But if you touch me wrong I fall apart
I found a woman who's soft but she's also hard
While I slept she nailed down my heart.”
-Morphine, All Your Way, from Yes, Rykodisc, 1995
I'd been underachieving for years.
There'd been a period of unemployment, a spotty record of warehouse jobs at minimum wage and night after night alternating between intoxication and hangovers.
Pervaded by a listlessness and lack of direction, punctuated by
lonely nights listening to jazz or blues in dark rooms lit only by
candles, chain-smoking, thinking about as little as possible until
the veil of drunk slowly eased over the eyes, through the pores,
numbing and transcendent yet all the while as though killing time
with the acupuncture of oblivion, bottle by bottle.
And perhaps just as inexplicably, what had seemed acceptable for the
better part of winter suddenly tasted like the bile of a bad meal
eaten too quickly.
I had to find something else, some other method of living, some
escape from the futureless present into a more tangible reality. I
needed a career.
Yet the two primary contributing factors to my DNA, namely two people whose antics I will detail more forensically later, consisted of two polar opposites, both of whom eventually affected my lack of upward mobility, motivation and general, all-around championship apathy.
Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, it’s time to play that age-old favourite of finger pointing and responsibility shirking called “Blame The Parents”:
Contestant One, My father, Zbiegniew, being a second generation Pole growing up in the Lower East Side and Contestant Two, my mother, Miranda, a first generation Puerto Rican living in Spanish Harlem, were not, at the time of the onset of their little conspiracy to create then ruin my life, moving in intersecting circles, either socially or culturally.
Compounding the improbability of their meeting, my father had two
great passions which dominated his life and shut out most else: he
had been an electrician's apprentice by the age of 14, dropping out
of school to help his mother make ends meet (my grandfather had died in a construction accident many years before forcing my grandmother and father into early destitution.) and gradually building on his experience to start his own small company, beginning with the wiring and rewiring of his own building to that of several buildings owned by the same landlord all over the city once he had proven himself. One of the buildings happened to be the one on the Upper East Side in Spanish Harlem, where my mother lived.
My father's other passion was Dixieland Jazz. Whenever he wasn't
working he was at home listening to recordings by trumpet player
Henryk Majewski, pianists Mieczyslaw Mazur, Wojciech Kaminski and of course, Jan Boba. He bought his first trumpet when he was 12 and had played both trumpet and piano ever since, sometimes for church functions, sometimes for social gatherings, sometimes for street fairs but with virtually every spare moment he had away from working his lips were puckered, or his fingers were exercising the keyboard.
The day my father met my mother was one summer afternoon when he happened to working on a flat in my mother's apartment building and overheard a bomba recording emanating from one of the adjacent flats. So intrigued by the drum ensembles, the rum barrels, maraca and the singer and chorus calls responding alternatively to one another that he took the brazen step of actually knocking on the door to ask what it was.
As it turned out, it was my mother who answered, just 16 at the
time, who knew little about the specifics or the history that my
father wanted to know about, but loved to dance to it and because
she was able to bridge the language barrier between her mother's
historical narrative and my father's inability to speak Spanish, she
acted both as an interpreter and demonstrator of some of the dance
moves.
Not to mention that Zbiegniew was astounded from the moment my
mother opened the door.
Some days, many years later, my father would catch me off guard in the middle of a Saturday afternoon whilst he'd been seemingly, though not yet literally drown in his own thoughts propelled by whatever symphony or jazz combo he was absorbed in whilst drinking one bottle of beer after another, contemplating perhaps one of my mother‘s frequent, unexplained disappearances, he would suddenly stand up, pull the lone, tattered and barely populated photo album out of the closet and sit next to me in beery recollection, one photograph after another like precious and out of print baseball cards, collectors editions, black and white, sometimes colour Polaroid photos of Miranda, my mother, the 16 year old girl who'd invaded my father's up-to-then unblemished heart.
Look at how beautiful she was Witold, he would mutter. Imagine what
it was like to walk along 1st Avenue with her on my arm, by Christ,
the stares we'd get from passers-by made me imagine I was walking
with a movie star. You just didn't see beauty like that in this
neighbourhood. Not back then. It was all blonde and blue,
child-bearing hips and pinched immigrant faces. Miranda was like a
matinee of fireworks shooting off stars in everyone's eyes.
I often wonder about that afternoon, somewhere in some anonymously massive apartment complex overlooking the East River on a warm June afternoon, my father transfixed by a new sound he'd never come across before and my mother, dancer and translator of music from her native island. What an odd sight it might have made; the electrician and the beauty school student, weaving a new history in the course of an afternoon delicately balanced on a common interest in music.
Of course, it didn't end there. There wasn't anywhere in his own
neighbourhood where he could listen to such music live and he
certainly wasn't socially capable of making the leap to weekend
visits to Spanish Harlem on his own to watch live bomba dancing and
singing and so eventually, it was sorted out that he would join
Miranda, her family and friends one afternoon for a delicately
monitored social visit which would include an evening of local food,
music and dance.
And perhaps it's not such an amazing surprise that from those
twice-monthly visits, my father attempted boleros, started listening
to music like the Rafael Munoz and might have forgotten all about
his precious Dixieland Jazz musicians were it not for my abuela's
interest when he casually mentioned one day that he too played
musical instruments quite passionately.
This eventually led to an excursion of the Melendez family down to a late August Sunday afternoon of stifling Dixieland Jazz at the Ukrainian Street Fair where they formally met the Kazmirsky family (Zbiegniew and babcia) over kielbasas, pierogies, blintzes, bacalaitos, carne guisada and empanadillas washed down with cold Polish beer and rounds of Puerto Rican rum in a cultural summit of unprecedented proportion for ours or their neighbourhood.
