The Lies We Told

The office was cold and non-descript.  An eight by twelve box with a small wooden desk covered in psychiatric textbooks on one side and a tiny window obscured by institutional vertical gray blinds on the other.   The remaining furniture consisted of an old wooden book case filled with board games, children’s books and magazines, and a white painted toy box which sat inconspicuously in a corner almost as an afterthought.  In the middle of the room, impossible to miss, was a circle of hard plastic, multi-color school chairs strategically arranged to encourage discussion.  It was a place where people were supposed to reveal their deepest, darkest secrets in an atmosphere of safety and security.  In retrospect, it was the scariest room I’d ever entered.

It was early October and the air was brisk and the sky bright as it usually is that time of year in New York City.  I was ten years old, soon to be eleven in just a couple of weeks and thought I knew it all.  On this day, my whole family, which consisted of my three older brothers and older sister, as well as, my mother and father who were seated to my left and right, found ourselves in a state run family therapist’s office after my sister’s 8^th grade school counselor strongly recommended we attend.

Everyone in my family knew there was something wrong with my sister Kathy, but no one talked about it. With her coke bottle glasses, bushy hair and unfixable slouch, she just looked different.  Back then, people called children like her slow or retarded, even though she had been diagnosed as emotionally disturbed rather than mentally handicapped.  “She has no trouble learning and easily picks up new concepts”, her teachers said.  In fact, they were absolutely certain she would one day graduate.  However, she was constantly and viciously teased by other students at school.  They would call her names and throw things at her.  In addition to the bullying was the non-specified trouble at home.  All of which would cause her to withdraw and sometimes disengage from her surroundings.  She was the reason we were in that office, displaying various degrees of disinterest and not looking at the twenty five year old family therapist, a recent college graduate, whose sole idea of dysfunctional was what she read in textbooks.   

In fact, if my normally unshakable mother wasn’t completely at her wits end over her first-born daughter’s penchant for running away, we wouldn’t have been there at all.  Like most wives and mothers, she would have preferred her children be normal and her husband not a complete waste but at this point any solution, even one she didn’t believe in, had to be considered.

As I sat on the uncomfortable yellow plastic chair, its rounded seat made sitting up straight impossible, hoping I would get to play with some of the wooden puzzles or look through the array of books on the shelves, I realized the chair wasn’t the only reason I couldn’t sit still.  Something was very wrong; I could tell.  It didn’t help my fluttery stomach or sweaty palms that each and every member of my family was looking at anything else but each other.  They frightened me as the sight of their own scared faces and nervous tics caused my own anxiety to increase.

 I had lived my life up to that point constantly afraid of things that normal little kids didn’t usually have to worry about.  Things like my mother finally giving up and kicking my father out of the house.   I imagined him drunk or passed out on some park bench near the Bowery, where a bunch of teens looking for kicks or an easy bum to roll, would rob and beat him up.   I worried about my sister running away,  wandering around the dangerous streets of the Lower East Side, where we lived,  and maybe never coming home, leaving me to sleep all by myself in the dark bedroom we shared where every word was spoken in anger and every noise intensified.   But my biggest fear was that some faceless person from the Department of Children’s and Family Services would come to take me away from the life and people I knew while they repeated over and over again that it was for my own good.  These were the thoughts that kept me up at night.

But, as I sat in that office surrounded by those very people whose presence in my life simultaneously terrified me and comforted me, I was certain this experience would be worse than anything else that ever happened to me.  Even worse than when my oldest brother tried to punch out my father, missed and put his hand through our twenty gallon fish tank.  I cried as I watched all those fancy tail guppies and angel fish, who had given me hours of pleasure, flail about as they gasped for air.

The therapist, in her by-the-book psychological speak, started with the prerequisite, “Is there anything anyone would like to say?” and answered by our blank looks and staunch silence, proceeded with “Well okay, I’ll begin.”.  From that point on, I zoned out.  I wanted to be anywhere else but there so my mind turned to the most mundane thoughts.

