The Bookie's Daughter (40 page)

Years later, Vanessa and I found out the source of Bonnie’s urgency. A few days before she had reached out to my father’s powerful “friend,” she had faced her own mortality. Unknown masked thugs had kicked in the door to her apartment and held her at gunpoint while demanding she make good on one of my father’s debts. These well-informed thugs knew that she had received envelopes full of cash at her husband’s funeral. They threatened to blow her brains out, Luca Brasi-style, if she refused to turn over the money. Faced with certain death, my mother complied, handing over the more than $20,000 she had hidden in the freezer.

Not wanting to add to her daughters’ worries, she had kept the monstrous event secret. She claimed that she had used the money to pay off legitimate debts. Thinking that the source of the calls had been satisfied with the frozen money she had been compelled to relinquish, my mother breathed a sigh of relief. Her fear returned full force the next morning when she was roused from her troubled sleep by the ringing of the phone. The same sinister voice again demanded money. After several repeat performances, Bonnie, fearful of another sudden attack on herself or her daughters, swallowed her pride and reached out for help.

Robbed of the money that might have provided her a new start and afraid of the unknown, my mother began to liquidate the store’s inventory. Facing her husband’s enormous illegitimate debts, she forfeited her right to pursue the collection of the thousands of dollars in outstanding debts owed to my father. She understood that those debtors could not be relied upon to make good on the money they owed. After all, illegitimate debts are impossible to prove, and without persuasion all but impossible to collect. Desperate to escape the fear-charged atmosphere that was my father’s legacy, my mother concentrated on the most urgent matter—her escape from the Avenue. By August, she had closed the store and moved into the home of her eldest daughter.

After more than thirty years of hard work in the family store, Bonnie faced an uncertain future with not a penny to her name. My father’s demons had greedily consumed everything, leaving her emotionally and financially bankrupt. Her husband’s sudden death, the ensuing spectacle of his funeral, and the feel of a steel barrel at her temple had broken her spirit. She would never recover. The magnificent, defiant, brave, humorous, and reckless mother of my youth all but vanished. Her anger remained.

Although reeling from my father’s death, I found myself unable to grieve. Trained almost from birth to keep secrets, swallow my emotions, and to ignore the pain of the past, I was left without the tools necessary to navigate the turmoil and grief I now faced. I felt as if I were drowning. My father, the center of my world for nineteen years, was gone. I simply did not know how to conceive a world without him. For all the angst-filled, colorful, and dangerous years we spent together, he was my rock—the one person I could always rely upon. Without him, I was alone, a solitary walking wounded.

I had moments of undeniable pain but turned away from them, fearful that they would consume me if unleashed. I had survived all my previous traumas by finding the humor in them and by diving into a pile of books. I now found myself unable to read. No matter the subject, my mind could not escape into another’s adventures. Laughter, my companion for so long, suddenly seemed too dangerous, too closely related to the tears of grief I feared would never stop if I gave in to them. Ill equipped to face the pain of my father’s death and truly engage the emotional traumas of my youth, I turned to work and alcohol for comfort.

Work occupied my troubled mind and kept me from floundering in a black hole of grief. I spent my days engaged in righting the wrongs of others and dreading quiet evenings at home. Having once craved a contemplative life, I now found myself afraid of the grief and ghosts that too often inhabited my solitary hours. I sought escape by embracing a serious persona at work and a reckless one during my personal hours. I dove into the party scene, attending the myriad of rallies, dinners, and cocktail parties that the political arena provided. Afterwards, I would pop into a neighborhood bar and partake in extended drinking to ensure that my sleep would be deep and dreamless. Alcohol, my mother’s dark passenger, became the instrument through which I could drown my pain.

Through the fog of perpetual hangovers and unexpressed sorrow, I also jumped into an active dating scene. Up to this point, I had all but avoided this aspect of youth. In the year between graduating high school and my father’s death, I had put my social life on hold and only occasionally dated a trusted friend. I had my eye on a future that included saving enough money to put myself through night school and had little time for romance.

My world now upside down, I embraced outside distraction with the hopes of keeping an emotional collapse at bay. In retrospect, it seems inevitable that I would choose emotionally dysfunctional and even abusive relationships. A calamity waiting to happen, I shunned the good guys and recklessly ran with the bad boys. I avoided “normalcy” at all costs. Folly finds masochistic comfort in its own company.

After a few years of emotionally charged work, a series of dysfunctional relationships, and too much exposure to the seedier side of politics, I found myself partially awakening from my self-inflicted alcohol haze. Although horrified with the direction my life was taking, I could not yet find the strength to stop the insanity. I feared a future that would perpetuate the cycle of addiction and self-destruction that had shaped the lives of my parents. Overwhelmed and emotionally fatigued with the life I was living, I did the unthinkable. I quit my job. I walked away from the job I loved, not so much because it added to my misery but because I wanted to break free from the life I had so unexpectedly and recklessly created for myself. Drastic action was necessary.

