This short entry appeared on my now defunct old blog many years ago but I was reminded of it today following the passing of the Monkees Davy Jones.
When John Lennon was shot I was only six years old. I remember my mom crying, but I don’t remember being sad because I got to stay home from school. This started the bittersweet tradition of the Celebrity Snow Day.
A few years later it happened again:
“Mom, John Belushi died, can we stay home from school?”
“Yes”
Then the next year:
“Mom, Marvin Gaye got shot”
“Did he die”
“Yeah”
“No school tomorrow”
“Yay!”
In time this tradition faded away and eventually it disappeared completely*. When Rock Hudson died we took a half day but according to my much younger brother, they didn’t miss a minute of school when Kurt Cobain, Tupac or Biggie died. The kids today may have a lot of advantages but they don’t have it all.
*I resurrected the old tradition on my own by taking a day off when Joe Strummer passed away. I’m sure that my mom would have approved and I’m also certain that Davy Jones’ passing would warrant a day off. RIP Davy.
Nobody told us what happened inside of the building across the street before my mother rented the house in the summer of 1983. Since we moved in over a weekend it was a few days before we found out that the small white building was an industrial bread bakery. As far as we were concerned, that summer we had arrived in paradise.
Our version of paradise was a high ranch three bedroom house on a dirt lot, a few doors down from the elevated train tracks. There was one fewer door between us and the train because the house next door had burned down shortly before we moved in. The presence of a charred windowless shell of a home 15 feet away probably contributed to my single mother being able to afford the place but like I said, it was fine by us. We had spent the last four years living in basements on the edge of poverty and suddenly we had ROOMS.
Then, after the weekend, the bakery came back to life. I don’t know if you’ve ever been three doors down from THOUSANDS of loaves of bread being baked at once but it’s pretty much the best thing ever, or at least it was the best thing my brother, my sister and me had experienced to that point in our life. At nine years old I was the oldest so I led my brother and sister down towards the bakery where we saw the racks of bread cooling outside.
Unless you’ve been poor you can’t understand how amazing it is to see so much food just sitting out in the open. We just stared at it from the curb for a while unsure if it was real. There were people inside but nobody was standing by the racks. After a few minutes someone else approached the building and knocked on the door. They handed the person who answered it some money then they were handed a paper bag which they filled with bread. We had stumbled onto the black market of bread where it was just sold out of a factory back door and taken straight home to eat.
Looking back it doesn’t seem like much but it was one of the most amazing things my siblings and I had ever seen up to that point. We had not only moved into a giant house but there was food just sitting around waiting for someone to come and get it. Between the three of us we had less than a dollar but that was enough to get a small paper bag from the man inside which held a fresh loaf of bread. On later trips we would learn to fill the paper bags and our pockets and eventually to just fill our pockets and run.
One morning my brother and I were on our way back from a bakery run with our pockets full of onion rolls when a car pulled up beside us. We were only about 50 feet from out front door and we were about to get busted for stealing bread…or so we thought. When the driver told us to get in the car we said nothing to one another. When he opened the car door I told my brother, under my breath to not go. He told me under his breath that he knew that. This guy in the car was trying to kidnap us.
He beckoned us towards the car through the open passenger door but we stood our ground. When he said as nicely as possible: “Get in.” My brother and I decided to see what was in it for us.
“Why should we get in?” I asked as I looked towards my house.
Everyone was still asleep inside and couldn’t see what was going on. The driver had situated his car between us and the path to our front door.
The driver reached into his bag and said: “I have a cupcake.” He pulled a single individually wrapped Hostess cupcake out and showed it to us.
My brother had a question: “Do you have a cupcake for each of us?”
Perhaps it was his first day as a kidnapper because he admitted that he only had the one cupcake. My brother and I told him that we would get in the car only if he got us a second cupcake. We told him we’d wait there, he closed the passenger door and drove away.
My brother and I debated waiting for that second cupcake for moment and then thought better of it. We ran home to eat bread and watch from the window to see if our would be kidnapper returned. He never did.
Two weeks ago I found myself driving through my hometown at 7 AM looking for a place to get coffee. I pulled into the parking lot of a Dunkin’ Donuts and walked inside. It was Sunday and the line was shorter than I expected. I looked around for a newspaper but couldn’t find one so I walked up to the counter and ordered coffee.
I was hungry but I couldn’t bring myself to order a breakfast sandwich or a donut. The idea of eating fast food on a Sunday morning made me feel like I was letting my father down. It was the second anniversary of his death and I was on my way to the cemetery.