Zbiegniew was swollen with some sort of love sick hangover for
months and this festival was the culmination of it all. Meeting by
meeting Miranda and he had been exchanging secret glances, passing
notes in mutually yet characteristically different broken English,
using music and family gatherings as excuses to sneak away when
nobody was looking.
And before anyone was the wiser, they were already hammering out the fine print of their relationship across the front seat of Zbiegniew's pick up, pushing away the tools, lying down on estimate sheets and newspapers well after the light had escaped from the
afternoon and windows had steamed up enough, the rum was gone,
nothing but crumbs left and both families were approving of what was
impossible to disprove: Miranda and Zbiegniew were an item.
Sure, it was an unusual cultural stew, taking up with a white boy,
taking up with the Puerto Rican teenager, a West Side Story without the gangs and knives, the choreographed dancing and well-rehearsed singing.
Both families were compelled to agree: there was something
appealing and endearing about them – memories of their own past
passions sprang up in front of them and as though they were looking
at the children of others and remembering their own, the
cross-cultural romance of Zbiegniew and Miranda was compelling
enough for both families.
As things progress in natural causes, eventually, I became the next
bit of miraculous news to hit the two families.
It was a bit stressful of course, given that Miranda and Zbiegniew were not married, but once that sticky situation was resolved with a ceremony that covered two different Catholic churches, one on East 7th Street near Tompkins Square park and the other near East 91st Street, the only unresolved problem was whether I would grow up in Spanish Harlem or in the East Village – as it turned out, a bit of both, until the timely death of old lady Sadowicz in a building just around the corner from my grandmother's flat provided an opening which Miranda and Zbiegniew seized without much hesitation once it was agreed there would be plenty of subway and bus rides back and forth between the two neighbourhoods.
*****
How does this explain my own shiftlessness and dead end career
choices? Well, as in many romances which begin with focused passion, inexperience and closed quarters, reality gradually set in, almost imperceptibly; nearly translucent cobwebs formulating in the corners of each's heart, petty arguments over money and of course, the constant nip and tug and pull of two distinct cultures grinding against each other like sand in the gears.
My mother's career as a beautician was in essence, ended upon
impregnation. My father was earning a decent living as an
electrician, we were in a rent-controlled flat and there was little
need for my mother to work.
And so their intentionally interwoven lives might have strangled
them.
Most weeks went on the same; my father off for work near dawn, my
mother trying desperately to find a means of idling away the hours –
housework in a small flat was no day-long episode and by noon, the
cleaning and shopping had been done, the boredom set in.
Some afternoons if the weather was bright, she'd drag me out to
Tompkins Square Park, mingling with the homeless and the junkies
just for a sniff of a few trees, a glance at the skies by staring
straight upwards. In my country, she liked to say, the sky is
everywhere. You don't have to break your neck to find it. Here we
live like rats in holes, staring everywhere around you Witold, look,
apartments, windows, brick and concrete. How can we live so trapped
like this?
Other afternoons, she'd pack us up on the subway or the uptown bus
to the barrio and I would spend the afternoon lost in a word of
foreign sounds and smells. It was incredible that we could travel
such a short distance to find ourselves in another world. What was
this world? It must have been similar to what it was like looking
out at East Berlin from West Berlin in the 70s. My mother made that
commute as often as possible, from the black and white and drab to a
vibrating binge of colours, animation where stoicism had only hours
before, prevailed. My sky is here, she said, looking out over the
East River. It isn't pretty, but at least it's alive.
My mother often reminded me, in her occasionally bitter, nostalgic ways, of a fruit ripped from the familiarity of its tree, gathered by migrant worker on a bleak hourly wage barely above starvation level, placed into a box with other fruit the hungry labourer couldn’t eat, and transported to the supermarket where it was then selected by someone who had a better paying job, and later, or perhaps right there on the spot, greedily consumed, juice dribbling down the chin.
Despite the consumption of her outer skin her seeds yearned to return to that same tree and begin the process all over again.
This was how we wiled away the hours of my childhood. Long walks
seeking clear views of the skies, subways and buses, leaving one
world for the next and then returning.
Later, we'd retire home to prepare dinner and begin the vigil of
waiting for my father. Depending on how business went that day he
might be home by 6 or 7, weary, but emotionally bouncy at the
thought of what he'd accomplished that day.
Other times, the harder days, the days with disagreements with customers or, more inevitably, other contractors and labourers, he'd stop somewhere on the way back to wind down with a beer or two in one of several neighbourhood Polish or Ukrainian watering holes. Some nights, after particularly gruelling days, the socialising took a more serious form and the drinking was more concerted and meaningful with oblivion being the goal, shots of vodka with mugs of cold beer chasers being the mode of transportation.
Those nights my mother and I would wait around for hours and then
gradually, she would acquiesce to allowing me to eat but would hold
off herself on the vague hope that any minute he would come bounding up the stairs and through the front door.
Over the early years however, a pattern emerged, as it often does,
and as time went on, we ate every night at the same time, regardless
of whether or not my father was planning on being around, once a
silent, mental deadline had passed in my mother's mind, her eating a
distraction from the seething disappointment that wallowed in her
like a taxidermist's fluid.
And when my father did eventually make it home, it was no longer
fatigued but angry. Angry with the world, with the contractors, with
the crooked businessmen, with the fact that dinner was no longer
waiting, that neither I nor his wife were there at the doorstep to
great him. Those nights all hell would break loose – screaming,
yelling, threats, dishes shattering, bottles breaking – a world
within the walls of our flat of a slow breakdown of détente, a
renewed vigour for finger pointing and accusations.
