Search Results for: poker

A Vor Never Sleeps

Garrett M. Graff | Longreads | June 2018 | 20 minutes (5,086 words)

Razhden Shulaya maintained a diverse business empire, like a Warren Buffet of crime. By age 40, from his base in Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, he had a cigarette smuggling operation, a drug ring, a counterfeit credit card scheme, an extortion racket, an illegal gambling establishment, and teams devoted to hacking slot machines. According to prosecutors who have been building a case against him, Shulaya’s associates provided gun-running, kidnap-for-hire, and the fencing of stolen jewelry. Plans were in place for what authorities came to call the “romance scam”: use an attractive woman to lure a target down to Atlantic City, knock him out with chloroform, and steal his money. They’d take his Rolex, too.

Read more…

Bundyville Chapter Two: By a Thread

Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Leah Sottile | Longreads | May 2018 | 26 minutes (6,578 words)

Part 2 of 4 of Bundyville, a series and podcast from Longreads and OPB.

I.

It’s mid-November, the end of the first week of the trial in Las Vegas. I’ve found that my favorite time of day here is early morning, when the only people to talk to are those calling “good morning!” from the doorways and brick plazas where they’ve slept. It’s when Fremont Street is free of tourists and populated only by guys with hoses whose jobs are to wash away the things that seem always to fill this city street: spilled margaritas and cheap beer and puke.

I’m staying in a cheap casino on Fremont Street in a room that’s not expensive enough to have a coffee maker, which means I have to eject myself into the world without any caffeine, a thing I would never do at home but here I’ve come to look forward to. It’s the only time it’s quiet enough to think, to not lose yourself in the things Vegas asks you to become.

At night on Fremont, blocks from the federal courthouse, you will be offered whatever you need. Booze, drugs, money, beautiful women, beautiful men. Your fortune, told to you in cards. Your name etched on a bottle opener, a license plate, a flashing keychain, a pair of dice. Get drunk. Get high. Get wild. It’s Vegas, baby — a line people repeat here like a mantra in packed elevators, in coffee shops, in the security line of the “fed castle” where Bundy’s followers empty their pockets of change and pocket-size Constitutions before going through the metal detector. When Judge Gloria Navarro strolls to the bench each morning — always late, always carrying an iced coffee — people explain it with a shrug: “Vegas, baby.”

I’ve avoided the Vegas life this week, but on my last night — a Thursday — I stop into a bar on Fremont Street and take the only seat left at the bar, next to a Mr. T impersonator. There’s no court tomorrow, so I’m OK with staying out a little late and seeing what’s so appealing about this city. Vegas at night, despite my resistance to it, is fun — and I’ve had enough to drink with Mr. T that I strike up a conversation with a couple of guys who’ve traveled here from the East Coast to sample the legal marijuana. I ask them if they’ve heard of Cliven Bundy, and one responds immediately, “He’s that cowboy the government is trying to steal land from, right?”

This must be what poker face feels like.

The next morning, I’m a little hungover and way out in the suburbs of the city. I’m sitting in this bright-white, fluorescent-lit office, guzzling complimentary bottles of water. I’m in the office of an ex-Bundy follower who used to be close with the family, Melissa Laughter. She went to Bundy Ranch in 2014 and to Malheur in 2016. She has spent holidays with the Bundys.

She’s since become a vocal detractor of the Bundys and the wider Patriot movement that supports them. She says the Bundys demand loyalty, allegiance. She has come to think of them as cult leaders.

“A cult is is a blind following of some enigmatic leader,” she says. “They don’t question. They don’t act independently. They act as one.”

Laughter is a devout member of the Mormon church, and the granddaughter of a Utah dairy farmer. She explained what initially attracted her to the Bundys. “I’m like, OK, we have something in common. I’m interested in talking to them and hearing what they have to say,” she says. “So like many people, I was sympathetic to them to begin with.”

Laughter is a staunch conservative — a woman who has run for public office in Nevada as a Republican. She has bright white teeth and wears big cowboy boots with dresses. She’s pro-gun, vehemently anti-marijuana.

She grew up in the church and felt like something was off about how the Bundys talked about the Gospel to friends and family. “We would often have these philosophical religious debates where they would talk about LDS doctrine,” she says. According to Laughter, her differing perspective on church teachings wasn’t well received around the ranch. “They constantly take offense if you say anything against what they’re saying.”

But the Bundys were seeing things in the Gospel she couldn’t understand.

“I’m going to show you something else no one else has but the federal government,” she says. She reaches to grab something from the floor, then plunks a big black binder onto her desk.

“Have you heard about The Nay Book?”

Yeah, I’d heard murmurs of it. I just didn’t think it was real. Read more…

Did Brian Easley Have to Die?

Calvin Easley holds a wallet-sized portrait of his brother, Brian. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)

Aaron Gell | Longreads | April 2018 | 37 minutes (9,230 words)

This feature is published in collaboration with Task & Purpose, whose team of veterans, military family members, and journalists tell the stories of the military and veterans communities.

The thing that everyone remembered about the man in the light gray sweatshirt was how composed he was, how polite and respectful. One morning this past summer, he quietly entered a Wells Fargo bank branch in the Atlanta suburbs in a desperate state. But he didn’t curse or even raise his voice. He just calmly relayed the litany of setbacks and obstacles that had led him to an extraordinarily reckless act.

Brian Easley, 33-years-old, standing 6 feet 2 inches with close-cropped hair and glasses, had woken up on the morning on July 7, 2017, in Room 252 of a $25-a-night hotel nearby, where he’d been living, scraping by on a small monthly disability check from the Department of Veterans Affairs.

A former lance corporal in the Marine Corps, he had served in Kuwait and Iraq as a supply clerk, separating with an honorable discharge in 2005. But his transition to civilian life had been fraught. Joining his mother in Jefferson, Georgia, he found himself suffering from backaches and mental illness. He met a cashier at the local Walmart, and soon they married had a daughter together, but he disappeared for long stretches as his symptoms worsened. After his mother died in 2011, he bounced around — alternating between relatives’ spare rooms, VA mental hospitals, and nonprofit housing facilities. During a few especially difficult periods, he slept in his car.

By the summer of 2017, Easley had lost even that option. His usual disability check from the VA had mysteriously failed to materialize, and the rent was due. If he couldn’t cover it, he’d be on the street, and the thought terrified him. In the first week of July,  Easley called the Veterans Crisis Line repeatedly to inquire about the status of his disability payment. When they hung up on him, he called back. On Monday, July 3, Easley made his way to the VA’s Regional Benefits Office in Atlanta. But after an argument with staffers there, he left in humiliation, his issue unresolved.

A few days later at around 9:30 a.m, the Marine veteran entered the Wells Fargo branch, a faux colonial building on Windy Hill Road, a six-lane commercial roadway, and claimed that the backpack slung over his shoulder contained C-4 explosive. He allowed several employees and customers to exit and informed the two remaining employees that they should lock the doors and stay put. Then he began making calls, dialing 911 to let the authorities know what was happening, and a local news station, WSB-TV, to explain his predicament. “They took everything,” he told the assignment editor who picked up the phone. “With my last little bit of money I got I’ve been able to hold up at a hotel, but I’m going to be out on the street and I’m going to have nothing. I’m not going to have any money for food or anything. I’m just going to be homeless, and I’m going to starve.”

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The Wells Fargo bank in Marietta, Georgia where Brian Easley took hostages during a three-hour standoff with police. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)

Easley spent nearly 38 minutes on the phone with the editor, relating his military history, his love for his young daughter, and his frustrations with the VA. At one point, he allowed her to speak with the hostages. One described her captor as “very respectful.”

Easley insisted he didn’t want to harm anyone. “I already told them if I detonate this bomb, I’ll let them go first,” he promised. “These ladies are very nice, and they’ve been very helpful and supportive.” He said he had no intention of robbing the bank, and though an employee had fled leaving piles of cash just sitting out at their workstation, he showed no interest in it. His focus was exclusively on his own money — that monthly disability payment from the VA.

“How much money are we talking about?” the editor asked.

“Not much,” Easley said. She pushed for a dollar figure.

“Eight hundred and ninety-two dollars,” he answered.

As Cobb County police deployed around the Wells Fargo, establishing an incident command center in the parking lot of the nearby Texaco gas station, two snipers, Officers Dennis Ponte and Brint Abernathy, took up positions at the edge of the bank’s rear parking lot. Chief Mike Register, who’d only recently taken over the department, arrived on the scene shortly thereafter. Easley, meanwhile, spent most of the morning on the phone.

In addition to WSB, he spoke to his wife, Jessica, and her cousin, Yolanda Usher. He fielded calls from random bank customers, politely informing them that there was an emergency underway and that they should call back later. He told his daughter, Jayla, then 8, that he loved her and to work hard in school. “Okay, Daddy,” she said. “I love you.” Through it all, he kept his cool, even indulging in some dark humor. He mused that he might be the “worst bank robber ever.” And when the WSB editor asked him for his Social Security number, he joked, “You’re not going to steal my money too, are you?”

As the three-hour ordeal unfolded, he remained unfailingly polite to his captives, allowing them to place calls to their loved ones and even maintain contact with police. “He just kept saying, ‘Ladies, I’m so sorry,’” one of the hostages told the Georgia Bureau of Investigation later. “And I was like, ‘I feel really bad. I understand. You’re in a hard spot.’ And he said, ‘Thank you. I appreciate that.’”

As reasonable and mild-mannered as he seemed, Easley did show some clear signs of mental illness. In his call with WSB, he explained that he was being followed and had been the victim of four kidnapping attempts, which he attributed to his halfbrother Calvin and a secret society. “I don’t know these people,” he said. “They seem to be able to track me wherever I go. They have my information.” During several difficult moments, he held his head in his hands and sobbed, muttering softly, “I just snapped.”

In an effort to understand the many factors that led to the Windy Hill Road incident, I spent seven months speaking to Easley’s family members and fellow Marines, officers of the Cobb County Police Department, Veterans Affairs officials, community activists, and experts in law enforcement, mental health, and military transition.

I found a story that was considerably more complex than it first appeared, involving the failure of the nation’s safety net; VA policies better designed to exploit former warriors than to assist them; a confused police response; and maybe an undercurrent of racial bias, one that the community liked to think it had outgrown long ago.

It was also the story of four former members of the U.S. armed forces, whose paths converged one morning in July on a busy suburban thoroughfare. Before the day was over, two would be recounting the incident to investigators, another would be facing the news media, trying to explain to the public just how it happened, and a fourth would lay dead on the floor of the bank, his head pierced by a single gunshot.

***

Born in 1983, Brian Easley was a mama’s boy as a child, his thumb rarely straying from his mouth. The youngest of eight kids, Easley lived with his siblings and parents, Barbara Easley and Bobby Lee Brown, in a ranch home in Williamstown, New Jersey. It was a tight fit — 10 of them in all, crammed into three bedrooms — but they made it work. Located south of Philly, it was a safe, quiet neighborhood with a small-town feel, notable mostly for the aroma of pizza sauce from the local cannery, which wafted across the local sports fields every afternoon.  Barbara was an indomitable woman, laboring tirelessly to make sure none of her children ever felt neglected despite their parents’ modest income. Brian was the baby, her very last, and she doted on him.

Easley had few friends growing up, but he was close with his brother James, the next oldest, joining him in PlayStation marathons that typically went on until there was no more game to play. Despite his height, he was soft-spoken and timid as a teenager. In school, he was painfully shy around girls, later confiding to his fellow Marines that he’d been a virgin when he signed up at 18.

Twelve weeks of basic training at Parris Island outwardly transformed him, precisely as the military intended. Watching him graduate in a ceremony at Camp Lejeune, his family members were dumbstruck. “I could not believe my eyes, how polished he was, how sharp, tall, strong,” said his brother Calvin, the oldest sibling. “I sat there in awe the whole entire time. He went in a little boy, and they turned him into a man.”

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Calvin Easley with a portrait of Brian from his service in the Marine Corps. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)

Assigned to the 2nd Marine Logistics Group, based at Camp Lejeune, the soft-spoken recruit fell into a circle of friends who each quickly took him under their wing. To them, Easley seemed less a warrior than a big goofy kid, more content to eat cereal and watch his favorite anime series than to hit the local bars or shoulder a rifle.

The group formed a tight bond, fortified during their deployment to Kuwait in 2003. Though Easley’s fellow Marines would roll their eyes at his devotion to Tolkien novels and compare him to Steve Urkel, the teasing was affectionate. His tranquil demeanor, generosity, and maddening compulsion to apologize for the smallest offense — and then apologize for doing so — earned him the nickname Easy. He mostly stayed out of the boisterous debates that often preoccupied his unit, only to pipe up seemingly out of nowhere with some deliberately inane assertion, like, “I hear Somalia has the world’s strongest navy,” and then hold a poker face as long as he could — which usually wasn’t long.

Deployed to Iraq in 2005, Easley was stationed at the Al-Taqaddum Air Base, known as TQ, where he served as a warehouse clerk with the 2nd Supply Battalion. Easley’s job was to fill requisition orders for Marine combat units operating throughout Al-Anbar province, where insurgents, including the nascent al-Qaeda in Iraq, were mounting a surprisingly fierce campaign to drive American forces from the Western Euphrates River Valley.

As the three-hour ordeal unfolded, Easley remained unfailingly polite to his captives, allowing them to place calls to their loved ones and even maintain contact with police

The work was arduous — up to 17 hours a day for months at a time without a break — contributing to the chronic back pain that would plague Easley when he eventually returned to civilian life. “The warehouse jobs are out in the rear, so I wasn’t on the front lines,” Easley told WSB. “I had one close call during a security detail, but that’s about it.” Nevertheless, according to James Dunlap, who served with him, mortar fire was a regular feature, often sending everyone scrambling for bunkers. “I’m thinking, ‘We’re in supply, we’re not going to see this type of action,’” he recalled. “But when they say ‘Every Marine is a rifleman,’ they mean it.”

Following his honorable discharge in 2005, Easley returned to his mother’s home in Jefferson. He met a woman, Jessica Tate, and they moved in together and eventually got married. Around Jessica, Brian seemed fine — strangely quiet maybe, but also devoted, sweet, and easygoing. To his family, though, it was clear that something was wrong. “We noticed a difference in him right away,” Calvin recalled. Diagnosed with PTSD, and suffering from schizophrenia and paranoia, Easley told relatives he was barred from reenlisting. He often set off on long walks by himself. On one occasion shortly after his discharge, he grew so upset at a sibling’s teasing that he flew into a rage that left the family shaken.

These symptoms are not uncommon. “After we got out, it got rough for everybody on the tour,” James Dunlap explained. “It’s easier to be in a war zone than live life out here. You’re not in the Marine Corps anymore, so what’s your purpose?”

***

In 2008, Jessica became pregnant. Both of Brian’s parents fell ill around the same time, and he found himself in New Jersey helping to help care for them, visiting Georgia only briefly for the birth of his daughter, Jayla, but vowing to come back soon.

“He never did come,” Jessica recalled. His phone rang and rang. Eventually, family members told her how he’d just stood up one day, announced he was going for a walk, and never returned. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, I just had his baby and he disappeared. Is he leading a double life?’” she said. Fearing for his safety, she spent many nights crying herself to sleep. “I’m tearing up now just thinking about it.”  

It turned out Easley had checked himself into a VA mental hospital. Upon his release, he stayed with a brother in New Jersey. Aside from one trip to Georgia to meet Jayla when she was about 3, he mostly kept his distance. He explained to Jessica that people were after him — he wouldn’t say who — and he didn’t want to put his family in danger.

Just a week or so before Barbara Easley died, in 2011, Brian ley once again “up and walked off,” Calvin said. Voicemails and texts went unreturned. The funeral came and went with no sign of Brian, and years went by without a word. After calling every VA hospital in the directory, Jessica tried to move on.

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Brian with his daughter, Jayla, possibly around 2014. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)

When he surfaced again around 2014, Easley moved in with Calvin in Georgia, taking his medication, keeping his VA appointments, and generally trying to get his life back on track.. He said he’d been in Orlando, enrolled in filmmaking classes. He made no mention to his brother about a brief spiritual detour, as a follower of the Black Israelites, a religious sect famous for preaching that African Americans are the true Jews. But perhaps it isn’t surprising that in his troubled state, Easley had gravitated toward a tight-knit community. “I think he wanted to belong to something larger than himself,” recalled Dunlap, who was in touch with Brian during this period. Eventually Easley “woke up,” Dunlap said, and was ejected from the group.

Easley didn’t spend much time in Georgia with Calvin and his wife, Anita—maybe a half year or so—before he was on the road again, moving to New Jersey to live with another brother. After several episodes, though, he returned to Marietta in early 2017, enrolling in computer classes at Lincoln College of Technology, a for-profit college located in a strip mall in Marietta. He had bought Jayla a phone and called regularly, helping her with homework and joining her in a prayer via Facetime nearly every night. Some of his money from the government went toward child support, and he wired more whenever Jayla needed it. Not long before Brian walked into the Wells Fargo, he had the idea to surprise Jayla with a dog. Jessica thinks the realization that he wouldn’t be able to follow through may be what set off the episode.

***

In the spring of 1971, 10-year-old Mike Register was walking through an affluent neighborhood of Macon, Georgia, when a pair of young men in a car waved him over with a proposition: How would he like to earn $5 helping out with some yard work? It was a tempting offer, but the situation seemed off. For one thing, Register was white, and the men in the car were black. Job offers like that just didn’t happen in Macon in those days. Register bolted toward the woods, but the men gave chase, abducted him, and later kept him captive in an abandoned house, demanding a $5,000 ransom from his family. His mother alerted the authorities and delivered the money as instructed.

All told, Register spent 20 hours as a prisoner, while the men debated whether to kill him. Eventually, they essentially let him go, threatening to slaughter his family if he said a word. The boy didn’t heed the warning. At some point, he’d managed to snag an ID belonging to the ringleader, 20-year-old John Plummer. After his release, Register presented the card to local police, resulting in Plummer’s arrest and eventual conviction. (The other two men were never identified.) At the trial, which drew charges of racial bias from the defense team, the all-white jury found Plummer guilty of kidnapping, then deliberated for just 10 minutes before suggesting a life sentence.