When my father was alive he struggled with putting many of his feelings into words. My father could express anger verbally but every other feeling was communicated through actions, most of them involving food. Over the years my father developed a food-based shorthand for each of his three kids as a way of letting us know how much he cared. He made pasta for my sister, grilled chicken and burgers for my brother and made breakfast for me whenever I made it back to Long Island.
The breakfast tradition my father and I shared had actually begun many years earlier. After my parents separated my brother, sister and I stayed with our mother but eight years later I moved back to my father’s house.
Shortly after I arrived things became difficult for my father and I but for different reasons: I was 15 years old and going through typical teenage growing pains but my father was experiencing something tougher. He didn’t say it out loud but for the first time in his life he felt like he was failing. He assumed that he could turn my troubles around overnight but this didn’t happen. Then, after more than a decade of climbing the ladder at his job he found himself out of work.
For what seemed like a very long time, both of our futures were uncertain and we were frequently at odds with one another but every Sunday morning we put these problems aside.
Every Sunday morning I woke up to find the same things: Coffee, a stack of Sunday papers (there were four newspapers in the area and we read three of them) and a full breakfast. We’d eat, read the papers and talk sports until it was time to take on the rest of the day. We did this every single Sunday from the day I arrived until the day I moved out five years later.
While other family members sometimes joined us around the table, as far as my dad and I were concerned, Sundays were our thing. Sometimes it was our only thing and it was important to us. This is why I always made sure to make it to his house for breakfast when I was back in town.
Back in the parking lot of the Dunkin’ Donuts I sat in the car with my coffee for a few minutes but I couldn’t waste too much time. I wanted to get to the cemetery early to beat the rush. My family is big on visiting graves and if you don’t get there early on a special day: like the anniversary of a death or a birthday of a loved one you could find yourself standing in a line waiting to pay your respects.
By 7:30 AM I was driving through the gates of the cemetery. I had only been there once since my father was buried but I knew the way to what I like to call “dad’s new place.” I drove slowly along the path leading up to the spot where my father is buried and parked my car across from a pickup truck that I didn’t recognize as belonging to any member of my family. I got out of the car and started walking towards my dad’s marker when the driver of the pickup truck got out and called my name. I recognized the voice before I saw his face.
Steve was a friend of my father and an all around good guy. It was good to see him. He was part of my father’s inner circle, in fact Steve was one of the few people who knew my how sick my father was before he died.
Steve and I were quietly looking at my father’s headstone when he said:
“I come down here on Sunday’s sometimes to have my coffee and read the paper.”
“Really?” I asked.
“Yeah, every couple of Sundays I used to go to your dad’s place. He’d make breakfast and we’d read the papers.”
“He and I used to do the same thing.”
“I know, he told me that every time.”
I asked Steve to give me a second. I went back to my car to get my coffee. I had thought that bringing coffee to the grave site would have been disrespectful but obviously it would have been okay with my dad.
About 15 minutes after I arrived a car pulled up and out stepped my grandmother, my aunt and my sister. My aunt and sister were holding cups of coffee and my grandmother had brought a newspaper.
Part one of a two part story.
I’ll never forget the night I spent with my father in September 1997. It was the first time anyone asked me how my mother died.
We were drinking at a bar in the Bronx when my father had introduced me to his secretary. My father’s job as a construction foreman didn’t require a lot of typing so it was unlikely that he actually had a secretary but I didn’t want to ruin a good time so I let it go.
Once the introductions were out of the way my father laid some cash on the table to cover the cost of our drinks and disappeared through the back door of the bar.
She and I quickly settled into a pleasant conversation and I could tell by the way the woman’s eyes lit up when she talked about my father that she was more than just a co-worker stopping by to say hello. I had met people who worked with my father before; they called him boss or the big man not Mike. None of those other coworkers knew as much about me as this woman did.
Going to a bar with my father was an uncommon event. We had a distant and uncomfortable relationship. It had been like this ever since my he and my mother split up but once or twice a year we’d try to put everything aside and do something together. On this particular Sunday we attempted to bridge the divide by going to a New York Jets game and then to the bar where he left me behind to talk to this mystery woman.
There was no sense in asking either of them to tell me the truth. My father never revealed more than he absolutely had to. His favorite way of explaining how he got something was to tell me he had: “Won it in a keeping your mouth shut contest” and people who were part of his inner circle were equally secretive.
Challenging the secretary story would get me nowhere so I sat at the table drinking my beer and ignoring the lie that was at the center of the conversation.
Truthfully, I didn’t care that my father had lied to me about who she was. I was happy to be let in on the lie. I felt like his letting me in on this secret meant he trusted me. I imagined that the acts of keeping this woman’s existence secret from the wife he had at home and the existence of that wife from the woman sitting across the table from me could heal our fractured relationship.