And although most nights it didn't reach histrionic proportions; a
few minutes of hushed voices, the slam of a door and that was the
end of it, the pace was gradually set in stone. Some afternoons we
would take the uptown bus and rather than a few hours of cosy chat,
"we" would decide to spend the night with the abuelos. Rather, I
would, and my mother would disappear for hours at a time.
But my father, despite his habits of late nights in bars after
particularly frequent rough afternoons, was still a hard-working man
and regardless of the state he woke up in the following morning he
was always out the door by five or six at the very latest, freshly
showered, ready to take on the world. In some ways he was
machine-like in his ability to shake a hangover off, a
characteristic I would later inherit and come to appreciate but at
such a young age, at the time, I had no sense whatsoever of what was
ever going on behind the scenes.
Sometimes, if my mother and I spent the night in Harlem, my father
would return home early the following afternoon with flowers and the
world's troubles long ago off his back, smiling and singing, playing
the trumpet whilst she prepared the evening meal. Those were
harmonious and happy nights which all of us recognised as being part
of a larger pattern of redemption – the ebb and flow of happiness at
home.
My father worked Saturdays as well but usually much shorter days and when he came home it was never with the same menace or venom he returned with on the weekdays. Saturdays and evenings following overnights my mother and I spent in Harlem, were always the happiest times in our home.
My parents would play records with teenage abandon all afternoon and evening, starting with Chopin and Debussy, moving on to the avant-guard jazz of the Polish 60s, Kurylewicz and Trzaskowski's hybrid of modern jazz and contemporary philharmonic hall music,
followed later by the Andrzej Trzaskowski Quartet and my father's new favourite, "Ptaszyn" Wroblewski, the brilliant tenor sax and flutist. And while this went on they'd sit in the parlour drinking rum or vodka or cold beers, smoking and talking like the two youngsters they were as though they'd peeled off the thick skin of adulthood for an afternoon and enjoyed themselves in precisely the manner they'd have done if they'd had a longer youth together before
I'd come along to add the weight of parenthood around their necks like a millstone. I would watch them quietly fascinated, only vaguely acknowledged and perpetually attempting to be as obsequious as possible.
When I was older, my father would try and teach me a few things with
the trumpet and although I was receptive, it was the tenor sax that
really tweaked my ear. The first inklings were of Lester Young and
his gentle manner I listened to within the Count Basie Band
recordings before unconsciously following the chronology, the
gawking aggressive sound of Coleman Hawkins, especially in those
days leading a combo with Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis and Max
Roach, among others, as sidemen.
And then Coltrane swung into my hearing and whilst at one time I had
merely dabbled, it was Coltrane's mad spiralling; his out of
consciousness playing that hooked me once and for all on the
instrument.
When the polkas and waltzes and jazz records had all been played, by
that time the room was thick with smoke and the careless, incessant
laughter and howling of late afternoon/early evening Saturday night
drunks and then my mother would insist they listen to jibaro
records, the cuatrom guitar and guiro ensembles, bongos and bass,
the old periódico cantaos of the plena, made up from old stories of
old neighbourhoods of my mother's former island, the seguidors,
segundos and requintos reverberating off the walls, shaking past
midnight with the boleros and danzas until the flat was magically
transformed by booze and music into a personal dance hall for my
parents – furniture shoved aside, yipping and clapping themselves
into a frenzy which would inevitably end with me being left sitting
in a room alone whilst they disappeared into their own for
mysterious yet equally noisy undertakings.
And of course, on Sundays, there was atonement. I, of course, had
nothing to be sorry for, nothing for which to ask forgiveness – sins
are few and far between until you first are aware that they are
possible and second, are willing to try them out.
It usually began and alternated between St Stanislaus Church ,
followed by dinner at Babcia's of stuffed cabbage, kasha, peirogies,
blintzes and pickles, a quiet afternoon of dulled senses from the
church service to the heavy meal to the silent hours sat in the
front parlour listening to the condensed orchestras of Liszt's piano
and Chopin polonaises before Mozart, Bach and Beethoven were all
brought out in due course – music for remembering in that household, dark, craven thoughts, not conversing as it was clear in my household of my father's youth, little talking, unless absolutely necessary, went on at all. My babcia would only stare morosely at photographs of my father's father, showing my the black and white albums, their youth in Poland, the countryside, the funny dress, the world outside a world outside a world of memories and lost hopes. It
was depressing, even for someone as young as myself who hadn't even started school yet, just to be sitting in such a heavy, stilted air of musical harmony yet emotional distress. We could all feel it and not a single one acknowledged it. Still, the flickering snatches of a past and a country and culture I didn’t know fascinated me, filled me with wonder, lent substance to dreamy afternoons of silence sitting, staring at nothing.
On alternate Sundays, we would dress up and all climb into father's
pickup truck with the words Kazmirsky Electricians painted on each
side door and we would drive up town to meet my mother's family for
the day, and afternoon invariably filled with contrasts, afternoons
which whetted my appetite for exotic day dreams and although we were still on the same island of Manhattan, it was easily as though we had transported ourselves to another world altogether.
Of course, my parents' translation skills were required in all these
endeavours – afternoons with babcia would require my father to
translate the Polish to English for my mother's sake. I was already
familiar with the language and the sounds yet owed to age, my
vocabulary in any language was strictly limited.
