Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (9 page)

During his two years behind bars my father claims to have been shuttled between twenty different federal prisons and hospitals, in fourteen different states. He refers to this often, the number of prisons, the number of states, to prove he has been subjected to “cruel and unusual punishment.” Those are the words he uses in his letters to the judge who sentenced him. Judge W. Arthur Garrity, well-known at this time for overseeing school desegregation in Boston, receives a flurry of letters over a span of two months, sometimes two a day, mostly pleas to consider “Rule 35,” which will apparently force him to reduce my father’s sentence. In these letters my father also documents clear-cut examples of being treated cruelly and unusually. In one prison he is forced to work running an elevator, with no monthly pay, when his shoulder, right hand, and both legs are “completely destroyed.” He sends a medical report to the judge at one point listing these crippling ailments, a report that has no doctor’s name or hospital attached to it. It is typed out on a manual typewriter, using unusual medical jargon. “Both legs,” it states: “total case of lethal phlebitis.” “Lethal phlebitis” is the term my father always uses to describe his legs, to make it clear that he could drop dead at any moment. He describes the federal prison, variously, as “a massive death house,” a “federal farce,” and “a zoo.” He makes it clear that he intends “a full, complete suit” against at least two of these prisons once he is released. He reiterates that he “had a choice in cashing the checks,” but he made “the wrong choice.” He pleads coercion, memory loss, his fingers broken by Doyle as threats. He refers to promises made and broken by federal prosecutors, insists that he would never do something so stupid again. He signs his letters variously “As ever” “With respect and regard for the truth” “Many thanks for your consideration” “With deep respect to you always, your Honor” and, simply, “I need my human rights.”

In prison movies the men move slowly, carefully, weighted down. Some plan is always being whispered, someone is about to be shivved, a tunnel spooned out of a wall. The screws twitch their clubs, their cattle prods. The first letter I ever receive from my father is when I’m sixteen, after he’s been locked up for a few months—
Tell me of yourself—I regret our mutual loss—perhaps—soon—in our future—we can regain our lost knowledge of each other
. After thirty letters Judge Garrity rules against Rule 35, and my father stays in prison for another year.

(1978)
The pavement drifts past inches below my bare feet, my soles hardened over, but still I must focus—doing sixty on a motorcycle is quantitatively different from, say, riding a bicycle. I can’t allow my mind to wander into what will happen if I put a foot down at this speed.
Focus
, I yell up to my brain, as it drifts into the happy-go-lucky stratosphere of this and that. But you have to touch down to earth once in a while, if there are stoplights, intersections, traffic. You have to force yourself to remember your feet, but not to obsess. To allow whatever song’s coursing through your addled happy brain to fade into background noise, to not forget the danger but also not become paralyzed. A difficult balancing act on a CB350, a near-perfect machine, the pistons all lined up and firing between my legs, the asphalt unspooling below like sandpaper, leading me back to my one pair of shoes, forgotten in Quincy. It’s midafternoon and hot and I’ve already gotten high a few times, which makes the day pleasantly endless. Can this be the same sun, the same back road, that Mary and I drove just this morning in her mom’s car? We’ve just graduated high school, no plans for college, it seems enough to ride around on my motorcycle with Mary’s arms around me. Mary’s my first girlfriend,
Darkness on the Edge of Town
has just come out, and Springsteen’s bleak Catholicism resonates in my circle. He’s playing the Garden later in the summer and I’d mistakenly left my only shoes, a ratty pair of sneakers, perched on a useless behemoth air conditioner where we’d gone to buy tickets. The ticket counter was at the far end of a stuffy hallway and there’d been a line and Mary and I sat on the cooler floor, pulling ourselves toward the window as the line allowed. The floor was polished concrete, an aggregate of marble flecks floating in a white heaven, and I must have lost track. I’m fast becoming the one who leaves things behind, who blows a rod and pulls into the breakdown lane and unscrews the plates and walks. Who puts his stuff in your basement and never returns. Who steps out onto a sidewalk in a small city, into the stifling air, without his shoes, without remembering he was even wearing shoes, or ever wore shoes.