Surprisingly unguarded for a chief of police, now leading a department of more than 600 officers, Register is a voluble storyteller, recounting this traumatic chapter from a difficult childhood in an easygoing, buttery drawl without a hint of disquiet. Asked how the terrifying crime he experienced as a child may have affected his response to the Wells Fargo hostage-taking, he insisted it had no impact. “I certainly have empathy for anyone who is held against their will,” he said. “Certainly that’s a part of my life, and I’m very thankful that it turned out the way it did for me. But no matter what my life experience may have been, I certainly try to be objective with any situation.”

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Cobb County’s Chief of Police, Michael J. Register. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)

Register enlisted in the reserves in his early twenties, joining the 11th Special Forces Group and becoming what was then known as “SF baby,” jumping right into commando training without any prior military experience. He thrived in the reserves, taking time off from his work as a police officer with the Cobb County PD for intensive training and deployments to Germany, Haiti, and Belize, among other countries.

By 2002, when Brian Easley entered the Marine Corps, 40-year-old Register was in Afghanistan with the 20th Special Forces Group, serving on a mobile reconnaissance team. After retiring from active duty in 2005, the same year Easley left the service, Register worked for the Department of Defense, devising strategies to counter the insurgency’s devastating use of IEDs. In 2014, he returned to suburban Atlanta and eventually resumed his career in law enforcement, becoming chief of police for Clayton County, 20 miles south of Atlanta.

Register was recruited as chief of police for nearby Cobb, which includes the city of Marietta, just three weeks before Brian Easley walked into the Wells Fargo. Though both counties belong to the metropolitan Atlanta area, they pose distinct challenges for law enforcement. Whereas Clayton is economically depressed and predominantly black, Cobb County is a mostly white, affluent bedroom community that was represented in Congress by a former leader of the nativist John Birch Society for nearly a decade and was long known for its “legendary intolerance,” as The Atlanta Journal-Constitution put it.

Though an influx of recent transplants, mostly young professionals, has tilted Cobb’s politics left, the county retains its reputation as a stronghold of white conservatism. Despite the 2017 opening of a new stadium for the Atlanta Braves, Cobb had for years steadfastly refused to allow the construction of a rail link to Atlanta’s transit system, in part out of a longstanding desire to wall itself off from the so-called “black Mecca” across the Chattahoochee River. (Years ago, a county commissioner infamously declared he’d stock the river with piranha to block rapid transit.)

Although the violent crime rate is considerably higher in Clayton than in Cobb — with nearly eight times as many murders on a per capita basis in 2016 — Register’s new position is in some respects trickier to navigate, given Cobb’s fast-changing demographics and more fraught political atmosphere. As chief of police for Clayton County, Register was an advocate of transparency and community policing initiatives, and Cobb community activists viewed him as an ideal choice to take the helm of their department as it sought to transform itself from a hidebound reminder of the region’s troubled past into an exemplar of the bighearted cosmopolitan New South.

To judge by the stream of racially charged incidents that have made the news in the area in recent years, change was long overdue. In 2015, the county’s only black commissioner reported what appeared to be racial profiling by an undercover officer — a complaint that elicited a shrug from her fellow commissioners. A few months later, the same officer was involved in a disturbing encounter with a black driver that was captured on dashcam. (“Go to Fulton County,” he said. “I don’t care about your people”). Following a suspension, the officer resigned.

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The front desk of Cobb County Police Headquarters in Marietta, Georgia. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)

The community’s negative perception of the department was confirmed last year in an independent report on police operations drawn up at the county’s behest by the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Although the report did not find evidence of systematic bias, it identified “a concerning deficit of public trust in and among a portion of the population.” It also made 34 recommendations, many of which Register is now implementing. Among a host of other changes, he ordered that all members of his department receive additional training in crisis intervention, crime prevention, cultural diversity, and fairness in policing. The chief has also considered a proposal by the Cobb Coalition for Public Safety to ensure that mental health professionals be called upon on in crisis situations. Some departments mandate that specially trained teams be deployed whenever an incident involves a potential mental health emergency, but in Cobb County, such experts are only brought in at the request of the crisis negotiation team. In Easley’s case, no such request was ever made.

***

According to the Marshall Project, law enforcement is the third most common occupation for military veterans, after truck driving and management. In part, this is attributable to the preferential hiring encouraged by initiatives like the 2012 federal program Vets to Cops. A career in law enforcement has an additional appeal to veterans, offering, as few occupations do, the sense of fellowship, duty, and shared risk that they experienced in the military. “I think that everyone, no matter who you are, you want to belong to something,” Register said. “People that have served in the military understand that they are part of something that is great, admirable, honorable, and that is important.” A police force, he added, “is a natural transition”  — conferring membership in what Ken Vance, executive director of the Peace Officer Standards and Training Council of Georgia, termed a “blue brotherhood.”

A substantial percentage of CCPD officers are veterans — several of whom, like Chief Register, played key roles in the Wells Fargo incident. Sgt. Andre Bates, the lead negotiator, served in the Marine Corps, as did Officer Dennis Ponte, the sniper who took Easley’s life.

In his 2016 book, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, Sebastian Junger advances a powerful case linking veterans’ struggles with PTSD largely to the difficulty of navigating the fraught transition from the tight-knit world of the armed forces to the more isolating and superficial existence of life on the homefront.

This certainly tracks with Brian Easley’s experience. Joining the Marine Corps at 18, the former wallflower quickly found the camaraderie, friendship and shared sense of purpose that had largely eluded him until that point. After his discharge, cut off from his social group, he found himself increasingly alienated and adrift — an experience that undoubtedly contributed to his mental illness. Soon, aside from his immediate family and Jessica, he was more or less on his own, so lonesome in those early years that in addition to his primary job at a Home Depot distribution center, he took a second gig at a Church’s Chicken, not for the money, he told Jessica, but “just to pass the time while you’re at work.”

A career in law enforcement has an additional appeal to veterans, offering, as few occupations do, the sense of fellowship, duty, and shared risk that they experienced in the military.

When I asked Register how he has dealt with his own traumatic experiences — the kidnapping as well as his later service in Afghanistan — he shrugged off the question, more comfortable speaking about the prevalence of PTSD in general. But as frightening as his childhood ordeal clearly was, his success in dealing with it is not surprising: After helping to foil his own abduction, he was hailed as a hero by the national news media. In recognition of his bravery and quick-wittedness, the local police department named the 11-year-old its honorary chief of detectives.

“Humans don’t mind hardship, in fact, they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary,” Junger wrote in Tribe. “Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.” Register seems to have found his purpose and his community in law enforcement, as did Bates, Ponte, and the many other veteran members of the CCPD.

***

As Brian Easley told the editor at WSB, the two hostages, and the crisis negotiator — basically anyone who would listen — his monthly disability check from the Department of Veterans Affairs came to $892. The VA confirmed that his last payment, for that precise amount, was sent on June 1. So perhaps it’s no wonder that when July 1 came and went, and the expected funds were not in the account, Easley began to panic.

According to WSB investigative reporter Aaron Diamant, Easley called the VA’s Veterans Crisis Line eight or nine times that week, including twice on the morning of the incident, and he was “hung up on a few times.” (When contacted, a VA spokesperson declined to comment on Diamant’s reporting.) According to its mission statement, the VCL was established in 2007 to “provide 24/7, world class suicide prevention and crisis intervention services to veterans, service members, and their family members.” But as the demand for its services has surged, the program has been plagued with issues. A March 2017 report by the VA’s Office of Inspector General found a number of shortcomings with the VCL, including deficiencies in operations and quality assurance. In response, the VA issued a press release touting improvements; a few months after Brian Easley’s death, it announced plans to open a third call center to handle another spike in demand.

According to Lincoln Educational Services senior VP for student financial services Rajat Shah, Easley visited the school’s Marietta campus on June 30 to discuss the possibility that his money had been garnished due to a tuition issue. A counselor at the school called the VA directly, and Easley was given an appointment at the VA’s Regional Benefits Office on July 3. He “was extremely agitated and belligerent,” a VA spokesperson told me , and as a result was briefly placed him in handcuffs. “Once Easley calmed down,” the spokesperson said, “police removed the handcuffs and a VA benefits supervisor … explained to him that his compensation check was recouped due to a debt he had created by his failure to complete college courses.” Easley agreed to return on July 6 with the proper documentation to set up a payment plan “and left the regional office voluntarily.” He never returned.

Perhaps unwittingly, Easley had become caught in a financial squeeze involving what are known as overpayments — a common pitfall for recipients of Post 9-11 GI Bill tuition assistance. Government tuition payments are made in full directly to an academic institution, but if a veteran drops too many courses or fails to attend class, the VA will initiate a process to recover the money directly from the student. According to Shah, Easley last attended class in late November 2016. He would have had to miss just six days of his module to trigger a mandatory notice to the VA, though Shah said the school tries to contact a student before taking that step. Easley’s overpayment was $1,163, so after the $892 was deducted from his account, he owed a mere $271.

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Objects found in Brian Easley’s pockets after his standoff with the Cobb County police. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)

If, in fact, Easley did miss some classes, it would hardly be a surprise. He was suffering from a severe mental illness, something the Department of Veterans Affairs, which was responsible for his care, certainly knew. Although the VA claims it sent Easley five letters informing him of the overpayment, his erratic housing situation meant he probably never received them.

“This happens literally all the time,” said Carrie Wofford, president of Veterans Education Success, a nonprofit watchdog and advocacy group focused on veterans education. A 2015 report by the General Accounting Office estimated that a quarter of all veterans receiving tuition assistance are billed for overpayments, many without ever fully understanding how the system works. “Because VA is not effectively communicating its program policies to veterans,” the report said, “some veterans may be incurring debts that they could have otherwise avoided.”

Although Shah said Lincoln staffers tried to help Easley with the VA, the school has drawn criticism in the past for an apparent indifference to the welfare of its students. “The programs are costly, more than twice as much as at local community colleges,” the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee the committee wrote in a 2012 report, “and Lincoln makes virtually no investment in student services despite enrolling the students most in need of these services.” The committee said student retention and loan repayment rates were among the worst it had seen, and the report concluded, “Although the majority of students leave the company’s schools with no degree or diploma, the company also receives increasing amounts of Federal taxpayer dollars and profit.”

***

Shortly after Easley spoke to the 911 operator that Friday morning in July, the Cobb County Police Department showed up in force. They closed Windy Hill Road to all civilian traffic. They made sure those sheltering inside the Popeye’s, the Waffle House, the Wendy’s, the Subway, and the Chick-fil-A all knew to keep clear of the windows in case a detonation shattered the glass. The fire department was dispatched to the scene, as was the bomb squad, SWAT team, crisis negotiators, and a K-9 unit. Officers of the Sheriff’s Department handled traffic duties. Representatives from the Marietta PD, the ATF, the FBI, and its state equivalent, the GBI, turned up as well.

Register arrived within the hour, taking up a position at the makeshift command post. Solidly built, with a tree-trunk physique and wispy brown hair fading to gray, Register was viewed by community leaders as a reformer. The incident at Windy Hill Road would be his first test.

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Michael Register was recruited as chief of police for Cobb County just three weeks before Brian Easley walked into the Wells Fargo. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)

Meanwhile, inside the bank, Easley was getting a crash course in how TV news gets made. WSB-TV boasts one of the top local news organizations in the country: In the June ratings period, the station had attracted nearly two-thirds of TV news viewers in the metropolitan Atlanta area. Now, the staff had landed an incredible scoop simply by picking up the phone, and they knew it. On an audio recording of the call turned over to the GBI, one can hear the assignment editor’s colleagues scrambling to press their advantage. As she works to nail down what to Easley must have sounded like trivial details (“You said you had lived in Marietta previously, when did you live in Marietta?”), it seemed to dawn on him that her interest lay less in solving his problem than in working the story. “Okay, ma’am, I’m sorry,” he finally said, “but I’m about to wrap this up.”

As the call ended, two of the editor’s colleagues could be heard discussing how to proceed. “What can I report?” one asks. The exuberant reply: “Everything!”

Sometime after 11 a.m., Sgt. Andre Bates, the incident’s lead crisis negotiator, settled into a black Ford Taurus at the Texaco. He took a deep breath and dialed the number given to him by the 911 operator. Bates — who, like Easley, is black — established a rapport with the hostage taker almost instantly based on their shared military background. “I’m going through it with Veterans Affairs myself, so I know it can be difficult when they drag their feet,” he said.

Their status as former Marines further cemented the bond. “Semper Fi, sir. I’m a West Coaster, MCRD San Diego,” Bates said. “What can we do to resolve this, sir, and help you out? From one Marine to the other?” Although only Sgt. Bates’s side of the conversation is audible on the recording, his skills as a negotiator are evident. He gets Easley talking about his back injury and mentions his own knee and ankle issues. He assures Easley nobody is going to get hurt: “That’s my responsibility — to make sure you stay alive.” He compares the police force to the Marine Corps and engages Easley as a fellow enlisted man. “I have three of my chiefs that are personally here … guys walking around with stars just like it is in the Marine Corps . . . they’re not happy,” he said. “Just asking from one Marine to the next — to show that you and I are communicating and we’re on the same program — could you release one of those ladies, please?” And he appeals to Easley’s personal dignity, reminding him, “Your honor is worth more than the $892 the VA owes you, sir.”

Around noon, Easley agreed to a deal: A pack of Newports in exchange for one of the hostages. He seemed to mean it. As soon as he got off the call, Easley turned to his two captives and invited them to decide which one would leave. They told him they couldn’t choose. “Well, you’re just the teller,” he told one, “so I’ll let you go, and I’ll keep the branch manager here so they won’t blow my head off.”

The deal marked a significant breakthrough. They were working together now. A resolution seemed well in hand. In a brief interview, Sgt. Bates expressed absolute confidence that Easley would have honored his side of the bargain. “We were brothers who had bonded with each other,” he said. “I felt that me and him had connected as men, as Marines, and as family men.”

Bates hustled over to brief his superiors in the mobile command center, a large RV parked nearby. Among them were Register and the incident commander, Maj. Jeff Adcock. Reporting to him were Lt. Joel Preston, another Marine veteran, who commanded the tactical team, and Lt. Jorge Mestre, the crisis team commander.

It was a formidable group, with decades of experience. Mestre was a key figure in a 1999 incident in which he was wounded after trying to reason with a local man who was reportedly suffering from paranoid delusions. After opening fire on the officer, the man barricaded himself inside the house with his aging mother, and later killed two members of the Cobb County SWAT team after they stormed the family home. The tragedy is viewed as a critical lesson among tactical-policing experts, who blamed the incident on poor intelligence and inadequate staffing, revising standard procedures accordingly. For some members of the Cobb County PD, the killing may have carried an additional lesson: In a barricaded subject situation, avoid unnecessary risks.

The negotiator tried to appeal to Easley’s personal dignity. ‘Your honor is worth more than the $892 the VA owes you, sir.’

As Adcock and the other commanders quickly began hammering out a plan to deliver the cigarettes without endangering their officers, they had good reason for optimism. According to Chris Grollnek, a former SWAT officer who now provides training in dealing with active-shooter situations, “Ninety-nine percent of the time, when a negotiator is making a deal for one thing for another, the incident ends peacefully.”

Around the same time, another opportunity to end the standoff safely presented itself. One of the hostages who’d been on the phone with the police throughout much of the morning reported to Officer Christopher Few, Bates’s colleague on the crisis negotiation team, that Easley had gone to the bathroom. He was in there for more than a minute, it seemed, long enough for both hostages to potentially run out the doors. Once Few understood what was happening, he began to walk the hostage through an escape plan. But seconds later, Easley returned. “He’s out,” she said quietly.

Meanwhile, along the wood line, the snipers lay on the ground, squinting through scopes at the action inside the bank. One of them, Officer Ponte, had also served in the Marine Corps, working as a helicopter crew chief before his discharge in 1992. On assessing the situation, he’d selected a Lapua .338, a $5,000 semiautomatic rifle billed as “The Long Arm of the Free World,” and loaded it with Sierra MatchKing .338 250 grain ammunition, a combination he felt certain would have the power to penetrate the two glass doors and still maintain its trajectory. Then he’d aimed his laser at the building and noted a range of approximately 66 yards. Every once in awhile, as he peered through the scope, he got a good visual of the man in the gray sweatshirt. He radioed Lt. Benjamin Cohen, the assistant SWAT commander, and advised him that he had a clean shot. Should he engage the threat, he asked. Word came back: “Not at this time.” The rest of the tactical team was not yet in position. Stand by.

Minutes passed. On the SWAT team’s radio frequency, Ponte heard indications that a hostage might be released, but from what he could see, he later told the GBI, “There was no effort or energy being put forth toward releasing somebody.” Then Ponte made a fateful decision.

Around 12:15 p.m. on July 7, a single shot rang out on Windy Hill Road, ending the three-hour ordeal in the Wells Fargo and adding Easley’s name to the list of 236 mentally ill people killed by police in 2017.

***

Not only were Sgt. Bates and the various commanders caught off guard by Ponte’s action, his own fellow SWAT team members were as well. In a well-planned operation, the tactical team would have reacted instantly to the gunshot. Instead, nine long seconds ticked by before an officer put the CCPD’s BearCat armored vehicle in drive and began barrelling toward the door of the bank, inadvertently endangering the hostages, who were just then preparing to dash out in the opposite direction. After the BearCat struck a column and backed up, its hood covered with broken bricks, the hostages escaped, and members of the SWAT team hustled them into the back of the vehicle, which quickly reversed away from the bank.

