  Did I secretly wish my father had been not some small-time hood, but a John Gotti? I could answer that either way and be telling the truth.

  Would I really have wished him to be somebody out of Goodfellas?

  Really?

  I think of my oldest grandson, first born of my only son. If you were in my vicinity, I could be showing you photogenic snaps of him and his two siblings on my phone, so consider yourself off the hook. Once, we were waiting for a movie to begin, rainy day, he was seven or eight, and we wandered into a nearby bookstore in the mall till showtime came around. He’s a very bookish boy, the kind who used to carry Diary of a Wimpy Kid to the playground, so that was a congenial destination for him. As it happened, a book of mine was then being featured in the new books section. By reflex, I took it down to have a look, can’t quite explain. He noticed what I was doing and had a question:

  “You really like yourself, don’t you?” Then we both cracked up, he got me.

  Another time, he wanted to know:

  “Nonno, are you famous?”

  I tell him no, not at all.

  But he isn’t satisfied, I can tell, and he badly wants to believe otherwise.

  At some later point I was walking him and his friend home from school—perhaps when he was nine. His pal wanted to know who was the old guy trailing, keeping them company.

  “That’s my nonno, he’s a famous author.”

  He likes to take down books from my shelves. Once without warning he spent a few hours reading my novel All for Now, though what he was taking in was hard for me to determine. I hoped he wasn’t understanding it, given the unremittingly R-rated jokes and the fundamentally tragic story. I didn’t want to snatch the book from his hands, because that would supercharge his curiosity and mystify the subject and the author. His wise, loving parents do their best to guide him in his reading. As he put it, “They don’t want me to read about things I don’t understand. They mean like sex. But I read stuff all the time I don’t understand.” (I’m looking forward to his adolescence.) In any case, that day, when he was ready, he and I tried to discuss what he took from the book of mine, didn’t get very far, which was comforting. Whew, close call. I told his father about the incident, and all Mario could say was it was just like his boy, but then he added: “Let’s keep him away from Subway to California for a long time.”

  Once when he met some new kids, my son reported that as they were getting to know each other, what video games and music they liked, and so on, the boy asked the others, by way of an icebreaker, I suppose: “So, have you read All for Now?”

  Do we all want the major figures in our lives to be larger than life? Yes, I suppose we might. Did I give over to that fantasy myself with my father? I think I probably did. Which is on one level crazy, and on another, normal.

  •

  Fathers and sons, bonded by their lies to each other. Separated by their truthfulness. Never ask a question you don’t know or want the answer to. Words for attorneys to live by, as well as by fathers and their sons. Also Russian novelists and Shakespeare. But I digress.

  I began by searching out the predicate for our flight from Brooklyn to California. That led me into performing a type of exhumation of my past and my family’s.

  Yes, it was traumatic for a ten-year-old boy like me to be abruptly, inexplicably uprooted from home and friends and dropped down—infinitely dropped, as Winnicott put it—in a state of incredible, awful beauty Didion would have her way with because it required that correction. And it was all about the lifesaving lies and necessary deceptions of my father. Lies told to preserve himself and his freedom.

  And the trade-off for me was that eventually it proved mostly to my benefit, being liberated from Brooklyn to the fantastic city of Berkeley, with California being a land of inestimable opportunity. And sunshine. And no snow. Who knows what sort of life I might have led had I stayed? Not that such speculation is ultimately interesting to me.

  •

  As a child I was continually anxious and fearful, always on guard, listening for approaching footsteps, on the lookout for somebody coming up behind me, not necessarily figuratively, either. My condition ought not to be confused with PTSD. That would be overstatement. When I was eight or nine I took to carrying around for protection not a switchblade (as my older brother did) but a pocket knife, without a clear concept about what I would do with such an impractical weapon.