On the days in Spanish Harlem, my father would endeavour to muddle through some of the phrases he picked up via my mother, via labourers he came across, via the little islets of Hispanic culture appearing on nearly every street corner, and of course, via the lyrics of the music he'd become so fond of, but even then, for the more serious conversations he required my mother's interventions for dialectical phrases, specific questions requiring specific answers rather than broad, philosophical strokes of whimsical speculation.
And in the early days especially, for its flavour, colour, beat and
sassiness, pure interest alone, I was growing up more Hispanic than
Polish and imperceptibly, as they'd likely intended, large weeds of
Americanism sprouting up through the cracks in the pavement of my
Puerto Rican/Polish heritage.
But more often, I grew up in a house of boredom that epitomised the
hopelessness, the gutted future of my mother since I spent so much
time around her and so little around my father.
Although only a 40 minute bus excursion through traffic back to her home, my mother was in some ways, cut off from her own life, the life of security and familiarity, to be thrust in to a new role of motherhood in a neighbourhood of prying, fat babushkas who spoke in dialects she could not understand as they sniffed and pointed and mumbled whenever we entered a deli or stopped in somewhere for a egg cream.
She was ostracized from social circles outside of my father and
grandmother by those who bled jealously at her steamy beauty, her
flamboyant personality and the loud salsa that emanated from our
windows.
She took me out of the neighbourhood frequently, enough so that I
grew up hearing more Spanish than Polish, but it wasn't enough to
take field trips thrice weekly to Spanish Harlem simply to have a
brief dip in the pools of her culture. Gradually, the unease
graduated to unhappiness, mild at first, growing as I did and my
needs for her waned.
Thinking of the future, my father began taking on more and more work which in turn led to being home less and less frequently and even when he was home, he was tired, overworked, grumpy, no longer the hard-working yet simultaneously carefree Pole with a passion for
Dixieland Jazz but simply greying in flesh, tiring in spirit, dying
in soul.
Then there were fights – many of them in fact, some weeks, nearly
every night so that I grew up with the impression that the two
people who were meant to mean the most to me simply hated each other
outright, tolerating one another's existence simply out of a sense
of duty to me, as if I'd had any say in the matter at all, as if I
were the collective anchor weighing around their necks, as if it
weren't for me, Miranda would be working as a beautician somewhere
in Spanish Harlem, surrounded by her culture, surrounded by her
family and friends, surrounded by boys who chased her and praised
her beauty knowing it was not being disassembled daily by the
existence of a half-breed son neither Puerto Rican nor Polish,
simply existing somewhere on a plain of foreign American neither
here nor there.
No one came right out and said this of course, but it was there,
palpable, for all someone who spent the entirety of their day with
another, to begin to allow to sink in. My father resented me for I'd
meant more work, driven a barrier between himself and the sexual
passion of his wife, not to mention, taking away any semblance of
free time to practice his beloved music. And my mother, although at
first enthusiastically carrying me from place to place with her like
an adult pacifier, gradually began to lose interest. She was too
young to be so old and it was too early to have packed in a
promising future so early.
So rather than a prize in a game of tug of war, I became the object
of mutual resentment and blame, the cause of unhappiness, the ending
of potentials and futures. Or so it seemed. Sometimes it doesn't
take a complicated thought process or a license in psychotherapy to
draw simple conclusions.
Don't think it wasn't a relief to get out of the flat and finally
start school. It meant freedom for us all.
Well, not exactly freedom. True, I was free from being toted from
place to place and let out of the environment that was suffocating
me with it's resentment and blame, but I wasn't exactly free, just
on furlough.
For my mother, there was first the relief of not having to take a
kid around with her everywhere she went, but also the freedom in
there not being me around to report on our comings and goings to my
father when he came home. This in turn led to some rather strange
behaviour on the part of my mother who discovered a vicarious
excitement in affairs of all sorts which might pop up from anywhere,
any street corner outside of our or her neighbourhood, any chance
propositions, any furtive glances of lust in her direction for
regardless of being burdened with motherhood, my mother was still
quite young and still quite attractive.
Eventually her disappearances became more frequent and lasted longer.
Some times my father would come home from work, find me buried in
books and command me to come along with him, driving up to Harlem,
riding in silence up and down the streets in search of Miranda, a
habit I would later undertake myself, albeit without the pick up
truck and a lower quotient of anger boiling inside of me.
Like watching water swirling down the drain after uncorking the
bathtub so was it to watch the disappearances eating away at my
father, so it was like watching the marriage flounder, Miranda's
sudden appearances at home, drunken or remorseful, bursts of passion
flowing between them as though they both knew the legacy was ending
for both of them and I was forced to stand witness to it.
Years went by like this – it's remarkable to think how normal it all
seemed somehow. Day after day turned year after year, schooling
continued, dinners were burned, arguments erupted but were quickly
placated by my father who, although resigned to my mother's
scattered disappearances, knew there always existed the possibility
of avoiding them just like the arguments – by keeping silent,
seething within as if she wouldn't notice the resentment, as if she
were impervious to being ignored, she would remain faithful, not at
his side but not utterly abandoning the two of us either.
You wonder what goes on in two peoples' minds and hearts, linked by
a sentence of marriage with occasional furloughs of genial grace,
walls dripping with polite interaction, please, sorry, excuse me,
might I…etc.
And then as if by silent, mutual accord the incessant bickering and
the wild, drunken arguments ceased. I would often wonder for years
what precipitated this truce – if they had in fact conspired
together in the interests of their lone son's sanity or perhaps
their own, to put a definitive end to the hostilities and carry on
quietly with their lives together, yet apart. Or if this had been
precipitated by one, perhaps my father was having an affair to
counterbalance those my mother was most certainly if not openly
engaging in herself, but in any event, during the winter months a
change came over the both of them.