Disillusioned with the atmosphere my career provided, I recognized that my father’s assessment of the political arena was spot on. After three years of immersing myself in the political world, I found it not so different from the illicit world in which I was raised, if you subtract the looming raids. The criminals of my youth were replaced by masked upstanding citizens who cheerfully engaged in backstabbing, exploitation, and manipulation in order to accomplish their selfish goals. Of course, there were those who fought the good fight, but their dedication and idealism was all too often sullied by the inherent griminess of political backbiting and deception.

Although seemingly a drastic course of action, quitting Congressman Murtha’s office strangely enough paved the way for a painful self-examination of my destructive lifestyle. In need of a job, I decided to forgo the pursuit of another office position and impulsively accepted a bartending job in a neighboring town. The job was educational for me. There, in the smoke-filled frenzy of the bar scene, I saw myself from a shocking new angle.

A veteran of the bar scene, I assumed I would find comfort in the familiar surroundings. Instead, I found myself repulsed by the spectacle that played out on a nightly basis. The job provided a favorable income but it also gave me a shocking glimpse of my life over the past few years. Drunks are a pathetic sight, and in every drunk, I saw myself. I recognized the complicated mix of emotions, from mockery and self-pity to anger and fear. I shared the loneliness, desperation, and self-destructive tendencies of every barfly. It was like looking into a mirror.

I was acutely aware that if I stayed on my current course, the odds were stacked against me. I could either weep over the peculiar hand I was dealt, or change my game. I needed to break away from my self-constructed chaos and fashion a new playbook. I began to think, as I had been trained to do, like a gambler. I realized that the history of my “book” contained enough losses that a win was inevitable. I saw myself as an underdog who needed to accept the past and still bet on my own future—to take control of my life and become my own odds maker. I knew better than most that odds do not dictate the game’s outcome. Upsets are a marvelous thing. I was, after all, the Bookie’s Daughter.

“
Each generation wants new symbols, new people, new names.
They want to divorce themselves from their predecessors.”

Jim Morrison

“
The only question in life is whether or not you are going to answer a hearty
‘
YES!’ to your adventure.”

Joseph Campbell

It is said that the human body renews itself every seven years. That each cell is shed and replaced by new cells, thereby regenerating the body. This renewal has always intrigued me and I have often thought of my life in seven-year stages. The first three stages (birth to twenty-one) constitute the years I have covered in this book.

The fourth stage represents the years I lived as a half-assed escape artist. In a desperate attempt to distinguish myself from the role I inherited from my parents, I ignored the madcap events of my youth and simply lived in denial of the past. I desperately wanted to create a new identity, embrace life’s possibilities, and discover my own potential.

In pursuit of this goal, I left my hometown of Jeannette and settled a thousand miles away in Vero Beach, Florida. There, in fresh surroundings that were not troubled by past memories, I began to build a new life. After a period of working in the home cleaning business, I secured an office manager position with a local entrepreneur and began to put aside money for the education that had so far eluded me. Returning to my characteristic pattern of escape, I threw myself into work and again embraced my love of books.

The anonymity that came with my new surroundings allowed me, for the first time, to form a life free from association with my father’s criminal world. To the Floridians I encountered, I was not linked to a notorious name. I was simply another “damn Yankee.” I reveled in my newfound anonymity. Working hard and keeping an eye on the future, I only encountered my demons in dreams. Although no longer anchored to the physical locations of my past, I found that the ghosts of Clay Avenue had joined me in my migration south; they remained my faithful companions. Three years into my new life in Florida, a deep and overwhelming sadness still consumed me. In an attempt to escape, I ran away again.

It was in Atlanta, Georgia that I entered the fifth stage of my life—a stage of reflection and confrontation. I turned to psychotherapy, which changed my life. My entry into the world of self-reflection was difficult. Trained not to “talk,” I spent my first few sessions in uncomfortable silence. Mercifully, the floodgates finally opened; I found I had a voice and a great deal to say.

It was during this period of musing on the past that I began to prepare for college. Given that I had been only an occasional attendee in high school, I had to backtrack before I could go forward. With a plan in place, I enrolled at the community college and began a full year of remedial algebra classes. Somewhere amidst my full-time job as an insurance underwriter, countless hours in the math lab, and regular counseling sessions, I began to achieve a sense of peace. Healing begins when you bear witness.

The pursuit of a college education would dominate the sixth and seventh stages of my life. Luckily, my initiation into the world of academia coincided with a burgeoning relationship with the man I would eventually marry. My husband, Teo Sagisman, has proven a loving and patient supporter, as my journey through academia would span more than thirteen years. The slow process of night school is not for the faint of heart, but for me, the journey was nothing less than divine.

In January 2009, I finally attained my goal, graduating from Georgia State University with a Master’s degree in religious studies. My life-long dream of an education now a reality, I found myself thinking again of my formative years. After decades of trying to “divorce” the past, I realized it was time for me to “answer a hearty ‘YES!’ to [my] adventure.”

Reaching back through time has not been an easy task, but it has been cathartic and illuminating. In writing this book, I have relived traumatic events, but the process has also provided me with a unique opportunity to reconnect with my tragically flawed and oh-so-human parents. I came to see them, and our story, both from the perspective of a child caught up in their madcap lives and also that of an imperfect adult, who through her own struggles has reached a place of loving acceptance. I recognized that running away from the past is impossible. The half-assed escape artist had come full circle.