The choice was to buy new sneakers or to shoot forty minutes back north before the window closed. Some part of me must have been aware of the inherent danger of riding a motorcycle barefoot, but not enough to give up on my only sneakers.

I’d spent the month before hitchhiking Europe with my friend Doug. While I was away my father was released from prison, and at some point my brother mentioned something to my mother about him, so she set up a meeting, even though my brother didn’t want that. She picked my father up at the subway in Quincy and drove the two of them to Peggotty Beach, and they sat side by side, father and son, facing the waves while my mother smoked cigarettes in her car. My father did all the talking, never asked my brother about himself, and afterward my brother never wanted to see him again.

Coming off the backroads, about to make my way onto the highway, a cop pulls up behind me at a light. I never liked that, a cop car directly behind me. I usually walked away owing money, or worse, literally walked away, my vehicle impounded. A couple times already I’d even gone handcuffed to the station in the backseat of the cruiser. When I first bought the motorcycle I didn’t have enough money left to register and insure it, so I rummaged around for an old plate, changed a 2 to an 8 with red nail polish. This lasted maybe a week before a cop pulled me over, incredulous, asked me if I knew that what I had done was akin to forgery.

The traffic light turns green and the cop lights go on behind me and I look over my shoulder and he points to a parking lot beside a liquor store I’d been to quite often on the way to and from the city. I know what to do—pull over, keep my sunglasses on, my hands on the handlebars, look contrite yet calm. The cop takes his time, asks for my license and registration, meanders back to the cruiser, punches my info into the computer or phones it in, I don’t really know what he does for so long in that car, maybe he’s reading a magazine or cleaning his gun, while my feet blister in the sun. After a short eternity he comes back shaking his head,
Well, there’s nothing in my book about needing to wear shoes, but I’m gonna give you a ticket anyway just for being stupid
. I shake my head at my own obvious stupidity, consider against telling the story of the forgotten sneakers, thank him,
Thank you, sir.

Within a month, a week before the Springsteen concert, I will drive that same motorcycle off a winding country road at night, coming home from a movie with Mary, where we’d split a pint of peppermint schnapps and made out. Mary broke her wrist (or, more accurately, I broke her wrist) and I lost my spleen, ruptured it when I went over the handlebars. I jumped up immediately and went for the bike, until I heard Mary, whom I’d somehow forgotten, moan. I was full of confused adrenaline, unaware that my lungs were already being crushed by blood flowing where it should never be.

The first letter I got from my father was handwritten on prison stationery, but once he is released the letterhead appears, the creamy envelopes. The letterhead shows an open book beside the name of his dummy corporation—the Fact Foundation of America, Inc.—listing an address he has never occupied, a private post-office box, the kind you pay for by the month, on Beacon Hill, a “high-class” address, good for a nonprofit-type think tank, which seems to be the image he’s striving for. The name of the corporation is centered, with a phone number below the address that will connect you to no one. On the right, beneath the open book, his name is listed as “President.” President, founder, and sole member, I will later learn. A quill pierces the book like an arrow through a heart. A quote in the upper left from Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881): “To be conscious that you are ignorant of the facts is a great step toward knowledge.” All I can think is that this is the foundation of a larger scam, one that never panned out, like those half-completed houses you sometimes pass, skeleton walls and a concrete base, the plastic torn and blowing. On Fact Foundation letterhead he sends a note to the soon-to-be-released Patty Hearst. Hearst replies:

My father has sent me this letter from Patty Hearst a dozen times, each beginning “Dear Mr. Flynn,” each exactly the same, none of them meant for me. The year on the top is always wrong, always fading further into the past, the signature that closes the letter breaking up, from being photocopied too often, a copy of a copy of a copy. On the bottom of one my father writes,
If you don’t think a letter from Patty Hearst is heavy—you’re gone
.