*****
Perhaps it was at the point when the arguments ceased entirely that
whatever lingering passion was extinguished forever.
To me and perhaps to my father it was clear my mother was merely biding her
time. She argued for the chance to go to night school and finish her
diploma. She started taking up interests completely outside the
realm of our household; palm reading, bowling, jogging, drinking and
smoking less, calm, collected, cleaning on schedule, putting dinner
on the table like clockwork, agreeing to everything my father said
much in the way he agreed with any suggestion she made. A truce of
magnificent emotional retraction, two icebergs passing in the night.
It was early in my 16th April of having played the role of millstone
around the necks of this couple with this accumulated and
uncomfortable truce of silence and impeccable politeness that an
evening arrived and my father did not make it home for dinner. As I
said, this happened once or sometimes twice a week, as it had most
of my life but that the primary difference between the early years
and the last several months being that although he would arrive back
to the flat late, he did not reek of alcohol, did not come home
shouting his displeasure or swaying with one hand on the kitchen
table, rather he would return meekly, quietly on tip toes in the
darkened room so as not to wake me and then push open the bedroom
door for whatever silent fate awaited him inside. It was on these
nights the atmosphere was almost feral and their lovemaking, no
matter how discrete they believed themselves to be, was enough to
keep me awake until the early hours of morning.
And because this was almost like clockwork, these once or twice a
week midnight returns to the flat I did not grow concerned until
one day dawn had begun to rub the black from the night and I had not
witnessed his return. By five in the morning I was out of sofa bed
and ritualistically having removed the sheets and pushed the
mattress back down into the recesses of the sofa quietly, having
folded and put away those same sheets in the storage space just
above the sofa thinking in the back of my mind perhaps he had
arrived with even more stealth than usual and I had simply missed
his return or slept more heavily than normal, when I had set about
making the coffee as I did most mornings so that it would be ready
for my father when he slipped out to go to work I had convinced
myself by then that this must have been the case, I must have simply
slept through his return.
But hearing the rustling in the kitchen, the bedroom door opened as
if on cue only this time, instead of my father's weary face it was
my mother's tepidly poking out and I watched as she took the scene
in quickly, myself standing there alone, and the recognition in her
face, like mine that the convincing it had taken our minds to
entertain explanations for this figment of imagination, that Witold
had somehow arrived without our knowing and perhaps left just as
stealthily, was a fabrication the light of day would not allow us to
continue believing.
And as my mother sat at the kitchen table in her nightgown slowly
sipping the coffee I could see the wheels of imagination turning in
her mind contemplating all the possible explanations. And being
privy to a not-so-secret secret regarding Zbiegniew's affair we both
allowed ourselves to believe if fleetingly that perhaps rather than
simply stopping off for a few hours of blissful infidelity, my father
had decided to spend the entire night this time and would arrive
through the door at any minute, sheepishly and fighting off the
accusations with the excuse that he had no time to discuss things,
he was running late for work,
I could see my mother seething silently at this possibility. I could
almost see in her eyes the scenario she held for him upon his
return, how this would be the last straw, how this indiscretion
would invoke the final argument and all hell would break loose
either this morning or by evening.
And just as easily I could see as 5 became 6 and then nearly 7, this
seething was replaced by uncertainty and as though we were one mind
we turned over the idea that perhaps he had in fact decided to leave
us, had taken the initiative to decide our fates for us without
further discussion and perhaps had simply moved in with this woman
without further preamble and there would be some word, a telephone
call, some explanation of the decision taken, regardless of the
repercussions.
Whilst my mother continued busying herself with these possibilities
I got ready for school and before leaving, kissed her once upon the
cheek and took my books along with the silent acknowledgement in
both our eyes of what had transpired and the confused state this
left us both in.
I couldn't concentrate that day in school. I secretly entertained
the idea that magically my father would appear at my school either
to pick me up and take me to this new place of his or to offer an
explanation of what had happened the night before as a preamble to
explaining the same to my mother. But he did not magically appear. I
felt every hour passing with excruciating anticipation for that
evening's meal both dreading the consequences of my father's
decision and the arguing and fighting that would be the hallmarks of
this final showdown between himself and my mother.
I ran home after the final class and found my mother still sitting
there at the kitchen table still in her nightgown and accompanying
her at the table an ashtray filled with finished butts and a bottle
of rum slowly inching its way down to its conclusion. No music
played and nothing was said between us. There would be no dinner.
There would only be the waiting for this grand finale which was
certain to kick off in grandiose fashion now that my mother had
lubricated herself against all possible scenarios, plotting the
details of her revenge in silent fury.
I decided then that rather than try and occupy this space with my
presence, intruding yet again on their private turmoil, I would
instead take my books to the public library and spend the late
afternoon and early evening until closing time at 9 at first
feigning study and later simply sitting by myself at a table staring
blankly at pages of a book I was pretending to read.
And at 9, as they were turning the lights on and off signalling the
close of library hours I gathered up the books and made the 35 block
walk back to my neighbourhood, back to the apartment where I had no
idea what would or would have transpired. As I made it down the
street I stopped meekly looking up to the windows of our flat and
saw that no lights were on.
I entered the apartment expecting at the very least some remnants of
the carnage but instead there was nothing. No sounds coming from the
bedroom, the air stale with cigarette smoke and no one inside. I
even pushed open the bedroom door after knocking twice and getting
no response and finding only my mother lying there still in her
nightgown, splayed across the unmade bed, snoring comfortably to
herself.