I wondered what we would eat that night and if my mother had enough money for Gino’s pizza or Chinese from our favorite place at 16 Mott St.  I also wondered if my father, when we finally left, would sneak away to buy a bottle for later, or perhaps stumble in after downing one, reeking of booze and drunk out of his head. 

Things were so different when he didn’t drink.  He was so different. At least, I thought so.

 My father never spoke about his past or revealed anything personal to his children.  But sometimes, when he didn’t drink, he would reminisce and tell me things that he hadn’t told anyone else.  There was one story that he told me that always seemed to mean more than I could understand.

 When my father was young he’d had an accident.  He had tried to climb over a fence and in doing so, slipped and cut his hand on the rusty iron.  For whatever reasons, the wound was never treated properly and he developed gangrene.  The infection caused the doctors to amputate most of the fingers on his left hand.  What was left was a misshapen claw and my father’s patented excuse for the rest of his life.

His mother, the grand-mother who, voluntarily, didn’t recognize any of her grand-children, sent him to a rehabilitation center to recover and adapt to his new circumstances.  He told me about all the disabled kids he’d met there but the image of the pretty young girls with recently amputated legs (for a variety of reasons) forced to attend dances, as they sat on the side-lines and watched the more capable children enjoy the music in a way they would never be able to, haunted me for weeks and left me with a sadness I didn’t really understand.  As I watched him describe such a difficult time in his life, I saw his eyes cloud over and his memories come rushing back.

When he didn’t drink, my father and I would sit in the small, roach infested kitchen of our three bedroom, railroad shaped apartment and talk about the Yankees and what kind of season they were having.  Even though I was the baby of the family and a girl, his other children had long since given him up as a lost cause.  It was only natural that he shared his love of baseball with me; I actually listened and learned that the NY Yankees were one of the few things in his life that made him happy.  Besides cigarettes, a good cup of coffee and a pint of alcohol.

 He showed me how to create a score-card by making nine columns for the number of innings on top and listing the names of the players in the line-up on the side.  Then, depending on whether the player hit, walked, or struck out, he showed me the symbol for each one and where to put it. 

When he didn’t drink, he also loved to read.  He often stayed in his room for hours and hours devouring his latest paper-back.  Spy novels by John le Carre and Ian Fleming were among his favorites.   I also loved to read, getting lost in the adventures of other children my age.  Although at ten, my taste began to venture into more difficult subjects like “The Diary of Anne Frank” and “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” (one of my favorite for obvious reasons).    Books were my escape, my way out of a life that was totally different from those in the stories.  Perhaps my father felt the same way.  He and I had many things in common.  When he didn’t drink.

When he was drunk, which was most of the time, he was sad and pathetic.  Not a mean drunk and since he stood at five feet seven inches tall and weighed around one hundred and thirty five pounds, he was far from physically imposing.  Instead, he would often get silly, dancing around the house to music only he could hear and repeating himself over and over to whoever was in ear-shot.  Eventually, as he had hundreds of other times, he would pass out.  Sometimes, if he drank way too much, he would lose control of his bowels and crap all over himself.  At those times, my mother would clean him up just like she had for all of her children and put him to bed.  On occasion, though, she would leave him in his own mess laying wherever he passed out and stinking to high heaven.  Which option she chose depended on how pissed off she was.

And when that happened, when the world just got to be too much for her, she would go to one of the three Bingo parlors in the neighborhood and try to forget for a while how she wound up this way.   She would usually be gone from six to eleven in the evening, leaving my sister and I all alone with our father.  My brothers had stopped baby-sitting when they figured we could take care of ourselves (after all they had survived) and my mother could no longer force them to do it.

I wasn’t afraid of him but I was certain my sister was by the terror in her eyes whenever this happened.  My fear was caused by the uncertainty of the situation.  The thousands of horrors that could befall two young girls alone with a drunk in a NYC housing project where everyone knew even the police were afraid to go.

 What if someone knocked on the door while he was passed out cold?