The standoff was over. But exactly what happened to Brian Easley — and who made the decision to kill him — would remain a mystery for months. Addressing the news media shortly after 1:30 p.m., Register incorrectly framed the incident as an extraction operation gone awry. “We had a SWAT team, tactical team, move up on the bank to help get the hostages out,” he said. “During the extraction process, contact was made with the suspect, and it appears the subject is deceased.” The explanation seemed to imply that Easley had been shot during some kind of confrontation with the entry team rather than by a sniper hidden in the woods. No mention was made to the public of Bates’s negotiations with Easley to release one of the women for a pack of smokes. Although the entire command team knew of the arrangement — as did the two hostages and other members of the CCPD — it is only being made public now as a result of an open records request.

Barricaded-subject incidents, especially those involving hostages, are among the most difficult circumstances police officers face. Typically, attempting to negotiate a peaceful resolution is the preferred approach, with a tactical assault reserved as a last resort. But the balance between crisis negotiators and SWAT elements is a delicate one. Negotiators are trained to strike up a rapport with a suspect, calm them down, appeal to their sense of reason. Tactical officers, increasingly outfitted with military-style gear, are primed to take swift, decisive action.

The Cobb County Police Department’s internal Policy Manual states that in a hostage situation like the one at the Wells Fargo, a tactical solution must only be initiated “should communication with the subject fail to resolve the incident,” and that “the ultimate decision [on how to respond] will be made by the On-Scene Commander.” In the case of Brian Easley, communication was making genuine progress, and the On-Scene Commander, Major Adcock, had decided to let the negotiations play out. According to Ponte’s own testimony, he made the ultimate decision himself, an apparent violation of both policies. He cited no particular action on Easley’s part — an erratic movement or aggressive gesture, for instance — that might have indicated an elevated risk. When I reached him for comment, Ponte declined to speak except to say that his side of the story would be told “at the appropriate time.”

The standoff was over. But exactly what happened to Brian Easley — and who made the decision to kill him — would remain a mystery for months.

Sgt. Bates, the crisis negotiator, refused to criticize the actions of a colleague and fellow Marine. But asked whether he’d been sincere when he’d promised Easley that nobody would hurt him if he cooperated, Bates told me, “I meant that from the bottom of my heart. I’m out there to do a job. I’m pretty good at what I do, and the things I’m telling him are coming from the heart, one human being to the next. My job is to protect everyone so we can all walk out of there and play out whatever happened in court. That is the win for me.”

All of the experts I contacted were careful to emphasize they lacked a complete picture of what happened, and they expressed reluctance to second-guess CCPD’s handling of a dangerous and chaotic situation. They agreed, however, that the decision to shift away from a negotiating posture and initiate a tactical operation is not typically made lightly or based on the judgment of an individual officer, and that the situation on Windy Hill Road might well have concluded peacefully had negotiations been given more time.

Easley “articulated he’s not going to do anything to harm the hostages, so that’s a great sign,” said Randall Rogan, a crisis negotiation expert and co-interim dean of communications at Wake Forest University. “If a suspect is emotionally calm at the beginning of a siege or incident, that is the most critical moment.” He added that Easley’s demands were extraordinarily modest. “He’s not asking for a helicopter and $2 million dollars and taking two hostages on a plane.”

“Easley was very calm, he indicated wasn’t looking to hurt anybody, and he demonstrated a willingness to cooperate,” noted Jack Cambria, a 33-year veteran of the New York City Police Department who spent more than a decade in tactical operations and, later, as commander of the NYPD’s crisis negotiation squad, responded to more than 4,000 incidents. “Tactical assault is reserved for the last option, when it becomes absolutely necessary.”

Following a grand jury hearing, Ponte was cleared of any wrongdoing in connection with Easley’s death. District Attorney Vic Reynolds told WSB that the officers “followed the law and did what they were supposed to do.” According to the policy manual, “ability, opportunity and jeopardy” must all be present for a shooting to be justified. As far as anyone knew, Easley had the ability to cause harm to the hostages with a backpack full of explosives. He had the opportunity to do so. And the hostages were plainly in jeopardy.

Cambria, who trains law enforcement agencies around the country in crisis and hostage negotiation, agreed that Ponte likely acted within the law. Nonetheless, he pointed out, “Just because an action might be lawful doesn’t mean it was necessary.”

The operation appears to have been flawed in several additional respects. Given Ponte’s testimony that the hostages were not in sight when he opened fire, he ran the risk that one might have been injured by debris or a wayward bullet. A poorly aimed round might have set off the explosives Easley claimed to have in the backpack, mere inches from where the shot made contact. And there was one more possibility to consider: “When there are people alive near the subject, you very rarely will take a shot to neutralize him in the event that God forbid, he has a dead-man’s switch,” Grollnek said, referring to a detonator wired to explode if a trigger is released. Such devices, which work like a hand grenade, are simple to engineer. Had Easley been using one, Ponte’s shot could well have caused the deaths of the hostages. Finally, the haphazard extraction of the two captives also indicated that the decision to act may have been taken too hastily.

As the hostages were whisked to safety, a robot entered the bank and retrieved Easley’s backpack, placing it in a “total containment vessel.” It was eventually deemed harmless, and inside investigators found a Bible, some papers, and a small machete, among other incidentals. (Easley had never taken out the knife or mentioned having it, and Calvin later suggested he may have been carrying it for protection.) On his body, they found a wallet, a broken cross pendant, and an electronic device one hostage had assumed was a switch to detonate a bomb. In fact, it was a tool for detecting hidden listening devices, perhaps a prudent purchase for a man suffering from the paranoid delusion that he might be kidnapped at any time.

Before long, patrons of the nearby establishments, who’d been on lockdown all day, were finally allowed to go about their business. After being interviewed by police and GBI agents, the two hostages went home to their worried families. The local news teams packed up their gear. Easley’s body taken to the Cobb County’s Medical Examiner in Marietta. Chief Register addressed the media and then headed back to headquarters. Traffic on Windy Hill Road resumed in both directions.

***

The killing of Brian Easley was just the first of several crises to engulf the Cobb County Police Department in the early months of Register’s tenure. In late August, WSB aired bodycam footage from November 2016 in which Officer James Caleb Elliot is seen firing multiple shots at the back of an unarmed teenager as he flees through a residential neighborhood, striking him in the leg. A grand jury declined to recommend charges against Elliot, and DA Reynolds noted that officers pursuing a fleeing suspect in a “violent, forcible felony” are allowed to use lethal force. The fact that the teenager was not actually involved in a carjacking was viewed as immaterial, since the officer merely had to believe he was.

The new chief, for his part, indicated that legalities aside, the shooting endangered the public, and he used the release of the video as an opportunity to initiate additional use-of-force training. He also noted that the department recently purchased a new simulator to better prepare officers to handle such situations. Elliot left the force three weeks after the shooting, and a lawyer for the victim announced plans to file a federal lawsuit.

Then on August 31, Channel 2 released another dashcam video, this one from the summer of 2016. In it Lt. Greg Abbott, who is white, is heard remarking to a white motorist, “Remember, we only kill black people.” Though many observers pointed out the officer’s sarcastic tone, the starkness of his statement at a time of heightened concern over police shootings of African Americans (the killing of Philando Castile outside St. Paul, Minnesota, had happened just four days before the traffic stop) seemed emblematic. The video went viral. National outlets picked up the story. Representatives for Al Sharpton’s National Action Network told Register a protest march was being organized. Register’s office was bombarded by media calls from as far away as the United Kingdom. This time, Register moved swiftly, announcing that the process to terminate Abbott had begun.

“It’s been one of those weeks in Cobb County,” Register told me with a sigh not long after. The decision, he said, had not been easy. But Register was unmoved by the argument that Abbott had been trying to gain the motorist’s compliance by creating a casual rapport, calling the statements “inexcusable and inappropriate” and “not indicative of the values and the facts that surround the Cobb County Police Department and this county in general.”

A vocal contingent within the CCPD expressed unhappiness that he hadn’t defended Abbott. “They took it as me not supporting them,” Register said. After a local talk radio jock went after him — taking care to inform listeners that the police chief’s wife is African American and even noting her place of work — white nationalists went on the offensive, sending Register hate mail in which they called him “a disgrace to the white race.”

Following the decision, Register scheduled a set of mandatory staff meetings in which he laid out his rationale for demanding Abbott’s ouster. The radio station apologized. Eventually, the controversy seemed to die down. Still, it was clear the job was weighing on him. “I’ve got to tell you,” he admitted, “sometimes I’m like, ‘Damn, maybe I should have stayed in Clayton County.’”  

***

The tendency of police departments to close ranks in an effort to shield their actions from public scrutiny is well established and perhaps unsurprising. The same “blue brotherhood” that bonds law enforcement officers can easily slip into a form of tribalism when a member of the team is under threat. The commitment to one another that keeps officers alive in dangerous situations also seems to discourage self-reflection when things go wrong. Initially, after I asked Register about the killing of Easley, he mounted a strong defense of Ponte. “He saw this thing unfolding and felt that this might be the only chance to immobilize the suspect and save the two women, and he took it,” Register said. “If we would have waited five more minutes, and he had detonated explosives and killed himself and the two hostages, then we may have been having a conversation — ‘Now, why did we wait so long?’”

Register also emphasized that Ponte — who was cleared by a grand jury following another fatal shooting in 2016 — had struggled in the aftermath of the Wells Fargo incident. “One reason why it’s been so hard on this young man who took the shot,” he said, “is that he is a veteran himself and a Marine. It’s very hard on him. It makes you want to cry.” (Although Register repeatedly spoke of his officer as a “young man,” records indicate that Ponte was born in 1966.)

A month later, when I pressed Register about the revelations contained in the GBI report, which he indicated he had not yet seen, he reconsidered his position. While reiterating that the shot was legal, he said, “I do call into question the timeliness of it.” He also said he’d be looking into the apparent breakdown in command and control, explaining that he would “dig deeper and ensure that if there were any issues that created the dysnchronization between the negotiating team and the tactical team that we address that and we fix that. Certainly, as the event was unfolding, I don’t know if the communication was transpiring as quickly as it possibly should have.”

If we waited five more minutes, and he had detonated explosives and killed himself and the two hostages, then we may have been having a conversation — ‘Now, why did we wait so long?’

The next morning, Register called back. He mentioned an additional change he’d implemented a few months before, a monthly training session with his incident commanders to do “tabletop exercises,” reviewing some of the scenarios they might face in the field. He added that he’d been up half the night digging into the reports on the Easley shooting, and he’d scheduled a weekly meeting with his leadership staff to talk about developing a procedure for identifying mistakes so they won’t be repeated. “We have to take some time to look at what the findings were and come back for after-action reviews,” he said. “That’s the only way we were going to be better.”

***

Whatever mistakes may or may not have been made on Windy Hill Road on July 7, there’s one issue about which everyone seems to agree: Brian Easley himself bears a good portion of the blame. Even when one takes into account his mental illness and the other formidable struggles he was facing, the fact remains that Easley alone made the choice to enter the bank, claimed he had a bomb, and hold two women against their will.

“I’m sorry for what happened,” Calvin Easley told me when I visited him and his wife, Anita, in their tidy home in the Atlanta suburbs. “I’m sorry he went in there and took hostages. I’m very sorry for that. He was not in his right mind. But they didn’t have to kill him. He just wanted to get his story out.”

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On a phone call from the Wells Fargo, Easley told his daughter Jayla that he loved her and to work hard in school. (Hector René Membreno-Canales)

That story is one that many veterans can relate to. The same military experience that helped make him a man left him anxious, troubled, and eventually unable to work. Perhaps for the first time in his life, he discovered a sense of brotherhood and meaning in the Marine Corps, one he was unable to replicate once he returned home.

But Easley did what he could. He cared for his daughter, calling her every day and sending gifts when finances allowed. He battled the VA for years to receive the benefits he’d earned through his service. He sought an education, hoping to start a career, support his family, and make a new life, only to find himself in a trap that has ensnared thousands of his fellow veterans.

Then, one morning in July, he woke up to find that the money he counted on to make it through simply wasn’t there. And just like the Marine Corps had taught him, he took initiative. He called the hotline. When they hung up, he called again and again. Finally, he walked into the benefits office to plead his case in person. But instead of recognizing a veteran in crisis and working out a plan, or perhaps directing him across the street to the hospital, writing a prescription, and getting him back on track, they sent him away in search of paperwork.

“The problem was bigger than the Cobb County Police Department and Mr. Easley,” Bates told me. “The problem is the system — how they treat retired veterans. You should get more than ‘I appreciate your service.’ The VA owes these guys more. They’re willing to put their life on the line for their country, and when they separate from military they deserve better.” In particular, he criticized the VA’s decision to handcuff Brian Easley rather than help him. “That’s where the whole thing went bad, I believe,” he said.

He was not in his right mind. But they didn’t have to kill him. He just wanted to get his story out.

“I’m just baffled about what is so hard to negotiate,” said John Delorme, a Marine who served with Easley. “This isn’t a terrorist. This is a guy who fought against terrorism. As a veteran it makes me feel smaller than a grain of sand, the way he was treated.”

“I just don’t want his little girl to grow up to think her dad was a bad person,” said Ian Emmett, another battle buddy. “He was a good person.”

Alecia Miller, who dated Easley for two years when he was in the military, agreed. “I hate for him to be painted as this crazy deranged person,” she said. “This is someone who the system failed, and because of that, a decision was made out of desperation, and someone has lost their life because of it.”

“You go over there and you fight a war for our country and everybody’s out to kill you,” Calvin Easley told me. “You don’t know nobody. You’re in a foreign land. But the real sharks? The real sharks are back at home. There’s no reintegration. You don’t get support from the country that you fought for.”

It was late. Anita stood behind him as he spoke, patting his back. “I’m livid,” he went on, fighting back tears. “He was a hero. He was not some psycho on the corner. He was not. He was a gentle giant until you pushed him. If you pushed him to the max, then you’d see a different person. But it took an awful lot. It took a lot.”

“I know this,” he said. “He was my brother.”

***

Aaron Gell is the features editor of Task & Purpose and an adjunct instructor at NYU’s Prison Education Program. He has contributed to numerous publications, including New York magazine, The New Yorker, and Vanity Fair,

This article was published in collaboration with the editorial team at Task & Purpose. 

***

Editor: Michelle Legro
Photographs: Hector René Membreno-Canales

Fact checker: Matthew Giles
Copy editor: Jacob Gross

Death Rattle: The Body’s Betrayals

Transi tomb, Lula Tahula

Ellen-Wayland Smith | Longreads | March 2018 | 15 minutes (4,127 words)

One morning about a year ago I was sleeping on the sofa in my parents’ apartment when I was woken by the sound of my father dying in the next room.

At first I couldn’t tell what the noise was, or even locate where it was coming from. It was a ragged, scraping sound, like metal being pulled through tightly-packed glass. Then it shifted: like someone breathing in a viscous liquid in greedy gulps, aspirating yogurt. When I realized the noises were coming from my father’s throat, I froze.

According to the hospice manual I had scanned the night before, “death rattle” refers to the sound produced by “the pooling of secretions” in the throat after the body loses its ability to cough them up. “The air passing through the mucus causes this sound,” the booklet instructed me matter-of-factly. This symptom is listed under the rubric “When Death is Near.” Family members of the dying person frequently find this noise upsetting, according to the medical literature. Hospice workers recommend an anti-secretion medicine to dry up the mucous: one syringe-full against the gum.

We had had almost no time to prepare. A mere ten days earlier, my father had gone in to his doctor’s office to pick up the results of a routine scan, which turned out not to be routine at all: stage four pancreatic cancer. His physician, an old family friend, almost teared up when he delivered the news. “It is very difficult for me to say this to you,” he’d begun, gingerly. “Not as difficult as it is for me to hear it,” my father responded. He was 81 but looked much younger: six-foot-two, straight as a poker, salt-and-pepper hair and beard. After a bout with polio when he was 14, he’d never been sick a day in his life. We thought he was invincible.
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Inadvertent Matchmaker Seeks a Love of Her Own

Once upon a time, in a gritty, rent-stabilized land called the East Village of the late ’90s and early aughts, I introduced all my smart, interesting, kind, funny, straight guy friends to all my smart, interesting, kind, funny, straight girl friends, and they all got married and lived happily ever after.

This is the story of how I came to be known, far and wide, as the “East Village Yenta.”

Introducing people IRL — old school — was considered to be something of a major mitzvah even in those days. One of the harsher ironies of living in New York City has always been that even with the crushing multitudes of people, it can be incredibly lonely. It can seem impossible to find a mate. If you think meeting someone in New York City is hard now, I promise you, it was infinitely harder in the days before Facebook and Instagram and other social media made it standard to know pretty much everything about a person before ever meeting them.

So many single people, but so little context for knowing who was single, or for simply introducing yourself and striking up a conversation. How would you know whether the cute guy on the other side of the horseshoe bar at Vazac’s, who sort of smiled at you, or the one playing pool at Sophie’s, had a girlfriend? Or a boyfriend? Or if his relationship status might fall into the category of “It’s complicated?” In those days, it was particularly helpful to have an informed human vector pointing you in the direction of that special someone.

For a handful of couples in my East Village days, I was that vector. I tried to be subtle about it, creating low-stakes alternatives to that invariably awkward, inhumane fix-up standby, the blind date. I’d throw big parties, cramming forty or more guests into my un-renovated run-down East 13th Street tenement, for the express purpose of introducing just two of them in a low-key, dignified manner. I’d sneak a surprise guest into the exclusive weekly poker game I was part of, or into casual dinners with the group I came to think of as my East Village family, at 7A, or at one of the cheap sushi places in the neighborhood.

Sometimes I acted on my instincts almost unconsciously, making a last-minute phone call to invite someone along to a bar where I was meeting others, and it would invariably lead to a love connection. But in all situations, whether I was acting deliberately or inadvertently, there was one constant: I was always the one person in the room who knew both parties.