Unbeknownst to me whilst my mother had sat at the at the kitchen
table in her nightgown slowly washing down a bottle of rum with her
cigarettes, the phone had been ringing off the hook. At first she
ignored it believing it was only him, checking to see if she were
there, if it might be safe for him to slink back to the apartment
and gather up a few clothes for the secret move. She waited with
great anticipation for that moment, surprising him at the door as he
crept in slowly reeking of guilt but he did not arrive at all and by
the afternoon she allowed herself to answer the phone whose ringing,
in combination with the rum was beginning to drive her to the brink
of madness she believed.
But every time she answered it was someone different. A contractor,
a customer, his employees, friends all asking the same question of
where the hell was Zbiegniew, why hadn't he shown up at this job
site or that one, why hadn't he picked up his employees as he did
every morning before work with a few donuts and several cups of
coffee?
Having no explanation herself and finding herself increasingly
embarrassed to play the role of the wife who had no idea of the
whereabouts of her husband, she stopped answering the phone the rest
of the afternoon and concentrated fully on her bottle of rum trying
not to reflect too deeply on what it meant that not only had
Zbiegniew failed to come home the evening before, not only had he
not dropped in to pick up his clothing or his shaving kit, but that
he had shirked the responsibilities of his work equally and
uncharacteristically.
She didn't want to contemplate what it might have meant. She had
never known him to be anything but industrious. No matter how much
he'd had to drink the night before, no matter how enthralling their
lovemaking or hatemaking had been the night before he was always
awake the following morning by dawn ready to start the day again,
eager to begin work.
The following morning I repeated the ritual of making the coffee and
waiting but there was still no arrival of my father, sheepishly or
otherwise and this time my mother did not stir from her slumber and
I spent my breakfast with my heart in my mouth no longer capable of
imagining scenarios simply wishing something might return to
whatever might be construed as normal.
The following afternoon when I returned from school, launching
myself up the stairs with eager desperation for news, I found my
mother dressed this time, still seated at the kitchen table and
drinking coffee this time instead of rum although the pile of
finished cigarette butts was at least as high as the day before.
I've had to notify the police, she stated in an even voice without
looking up at me.
What do you mean?
Your father has disappeared.
Just because he hasn't come home for a few days…it went unspoken the
accusation that given all that had happened over the last year, her
infidelities and his, it wasn't so odd in hindsight that he would
fail to come home – this was the speech I had rehearsed so often in
my head over the last several days convincing myself that the
abnormal should in fact, have been expected - but I let the sentence
die there without saying another word until my mother lit another
cigarette and finally looked up at me with what I mistook for
amusement.
So you think that this is all my doing, do you, she accused,
exhaling. Her eyes were not playful at all rather sealed with a deep
seeded hatred I had never seen focused on myself before, only my
father. Would I now become the target?
I'm not saying it's anyone's fault, I'm just saying that perhaps he
hasn't disappeared but…
Your father has not shown up for work for the last two days, she
interrupted triumphantly as though in revealing this she could grind
my argument into the dirt as quickly as the suggestion had arisen.
And of course, we both new what this meant. We both understood
without stating so that whilst his not coming home for a few days
might have been folly the fact that he hadn't shown up for work was
a darker sign indeed.
What did the police say?
They took the details. I don't know if they took it very seriously,
of course. Men leave their families quite often apparently, she
laughed bitterly. They took the details and said they would look
into it.
And although my mother hadn't quite brought herself to believe in
their sincerity, let alone their professionalism, two days later
they reported that his pick up had been located on the corner of
Avenue C and 4th Street, not very far from home in fact, but there
was no one in it and no sign of where he'd gone or why he'd
abandoned it.
Perhaps the police themselves began to take the disappearance a
little more seriously thereafter because it appeared that after a
few more days, they had canvassed the neighbourhood near the
abandoned pick up and had found a person or two who could vaguely
recall having seen a man plunge himself from the East River Park off
the banks into the East River and begin swimming toward Brooklyn on
the other side.
No one could be certain of course if this was my father. As those
sightings had appeared after midnight, the few witnesses having
thought little of it, a madman swimming across the East River in the
middle of a Spring night perhaps drunk, perhaps encouraged by
whatever inner evil they could not imagine springing forth, none had
considered notifying the police. Not in that neighbourhood whose
residents were more concerned with turf wars and shootings to be
preoccupied with a man swimming across the river.
What he did or did not reckon for was that the Atlantic tides that run
through the narrow channel of the East river make it the most
turbulent in the area and were famed for the problems they gave to
sailors in the 17th century, so much so the midway point was
nicknamed, because of its deadly whirlpools and rocks, Hell Gate.
My mother didn't make it to the memorial service.
Once the idea that my father had drown himself, either intentionally
or accidentally, began to sink in, she appeared to see the light.
I was 16 by then, old enough to know the time was drawing near and
sure enough, within days, I came home from school one afternoon to
find the house empty.
Well, the furniture was all there, there were foodstuffs in the
cupboards, the laundry and dishes had been done. One less chore for
the guilty conscience. But she was gone, I could smell it the moment
I opened the door. This wasn't a disappearance to aggravate my
father, my father was dead. This was a disappearance to liberate
herself entirely from the memory of her life.
I checked the closets for her clothing and found a great deal of
them gone. All the shoes, all the dresses, all the hats and scarves.
A few winter coats remained, a few drabber styles and retired
undergarments stayed behind but all else, toothbrush, mascara,
deodorants, perfumes and soaps, shampoo and the essentials for
running away for good were gone.
And there I spent my entire afternoon, morbidly sorting through all their private stuff neither had wanted to take with them, wherever they ended up.