My sister and I were both instructed early on in life regarding project etiquette.  The first lesson was to never answer the door to strangers and always look out the peep-hole.  When your family was one of only five white households in a predominantly racially mixed building and you were brought up to believe that was more than enough reason to be afraid, the front door was terrifying.   My sister would never go to the door even if she knew who it was and I couldn’t even reach the peep-hole.  But what if we didn’t answer and the bad people thought we weren’t home and tried to break in like they did on the eleventh floor?  Most nights, there would be loud voices in the hallway and the tone of the menace and malice they conveyed terrified me to the core.

 Once, while my father was in his usual drunken stupor, I heard something outside.  Summoning up all my courage, I moved one of our mismatched kitchen chairs over to the door, climbed on it and peered through the peep-hole.  Staring back at me was another eye.  It took me months to even go near the front door again and years before I’d look through that damn hole.  By then, I no longer needed a chair.

When he was drunk, he would want to talk for hours and I was his captive audience.  I didn’t like it.  It made me uncomfortable.  Not because of what he said (which was usually how mean my mother was and how his sons didn’t give a shit about him) but because there was no way to get away from him.  Once started, he demanded your attention for the rest of the time he was conscious.   All the while, my older sister cowered in our bedroom under the covers and just waited for me to return and tell her everything was okay.  I found myself more and more strained as a result of the responsibility of taking care of an alcoholic father and an emotionally disturbed sister and quietly blamed my mother for unnecessarily putting me in that position.

I loved him, though, this I knew without doubt.   Drunk or sober.  It didn’t matter that he wasn’t like any of my friend’s fathers or that I secretly feared he would show up at school inebriated and embarrass me.  The results of his drinking and the reasons he drank were inconsequential.   I was too young to understand that there were demons that haunted people and caused them to seek safety and solace in any way possible.  Despite who he was or maybe because of it, I felt I had to love him.  If I didn’t, who would?

In the back of my mind, I always knew there were probably other secrets about him that were yet to be disclosed.  I had walked in on my parents way too many times only to have them abruptly stop whatever conversation they were having to think I knew everything.  The fact that it was forbidden to go in their closets or look through their dresser drawers didn’t help ease my suspicions either.  But, I didn’t care. Whatever the secrets were, they wouldn’t matter. 

“Al, is there anything you’d like to tell your daughter?”  The sound of my father’s name spoken by a stranger’s voice coupled with the word daughter woke me from the comfort of my own thoughts.  As I looked up, I noticed everyone was staring at me.

“No”, my father said quietly his eyes fixed on a spot on the floor, “You tell her.”

And she did.  In a cold and analytical tone, this twenty five year old who probably never had a childhood terror in her life and who I’m sure came from a nice home with a white picket fence and nice parents who never had a bad word to say to each other, explained to my ten year old self, that her Daddy, who she loved because he was her Daddy, was a criminal.

In the following moments, I was told he robbed banks before I was born.  I also found out that my father had spent many years in and out of prisons and my mother would sometimes have to take very long trips to visit him, even once when she was pregnant with my sister.

 Naturally, he blamed his disfigurement and the fact that no one would hire a cripple as the reasons he was forced to steal.  After all, he had to feed his family.  But I knew that was bullshit.  The truth was he thought if he gave my Mother any money at all, she’d get off his back about getting drunk.

Years later, when I was older, and rummaging around in my parent’s mysterious closets, I found a black and white clipping from an old Daily News.  It was in a cheap shoebox filled with letters he had written to my mom while incarcerated.  The picture showed my father with a defeated look on his face and his hands cuffed behind his back as two detectives stood to his side and three very frightened young boys looked on in shock. The caption read “Bank Robber Nabbed at Home”.  As I looked at the image of my father staring up at me, I saw the eyes of someone I’d only thought I knew.  This guy wasn’t my father drunk or sober.  He was a stranger.

I find it remarkable that even as I write this, the discoveries made on that otherwise common day, in that otherwise common office, still seem as revealing as they did then.  I often wonder, what would have happened if I’d never found out?

 After all, as far as I’m concerned, honesty never gets you any closer to the truth.