* * *

Mine was a full-service matchmaking enterprise. Not only would I introduce my friends, but in some cases, early in their courtships, before both parties were ready to considered themselves part of an “item,” I’d even chaperone them. Sure, I’ll be a third wheel on your road trip to a sleep-inducing community theater production of The Cherry Orchard in Bristol, Pennsylvania so that you don’t have to call it a “date.” Also included in the package was relationship advice for the unattached and lovelorn, which I’d provide for free. Ironic, considering that I myself was pretty consistently unattached and lovelorn, living, as I did, on a perpetual emotional roller coaster ride, courtesy of a coterie of ambivalent man-children, most of whom were complete jerks.

Occasionally my friends would try to return the favor. But while I loved introducing couples, I, myself, hated being fixed up. First of all, none of my friends were insecure or co-dependent enough to go to the ridiculous trouble I had for them, so awkward blind dates seemed to be the only option.

Second of all, in most cases, they wanted to introduce me exclusively to short dudes they had no one else to set up with. I’m a hair under five feet myself, so I’m not in any position to rule anyone out based on their height. But that’s not what this was about. I never had a problem with short guys. I dated men who were 5’2” and 5’3”. I also dated guys who were over six feet. The problem wasn’t the men’s lack of stature. The problem was, more often than not, it was the only thing we had in common. Having already logged more than my share of meals with short men who had no sense of humor, or had never read a book, I just wasn’t interested.

Third of all, in the cases where my friends did have great guys of any height that they wanted me to meet, I was forced to confront my aversion to…great guys of any height. No, not for me, the smart, interesting, kind, funny type! Let the other girls have them! I was in the market for a different breed of suitor: the rakishly cute, brooding, unreliable, sometimes mean, always broke, and decidedly broken species known as The Beautiful Mess, native to regions like the ’90s East Village. The anti-suitor. As if it isn’t already difficult enough in New York City to find someone to settle down with; try limiting yourself to the ones who are just not that into settling down. Or you. Or both. Stubbornly, I clung to this ridiculous preference way past the age when most women outgrow it.

If I was stuck in that groove way longer than I should have been, I hold New York City somewhat accountable. It provided me with too many compelling distractions from my misery and loneliness. New York is often anthropomorphized as a bad boyfriend who’s both hard to keep and hard to leave. But for me New York was more like my gay boyfriend, who wasn’t going to give me certain things you’d want in a relationship, but who would comfort me and cheer me up with shiny diversions when I most needed it. So much to see! Art, music, street fashion, architecture, crazy tourists. I’d walk around the lower tip of Manhattan on a Sunday afternoon after a bad date Saturday night, intrigued at every turn — interesting buildings, shops, a veritable UN of cuisines, people, people, people. The blessed profusion of variety tranquilized me. Afterward, my mind could remain occupied and my spirits high, at least until the man-child du jour would do or say something just subtly rejecting enough to throw me off balance. Where another woman might recognize this as a good stop to get off that train, I’d instead expend tremendous energy trying to decipher the mixed messages, and contorting myself into someone I imagined they’d be more interested in.

* * *

The people around me got tired of my tedious suffering before I did. The last straw was my 34th birthday dinner friends put together for me in October, 1999 at Jules on St. Marks Place. Bill, the on-again-off-again boyfriend I was, for some reason, living with at the time, had said no when I asked if he wanted to join my birthday celebration. My friends wouldn’t stand for it, though. They took matters into their own hands, calling Bill and persuading him to surprise me at the restaurant for cake.

Dinner and dessert came and went. We sat and sat. I wondered why my friends all kept looking to the door but not getting up and heading toward it. My friend Donna grabbed her Nokia cell phone and stepped outside. No one spoke. When Donna came back in, she couldn’t hide her anger.

“Bill is blowing us off,” she said. “He said he was going to surprise you and come for dessert. I’m so sorry, Sari.”

I hung in with Bill for another seven or eight months. I avoided my friends. I didn’t want to be lectured. I was crumbling inside, and I didn’t want them to see. And I wasn’t ready to walk away.

It hadn’t occurred to me that my friends might have been avoiding me, too.

“Buttons,” my friend Kevin said to me when I called him one afternoon — he was using one of his many affectionate nicknames for me — “I don’t know if you’ve noticed that I haven’t been spending so much time with you these days. It’s just that I can’t watch anymore as you put yourself through the ringer with guys like Bill. I can’t watch you as you keep staying.”

After a moment, I said, “I’m working on it, Kevin.” It came out more defensive than I wanted, but I didn’t know how to fix that, and I couldn’t say more words without crying. As soon as we hung up, the tears came rushing.

What Kevin had said hurt so much, but it was what I needed to hear. It was one of the most important things anyone has ever said to me.

It got me to dump Bill for good, and to then find myself a good New York shrink. And while I was busy getting my shit together, I made my next match, almost inadvertently.

I got a call from a guy I knew who’d moved from New York to Montréal the year before. His girlfriend, a lovely young woman I’d met at their going-away party across town at the Ear Inn, was now moving back to New York City. Without him. They’d broken up. Her name was Emily, and she was this pixie-ish, booksish dancer who also liked to write. She said she had just begun her first novel.

Emily was looking for a room to rent, and it so happened my friend Dave was looking for a roommate. I called them both and invited them to meet me for dinner at Jeoaldo, the cheap sushi place on East Fourth. When I hung up, the gears in my brain started turning. I made a third phone call, this one to Kevin.

Kevin and Emily married two years later.

As a daughter of clergy who rejects religion, I probably have no business invoking a Jewish adage about matchmakers. But it’s said that if you introduce three couples who go on to marry, a place is reserved for you at the highest level of Heaven. (Of course Jewish Heaven has different levels that you have to strive toward!) Kevin and Emily were couple number three for me.

Was it just a coincidence that after I introduced them — and, granted, after $20,000 worth of shrink sessions — that I then found my mate? That job I had to contract out; Nerve Personals served as my yenta — with the help of my gay boyfriend, New York City.

After we’d communicated intermittently on Nerve Personals for about six months but never met, I spotted Brian on East 7th Street, between Avenues C and D one morning when I was out jogging. He was standing behind his car, making sure it was outside the no-parking zone in front of a church entrance. I recognized him from his dating profile photo, and had enough context, obviously, to know he was single and in the market for a girlfriend. So, I said hello.

On February 5th, 2018, we celebrated our 13th wedding anniversary.

I’ll be forever grateful to New York City and its Alternate Side Parking Rules, and to Nerve Personals. And to Kevin, for a gift even greater than the mitzvah of matchmaking.

The Month of Giving Dangerously

Illustration by Stephanie Kubo

Elizabeth Greenwood | Longreads | January 2018 | 25 minutes (6,900 words)

Another fit of insomnia. I reach for a book I’ve read before, in times both happy and sad: Sharon Salzberg’s Lovingkindness. I open at random to a chapter toward the end, on the subject of generosity. “When a strong urge comes up in my mind to give something — even though the next fifty thoughts may be ‘Oh, no, I can’t do that. I might need it!’— I give it,” Salzberg writes. “Even if fear or other considerations come up, my resolve is to honor that first impulse to give.” As I read these lines, my heart seizes. Something in this passage contained the remedy I’d been craving because everything in my life felt as if it was contracting.

My first book was hot off the presses. I’d heard about the cruel process from other authors: You expect your life to change dramatically. This will not happen. There will be a short-lived flurry of attention and things will go back to normal. I steeled myself, but a part of me thought maybe they are wrong. Maybe my life will change!

 Dear reader, I am here to tell you there was no such reversal of fortune. I’d spent the past six years researching people who had faked their deaths and I was back to the drawing board. Typically, I would have been teaching several writing classes, but due to the vicissitudes of the adjunct professor labor market I was underemployed, anxious, and blue.

I got a prescription for Klonopin and I started getting acupuncture, which left me weeping on the table for thirty minutes while the poker and her interns assured me this outsized reaction to tiny pinpricks was totally normal. I’d have loved to have indulged in some old-fashioned talk therapy, but my disaster health insurance didn’t cover it. I even tried equine therapy, which I wrote about for a travel magazine, and spent the afternoon corralling two miniature horses in order to learn to trust myself.

I was still questioning whether the choices I’d made over the past few years were worth it if all I had to show for it felt like a big nothing. The luxury of complaining about any of this — I’m a childless, educated woman in America — made it feel all the more shameful. So the cycle compounded. Something needed to change.

Then the election happened. In a confluence of a precipitous adrenalin crash, a gaping daily schedule, limited finances, and a political climate that had everyone adjusting their meds, I was crying almost every day at the pointlessness of it all. My sleepless nights stretched into twos and threes. I wanted to figure out the way I was going to help but had no clue as to how.

That’s when insomnia propelled me to open randomly to Salzberg’s lines about generosity. Something in this challenge to give blindly, to listen to the part of oneself that blithely seeks to contribute, instead of the cacophony of voices concerned with balancing the checkbook. Expanding beyond one’s postage-stamp reality seemed like it could be the antidote to the feelings of scarcity propelling my anxiety.

We all want to give, at least in theory. But when presented the opportunity, we come up with excuses as to why the time is not ripe. We imagine we’ll donate to charities when we are more financially secure. We consider getting up from our subway seat for the weary-looking woman, then demur. As if extending beyond ourselves even slightly will make our precarious balance of time, energy, and emotional resources come crashing down.

So I made a resolution — for the first month of 2017 I would give everything. The rules were simple: If I got the urge to be generous, I’d try to honor it. I would try to do this in every category of giving I could imagine — in time, in money, in undivided attention, in suspending judgment, in forgiveness, in giving people the benefit of a doubt. I’d volunteer, drop dollars in the most dubious panhandlers’ cups, I’d pick up the tab. I’d try to take generous interpretations of others’ baffling behavior, as I take most everything personally. I’d dispense unsolicited praise. For years I’d resisted the urge to invade other New Yorkers’ privacy. No more! I would compliment freely, and they could put my name on a registry if they wished. My great hope for this experiment was to plug back into my life and to brandish a big middle finger to a regime intent on making us feel separate from one another.

Then, just before Christmas, my dog decided to treat herself to a Ziploc of trail mix from my purse. The concoction contained raisins, which are lethal to canines. One $1500 vet bill later I was feeling exceptionally broke. This was the exact moment when excuses are made, when we chicken out. But I’d already committed to my experiment. With utter terror in my heart, I stepped off the ledge. It was time to give dangerously.

Day 1

I wake up in Oakland, having spent a few days with my best friend from college who is tremendously pregnant. Our daily routine consists of binge-watching shows, doing a light activity, and then returning home to rest. I’ve been giving Zoë shoulder rubs all week and paying for whatever she’ll let me — ice cream, gas, Mexican takeout.

What isn’t as easy is lunch with Krista, a longtime family friend, something of a cousin to me. We have a strained relationship and have little in common, but get together when I’m out west due to a misplaced sense of obligation. We were raised high WASP, and the conversation glides along the surface of things like a figure skater. Resentment? What resentment! Isn’t this cheese divine? We meet at a loud, overpriced restaurant in the Ferry Building. We discuss her kids, her “personal brand,” and Marin County real estate, all of which she has achieved. She takes a tone with the busboy when our food takes over half an hour to arrive. When the bill comes, I pick it up, much to her surprise and mine. The total comes to just over a hundred dollars because I tip extra.

I get back on BART in a disassociated state as I often do after spending any amount of time with Krista. Zoë picks me up, and we repair to an outdoor mall, my favorite California institution, and I spend over $200 dollars on various serums and unguents at Sephora. This doesn’t feel like self-care or generosity. This feels like mania.

Day 3

Back in New York I have ten dollars out for the cabbie on the way home from JFK and put two back in my wallet. Shameful. I go to a crowded resolutions-fresh yoga class. I typically set up in the front row, not because I am good at yoga but because I want as few toned yoga bodies in my line of sight as possible. A Lululemon doyenne with the triceps to show for it takes her place to my right, and I wedge into the front corner with the wall to my left. Perfect, I think. Just one other human in my peripheral vision, the rest of the class a jam-packed sweaty moving organism of good intentions. I will really kick this year off right.

Once the sun salutations begin, my neighbor flings her arms out to the side to Namaste the morning. She makes strong contact with me and gives not a nod of apology or acknowledgment. Oh well, I think. Round two, smacks me again! Every New Yorker knows well and good that in a crowded yoga studio you throw your arms up, not out. Round three, full on bopped this time! My heart starts pounding. She’s interrupting my flow with zero regard! After exchanging sweat with this precious soul several more times, and audibly sighing with each brush of her manicured hand, I decide: Fuck it.

I will extend generosity to her by allowing her to hit me. I will offer my body to her as a battering ram for full sun salutation. This requires much deep breathing on my part in lieu of biting her, but I am shifting my mind toward expansive acceptance rather than anger at a person oblivious to my moral outrage. I still want to bite her.

Day 4

I go to work on my laptop at a coffee shop near my house. I usually tip my beloved baristas $1 — and only about half the time, depending on my feelings of poverty that day. I will do this only if the coffee slinger sees me, in the sad hope that maybe she’ll give me an extra shot of espresso for free. But not today! I slip two dollars into the jar while the woman working the counter grabs my drink. She doesn’t even see me do it. I am basically Mother Teresa.

Day 5

The super in my building is a lanky fellow named Junior. He runs a small racket out of the recycling in the basement, distributing cans and bottles to neighborhood vagrants who line up around 10 a.m. every other day, for which I imagine Junior is taking a cut. Since I work from home and walk the dog around this time, I have a front row seat to the cottage industry. Junior will often stop me to kvetch about the weather for a while, then ask me “to hold ten dollars” so he can buy cigarettes. I rarely carry cash as part of an ill-advised ploy to spend less. I instead offer cigarettes from my own aging stash. He refuses, preferring Kools. Today we go through the same rigmarole, and in my wallet, I have a twenty, not a ten. “Here, take this,” I say, my hand quivering in giving over an Andrew Jackson. Junior is pumped and promises to get me back in the next few days. I never see the money again.

If I claimed this was an act of selfless generosity, I’d be lying. Junior lives in the apartment above me and often cares for his toddler granddaughter, whose bedtime is around 1 am. Junior seems to be prepping for his Riverdance audition both day and night. It is not infrequent that I will stomp upstairs after midnight in my housecoat asking in my white girl voice to “Please be mindful, as I am trying to get some sleep.” I’m hoping the crisp $20 will buy me some quiet. It does not.

Day 7

I’ve been meditating for a few years now, and not because I am virtuous. I have to meditate for 15 minutes each day in order to not get arrested. I bust out my meditation technique prior to nerve-wracking situations, like giving a talk. I’ll begin to summon the feeling I’d like to exude, sit on a few couch cushions, take some deep breaths and visualize myself fielding questions and criticisms with a smile and élan.

I’ve been trying the same strategy in the morning for the past week or so to psyche myself up to be generous. I close my eyes, picture an exhausted mother with bratty children entering the subway and see myself magnanimously, selflessly, standing up for her. Other passengers notice my benevolence, maybe even rousing inspiration. I see myself standing aside in line, letting some harried citizen to cut me. The bill comes after a big dinner with friends, and I quietly pick it up. The waitress even writes a small note on the receipt: If only there were more people like you.

But today it isn’t working. Seeing the slideshow of generous events only makes me feel stricken with anxiety, more aware of my limitations.

So I try something different. I instead conjure the feeling of having enough, visualizing what that would look like. I see myself engaged in each moment of my life — the tedious answering of emails, listening to my boyfriend instead of unloading on him, responding to prison letters for my new book project with the utmost care. My bank account doesn’t contain a certain target number, but I engage a feeling of peace toward it. I try to sit in the sensation of having enough, feeling generosity move through me. I am the conduit — the thing I am giving away was never mine in the first place. My chest begins to swell and my limbs experience a pleasant, groggy glow. I feel rooted to the ground in a way that doesn’t seem ponderous. I feel bolstered instead of weighed down.

Rather than picturing myself giving, I reverse engineer the feeling of abundance to make that the baseline for the day. I manage to:

  • Drop off my boyfriend’s bags of detritus that had been lingering in the hallway to Goodwill
  • Respond to all correspondences and queries, even ones I’ve been avoiding
  • Try to be extra nice to all customer service people I speak with, even the trifling representatives of New York Sports Club
  • Give a $20 tip (double the amount I normally would!) to the aesthetician who lasers my bikini line. She basically works with genitals all day and didn’t go to medical school for the privilege.
  • Let my dad lament my failure to procreate without rebuff
  • Drop $1 bills into four different panhandler’s cups

I felt a little surge, a little electrical current of belonging, each time. Belonging to what? I’m not quite sure, but it was something bigger than my own plight.

Day 8

There’s a homeless woman who sits in front of the falafel place near my boyfriend’s apartment. I can understand the words she says individually, but collectively they make no sense. She has a kindly way about her, so I call her Eunice.

Today I pack up a sack of food to give her on my way to the gym — clementines, granola bars, bananas, trail mix — a cornucopia of organic Brooklyn fare. I hand it to her, and she is gracious. I see her carefully stuff it into the innards of several bags nestled inside one another like skins. She smiles, I smile back. She thanks me, and I say “you’re welcome.” It’s all so easy. I could do this every day. I am a motherfucking saint.

On my way back to Scott’s building, I see his neighbor. She’s wheeling a little grocery cart, closes in on Eunice, and…she’s giving it to her! Goddamn her! Here’s something Eunice can actually use! I was supposed to be the good person today, and here she goes, showing me up.

Perhaps I still have a few dark and petty corners where the light of generosity could give a good scrub.

Day 11

I have volunteered to subject myself to something called MulchFest.

It’s Sunday. I’m hungover, it’s freezing, and Scott is sprawled out on the couch with coffee and The New York Times. I sit with him and debate the relative merits of submitting myself to the elements, and to the perky knowingness of the Park Slope canvas bag-toting crowd. Scott is from the Midwest and believes that life should be difficult. I put on two pairs of socks and my heaviest coat and head out.