There were some bits of correspondence in my mother’s boxes; letters in Spanish back and forth from Puerto Rico, little scraps of paper pledging love in my father’s careful script, notes she kept to herself on mundane miscellanea, bits and pieces torn from magazines with tips on hairstyles, skin care, love- making, fulfilling dreams, get-aways.
Odd, I thought. My father was dead yet all of his personal effects,
all his clothes, all his documents and papers, auld tax returns,
business statements, photographs, music – all of it were still here
lingering like a foul odour. On the other hand, my mother had left
little behind but the shell of the skin she had shed, free for the
first time in her life.
On the kitchen table, which I had somehow missed in my investigative
rummaging, was what I thought was a letter but as it turned out,
merely bank statements, account numbers and passwords. Their legacy
to me.
She'd put the bank accounts into hers and my name jointly so that I
could take money whenever I needed it. I never really knew if she
trusted me not to simply empty it out, if she had another stash off
a life insurance policy she planned to cash in or if she simply
didn't care, had another source of income to draw from, hell, maybe
even another man, a sugar daddy. Or a series of them. I didn't know
and yes of course I was curious but more than curious I was hurt,
abandoned and very busy turning my emotions and my soul into a
tempered steel I presumed would be strong and durable enough to
withstand any future such abandonment.
Not that I had any intention of drawing close to anyone. I had never
been that close to anyone to begin with. Having spent as much time
as I did growing up either on my own or in the company of a quasi
catatonic grandmother who didn't speak a word of English anyway, I was rather accustomed to entertaining myself. Games, fantasies, books, finding little niches in the cityscape that would allow me to watch people from a secluded vantage point.
I can't really say that I was ever lonely. No, I didn't have many, or
perhaps on reflection, any friends to speak of. There were a few
Polish boys in my neighbourhood about my age who went to my school
but mostly they targeted me for spare change or verbal or physical
abuse rather than friendship.
There were a few kids who were about my age in the barrio my mother
took me to during her family visits when she was utterly sick of the
East Village and dragged me along with her on a series of buses back
to her home. Those kids seemed to despise me even more than the kids
in my own neighbourhood. What was my mother doing with that white
kid. What was that white kid doing in their barrio, on their turf.
They didn't want to befriend me, they wanted to beat me. They wanted to abuse me for being different or for even being some impurity between white
and Puerto Rican, having a foot in both worlds but a foot hold in
neither.
So I’d already learned from the start to stay away from them and everybody else. My mother was quite satisfied that I left her to her own whims. When I was younger, and probably only because I was too young to be left alone or my mother had serious doubts my grandmother was capable of caring for me, she
had no choice, but it didn't take much cajoling from me, once I'd reached 10 or 11 to convince her I could be trusted to stay in the flat on my own content with my instruments or my books and when I told her I wanted to spend the
day in the library, sure, even she looked at me a little disdainfully but agreed without much protest.
They tell you that shit about not feeling loved but the truth is, I
don't think I was ever really aware of what that was. I wasn't
cogniscent of missing out on anything because frankly between what I
saw in my own household and what I saw or heard of or about those
around me, it didn't seem like I was really missing out on much
anyway. For the most part life was pretty much a self-contained
world of wonder at that around me, the greatest city in the world,
and the strangers in it. Wondering who they were but not wanting to
know the truth, just imagining what their own daily lives were like.
So despite the fact it was still somewhat shocking, the duel events,
formative perhaps but still, when it happens to you it's as though you're dreaming it anyway, there isn't the distance to judge it by or really even the wisdom to perceive it either from up close and inside or further away, the situation never felt as traumatising as I would later read others believed it was when they told me or I read about their own experiences. A bunch of excuses
not to get on with it, or get on with it in some shitty way that made you miserable instead of feeling lucky.
I admit, I did feel lucky.
The Blame Game was officially over.
All I'd ever really wanted to do when I was growing up was to get grown
up and get on with my life. With both parents gone by 16, sure
enough, my life was there to get on with.
In some ways I'd have expected my father to have been a little more romantic, a little less pragmatic considering his early love of music. It's
probably the main thing I wondered about him as I grew up in my late
teens and watched others. What event had caused him to forsake the
music and get down to business, to become so focused not just on his
trade but on making money from it.
Sure, I felt the resentment - it was brought up often enough to
stick in my memory, the idea that if I hadn't come along when I did, or if I'd been aborted, there'd have been plenty more good times in the years ahead to squeeze in before parenthood for both of them.
I read enough immigrant stories in my time to realise how many
parents sacrificed their own futures for the sake of their children and certainly from all appearances that was the noble business my father was carrying on with. But perhaps it was tinged ever so slightly by the unnerving feeling that even though he was doing it, he did so grudgingly, resentfully, maybe even angrily.
Adults would ask me stupid questions when I was a kid like, what do
I want to be when I grew up. I want my youth to end abruptly,
caesura by parenthood, to adopt a profession that I might well have
cared about but was forced out of a sense of responsibility to take
far more seriously and far earlier than I'd ever expected. I wanted to resent my life, my child, my spouse, all anchors, millstones around my neck so that at least even if I hated every second of my life I could shroud myself with a sense of chivalric justice that I'd done the right thing.
Here's how I'd hear about it: a favoured theme I'd overhear in drunken
arguments in the bedroom late at night- it'd be muffled of course
but eventually, if you hear the same phrases enough times, even
muffled, you begin to get the gist. You begin to decipher, to
translate, to read between the lines.