  My compulsive behaviors, as early as when I was five or six, encouraged my mother to take me to the doctor. I was continually washing my hands. She recounted the story to me and others a hundred times and highlighted my beloved pediatrician’s diagnosis and prescription: no big deal, and I should slather lotion on my dried-out paws. Her account cut both ways. She wanted to prove that she was a good mother and I was a drama queen.

  It took a long time to get some measure of control over the hand washing and my generalized compulsivity and anxiety. I must have employed a type of cognitive behavior therapy upon myself, not that I knew the term. Not surprisingly, when I was a young adult I found myself inside the offices of one psychotherapist after another.

  Perhaps my favorite was one I found in California. He was a native New Yorker, and an eminent figure on the national psychological scene. He wrote a haunting, graphic book that tackled nothing less than the nature of evil, and he espoused the benefits of hypnosis, and he was hilarious and kind, and not too easy on me. I was never hypnotized (as far as I was aware) but he helped me face myself, including my debilitating obsessive checking and rechecking. It was deceptively simple, what he did.

  What if, for instance, I left the keys in my car, he wanted to know, what would be the worst that could happen? We talked at length through this horrifying, to me, hypothetical. We grasped it was about the maintenance of a sense of order and control, since order and control were hardly ever givens in my mind. We could have chosen other equally dreadful hypotheticals that obsessed me, like leaving a door unlocked, like losing a button on my shirt, like parking the car outside the lines, like turning in a paper with a misspelled word.

  I believe I know that the back door is definitely locked, but I don’t know the door is definitely locked, or know the door is definitely locked, or KNOW it, for that matter. Besides, what harm could it do, to check, to put my mind at rest? Mind at rest? That’s the plan? Good luck. Do you always talk to yourself when you’re checking? Yes, you got a problem with that?

  And check a few more times.

  And then a few more times more.

  This whole exhausting project must sound loony tunes to a non-compulsive person. Good for you, non-compulsive person, you’re lucky. You probably also get to appointments on time, too.

  Psychiatrists might have recently landed on a beta-blocker, propranolol, that, when combined with exposure the
rapy, seems to work wonders addressing or curing incapacitating anxieties. I myself am not pathological, therefore not a worthy candidate for the protocol. Because that day as my shrink and I talked through what it would mean to leave my keys or lose my keys, we—I mean I—reached this conclusion: the worst that could happen, whatever it was, was something I could survive. I wouldn’t perish, I wouldn’t crack up. I cannot explain how liberating this was to me. As I write these sentences now I cannot believe how such a simple idea flooded me with hopefulness. There was hope. Sometimes hope is enough.

  But let’s go back. Did my childhood obsessive behaviors (which have persisted well into my adult life) connect to whatever level of trauma I experienced in my early home life? I could not say with any degree of certitude, but I never for a minute viewed myself as a victim. I construed my life as conforming to a type of norm, the way all children strive to do, no matter how apparently dysfunctional the family system would seem to an outsider. Yes, my family was normal and that was Brooklyn, notions that locked together like Legos. I never felt physically threatened in or by my home life, if, that is, I discount the high level of rage my parents expressed toward each other—which I probably shouldn’t do. Having an unreliable mother probably affected my conceptions of love and undermined my psychic security, but she’s not to blame for my poor romantic track record in the past. Having a mostly absentee father surely unsteadied my existential underpinnings, as did the anxiety he himself had to have felt, and unconsciously or consciously transmitted, while being under constant pressure as he gambled compulsively and lived his life of petty crime. The effects had to have been anything but negligible for him—and for me and my brother. And then the flight out of Brooklyn, taking that subway to California: that disturbed and angered me. It must have eroded any residual sense I had of order and control. Those tumultuous feelings I mostly repressed—repressed and then probably sublimated into schoolwork and my faith. I would also write poems, which I started doing around ten or eleven, and borrow stacks of library books, and seek out those brighter, warmer, organized, alternative worlds where I could take up residence. I may have been solitary but I felt welcomed by the disembodied presences located on the page. I was keeping company with all the figures of my imagination and I could bring them to life in my head and sometimes on the page.