I’m several hours late and somebody in a neon pinafore hands me a clicker counter to tick off the trees as they get mulched. I have the overwhelming urge to punch my thumb down, to feel the satisfying click click click but know this will irretrievably fuck up the count. So I stand at attention, desperately resisting the urge to pull out my phone and appear occupied. The point of MulchFest, I have decided, is to commune with my surroundings, my neighbors, to behold the circle of life as manifested by browning pine needles, the melancholy stench of decomposition signaling the promise of a new year. A fellow who looks to me like a human hacky sack sees me with my brow furrowed and waiting to count trees that never arrive. Everyone is still at lunch, he informs me. I return the clicker and he gently ushers me over to a little white tent and presents me with a new task: creating pine sachets from freshly mulched trees to distribute to park patrons.

For years I’d resisted the urge to invade other New Yorkers’ privacy. No more! I would compliment freely. They could put my name on a registry if they wished.

The rhythm of dipping a trowel into the needles and tying off the bag is lulling, relaxing. I merchandise my wares attractively on a card table. Park goers stop by and ask, “May I take one?” “Take TWO!” I implore, “and a snack!” chucking an apple and a granola bar at them. I am giving people something they want, for free, something crafted by these two hands. I’m loving this. An hour and a half passes and it feels like but a moment. I’m in love with Brooklyn, with humanity.

I once dated a journalist who never stopped giving — to strangers, to the less fortunate, to people he was writing about, mostly. Every Sunday morning, Rob would throw back the comforter and go to prepare lunch for homeless people in a church basement. He became close with one of the regulars, helping him advocate to get his VA benefits reinstated, putting his name on housing lottery lists, taking him to doctor’s appointments for his chronic pain. Rob was widely regarded as someone who would interrupt his life for the benefit of others, one of the most generous people anyone had ever known. But I could never get him to open up to me, not in any deepening intimacy. A frustrating part of our relationship was how his service made him somehow unimpeachable.

To whom are we generous, and why? For Rob, caring for strangers came second nature. For me, not so much. Looking back, I think Rob threw himself into others because he was a little scared of his own life, and of people getting close. Giving, for him, was, in part, a way to hide. This is an ungenerous interpretation, I realize — but on which side of the ledger does our giving fall? And who is keeping score?

Day 12

The worst words a New Yorker can hear on the subway: What time is it? SHOWTIME! Out-of-town visitors film the acrobatics with glee while I contract further into myself. I give a dollar to Showtime, which I loathe. But giving the dollar somehow makes me loathe them less.

Day 15

I am still meditating in my new style, conjuring a sense of abundance. The phrase that came to me today was “less afraid.” In that tiny moment in the morning, I certainly feel a wash of quiet confidence. Getting up off my meditation cushion, well, that’s a different story.

Day 18

I understand my little experiment is made possible by the fact of my privileges: I enjoy a degree of freedom and mobility unknown any time in previous human history. I am in charge of keeping alive no one but myself and a 15-pound dog. My career choices may not pay in money, but I am wealthy in time, flexibility, and multiple breakfasts. I’m healthy and able-bodied. Perhaps my generosity experiment is a foray into a kind of first-world problem, manufacturing a false sense of adversity. What would, say, a single mom think of my enterprise? I ask the best one I know: my own.

I give her a call and explain the project. “What would you have said to somebody embarking on such a journey back when my sister and I were younger?”

“Well, I can tell you what I would’ve thought,” she says laughing with the irreverence that is my genetic inheritance. “My whole life is about being generous to my children. I use up my finite supply of generosity in keeping the household together.” It’s true. I remember her falling asleep on the couch by 9 p.m. every night of my childhood.

“But generosity can also be about receiving, allowing others to be generous to you,” I counter.

“When I was raising you guys, I had to convince myself of my own strength. I had to get into the mindset that I was capable of doing this on my own. If the spark plug went out on the lawnmower, then I needed to know how to fix it myself.”

Then she tells me something I didn’t know: “I also felt so alone, and I didn’t want to depend on anyone else. And then you start to build up walls, and even a martyr complex, like, ‘I’m the good responsible one, I have to be sensible.’”

“It does seem we expect more automatic generosity from women, and are then delightfully surprised when men go beyond themselves, huh?” I say.

“Hell, yes! Women are always putting other people first. All our energy goes into other people. Think about Grammy, her life was cut short because of it,” my mom says breathlessly. My grandmother had three kids, a paraplegic husband, a rural mail route as a postal worker, her elderly parents across the street, a dozen grandchildren, and innumerable wayward souls she cared for. She literally worked herself to death.

“If you could go back in time, what generosity would you have offered yourself?” I ask.

“I would’ve just allowed myself to take more time for me, I suppose. I could’ve hired a babysitter for the night, but that seemed unthinkable. Same too with little splurges, like a facial or a massage. Those lines just seemed so clear to me then, and I couldn’t cross them. It’s not selfish to take care of yourself.” she says. 

Day 20

One of the greatest generosities I’ve known is when strangers reach out to let me know they’ve enjoyed my book. This means more to me than any review or professional accolade; it buoys me during the rough times and makes my whole day. I think about how many books I’ve devoured and recommended to anyone who will listen — save the author. So today I send laudatory notes, thanking writers whose work has meant much to me.

When you truly love something, there is nothing easier or more natural in the world than to say so. I write my friend Amitava, letting him know I will teach his essay about performing Hindu burial rites for his mother, and how moving I found his recollection. I send an earnest letter of gratitude to a beloved actress thanking her for a recent personal essay she wrote about her relationship with reviews, and how it made me feel less alone. I write an Irish fellow about how much I enjoyed an excerpt of his book. Though it feels a bit awkward to telegraph admiration to total strangers, the feeling of lift far outweighs the embarrassment. It feels like an unburdening.

Day 21

Generosity, thus far, has proved illuminating when giving comes easily — giving compliments, sending texts to friends trying to brighten their day, in little gestures like getting up to offer a lady in nurse’s scrubs my subway seat.

But money is where I am stuck. Scarcity is the heart of my fear. Being in deep student loan debt and in precarious employment, my inner monologue is a stream of calculations, always trying to suss out how many more months I can exist in New York. Instead of getting a real handle on my finances, like by following a budget, I adhere to Coinstar, consigning clothes, cooking big batches of chili to eat throughout the week, and prayer.

So today I decide to give away money. I send $10 to a friend of a friend’s GoFundMe to help replace clothes and furniture lost in a fire. I then notice more calls for help which I skillfully tend to ignore — $10 to a friend’s sister’s boyfriend’s sister’s fundraiser to get a seeing-eye dog, $10 to my second cousin who wants to record a demo of songs. And because we live in end times I send $10 to the ACLU, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and Planned Parenthood. Then I give a whopping $50 to WNYC because it’s pledge drive time and every little bit helps. That’s $110 in total. Turns out that donating via the internet is pretty much like any kind of online shopping: You end up spending far more than you would if the cold currency were to physically depart from your wallet.

By evening I receive an email from a former tutoring client about starting sessions with her younger son, and another query about subletting my room. Did parting with my funds send a rupture of wealth through the universe? Did I just manifest money by giving it away? Steeped in the culture of The Secret and living in late capitalism, it’s tough to imagine giving without getting anything back in return. Does this mean my project is sullied?

Day 24

I decide to take this line of inquiry to somebody who may know. I meet Richard Bascetta, a senior Buddhist teacher at the Shambhala Center of New York, for coffee. He’s a bit of a silver fox and wears cool square-framed glasses. I explain my project and my query — how can we give selflessly without expecting anything back? Since this giving thing has been feeling pretty good, is it okay to use generosity as a panacea to feeling bad?

Richard has lived in New York and practiced Buddhism here for decades, and realizes generosity’s challenges: “In this environment, we are fighting for space, for money, for status, for a fear of not having that money and status. People come here to accomplish. I’m sure you’re a good writer, but there are at least a hundred people here who are as good or better.” Damn, Richard.

To whom are we generous, and why? For Rob, caring for strangers came second nature. I think Rob threw himself into others because he was a little scared of his own life, and of people getting close.

“Our inertia typically prevents us from acting for others,” he says, his eyes never wavering from my gaze. “We buffer ourselves through our lives. Through parenting, running a business, careers, chasing one love after another, our anger — whatever buffers us from the rawness of the moment. The more layers we put on like an itchy coat, the more difficult it is to access a sense of generosity. Generosity, in its most powerful form, is breaking through the inertia.”

Richard tells me that a few years back he started carrying a stack of ones in his front pocket. Each time he’d pass a panhandler or street musician whose tunes he admired, he’d drop a dollar in their cup. But lately, he’s been pulling his hand back. And he’s not sure why. “It’s been a pinching reminder that I’m compromising my original intention—to give regardless of my inner commentary about the person,” he says. But he doesn’t see this as all bad: “It’s given me the chance to reflect and see how my judgments get in the way and clog the flow of generosity.”

Richard assures me this is okay, because the benefit of generosity — beyond how good it feels, beyond helping someone else — is that it reveals to us where we are stuck. “We are working with that resistance. Where does that mistrust and worry reside in you? That’s the investigation.”

Buddhists believe that one moment of presence is a moment of enlightenment. And when I think back over the past month, I see I’ve built a repository of these moments: connecting with Eunice before I was shown up; becoming hypnotized by the rhythm of filling a cloth bag with pine needles; hearing about a time in my mom’s life that was a struggle. Enlightenment is a distant shore for me but these moments are undeniably fractals of a larger mosaic.

Day 27

On Inauguration Day I take a train to Philadelphia to rendezvous with my sister, mom, and aunt, where we will set out for the Women’s March before dawn the next day. I expect to have many opportunities to exercise generosity, what with thousands of strangers vying for catharsis and a bathroom. The last time I saw my sister was over Christmas, when she called me a sausage, referring to the growing weight differential between us. I close my eyes on the train and silently release that hardened gem of hurt. The release is more gestural than actual, a bit of fake-it-till-you-make-it.

Day 28

We are on the road and our excitement swells as we pass dozens of charter buses at rest stops and see pink floppy hats all around. But when we go to drop our bags at our hotel, it hits me. The inauguration crowd is still in town. Staying at our Marriott Courtyard just outside the Pentagon are not only protesters of the new regime but supporters as well. I see whole families decked out in matching red hats and commemorative t-shirts. My body seizes up. I actually feel terrified of these people, even though I think the fear is irrational. I’d been envisioning practicing my giving toward allies, my family, people as outraged as me. Now I have to dive deep into the wells of whatever reserves of compassion I’ve been cultivating over the month toward my perceived enemies. How can I engage those from the other side? What will be my part in making things better? I decide today will be about extending generosity to these folks, to people who took off work and spent their hard-earned money to bear witness and lend their enthusiasm to the installation of our new president.

The march itself is magical, and exhausting, and inspiring. I behold so much generosity around me: There are people passing around bags of trail mix and carrot sticks; people creating a human microphone to reunite a lost child with her mother; there are cops and medics rushing to help the fallen in the crush of humans. But what impresses me most about the day is the new reality we live in. I feel safe and secure in the sea of witty signs and like-minded representatives of the popular vote. But the second we break away and walk along the Mall we pass more Trump supporters. What would my generosity even look like to them? Would it register? Right now the most generous thing I can do is to not push them into traffic on Independence Avenue. But I think about a quote, supposedly from the Dalai Lama: “If you can, help others; if you cannot do that, at least do not harm them.”

As we walk back across the bridge toward Arlington Cemetery, where my grandfather, a veteran of World War II and Korea is buried, I lag behind. The day is gray, thick, and unseasonably warm. We are all hungry and cranky, legs achy from standing for hours. In the distance, I see a pack of white boys in red caps walking toward us. My body responds before my brain, sensing a threat. They pass my mom and sister, who are still wearing their pink hats, ahead of me. I took mine off when we left the March because I am an actual pussy, fearful a Trump supporter would hurl an epithet or punch me in the face. When I catch up with them, my mom and sister seem shaken and tired, trying to be stoic.

“They called us ‘clits,’” my mom says, shaking her head.

Now my limbic system is just confused, outraged that these assholes would dare speak to anyone, let alone two women. But I’m doubly confused because “clit” is perhaps the most bizarre term they could have lobbed. “They wouldn’t know where to locate one on a human female!” I counter. I try to make light of it, but we are all on edge.

Back at the hotel, the air conditioning is blasting and we devour our burgers. More white people are milling around in stars-and-stripes gear. It occurs to me I have a choice. I can treat all of these people as a monolith of hatred and ignorance, or try to see them as individuals. The results are nothing stunning: I allow a Trump-supporting couple to enter the elevator ahead of me. I move my bag at breakfast the next morning so a teenage girl in a red cap can sit down. I leave a tip for the housekeeper, her political affiliations unknown. I let the same Trump-supporting couple board the airport courtesy van first. It doesn’t matter, we’re all going to the same place anyway.

***

The month ends. By my count I’ve given away 19 subway seats, picked up the check at dinner and drinks half a dozen times, sent 36 “I just called to say I love you” texts to friends, sent $320 dollars to different fundraisers and organizations, given $47 to the homeless, and spent 15 hours of my life volunteering. I’ve let Scott’s innocent yet potentially inflammatory comments slide more times than my ego is comfortable with. I bought coffee and a sandwich for my ex without sending a Venmo request for the privilege. I traveled to distant neighborhoods to meet friends for dinner closer to where they live. I’ve left notes in Scott’s pockets for him to discover during the day. I’ve bought bouquets of flowers to bestow upon unsuspecting pals. I’ve done nothing but listen on the phone, seated, taking it in, when usually doing household chores simultaneously. I’ve stayed past my office hours to meet a student who was freaking out about an assignment. I’ve sent e-books to a friend to use while nursing. I’ve been generous to myself by wearing the good underwear at the back of my drawer that I save for a special occasion that never comes. I’ve tried to do only one thing at a time.

We buffer ourselves through our lives. Through parenting, running a business, chasing one love after another — whatever buffers us from the rawness of the moment. The more layers we put on, the more difficult it is to access a sense of generosity.

But the experiment doesn’t feel like it’s over — I didn’t do this perfectly. There were times when I grabbed a subway seat like manifest destiny. There was a time I decided to get offended by a friend’s offhanded remark. I spent an afternoon at the Brooklyn Food Bank silently cursing the project director, who I took to be an imperious asshole. I noticed I have the hardest time letting things slide from the people closest to me. Like Richard said, examining oneself through the lens of generosity can be illuminating. At the beginning of the month I was listing all my generous acts. But by the end of the month, I was listing opportunities to be generous that I didn’t take up. Those moments taught me more about myself. Instead of feeling defeated by my imperfection, I feel curious, inspired even.

You make yourself vulnerable by making an offering the other may or may not take. You extend yourself in giving praise, attention, patience. You let the other in. You see the sky does not fall. You do it again. Giving becomes easier. Defensiveness can soften because you’re not fighting to preserve what little you feel you have to protect. From the constant gnaw of scarcity, you realize there is enough.

I’m still grouchy as hell. But I’ve found giving to be the easiest, quickest, even cheapest way to feel good, better than therapy, equine or otherwise. If I want to reset the chemistry of my brain on a particularly down day, I’ll just try to listen to what someone is telling me. I’ll text friends telling them how much I adore them. I’ll buy coffee for the person behind me in line. And a little bit of the weight lifts.

When I think back to the first day of my experiment, when I endured and paid for a frustrating lunch with Krista, I see it differently now. The truest generosity I could’ve offered wouldn’t have been in picking up the tab, but in looking directly in her eyes and meeting her where she is, where we all are: imperfect, flawed, all-too-human, locked into our own stories of what is going on, the only story we understand to be true. For all I know, she had to do deep breathing just to be around me.

I haven’t mastered generosity and the fearlessness that comes with it. But I’ve touched it in moments. I want to experience more of those moments. And because life always gives us a heaping helping of stress and awkward lunches and unexpected vet bills, I know I will have more to do. Because I didn’t die this month, nor did I go into the poorhouse, nor did I feel overextended. Instead, I felt connected. Instead of feeling overwhelmed by how much further I have to go, I feel ready. Instead of feeling stretched thin, I feel full.

***

Elizabeth Greenwood is the author of Playing Dead: A Journey Through the World of Death Fraud, a nonfiction book about people who have faked their deaths.

 

The Itch and the Touch

(Alessia Pederzoli / Getty)
 Evan Lavender-Smith | The Southern Review | Fall 2017 | 37 minutes (10,132 words)

I.

Mom called last night to say that when she and my brother went to Good Sam’s yesterday, they found Grandpa John totally naked in the bathroom, his butt basically stuck in the toilet seat, unable to get up, and it was a good thing my brother was with her, Mom said, because dealing with her father when he’s naked is one thing she just can’t bring herself to do. “I can’t deal with his penis,” she said. I told her that I understood, which I do, as often, in recent years, when I’ve been in the position of having to deal with his penis myself, I’ve thought the very same thing, viz., “I can’t deal with his penis.” Mom said that she went into the other room — Grandpa John’s bedroom / dining room / living room — while my brother and a nurse hoisted him from the toilet seat, cleaned him up, and got him dressed. Mom was trying not to cry while describing this scene to me, I could tell; I believe Mom fears crying while talking on the phone with me, worried that if she were to cry, I might get annoyed. Apparently, I am content allowing her to believe that I would get annoyed were she to cry, so she doesn’t. When Grandpa John dies, a death which his GP has suggested is now imminent, I have no doubt that Mom will cry while relating the news to me, but it remains to be seen whether I will or will not get annoyed.

***

Over the past few years I’ve spent a lot of time at Good Sam’s with Grandpa John. A primary topic of discussion has been Grandpa John’s so-called itch.

“How are you feeling today, Grandpa John?” I’ve often asked him.

“Not good,” he’s often replied. “It’s this damn itch again.”

We’ve taken him to several doctors to see what can be done about the itch. When the doctor asks Grandpa John to describe his symptoms, Grandpa John replies thus: “I itch!” And when the doctor asks him to elaborate, thus: “Everywhere! All the time!”

We took him to a dermatologist who told us we ought to see a neurologist. We took him to a neurologist who told us we ought to see a dermatologist.