Being honest had not gotten me far with my father but maybe I could lie my way into winning his trust. On the other hand he might have simply been reckless, but either way I think he knew that I valued his approval enough to keep my mouth shut.
Back at the table she and I kept talking and drinking through the cash my father had left behind. She and I were having fun. Her name was Estelle; she was smart and seemed genuinely interested in me, which went a long way towards making me feel better about not asking questions. About 45 minutes after my father left I started to wonder what she saw in him.
I was about to find out exactly what she saw in him and I didn’t like what I discovered.
After Estelle and I had finished three beers each I reached for my wallet. We’d need more beer and my father was nowhere to be seen. I pulled out a $20 and my ID in case they asked for it. They had been serving me all night but I was only 23 and used to showing proof of age. Months earlier, for no reason at all, I had taped a thumbnail sized picture of my sister to the back of my ID. In the course of my conversation Estelle and I we had touched on a lot of topics including my siblings so she knew I wasn’t an only child. I turned the back of my ID towards her and said:
“That’s a picture of my sister.”
She looked at it, smiled, and asked me how old my sister was.
“She’s 3.”
“Not in the picture, I mean now?” She asked, with a smile still on her face.
“She’s 3 years old.” I said. I was used to getting puzzled looks like the one she was giving me because I’m 20 years older than my youngest sister. I was not prepared for what happened next. Estelle stopped smiling as she slowly asked me:
“Sam…when did…your mother die?”
I assumed I had misheard the question so I asked her to repeat it.
She asked me again. Slowly to make sure I heard: “I’m sorry to bring this up but how old were you when she died?”
I was still completely confused but at least I understood that Estelle thought someone close to me was dead.
I tried to get to the bottom of things: “When who died?” I asked.
She reached out for my hand and said: “You mother” like she was worried that she had broken this terrible news to me.
I paused and over the course of about a half second I realized that this woman thought that my mother was dead, and that my father had most likely told her that she was dead. This was more of a secret than I was prepared to keep.
Keeping my cool I said: “I guess I was 23 because if she’s dead it happened today after I spoke to her.” and then turned towards the bar to get a round of beers and fully compose myself. I didn’t look over my shoulder but I was sure that behind me she was as shaken as I was.
Placing two beers on the table I took my seat and asked her if she wanted to ask me anything else.
The lie she had been told was unraveling, she still had several questions:
“So your mother is alive?” She asked.
I assured her that my mother was still alive.
“But your father raised you?”
He didn’t and I told her as much.
“What about his second wife” she asked.
Relieved that there might finally be some truth being told I confirmed that my father had remarried. I was still aware of the fact that I had to see my father again so I didn’t give out any details like the fact that he was still married to this second wife. My father’s second wife was a perfectly nice woman who was sitting at home at that very moment, under the assumption that he and I were having a nice night out bonding as father and son.
I kept these details to myself and just confirmed that there was a marriage.
In my head I thought about what had happened up to this point: Day out with dad goes great. He introduces me to his secret lady friend, which is weird but cool in an “I trust you to be in my weird inner circle of lies sort of way.” Sure it wasn’t ideal but at that point I just wanted some sort of relationship with the guy.
After I discover that he’s told this woman that my mother is dead and he raised me I feel shaken but maybe he has a reasonable explanation. At very least, I tell myself, things can’t possibly get worse.
This little bit of reassurance I give myself turns out to also be false. Things were about to get even worse.
She and I drank our beers and she tried to change the subject but after about 3 minutes of talking about music she picked up where we had previously left off.
“So let me see if I understand this,” she asked me: “your mother is still alive but they are divorced and his second wife took off a few years ago?”
I put my beer down and contemplated my options. I could confirm these things and just avoid things getting any worse but the whole: “Telling people that my mother was dead” had made me angry, anger much greater than the fear I had of my father. It might have been the angriest moment of my life to that point so I decided that I was going to just lay it all out on the table. This would probably lead to an altercation with my father but so what, I was willing to deal with that in the name of truth and anger.
Instead of answering I came back with a question of my own:
“What did he tell you happened?”
I figured I was ready for whatever was going to come next but I underestimated my father’s ability to sell a story. She started over from the beginning. In this version of my father’s life he had married my mother and had three kids before she tragically passed away of some undisclosed illness. My father, who was raising three children, bravely gave love another try after meeting a woman from Brazil named Nina Fernandez. He and Nina wed and were set to live happily ever after until that no good Nina took off with all of his money, leaving us all behind.
After taking this in I responded with the facts. I explained that my parents had split 15 years earlier and all three kids had lived with my mom. There was no illness and no Nina.
It was out in the open, she was wounded and my father was going to be angry. At this point I figured it would probably be best if I just finished my beer and found my own way home. She had other ideas because she had more questions.