My father would be complaining about the injustices of it all, the responsibilities of work and fatherhood, how his life was ripped from him and logically, my mother would feel offended and hurt, would scream in Spanish at him until he'd slap her quiet and then you'd hear that angry, hard cold
voice asking snidely and rhetorically, what - should I be like
people in your neighbourhood and just forget about it, shirk my
responsibilities, run away, abandon them for my own freedom? Should
I go on welfare like your father? Then he would snort in disgust, a
few more slaps would ensue and more often than not he'd go back out,
doors slamming everywhere, somewhere into the night to drown his
sorrows even deeper and find other drunks to drown them with. Drunks
who understood exactly what he was talking about.
So naturally I was curious: what would my father's life had been like had I not been born? What would he have been doing?
I asked him this once when we were out walking along the
piers on the West Side looking out over the Hudson River at Jersey
when he'd spat out some incomprehensible hatred he'd been mulling
over in his head unspoken for days but for monosyllabic grunting.
He smacked me in the head. Not hard, mind you. Not out of anger,
more out of some barbaric form of loving denial. What kind of stupid
question is that Witold?
I shrugged. It was a Sunday, early in the morning and we were on one
of the walks he would go on every Sunday morning, usually alone only
this time he'd dragged me along for some reason and clearly seemed all the more annoyed for having done so.
I don't know. I was just curious.
It was his turn to shrug. In his world an honest question deserved
an honest answer. Or maybe he was just still a little drunk from the
night before. I didn't know. I didn't inhabit his world, just a satellite around it.
Well I don't know Witold. I don't waste my time thinking about things like
that. Nor should you. You are my son and that's that. Why would I
waste time thinking about if you weren't my son? What would be the
point?
I dunno. Sometimes I think about what if I'd been born with one leg instead of two or if I'd been born in another country instead of America or if we lived on the West side instead of the East side. I don't know why.
Well, it's a stupid way to think. You are what you are. You have two legs,
not one, you live in America, not Russia or Poland, for which, I
would add you should be very grateful for on both counts. So don't
waste your time thinking about what could be or could have been or
might be. Just deal with what is. You should be happy that you are
in the situation you are in. Do you know what kind of life I had as
a boy? Nothing but work. You don't have to work at all. You will
eventually, but you don't now. It's a luxury I didn't have. My
father made me work when I was 8 years old, helping him with his
deliveries, helping him try to make ends meet so we didn't starve to
death. And you know what Witold? As crummy as my childhood was it
was a million times better than my father's, just like yours is a
million times better than mine. Don't be an idiot. Enjoy it. Soon
enough you'll be a man of your own with your own real problems, not
fantasy problems. You'll have your own responsibilities and then you
won't have time to worry about what if. Only about what is.
And my mother? Sure, for many years when I was growing up, despite
the burden, I was the source of immense pride to her. She took me
everywhere, bragged to her friends and family what a bright and
promising boy I was, taught me to be a gentleman to ladies, light
their cigarettes, open doors for them, flatter them about their
beauty and worship them.
But eventually, who knows what age exactly, 5 or 6 or 8, somewhere
along the line I began to resemble my father too much perhaps. I
asked too many pointed questions which were unanswerable perhaps,
but anyway, I became less important, less a source of pride, more of
a burden, more of a reminder of what she couldn't have as long as I was tagging around.
Maybe it started when she stopped going so often back up to the
barrio, like it was too much work or there were too many
complications, but somewhere along the line she started drinking
more frequently - not with my father but alone, in that flat, in the
afternoons once she knew my father wasn't coming home for dinner anyway so I'd be left to sort out my dinner on my own.
In any event, she stopped bringing me anywhere she went. If I stayed
in she'd look over at me and ask me why I wasn't outside. Sometimes she'd
demand it, go out and play with the other kids. Why do you sit at
home all the time reading, dreaming your time away? What's wrong
with you? Why don't you have any friends? Get outside, it's
beautiful out, GO play. Leave me alone. Leave me in peace for
crissakes. Get out of my hair. I don't care what you do, just go,
get out. Here, take a few dollars, just get out.
And frankly, it was easier being away. All the theatrics would be
concluded by the time I'd gotten home. Usually after midnight. Yeah, the library closed at 8 or 9 and I'd just wander the streets, never really getting in
trouble - sometimes I'd go to the movies, sometimes I'd just wander
around Times Square watching all the strange people doing weird
things to themselves and others, sometimes I'd just wander along on
main avenues where it was safest, away from gangs and troublemakers,
just another anonymous figure in the darkness. I'd learned from
boyhood beatings to sort of blend into the background as though I
didn't really exist or as though I were invisible. And I preferred
it that way.
It helped too that I did well in school. I didn't mind school, other than all the bullshit about getting picked on or made fun of or beaten up. The parts in class, absorbing, listening, demonstrating I knew the answers, that was all good fun.
But year after year, the classes became less interesting, more time
was spent trying to control uncontrollable classes and thus
eventually I lost interest in that too.
Which of course, was all resolved once my father disappeared and my
mother followed in short order.
I was 16, I could drop out and didn't have to bother any more. It wasn't that I didn't want to learn.
It was wanting to learn what I wanted to learn at my own private
speed, not limited by the abilities of teachers to simultaneously
subdue the rowdiness whilst continuing to teach. And to learn about
what interested me, oftentimes which wasn't part of the curriculum.
***
I didn't have many marketable skills to speak of. I'd learned a few
whispers of the trade my father worked in and picked up skills like
lint in the bellybutton merely by the experience of being on the job
sites in my own free time when I wanted to earn a little extra cash
after school.
My father probably dreamt some day of passing his electricians
business still intact down to his son one day but of course, without
my father, that business didn't last forever.
And so without even a High School diploma as well as the absence of any clear, marketable skills, by default I was destined to simple meandering from one listless dead-end job to another, a future of underachieving for years to come.
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