To hell in a handbasket
—this is how my grandmother described my future with a knowing wink. After I’d already totaled two cars, my mother sat me down and asked what I planned to do with my life. Seventeen, clearly on the wrong path, I thought for a moment and answered,
Crime
. As tears well up in my mother’s eyes I tried to explain—
White-collar, victimless
. She walked out of the room.

A year later, the morning after the motorcycle accident, my mother is strangling me in the ICU, muttering,
You little shit
, the heart monitor wildly peaking, a nurse coming in to drag her off. After I’ve spent the night in surgery, after I drove off the road, after I ditched the bike to avoid hitting a stone wall. After I waved the first two cars on, insisting I was all right, pumped up with adrenaline, not wanting to believe Mary’s wrist was broken. After finally accepting a lift and checking her into the hospital, after calling my mother to say everything was fine, a small accident, No, no need to come down. After I forgot to hang up the phone, after I knocked all the magazines off the waiting room table, suddenly overcome, I just needed to lie down for a second. After I rose up, minutes later, some part of me knowing something was wrong, by then I was seeing triple. After I staggered down the hall to the admissions desk, I think I need to be looked at, I managed, my eyes already gone yellow. I sang the theme song from Winnie-the-Pooh to Mary, waiting to get her wrist set, as we lay side by side on our gurneys, a curtain between us, both still tipsy from the schnapps, begging the nurses for more painkillers, laughing, as the blood from my broken spleen, unnoticed, drowned me from within. When I woke up that morning after going under the knife I can remember my brother halfheartedly pulling my mother off me as the nurse rushed in. Or perhaps he was egging her on.

A few months before the motorcycle accident I had been with Mary at my house. An April night, my mother bartending, not due home until one or two. If my mother was away on a Saturday night Mary was in my bed. That night, after we came up for air, we were drinking whiskey in the kitchen, and Mary opened a notepad to write something down. In the pad she found a letter my mother had written, a suicide note, undated, but referring to the time after Travis had left the house, the summer of the Red Sox, maybe three years before. I read it, and told Mary, told myself, that it must have been from that time, a hard time for us all, but she had gotten through it, and everything now was better. I made this story up on the spot, I had to tell myself something. We killed the bottle of whiskey, and I tore the note out of the notebook and took it into the yard and burned it, four pages in all, and never mentioned a word of it to my mother. But from then on I kept a closer eye on her, and within four months (
Seek, seek for him, / Lest his ungoverned rage dissolve the life / That wants the means to end it
) I drove my motorcycle into a wall.

(1978)
The day he’s released from Danbury, the prison where he finishes out his time, my father takes a series of buses straight to Ray and Clare’s house outside of Boston. The first thing he does, after two years without a real drink, aside from the occasional swallow of homemade prison wine (“pruno”), is get drunk. He tags along to a local party that night and ends up rolling Ray in a rug, standing him in a corner. It’s good to be free. There are women at the party, some he knows from before, some he doesn’t. The next day the hostess asks Ray if he knew Jonathan was an ex-con, that he’d just been released that day. Ray assures her that he isn’t violent, that he tends to get drunk is all. Ray and Clare by this time have two children, both girls, nineteen and sixteen. The girls remember Jonathan from before he was put away, and they hadn’t liked him much then. Cross-eyed. Unpredictable.
Disreputable is an understatement
, Ray admits—
Wives couldn’t stand him, he was the drunken slob who tries to make your daughter
.