Grandpa John’s GP finally told me there’s no reason he should be so itchy all the time. She pulled me aside in the exam room to say, “I’m convinced that the itchiness is all in his head. You might consider taking him to see a psychologist.”

“A psychologist!” Grandpa John said, riding shotgun in the minivan on the drive from the GP’s back to Good Sam’s. “But it’s an itch!”

“I’m just telling you what the doctor told me.”

“Do you know what doctors do? Evan, do you know what doctors do?”

“They practice.”

“You’re goddamn right they practice,” he said. “And that’s all they do.”

I suggested that maybe we should give the topical route another go, maybe stop off at Walmart and try to find something there, as none of the various pills he’d been prescribed had seemed to have any effect on curbing the itch.

In the Walmart parking lot, Grandpa John turned to regard me with his amber fit-over sunglasses. “I’ll wait here,” he said. He fished in his wallet, handed me a one-dollar bill.

“Generic, then. Travel size. Good. We’ll see how it works and go from there.”

In his lenses my reflection remained still for a long moment. He fished in his wallet again, pulled out a hundred. “Don’t bring back any change.”

Standing shirtless in his kitchenette later that afternoon, with his arms raised as high as he could get them, Grandpa John said, “You’ve got to get the whole back. And get it low. Yes, like that. Get it lower. Here.” He unbuckled his belt, pulled his pants and underwear all the way down. “Get the cheeks. Get all over the cheeks and then hit the tops of the legs, the fronts and the backs. Get everywhere. And get the crack. Get it good. Yes, like that. Use the whole bottle, we’ve got ten more. We’re going to snuff out this itch if it’s the last thing we do.”

“Grandpa John told me you cured the itch,” Mom said to me on the phone that night. “I can’t believe it. All those doctors! What’s this special itch ointment you found? He said it was expensive.”

“Johnson’s Baby Oil. I bought a hundred dollars’ worth. No itch-relieving properties whatsoever.”

“I don’t understand,” Mom said.

“I think he just wants to be touched.”

“Touched?”

“He’s already got me penciled in for an hour and a half tomorrow, between church and poker.”

“Gosh,” Mom said, struggling to suppress a laugh, “it must be hell getting old, right?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. “Nude massage sounds pretty good to me.”

“Evan, I appreciate you so much. And so does he. And so does the itch, I’m sure.”

“Yeah, right,” I said. “The itch.”

***

On the days I drive over to Good Sam’s I always take a few minutes to come up with a list of things to talk about to which I can later refer while Grandpa John sits in his reclining chair staring at me blankly. Driving over earlier today — the A/C on full blast, fending off yet another sweltering New Mexican early-November afternoon — I considered the possibility of discussing the Republicans’ foreboding sweep of the midterm elections; my predictions for the upcoming Panthers-Eagles Monday Night Football game; my son’s lack of progress at piano; my daughter’s enrollment in hip-hop dance class; the Yankees’ qualifying offer to D-Rob and the likelihood that he would turn it down; the comical nature of our family’s recent trip to the annual Renaissance Faire; the comical nature of our family’s continued failures to housebreak our new puppy; and, if Grandpa John seemed up for it, Mom’s newly established plan for moving him from his assisted-living place at Good Sam’s over to long-term care at a local nursing home called The Aristocrat. My mental list of conversational possibilities would generally consist of even more items, maybe a dozen or so, but my son and daughter, who’d agreed to accompany me to Good Sam’s this afternoon, would serve, I hoped, as they had during past visits, as readily available means of conversational diversion were things to get silent and awkward between Grandpa John and me, or, were Grandpa John in an especially bad mood — were things to get combative between us, as they occasionally do — as conversational wedges, conversational shields.

“So,” I asked the kids, lowering the driver’s side visor to spare my eyes the afternoon sun’s harsh glare, “what are you guys going to talk about with Grandpa John?”

“Probably politics and stuff,” my son said.

“Probably just football and stuff,” my daughter said.

“Not good. Instead, I should like for you,” I said to my son, “to talk to him about stuff besides politics, because I’ve already decided that I’m going to talk to him about politics, especially about the midterm election results, and, besides, you don’t really know anything about politics. And you,” I said to my daughter, “I want you to talk to him about something besides football, because everybody knows you hate football, and because I’ve already got some stuff planned to talk to him about, about football.”

“So what should we talk to him about then?” my son asked.

“Yeah,” my daughter asked, “what should we talk to him about then?”

“What you guys should do is try to think of stuff to talk about that’s going to make Grandpa John feel better about dying,” I said. “Try to come up with stuff about what it’s like to be a kid, to encourage Grandpa John to conjure up images from his childhood and reflect on them with feelings of satisfaction and contentment about a life lived completely. Maybe think about something that happened recently on the playground at school, or in the cafeteria, or in the classroom, or at PE or something. Poignant interactions with other kids, your frustration with curricular requirements, the developmental travails of prepubescence. Something you did that got you in trouble. I know Grandpa John used to get in all sorts of trouble when he was a kid.”

“He did?” my daughter asked. “Like what sort of trouble?”

“Yeah,” my son asked, “what sorts of things did Grandpa John do to get into trouble when he was kid?”

“Talking in class, forgetting his backpack at home,” I said. “Not taking the puppy for long enough walks in the evening.”

“What kind of puppy did Grandpa John have when he was a kid?” my daughter asked.

“Yeah,” my son asked, “what kind of puppy did Grandpa John have when he was a kid?”

“I don’t remember. Maybe a Yorkshire terrier?”

“A Yorkie? You mean like Bucky?”

“That’s right. His puppy was the exact same breed as Bucky.”

“Cool,” my son said.

“Yeah,” my daughter said, “cool.”

“Not so cool, actually. If I remember correctly, Grandpa John’s Yorkie died at a very young age. Nobody ever took it for long enough walks in the evenings so its muscles atrophied and it just sort of withered away. Please don’t mention that to Grandpa John, though. I know he’s worked hard to forget it.”

A stoplight ahead of us turned red. I decelerated, bringing the minivan to a halt. None of us spoke for the duration of the red light.

After we’d started moving again, my daughter said, solemnly, “I’m going to take Bucky for a really long walk tonight.”

I scanned the rearview mirror to find that my son’s face had flushed red. “Dad,” he said, also solemnly, “I think we ought to take Bucky on a really long walk tonight.”

***

the old man and the outhouse

(as recently narrated to me, for the umpteenth time, by Grandpa John)

Can’t remember who he was, some old geezer from the neighborhood. I’m ten, see, eleven, still in my short pants. The old man’s trudging up the hill to the outhouse on his way to take his morning dump, newspaper in one hand, roll of tissue paper in the other. And I’m in the mulberry bushes with my buddies, see, watching, hiding out. And then I says to them, after the old man shuts the door behind him, I says to my buddies, real quiet-like, “OK, boys, now let’s tip the shit house over with the old man inside.”

***

Did Grandpa John have a dog as a kid? The image I have of Grandpa John’s father, given the former’s disturbing tales of abuse suffered at the latter’s hand, the intensity and immediacy of which has always been compounded by Grandpa John’s fondness for the historical present, does not at all jibe with the image of a yapping puppy running around the house. I guess I could imagine them owning a Doberman pinscher or a pit bull, maybe a German shepherd. I suspect that Grandpa John became a serious dog person only later in life, after his wife, my grandmother, the mortally emphysemic Grandma Blanche, died. While Grandpa John is not the type of man to admit of such a correlation — I can’t hear him saying, “Daily cuddles with this shih tzu eases the pain and anxiety associated with the unfortunate early passing of the love of my life” — it seemed obvious enough: during the twenty or so years intervening between Grandma Blanche’s death and Grandpa John’s matriculation at Good Sam’s, he was to be found without a canine cuddling companion for never more than a few days, that being the amount of time it took to have someone come in and dispose of the old dog’s dead body and then have someone else come in with an assortment of new puppies from which Grandpa John would proceed to make an unceremonious and often ill-advised selection.

What you guys should do is try to think of stuff to talk about that’s going to make Grandpa John feel better about dying.

No pets allowed at Good Sam’s, however. With Grandpa John’s escalating depression and his fondness for super cute dogs near to our minds, we decided, a couple of weeks back — associating Grandpa John’s contentedness, even Grandpa John’s happiness, with Grandpa John’s proximity to a real puppy’s wet nose and a real puppy’s rough tongue and a real puppy’s real soft puppy fur, as opposed to these things’ mere photographic representation all over the walls of Grandpa John’s bedroom / dining room / living room — to smuggle our new puppy into Grandpa John’s apartment at Good Sam’s. But, alas, Bucky’s little contraband nails kept puncturing the heavily bruised, grotesquely translucent, tissue-thin skin on Grandpa John’s hands and arms and cheeks. “Your puppy’s claws and my old-man skin aren’t the best of bedfellows,” Grandpa John said. He sat in his recliner, lesions along his arms oozing dark blood, Band-Aid wrappers strewn across his lap.

“They’re not claws, silly,” my daughter said. “They’re fingernails.”

“They’re not fingernails, stupid,” my son said. “They’re pawnails.”

“Nails, claws, whatever. Words don’t matter,” I said. “What matters is Buck’s tearing the shit out of Grandpa John’s old-man skin. Now, you two, put down your iPads and get him off.”

Grandpa John, bleeding, said, “Buck.” He stroked Bucky’s back, giggling.

“That’s right,” I said. “Buck. We named him after you.”

“No we didn’t,” my son said, playing on his iPad. “You said we named him after Starbuck from Moby-Dick.”

“No we didn’t,” my daughter said, playing on her iPad. “We named him after Star­bucks. Dad took me there to get a cake pop right after we got him from the breeder.”

“You got a cake pop?” my son asked, incredulous, looking up from his iPad. “Dad, is that true?”

***

blind par three

(which often follows “TOMATO” in the manner of a coda)

So me and my buddies, we’re twelve, thirteen, see, and we’re hiding out in some bushes, right beside the green, waiting for a threesome to tee off at the bottom of the hill from where they can’t see the flag. As soon as that last ball hits the green, we all of us scramble to gather them up. They trudge up the hill, the golfers do, take about five minutes searching around for their tee shots. Then somebody thinks to check the hole. The looks of disbelief on those men’s faces, Evan, I’m telling you, their hoots and their hollers. Dancing around the green, hugging each other, kissing. They’re over there crying real tears of joy.

And we’re in those bushes crying a few of our own, too.

***

While driving over to Good Sam’s this afternoon, we approached a stoplight. Although we were the only car at the intersection, the stoplight still turned red.

“How come we have to go to Grandpa John’s all the time, anyway?”

It used to be that Grandpa John could drive himself around. A few days before Mom’s official revocation of Grandpa John’s driving privileges, the kids and I found ourselves in the harrowing position of having to trail Grandpa John in our minivan as he drove his own car, a Toyota Solara, across town, from Mom’s house all the way back to Good Sam’s. It reminded me of watching my son play a racing video game called Gran Turismo shortly after we first got it for him: dashed white lines on the asphalt signifying nothing, other cars on the road existing not in relation to the lives of humans and human families but only to that of the POV car’s maniacal caprice.

Grandpa John’s driving privilege coup de grace occurred after we pulled up behind him at a red light and the sound of a police cruiser’s siren issued from somewhere beyond the intersection. I suspected that Grandpa John wouldn’t be able to hear it, given the recent debacle involving his $5,000 hearing aids, the result of which was that he’d been left with only the left-ear one. As the police cruiser came into view, I flailed my arms wildly in the minivan and repeatedly mouthed the word no, hoping, I guess, that Grandpa John might look up at his rearview mirror and see me, causing him to pause long enough — curious as to why his grandson was acting the fool in his minivan — to allow the cruiser to pass through the intersection unimpeded. The light turned green; Grandpa John stepped on the gas. The police cruiser’s tires screeched; its front bumper came to rest only inches before the driver’s side of Grandpa John’s car, which continued to slowly, nonchalantly traverse the intersection. Aghast, I looked on as the officer flailed his arms inside the cruiser, as he repeatedly mouthed what I presumed to be the word no. Beyond the cruiser, off in the middle distance, the driver’s side tires of Grandpa John’s slow-moving Solara left a dashed white line in their wake.

“Yeah, how come we always have to go to Grandpa John’s? Why can’t he ever drive over to our house?”

* * *

Grandpa John sometimes says to me, “It’s hell getting old.”

“You know what my biggest problem is?” Grandpa John sometimes asks me. “What’s that?” I say. “Old age,” he replies.

“Today the doctor finally gave me some information I can work with,” Grandpa John says to me. “Oh yeah?” “Yeah,” he says to me. “She told me that I’m old.”

“Evan, I have some advice for you,” Grandpa John says to me. “Don’t ever get old.”

“Don’t worry,” I says to Grandpa John. “I won’t.”

* * *

I lived with Grandpa John and Grandma Blanche for a summer back in high school. Grandpa John was a senior VP at Waste Management, Inc., and he procured for me summer employment at a local dump.

I recall a torn wrapper from a packet of peanuts lying on the living room floor, Grandma Blanche telling Grandpa John to pick up the wrapper and put it in the trash. “What do I look like to you?” Grandpa John asked, watching televised golf, popping peanuts in his mouth. He wore an immaculate dress shirt, pleated slacks, ribbed socks, sparkling shoes. “You’re a garbage man, John,” Grandma Blanche said. “Do your job.”

When I returned home from work in the evenings, I was not allowed to enter the house until I had stripped down to my skivvies in the garage, placed my reeking work clothes in a trash bag, and cinched it all the way closed. I deposited the bag in the laundry room and raced across the house in my underwear — fearful that Grandpa John would catch a glimpse of my bean-pole figure and make a gibe about it — to the bathroom, where I showered and then sat on the toilet for twenty or more minutes enjoying the bathroom’s cleanliness, its spaciousness, its austerity . . . a far cry from the state of our cramped and often filthy bathroom back home, let alone that of the Porta-Johns at the dump. I would listen expectantly as the soles of Grandpa John’s oxfords tapped toward me from the hallway, as he knocked on the bathroom door to inquire as to whether I’d fallen in, as Grandma Blanche averred that teenagers require privacy of toilet and he really ought to leave me alone.

There was a rumor going around the dump that all of us worked for the mafia. “You mafia?” we’d ask each other, knee-deep in mounds of trash.

I was supposed to be saving up all my paycheck money for college, but I put aside a little each week for a portable CD stereo, which, maybe halfway through the summer, I finally purchased, positioning it on the marble-top dresser well beyond the foot of my bed. In the evenings, after Grandpa John and Grandma Blanche had released me from further familial obligation, I popped Nasty Nas’s groundbreaking Illmatic into the CD player’s tray and kicked back on that glorious California king with my elbows splayed out on either side of my head as it rested comfortably against the bed’s massive mahogany headboard. My hairless legs were crossed, my bare toes wiggled. In the huge gilt-framed mirror hanging above the dresser on the far side of the room, I studied an image of myself rapping along with Nas. Grandpa John’s house in Palm Springs was immense, palatial, nothing at all like his place at Good Sam’s; the guest room was in a whole other wing from where Grandpa John and Grandma Blanche’s bedroom was, so I was afforded the luxury of appreciating Nas at such a volume as Nas was intended to be appreciated: loud. “The World Is Yours” became my anthem. I recall lying on my bed in the guest room, slipping an eager hand beneath the elastic band of my boxer shorts as I watched myself in the mirror — the world was mine. I immersed and projected myself into the music of black culture, spending every weekend afternoon poring over the hip-hop CDs in the music section at the Palm Springs Barnes & Noble, memorizing track listings, taking assiduous note of rappers’ wardrobes — the world was mine. The large metal label on the back pocket of my Karl Kani jeans had scratched the absolute shit out of one of Grandma Blanche’s Windsor armchairs — the world was mine.

A loud banging issued from the other side of the door. Grandpa John entered the guest room, nude, livid. “Turn down the jungle music!” he yelled. His penis looked like a miniature human being.

We watched a movie together, something racy. During a sex scene, Grandma Blanche briefly removed the oxygen mask from her face to ask Grandpa John, “Why don’t you ever make love like that to me?” She returned the mask to her face; I listened to the cadence of compressed oxygen being released into my grandmother’s lungs. Grandpa John steadied his gaze on her. He replied, “Why don’t you ever make love like that to me?”

When I returned home from work in the evenings, I was not allowed to enter the house until I had stripped down to my skivvies in the garage, placed my reeking work clothes in a trash bag, and cinched it all the way closed.

I remember Grandpa John’s forearms resting on the dining room table, straddling his dinner — as if protecting it from some phantom threat: theft, mice, the swaying of a boat — fork in one hand, knife in the other, or, when not grasping cutlery, his fingers in loose fists, his thumbs pointing ceilingward.

And Grandpa John whiffing a three iron, swearing. Grandpa John repeatedly whiffing a wedge, chipping the ball with his foot.

Grandpa John kneeling in the pew, fingering a rosary, supplicating, trembling, the skin above his socks showing. Grandpa John smelling of Brut cologne, shoe polish, dry cleaning.

Grandpa John muttering curses under his breath while steering Grandma Blanche’s wheelchair up the ramp to the pulmonologist’s.

Grandpa John placing a finger above his left cheek, pulling down the skin, widening his eyes, asking, “Do you see anybody in here who cares?”

The three of us watched Jeopardy! together. Alex Trebek said, “He takes a green group of cowhands, prepares them for the drive, and then leads it.” Grandpa John and Grandma Blanche shouted at the TV, simultaneously, “Who is James Cagney!” Alex Trebek: “He watched the eighteen fourteen bombardment of Fort McHenry from a British ship and wrote a poem about it.” Grandpa John and Grandma Blanche, simultaneously: “Who is James Cagney!” “The name of this two- or three-toed mammal comes from Middle English for —” “Who is James Cagney!”