“So, what about his cousin?”
I thought of the dozens of cousins before I asked: “Which one?”
“He said he lives with his cousin…I guess that’s not true.”
I shook my head no and she continued: ”he told me that after Nina left him his cousin moved in to help with expenses and she still lived with him, but she was protective of him and that was why I couldn’t call the house.”
“You are the dumbest person alive.” Was the only response I could muster, which was unkind but I didn’t know what else to say and well…it all seemed so stupid…but I could see why she would want to believe that he lived with his cousin and not his wife. I had spent most of my life near my father but not close to him and I probably would have believed almost anything if he would have only told me anything. It would take several more years for him to open up to me though, at this point I was still trying to get into his inner circle and what happened that night wasn’t going to accomplish that.
As she pressed me for more details the back door opened and my father walked in. He stopped by to check on us and we didn’t let on that the world had shifted over the previous hour. We just said we were fine. He turned and headed for the bar to get a drink.
Sitting across from me, the woman whose life I had just unraveled was writing something down. She scanned the room before she slid a piece of paper across to me and said: “I’d like to talk more about this later.”
There was a phone number on the scrap of paper. I stuck it in my pocket and made small talk for a while longer while my father talked to the bartender and a few guys up at the bar. This part of the conversation was the easiest part of the night. Something important had passed between us.
We both had more questions to ask one another but at that moment my main concern was figuring out a way to get home on my own. I took the last sip from my beer and tried to make it to the door before my father noticed I was gone.
Part two, where things get even weirder, can be found here.
One of the highlights of my childhood was the trips we took to Carvel. Unfortunately these trips didn’t happen that often. This wasn’t because of a lack of Carvel locations; there were at least five of them within ten miles of my house selling soft serve ice cream and Fudgie The Whale cakes. The problem was my family.
According to my family, Carvel was strictly for special occasions: Birthdays, graduations and outstanding performances in sports. Since I wasn’t good at sports that left one birthday a year and a hope that I’d someday get a diploma.
You can imagine my surprise in 1989 - with my high school graduation three years away - when my father’s wife Linda came home and asked me if I wanted to go to Carvel. I said yes without asking any questions and soon we were on our way.
The nearest Carvel was less than a mile away, but Linda didn’t even slow the car down as we approached it. We continued driving. A minute later she said:
“We need to make a quick stop but we’ll hit Carvel on the way back.”
I didn’t ask where we were going. When Linda and my father married two years earlier, I still lived with my mother. Linda only had to contend with my brother, my sister and me on weekends but that changed and I moved into my father’s house Linda seemed to adapt to parenting a teenager pretty quickly.
Linda and I got along better than either of us got along with my father. I believe part of the reason Linda was so willing to let me move in was that she hoped it would lead to my father making changes or at least slow him down a little. But Dad continued to drink as much as ever and he was frequently gone without explanation, leaving Linda and I home to wonder what was going on.
Of course, Linda did know what was going on. In the few months I had been living with them, my dad’s unexplained disappearances became more frequent and so did the number of hang up phone calls that we received at the house. At some point, Linda had enough. She was angry. And so was I.
A few minutes after passing the Carvel, Linda took a right turn off of the main road through town and headed down a quiet residential street. Linda explained, without me asking, that we were stopping to visit “a friend of my father’s.” I knew that “a friend of my father’s” was code for a woman he was seeing.
We slowed down and I recognized my father’s car on the street. Linda left the car double-parked and running and told me to wait for her.
As Linda banged on the door, I contemplated my options: I could hide and hope no one saw me; this would keep me out of the conflict and the ugliness that would undoubtedly follow. This was usually the path I took when it came to my father because I was terrified of him. On the other hand, I could stand up to him and send a message that what he was doing was wrong. There would be consequences if I went this way and they might be pretty bad. There was really only one thing to do. I decided to stand up for what was right and for the person who had promised to take me to Carvel.
I got out of Linda’s car and walked up to the car parked in the driveway of the house to do my part. From the driveway, I saw the door open and Linda punch the woman who came to the door repeatedly. This brought my father to the door. Linda was not deterred; she hit him too. She stopped throwing punches when he slammed the door shut. By this time I had gotten back into the car. Linda yelled through the closed door to my father, telling him not to come home, and then she ran back to her car.
As we sped down the street I told Linda I had written “SLUT” on the door of the woman’s car. But I wrote it on the passenger side where hopefully she wouldn’t notice it for a few days.
We pulled into the Carvel parking lot and Linda handed me $20. Her left hand was still on the steering wheel and bleeding. She asked me to bring her back a vanilla cone and plenty of extra napkins.
I got a sundae and Linda and I drove home to change the locks on the doors.