Still, the ex-con’s an old friend, and once again he’s shown up penniless. Clare’s cousin Margaret owns a few rooming houses in Dorchester. Margaret has nine kids of her own but she has a soft spot for broken-down men and knows how to handle them and, more importantly, how to get rid of them if they get out of hand. Her buildings are ramshackle three-or four-deckers, three apartments on each floor, a hot plate and a sink with hot and cold running water in each. Shared bathrooms. Fine for the guys who end up there—marginal, somewhat or full-blown alcoholic, depending on the time of month or day, partly employed or just collecting one type of check or another to keep afloat. Margaret’s in it to make money, but she understands that sometimes she’ll get burned—Catholic charity meets the free market. If a guy’s on a bender, sliding downhill fast and unable to get out of it, locked in his room 24/7, incontinent, she will stop by, knock, look around the room, tell him she’s going to leave for a couple hours and that when she comes back she wants him shaved and dressed and she’ll take him to detox. If he can sober up for those twenty-eight days she will hold his room, she says, but if she has to put him out his room will be gone and he’ll never come back. Half the time it would work. The really bad ones would say,
Put one foot inside the door and I call the cops.
These were the ones who would stew all day thinking about one thing—how best to drink in comparative safety. Drunk but not crazy, they knew the law, and drunkenness, in and of itself, was no longer a crime. If she had to she would wait for this type to pass out, wrap his belongings up in a bedsheet and stash them in another room, take the keys off his sleeping body, drag the body by the ankles into the hallway, call the cops.
No, no, I never seen him before, must have just snuck in to sleep one off,
and they’d haul him away. Margaret understood how to deal with drunks, in part because she’d struggled with her own drinking over the years. She knew there was a point where it was useless to reason.

In comparison to the rest Jonathan looks pretty good. Margaret knows him from parties at Ray and Clare’s over the years, and offers him a room in the house on Beale Street, rent-free in exchange for managing the place. Managing consists of keeping the bathrooms clean and collecting the rent, calling her in case anything breaks down or falls in. Once beautiful, this house, with a curved mahogany staircase, a statue of the blessed Virgin in a niche between floors, though the neighborhood itself has fallen on hard times. The Ashmont subway stop is nearby, and the trains screech and rattle at five
A.M
.

Luther rents one room on the top floor. Four hundred pounds, in and out of institutions his whole life for one psychotic break or another, Luther assures Margaret that he doesn’t lose his temper anymore, that whenever he gets close he just takes out his nails and hammers them into the floor. Across from him is Alan, an amateur boxer, punch-drunk, jabbing and ducking his way up the stairs. On the floor below is Baxter—a real “bottom-of-the-barrel redneck type”—drinks the cheapest beer, tapes racist messages to his door.
Jonathan looks like a first-class liberal next to him
. In the beginning Jonathan and Baxter get along, throw back a few in the evenings, but soon they have a falling out—it’s said that Jonathan walloped Baxter, and that Baxter’s son came over and beat Jonathan good. Jonathan isn’t drinking heavily at this time, he hands over the rent along with a neat list of all the things he bought for the house, cleans the bathrooms, keeps his place tidy. He’s driving a cab and putting money away. So Margaret has to get rid of Baxter.

Margaret tells me all this years later. At the time I know almost nothing about my father, nor do I care. Lots of people would be good for long periods of time, Margaret says, then pick up a drink and it was over. At first it seemed Jonathan could drink moderately, but within a few months he starts going downhill. He stops handing over the rent, stops answering her calls, avoids Margaret. Other things occupy her, she lets it slide. One month, three. Five. She blames herself, she should have been paying more attention—
You don’t have the right to put temptation in front of people
. Even so, eventually she takes him to court. It was hard otherwise to get his attention. He presents a list to the magistrate of the housing court, detailing, among other expenses, two thousand dollars for toilet paper.

Maybe it’s at the Ashmont Arms, as he calls it, with Luther banging nails into the floor above his head, that Jonathan concocts the Fact Foundation of America (
One of my masterpieces—everybody loves it!
). A clearinghouse of facts, the place the world will turn to if they want to know the truth. Maybe he used some of the rent money he collected to have the letterhead designed, to have it printed on the heavy-weight bond. Maybe there
is
a stash somewhere, under a pile in his room, or maybe under the same palm tree where he claims to have buried the money from the bank jobs, a cache of facts that he will one day sell back to the universe.