Grandpa John awoke at 4 a.m. every morning and set to work at doing the dishes, as Grandma Blanche no longer possessed the strength required to load the dishwasher without breaking stuff. The kitchen was on the other side of the house, and yet, as I lay in the guest room bed vying for more beauty sleep before having to get up and get going to the dump, it was as if the racket Grandpa John made in the kitchen sink was happening in my ear. I now believe that the cleaning of those dirty dishes was Grandpa John’s cross to bear; he was announcing his frustration with the conditions of his life — viz., the unassailable fact of his wife’s imminent death — via an exaggerated clanging of pots and pans.

On my last day of work at the dump, Grandpa John insisted on picking me up, giving me a break from the long bus ride home. He rolled up to the chain link entrance in his DeVille, all the windows rolled down, the back seat plastered in thick plastic sheeting.

My coworkers, eyes bulging, mouths agape, looked on.

“He mafia,” one of them said.

***

happy birthday

(specially requested on the kids’ birthdays, in hopes they will better appreciate all the good things in their lives)

My old man, that would be your great-grandfather, he says to me, “No way, Buck.” He says, “Buck, you are fifteen years old.” The old man says, “I seen some war myself and it ain’t pretty. No way am I sending a son of mine off to that hell.” But his answer doesn’t go over too well with me, see, so every day I get up out of that bed and I sit down at that table and I have another go at him. “Don’t forget my birthday’s coming up,” I says. “You gotta sign for me.” And every day the old man says back to me, “No way, Buck, I’m not signing it.” But I don’t let it go, no, you bet your ass I don’t. “Ask your mother,” the old man says. Evan, you did not know my mother. If you’d known that woman you’d know there’d be no chance of her ever signing it. So I keep pestering and pestering the old man every day, see, and when my birthday finally rolls around I get out of bed real early and I head over to him with the form and the pen and I says, “Sign it.” The old man looks up at me, it’s the one time in my life I ever seen that man scared. His hands are shaking, like this. The old man looks down at that form, takes up that pen, signs his name to it with tears in his eyes.
“Happy birthday,” he says to me. I grab the form and I run out of that house as fast as I can.

“Yes, it’s true, I got her a cake pop. In fact, I take her there to get cake pops all the time. Whenever you’re not looking, we hop in the car and go to Starbucks for cake pops. Now, I would kindly ask you to get your puppy off your great-grandfather before he skins the old man alive.”

Grandpa John giggled. Bucky sat in his lap chewing on a Band-Aid wrapper.

“Buck’s named after Grandpa John,” I said. “End of story. Another word about it and no screens for a week. Now, Grandpa John, explain to these two rabble-rousers why everybody used to call you Buck.”

Grandpa John dabbed at crimson blood on his arm with a monogrammed hankie, set the hankie down, returned to stroking Bucky’s back. He cleared his throat. “I believe it was on account of my teeth. But then they gave me new teeth in the navy, better teeth. The name stuck.”

“Did you guys hear that? Grandpa John was in the navy. He fought in the Pacific to preserve the freedom and the way of life you two so enjoy today.”

“Thanks, Grandpa,” my daughter said, without looking up from her iPad.

“Dad, can you sign me in?” my son said, handing me his iPad. “Yeah, thanks, Grandpa. It’s a free app, Dad, I swear.”

II.

The first episode of Ken Burns’s 2007 WWII documentary, The War, is entitled “A Necessary War.” Despite having watched this entire documentary three, maybe four, maybe five or six or maybe even seven or eight times — I watch documentaries on my iPhone to help me fall asleep at night — I can remember little of it beyond what the episode titles call to mind. “A Necessary War”: the United States’ entrance into WWII was necessary, unlike so many other wars in which we’ve found ourselves embroiled, because, in the case of WWII . . . but I’m unable to paraphrase Ken Burns’s argument as to why the U.S. involvement in WWII was necessary; I can’t remember it. Although I can, if put to, knowing Ken Burns’s politics as I do, attempt to fudge a summary, with no small confidence in my attempt’s resemblance to Burns’s thesis as I imagine it’s laid out somewhere in the documentary’s first chapter. Thus: Hitler, the persecution of the Jews, to preserve the way of life all of us so enjoy today; contra Vietnam, contra Persian Gulf, contra the so-called War on Terror, wars that involved the U.S.’s largely unnecessary engagement, viz., there was no Hitler involved, there were no millions of Jews being murdered, and, most importantly, there was no actual imminent threat to those many existential comforts afforded the U.S.’s middle and upper classes by means of our country’s hegemonic, globally oppressive late-capitalist regime.

One morning, a couple of weeks back, after a night spent watching and/or sleeping through the first few episodes of The War, I arrived at Good Sam’s eager to pick Grandpa John’s brain about his necessary involvement in WWII’s Pacific theater. Upon arriving, I found him asleep in his recliner with his mouth wide open, the TV on full blast, his raucous snores duking it out with exclamatory constatives from obnoxious local TV ads. I have been repeatedly admonished by both Mom and Grandpa John to wake up the latter whenever I arrive at Good Sam’s to find him sleeping, as they believe that the palliative effects of family interaction trump those of beauty sleep for Grandpa John, but, as I consider sleep a precious resource, one that should never be squandered, doing so remains rather difficult for me. My first recourse is to lower the TV volume and sit down on one of Grandpa John’s barstools in his kitchenette, pretend to play with my iPhone, simply wait it out. If only I possess the patience to wait long enough, Grandpa John will eventually wake up, I know; but, despite possessing great patience, as Mom’s often told me I do, I do not possess such patience as to sit contentedly amid the sound of Grandpa John’s sporadic grunting, the sight of his spittled chin, and the stench of his apartment’s moldy carpet for very long. My next recourse is to silently approach sleeping Grandpa John, kneel down beside the recliner, and whisper sweet nothings into whichever of his ears contains a hearing aid. My next recourse is to pat him gently on the leg. My next recourse is to grasp him by the shoulders and gently shake him. My next recourse is to pull his hair, gently. My next recourse is to yell at him, gently, or to gently pluck out one of his few remaining eyebrow hairs. My next recourse is to dispose with all gentility and retrieve from one of the cupboards in his kitchenette a pot and a pan, which was my final recourse on this day, the morning that found me eager to pick Grandpa John’s brain about the U.S.’s necessary involvement in WWII.

Standing above an openmouthed Grandpa John, studying his fake teeth, I clanged the pot and the pan together. He awoke, scanned the room to get his bearings, assuring himself that he was still alive. “Evan,” he said, wiping spittle from his chin, “thanks for waking me up.”

“Not a problem.” I sat down beside him. “So, Grandpa John, there’s something I’ve been wanting to talk to you about. In my opinion, World War II is the only truly necessary war the U.S. has ever been involved in, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Horseshit!” he replied, spewing saliva in the direction of my mouth.

I placed the pot and pan on the carpet, retrieved a hankie from my pocket, wiped my lips. “What I mean to say is,” I said, “it was necessary for the U.S. to get involved in World War II, in order to preserve the way of life we so enjoy today, in contrast to our engagement in other wars, Vietnam, Persian Gulf, the so-called War on Terror, wars which posed no imminent threat to our way of life. But, in the case of World War II, Hitler was on the march, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, so it was necessary for us to get involved, wouldn’t you agree?”

“You bet your ass it was,” Grandpa John said.

“And so you fought in the Pacific, then?” I said. “At the age of sixteen? And so that’s how you lost your teeth or what?”

Grandpa John did not immediately reply. I’ve often attempted to bait him into telling me about the time he spent, between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, fighting in WWII’s Pacific theater. I’m not sure why this interests me as it does. It may be that the details concerning a teenage Grandpa John fighting for his life in the Pacific feel important to me because they contrast so starkly with details concerning my son’s enjoyment of his life: affixing brightly colored plastic interlocking bricks together, depressing buttons on remote controls, gesturing on touch screens. Could it be that I harbor a secret desire to learn of the horror of Grandpa John’s Pacific theater existence if only to project it, in my imagination, onto an imaginary mode of existence suffered by my son, transferring onto my son’s chubby preteen visage the horrors of war as once experienced by Grandpa John, in order to bring tears to my eyes, in order to watch as my son, in my mind, struggles in the face of wartime atrocity to retain some semblance of continued attachment to the peace of mind he so enjoyed back home while playing with his Legos, playing with his PS3, playing with his iPad mini? Yes, it’s true, I am very eager to place my young son’s life in jeopardy, in my mind. Or could it be that I want to know about Grandpa John’s life, to know as much as I can, before he dies? Grandpa John is dying, he’s been dying for some time, but Grandpa John once lived, too, and it’s important that knowledge of his life is given an opportunity to live on, at least for a time, in someone’s mind — in mine.

“Maybe the itch really is psychological,” I said, “maybe it comes from holding in all that stuff about World War II for all these years, never telling anyone about all the innocent people you killed or whatever, ever think of that? Maybe you should tell me about all of those horrible atrocities you witnessed in the Pacific, Grandpa John, and then maybe the itch will finally go away and I won’t have to keep giving you those full-body nude massages all the time.”

“I may be eighty-eight years young, Evan, but I’m not in short pants anymore.” Grandpa John motioned toward the urine- and spaghetti-stained heather sweat pants covering his legs. “Your parenting tricks won’t work on me.”

It could be, also, that I’m eager to hear Grandpa John tell his war stories simply to afford me an opportunity to throw on my narratologist’s cap and study his use of the historical present a bit more. I’ve always been especially attracted by Grandpa John’s manner of narration; while I’ve never considered myself a particularly gifted storyteller, hearing Grandpa John tell his stories evokes in me a hopeful sense that the gifted-storyteller gene yet resides dormant within my genotype, and perhaps the cadences and the colloquialisms and the excessive use of detail associated with Grandpa John’s historical-present narrative delivery will finally trigger the gene’s phenotypical manifestation in me, in my writing, and at long last I will enjoy that role so often fulfilled by Grandpa John over the course of his eighty-eight years — viz., the life of the party — as I will that of the commercially successful novelist whose gruff, vernacular, and largely transparent prose style finds his reader tearing through pages, having fallen inescapably into the world of story.

‘Maybe the itch really is psychological,’ I said, ‘maybe it comes from holding in all that stuff about World War II for all these years, never telling anyone about all the innocent people you killed or whatever, ever think of that?’

“Grandpa John,” I said, “you’re dying, you’ve been dying for some time, but you once lived, too. And it’s important that your life is given an opportunity to live on, at least for a time, in someone’s mind. Ever think of that?”

“In whose,” Grandpa John said, “yours?”

“That’s right,” I said, “in mine. And then I can later transfer memories of your life, as you’ve related them to me, to my kids’ minds, and then they can later transfer those memories to their kids’ minds, and so on, affording you and your memories a kind of immortality. Ever think of that?”

“Here’s what I think,” Grandpa John said. “Let’s cut out the middleman. Bring those kids of yours over here and I’ll tell them my stories myself.”

“Even better,” I said. “To be honest, the itch stuff and the immortality stuff was all a ruse, you’re right. What I really want is for the kids to hear your stories of wartime atrocity and have the shit scared out of them. I want those kids scared straight, Grandpa John. They need to start appreciating all the good things they have in life. And, moreover, I think it’ll be good for my writing to have one last opportunity to carefully scrutinize your use of the historical present.”

Grandpa John asked, “You’re going to do what to me?”

***

tell carl arenz

(a companion piece to “Happy Birthday,” which I’d heard only dribs and drabs of over the years until a few weeks back when Grandpa John, feeling magnanimous after my curing of his itch, finally agreed to narrate it to me in its entirety)

It’s my sixteenth birthday, see, I already got the form signed by the old man, I’m standing in line at the recruitment office in Ottawa, Illinois. “Army or navy?” the officer asks me. “Marines,” I says to him. He looks me up and down. Back then I was a bean pole, Evan, just like you. “How about we go with navy?” the officer says to me. “That’ll work,” I says to the officer. They put me on a train to boot camp up in
Michigan that same day, I don’t even go home for my things or say good-bye.

(“What?” I says to Grandpa John. “Is that true?”)

You bet your ass it’s true. Six weeks later my mother and the old man show up in Michigan, come by the barracks, but it’s already lights-out so the old man tells me through the window they’ll be back the next afternoon to take me out for a steak dinner. I can see my mother out there weeping, she can barely stand to look me in the eye, she’s got both her hands on the window, moving them around like, trying to get at me through the glass. My folks head on back to the motel. Come morning word arrives we’re shipping out that same day, nobody knows where to. My folks show up to get me
that steak but I’m already long gone. For all they know I’m on my way to France.

(“Are you kidding me?” I says to Grandpa John. “That’s crazy!”)

You’re damn right it’s crazy. From the age of sixteen and one day to the age of nineteen and one day I saw my parents’ faces for exactly two minutes’ time. So now I’m on the train, see, and word is we’re headed to Californy to catch a boat to the Pacific, nobody knows where to, and I’m seeing in my mind my mother standing outside those barracks banging on that window, weeping up a storm, falling to her knees and praying to God, “Don’t let it be true, my baby boy’s headed off to war and I didn’t even kiss him good-bye.” Evan, you did not know my mother. That woman’s heart was bigger than . . . that whole refrigerator there. So I’m on the train a few hours, feeling real sore about it, all tore up inside, crying my eyes out, and then, all of a sudden, I start recognizing places I know, some familiar landmarks out the window. “We’re in Illinois,” I says to myself, “and we’re coming up on Ottawa.” I can’t believe my eyes. We pass through Joliet, Morris, then head down into Streator. You know Streator. The train pulls in at the station to pick up some folks, it’s the dead of night, and I’m home, see, we’re just down the road from Ottawa, but what can I do about it? I’m looking out the window, and right as the train’s fixing to go, I make out in the distance this old hobo strolling through the grass. So I calls out to him, leaning as far out the window as I can, with my hands cupped around my mouth like this, I calls out to the hobo, “You know Carl Arenz?” And he calls out back to me, the hobo does, like this, “Sure I know Carl Arenz, who don’t know Carl Arenz?” See, everybody knew Carl Arenz, even the hoboes, he owned the only automobile dealership for miles around, and he’s also my uncle, see, my mother’s younger brother. So then I calls out to the hobo, like this, “Tell Carl Arenz tell his sister John Lavender’s headed to Californy where he’s gonna catch a boat to the Pacific and fight them Japs!” “OK, will do!” the old hobo calls out to me. And then I calls out to him, I calls out to the hobo like this, “And tell Carl Arenz tell his sister John Lavender misses his mother!” “OK, you got it, no problem,” the old hobo says, “anything else I can do for you?” So then I calls out to him, right as the train’s pulling away, I’m choking on my tears because I’m headed off to war and I didn’t kiss my mama good-bye, also because I can tell the old hobo’s already four sheets to the wind and he probably won’t remember any of what I’m saying, so I cup my hands around my mouth like this and I calls out to him as loud as I can, in a mean, threatening way, like he’s in big trouble if he don’t do it, like I’m a real soldier, like this. “You better tell Carl Arenz tell his sister John Lavender loves his mother! You better tell that Carl Arenz give his sister my mama a kiss good-bye from her baby boy John Lavender!”

That old hobo’s eyes go real wide. I think he gets the message that time.

(“Grandpa, that’s incredible. That’s amazing!”)

You bet your ass it’s amazing. Now, I want you to guess who’s sitting on that porch rocking in that rocking chair when my mother gets home from Michigan.

(“Seriously?”)

My uncle quits his rocking, stands up, and the minute she’s stepped onto that porch he places his hands on his sister’s cheeks, gives her a kiss. “From John,” Carl Arenz says to my mother.

III.

When we finally arrived at Grandpa John’s this afternoon, we found him in his reclining chair, earsplitting shrieks from the TV bouncing between his bedroom / dining room / living room’s four walls, his mouth wide open, his body unmoving. My son and daughter stood before him awhile, heads lowered, arms at their sides, trembling hands precariously holding on to their iPad minis.

“Should we go tell a nurse?” my son finally asked.

“Yeah,” my daughter asked, “shouldn’t we go tell somebody?”

“Guys,” I said, “come on. He’s just not snoring for some reason. It’s nothing to worry about.”

“Dad, it’s totally obvious. Look at him. He’s dead.”

“Yeah, Dad, look at him. He’s totally dead.”

He did look very dead, they were right. And yet often I’d arrived at Grandpa John’s to find him thus, absolutely certain of his death until such time as he’d awaken with a start and call out my name, to ask — as I pilfered his drawers for hawkable keepsakes and spare change — why I was going through all his stuff.

I leaned over Grandpa John, listening for his breath, examining his fake teeth. “Sweetie,” I said, extending my hand toward my daughter while training my eyes on Grandpa John’s shriveled uvula, “take your barrette out. I need to borrow it for something.”

“No way,” my daughter replied. “My hair looks fabulous today.”

“Yeah, Dad,” my son said. “Her hair looks really great today.”

“Do you guys still have that dog whistle app on your iPads?”

“But Grandpa John’s human,” my son replied. “He won’t be able to hear it. And even if he could, it wouldn’t matter anyway.”

“Yeah, Dad,” my daughter said, “it wouldn’t even matter. Dead people can’t hear things.”

“He’s still got his hearing aid in.” I pointed toward Grandpa John’s droopy earlobe. “Turn up the volume all the way and position the iPad’s speaker directly against it. I guarantee you that’ll wake him up.”

“From the dead?” my daughter asked.

“Yeah,” I replied.

My son flipped the cover from his iPad mini and swiped to unlock. He opened the dog whistle app, placed the iPad mini’s Lightning port against Grandpa John’s ear, fired up the inaudible whistle. After a few seconds, Grandpa John’s eyelids fluttered — and then they opened very wide.

“It’s just like in that book,” my daughter whispered, “with the guy.”

My son whispered, “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.”

“How are you feeling today, Grandpa John?” I asked Grandpa John.

“I’m alive, aren’t I?” Grandpa John replied.

I shot the kids a knowing glance. They raised their palms and shrugged their shoulders. Grandpa John wiped the spittle from his chin. The kids sat on the floor, crisscross applesauce, positioning their iPad minis in their laps.

“Guys, Grandpa John is more interesting than an iPad,” I said. “How many more chances are you going to have to come over here and socialize with Grandpa John, on the one hand, versus the other hand, the hand which holds not just these iPad minis but which will, doubtless, hold many future-gen iPad minis? There are no next-gen Grandpa Johns on the horizon. Put them up or else. I’m serious.”

The kids grudgingly closed their smart covers. Embarrassed, Grandpa John fake burped. And then he said: “Evan, today’s the day I’m going to tell your kids my war stories.”

“Kids,” I said, turning to the kids, “today’s the day Grandpa John is finally going to tell us his stories of wartime atrocity.” I grabbed the iPads out of the kids’ laps, sat down on the love seat, pulled my pen and notepad out of my pocket, licked my finger. “Grandpa,” I said, “why don’t we start with the story of how you lost your teeth. Do you need some water? Are we good to go here?”

Grandpa John cleared his throat. “The only thing I need, Evan, is for you to get the hell out of this room. I’ll tell these kids my stories on my own.”

“Yeah,” my son said. “Get the heck out of here, Dad.”

“Dad, out,” my daughter said, “right now. Or else.”

“Grandpa John,” I said, “seriously?”

“Hallway,” Grandpa John said to me. “Right now.”

“Out,” Mom said. “Right now, you two,” by which she meant Grandpa John and me. “I’d like to have a minute alone with her,” by which she meant her mom, Grandma Blanche. “Wait in the hallway,” by which she meant the hallway at the hospital, outside Grandma Blanche’s room.

Grandpa John and I shuffled out. We sat on folding chairs beside the door.

“Don’t you ever smoke,” Grandpa John said to me.

“I won’t,” I replied, pretending to massage that portion of quadriceps beneath the right pocket of my jeans in order to assure myself of the continued presence of my pack of cigarettes.

“Those two women in there,” Grandpa John said, turning to me. “They’re the loves of my life.”

He regarded my slightly askew baseball cap, my XL hoodie, my unlaced Timber­lands. His eyes teared up. He patted the leg of my Karl Kani’s, right near where my cigarettes were.

“Those two, plus you,” he said, gripping my hand, “are the three loves of my life.” He squeezed my fingers really hard. “Plus your brother. That makes four.”

I remember sitting in the hospital room after Mom told us it was OK to come back in, receiving eyefuls of the afternoon sun’s harsh rays as they made their way in through gaps in the window blinds. I remember Grandpa John kneeling bedside, fingering a rosary, trembling, supplicating, and I remember Grandma Blanche’s body beneath a long white sheet. I remember her rhythmic, cartoonish jaw movements, like a goldfish breathing.

I remember the window blinds. Crazy knots in the drawstring, bends in the slats, a couple slats missing. I remember Grandpa John getting up to futz around with the blinds’ drawstring, Mom telling him to cut it out or else. As Grandma Blanche inhaled one last time, Grandpa John was still over there at the window trying to coax the mess of slats into place, as if darkness were more amenable to life. After silence greeted Grandma Blanche’s final exhalation, Grandpa John let go of the drawstring. I remember him turning toward us to say, “To hell with it. It doesn’t matter, anyway.”

After returning home from Good Sam’s and eating dinner, the kids suckered me into accompanying them on their walk around the neighborhood with Bucky. We took him all the way to the stop sign at the top of the street, then turned to make our way back home, west — and there was the horizon, and there, atop it, a big fat setting sun, and everywhere a regal New Mexican sky with quilted streaks of lavender, orange, and green.

“Guys,” I said, pointing at the horizon, “there’s no app for that.” I pulled out my phone, snapped a picture. “Eat your heart out, Apple,” I said.

“Yeah, Apple,” the kids said. “Eat it.”

As we began to make our way home, I instructed the kids to relate to me every­thing that Grandpa John had said that afternoon at Good Sam’s concerning his experience in WWII’s Pacific theater, when I’d stood outside in the hallway with my ear pressed against the door attempting and mostly failing to discern the familiar cadences of Grandpa John’s historical-present narrative delivery.

The only thing I need is for you to get the hell out of this room. I’ll tell these kids my stories on my own.

“No way, Dad,” my son said, zipping up his lips. “Grandpa John told us we had to keep it under lockdown.”

“Yeah,” my daughter said, throwing her arm forward, flicking her fingers. “And he told us to throw away the key.”

Bucky stopped, sniffed at some petrified dog poo, maybe his own. I offered to make the kids a deal. If they would be willing to tell me what Grandpa John told them, then I would be willing take Bucky on his nightly walk, sans their accompaniment, for one week’s time.

“Nope. You’re going to have to do better than that.”

“Something way better, Dad.”

We continued walking. A quarter or so of the sun left above the horizon, I told the kids that if they told me every last detail of what Grandpa John had told them, then they could have an additional hour of screen time on Saturday of the upcoming weekend.

“Are you kidding? That’s practically nothing!”

“Yeah, that’s not a good deal at all, Dad!”

Bucky stopped to sniff at a discarded condom. I offered the kids a final deal. If they didn’t tell me every single last detail of what Grandpa John had told them, not only would they lose all their screen time for the upcoming weekend, but I would never again, for as long as they and/or Bucky lived, accompany them on their walks around the neighborhood in the evenings.

“OK, fine, we’ll tell you. But are those other deals still on the table?”

“Yeah, we’ll definitely tell you, Dad, but what about those other deals you offered us before?”

We stopped at the top of the driveway. The other deals’ continued validity was contingent upon the narrative quality of the story they must now proceed to relate to me, I told them. We sat down together on the short crumbling rock wall athwart the drive, and what little light remained at the horizon illuminated Bucky’s tiny teeth and the kids’ lips and cheeks and eyes as they proceeded to relate Grandpa John’s story of orthodontic wartime atrocity, culminating in an instance of highly questionable divine intervention, thus:

***

how grandpa john lost his teeth

(as told to Bucky and me by the kids last night, at the top of the driveway, right as the sun was setting)

So Grandpa John’s job on the boat is to help aim the big gun at the sky and try to shoot stuff down.

Yeah, Grandpa John’s a gunner’s assistant. His job’s to help gun down them Japs.

(“Don’t say Japs, guys. Please call them the Japanese.”)

And he’s out on the ocean in that boat, in the Pacific Ocean, in the ocean near to where the Japanese live, the island of Japan.

Yeah, he’s out on that ocean, Dad, and then all of a sudden these planes start coming in. Bam bam bam bam bam! It’s crazy! There’s planes everywhere. And those planes are shooting at Grandpa John and his friends. Grandpa John is only sixteen years old during this story. That’s barely five years older than me! Isn’t that crazy?

(“That’s totally crazy, yes. I hope that makes you appreciate all the good things you have in life.”)

So everybody’s running around on that deck and everybody thinks they’re going to die.

Yeah, Dad, everybody’s super scared. Everybody thinks they’re totally goners, even Grandpa John.

And so then a bunch of them boys start heading belowdecks. There’s just too many planes in the sky, see. When you look up at first you think all those planes are birds, like seagulls, because you’ve never seen anything like it before, because the only thing you can think it can be is a bunch of seagulls flying around.

But they’re not seagulls, Dad. They’re Japanese fighter planes trying to kill Grandpa
John.

Yeah, and all of Grandpa John’s buddies, too! All them boys!

And so then Grandpa John’s buddy, the main gunner guy, he, like, totally bails.

Dad, the main gunner guy gets so scared he pees his pants. He has to go below­decks to get a new pair of pants.

No, that’s not what happened.

But that’s what Grandpa said. He said the main gunner guy had to go change his pants.

He was just joking about that part, stupid.

You’re stupid!

No, you’re stupid!

(“Guys.”)

So Grandpa John is all alone up there with the big gun now because his buddy got scared so he has to start shooting the gun himself. Dad, we’re going to have to tell you all about how those guns work because you won’t understand this story if you don’t know anything about how those big guns really work.

Dad, there’s this thing that can get super hot on the gun, see, and it’s the assistant gunner’s job to take that thing off the gun when it gets hot and replace it with another one of those things that’s not super hot so that thing doesn’t get too hot and explode the whole gun.

But Dad, now that the main gunner guy peed his pants and Grandpa John took over the main gunner’s job to shoot, there’s nobody to take off the thing when it gets super hot.

Yeah and Grandpa John’s aiming the gun up in the sky without any help and shooting it all on his own!

And he’s shooting them seagulls down like crazy!

What? No. He’s shooting them Japanese.

Yeah, he’s shooting them Japanese. That’s what I said.

No, you said he’s shooting the seagulls.

No.

Yes.

No.

Yes!

No!

(“Guys, come on. This is important. Please.”)

And Grandpa’s shooting so much that the thing on the gun starts getting super hot, but there’s no one there to take the thing off now because that was Grandpa’s job but now he’s shooting the gun on his own because everybody else totally bailed and went down belowdecks.

He’s shooting that gun at those Japanese planes so much and the gun starts getting super hot and now it’s burning his hands off but he has to keep shooting it or else we might lose the whole war out there!

Yeah, Dad, we’re about to lose the war out there in that Pacific!

And then the gun starts turning bright red like the bottom of the fireplace. But even redder than that, Grandpa John said.

Yeah, way redder. But he still keeps shooting that gun even though his hands are getting totally burned.

His hands are totally on fire, Dad!

Yeah, Grandpa John’s hands are on fire for real now then the whole gun explodes right in his face because there’s nobody to take off the hot thing and that’s how he lost his teeth.

Dad, the gun exploded right into Grandpa John’s mouth! It melted all his teeth!

Not melted them. Knocked them out.

Yeah, that’s what I said. It knocked out all his teeth.

But then this is the really crazy part.

Yeah, this is the really crazy part, Dad. You’re not going to believe this part but it’s true.

Dad, Grandpa John died for a little while out there in the Pacific.

Yeah, Grandpa John died for a little bit. He went to heaven. Did you know about that part, Dad?

(“No, I don’t think I was aware of that.”)

Yeah, Grandpa John totally died. Isn’t that crazy?

(“Totally.”)

Grandpa John totally died and went to heaven and that’s when he had a little one-on-one with God.

Yeah, Dad, Grandpa John had some face time with God, for real, up in heaven.

But Dad, now this is the part that Grandpa John made us swear never to tell you.

Yeah, our lips are totally sealed on this part. You’re going to have to offer us something really good this time.

Like new iPads.

With retina displays.

And not minis.

Yeah and not minis. With expensive cases, too.

Deal?

Yeah, Dad, deal?

(“How about I take away your current ones only for an evening, rather than a fortnight?”)

Deal.

Deal and so Grandpa John says to God, “I sees what’s going on here, God, I sees what you have in mind for me, and I’m not too happy about it.”

Yeah and Grandpa John says to God, “God, listen up. I’ll make you a deal.”

Grandpa John says, “I’m not too happy about any of this because I’m only sixteen years old, see, and I haven’t even barely lived yet and already you have it in mind for me to die.”

“And so here’s the deal, God,” Grandpa John says to God. “You let me live today and I promise I’m going to do something real special for you.”

Yeah, Dad. Grandpa John says, “If you let me live, I’m going to marry a woman named Blanche, and with this Blanche I will have a daughter named Gail.”

He meant Grandma Gail, Dad. That’s your mom!

Yeah, Dad, totally! And listen to this. And then Grandpa John says to God, “God. And my daughter Gail will have a son named Evan.”

That’s you, Dad! Grandpa John was totally talking to God about you!

Totally, Dad. And then this is what Grandpa John says next. This is for sure the best part. Grandpa John says to that God, “OK, God. And then my grandson Evan will have two children of his own. And their names will be Jackson and Sofia.”

That’s us! Grandpa John totally told God about us! Can you believe it?

But now wait, this is totally the most amazing part. Grandpa John says, “Now you listen up, God, and you listen good. I’m making you a real good deal here. If you let me live, there are going to be two kids in the world named Jackson and Sofia, and that Jackson and Sofia are going to be just great, they’re going to be the best kids in the history of the world, even if they fight a lot. So what do you say, God, because this is my final offer. Deal?”

And Dad, you’re not going to believe what happened next. You’re not even going to believe what God says to Grandpa John.

God puts his hand on Grandpa John’s shoulder, like this. And then God says, “Deal.”

Dad, God told him he’s got a deal! And he even touched Grandpa John on the shoulder! Like this!

Yeah and then Grandpa John woke up in a hospital somewhere on some boat.

Yeah, but Grandpa John totally died, Dad, for real.

Dad, it’s true. But Grandpa John totally lived, too.

***

This essay first appeared in The Southern Review, the venerable quarterly journal of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry published by the Louisiana State University Press in Baton Rouge. Our thanks to the author and The Southern Review staff for allowing us to reprint this essay at Longreads.

The Whistleblower in the Family

Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Pearl Abraham | Michigan Quarterly Review | September 2017 | 18 minutes (5,007 words)

“The power of narrative stems from the narrator’s ability to be there and then, as well as here and now.”

— C. Fred Alford, Whistleblowers: Broken Lives and Organizational Power

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In 1974, the year Richard Nixon resigned to avoid impeachment, my father, a man with rabbinic aspirations, was deep in his own pickle, indicted for conspiracy and fraud in the federal summer school lunch program.

Nixon was brought down by Deep Throat, the pseudonym given the informant who passed information to Washington Post journalists about his administration’s involvement in what came to be known as the Watergate Scandal. My father got off somehow.

With him in court for one of his hearings, I suffered his ashen face, then his palpable relief when the case was deferred or dismissed, I’m not now sure which. I also don’t know whether his case made headlines the way rabbinic and priestly scandals do these days, “Five NJ Rabbis Arrested for Fraud and Conspiracy” a recent one.

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Phil Ivey’s Semi-Bluff

Longreads Pick

During poker’s boom in the early-aughts, Phil Ivey was the sport’s first genuine superstar, an intimidating manipulator with an utterly brilliant mind who helped catapult poker (and his own bank account) to dizzying heights. “I like it when I lose so much money I can barely breathe,” he once told a table during the filming of NBC’s Poker After Dark. But then Ivey disappeared, hamstrung by the lingering accusation and subsequent lawsuits that he had cheated casinos out of millions playing baccarat, which begs the question—does poker still need Phil Ivey?

Author: David Hill
Source: The Ringer
Published: Jul 13, 2017
Length: 32 minutes (8,071 words)

My Parents Said I Bruised Easily

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad

Jessica Berger Gross | Estranged: Leaving Family and Finding Home | Scribner | July 2017 | 13 minutes (3,194 words)

For a good 20 years now, I’ve been working on various versions of a memoir. Some of what’s been taking me so long is that I’m conflicted about sharing certain parts of my family’s story, and my own.

Last year I managed to write and perform a fairly vague monologue about my home life in my teen years, during six of which my mother was married to her second husband, an angry, miserable human being. In the monologue, I rattled off some behavior of his that would easily be categorized as domestic violence, but which we, in our suburban middle class Jewish home, filed under under the more tidy, less shameful euphemism, “He has a temper.”

That’s what we called it when he threw a glass serving bowl filled with spaghetti at his son’s head, leaving him with a concussion; when he threw a wine glass at my mother and it shattered on the floor after bouncing off the side of her face. That’s what we called it when he dragged my thirteen-year-old sister down the stairs by her hair, when he gripped his hands around her throat and violently shook her, leaving marks. That’s what we called it when we sought refuge at my mother’s friend’s house; when my mother went back, begging his forgiveness for having left; when someone — probably my mother’s friend — anonymously called Child Protective Services, and a social worker showed up at our house.

“He has a temper.” That’s what we called it when he threw my ceramic piggy bank at me one evening while I was sitting on my bed, doing my homework. He burst into my room waving a legal pad with numbers scratched in pencil, fuming that I wasn’t willing to call my father and ask him to pay more in child support. I ducked just in time. The piggy bank hit the wall, smashing to pieces.

I told the story aloud at a Domestic Violence Awareness Month event, in the context of a 2014 TMI Project writing workshop I had co-led for women living in a domestic violence shelter in Poughkeepsie. Hearing the women share their stories struck a nerve in me. It unearthed truths and shame I’d forgotten I’d long ago buried — my shame, my mother’s, my family’s. It was almost unbearable, and I nearly quit the workshop. Somehow, though, I found the fortitude to not only stick with it, but to also tell my story to the participants. And not just the story about my step-father, but also the one about the occasionally violent boyfriend I once had a bad habit of going back to, again and again.

Letting them know that I had witnessed and experienced some degree of what they had was an instant ground-leveler. I stopped being the nice, middle-class-writing-instructor-lady with no problems coming to help them, and became one of them. They comforted me as I had been comforting them, and I was reminded of why it’s so important to overcome shame and tell the hard truth — how telling the hard truth is an important antidote to our own shame, and more broadly to the stigma associated with the things we attach shame to. It occurred to me that it’s unfair to tuck these kinds of secrets behind facades of exceptionalism and superiority, and that maybe we have an obligation to others to be more forthcoming. It starts with the painful task of being honest with ourselves, when no one around us really wants us to be.

In certain communities, we’re raised to believe we’re immune to particular experiences and behaviors, that we’re above them. That domestic violence, for instance, is low-class. That it’s just not something us middle class suburban Jews on Long Island engage in. That he’s not an abuser — he has a temper.

But it’s not true, and author Jessica Berger Gross is here to back me up on that. In her moving, fearless memoir, Estranged: Leaving Family and Finding Home, she tells the story of growing up in a middle class suburban Jewish home on Long Island just about a 10-minute drive from my own — one where her father was violent, and her mother was his silent enabler. And she tells the story of bravely deciding, at 28, to preserve her wellbeing and sanity by cutting her parents and her brothers out of her life.

I so admire her courage in revealing all the ugly truth of her upbringing, while being fair, and not casting her parents as monsters. And I appreciate her standing up and dispelling the insidious myth that domestic violence doesn’t occur in the nice houses in the nice neighborhoods.

What follows is an excerpt. — Sari Botton, Longreads Essays Editor

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