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One summer when I was in college I went to El Salvador to help register indigenous tribes to vote. A kid in one of the villages I was visiting got his arm pulled off by an alligator while he was fishing with a hand line, and would have died in front of me if it hadn’t been for one of the other American volunteers, who was a doctor. Right then and there I decided to go to medical school.
This never actually happened, thank the Christ, and in fact I barely went to college, but it’s the kind of thing they tell you to say when you apply to med school. That or how you had some disease growing up that was so brilliantly cured you can now work 120 hours a week and be happy about it.
What they tell you not to say is that you want to be a doctor because your grandfather was a doctor and you always looked up to him. I’m not sure why this is so. I can think of worse reasons. Plus, my own grandfather was a doctor, and I did look up to him. As far as I could tell, he and my grandmother had one of the great romances of the twentieth century, and were also the last truly decent people on earth. They had a humorless dignity I’ve never managed to come close to, and an endless concern for the downtrodden that I can barely stand to think about. They also had good posture, and what appeared to be a sincere enjoyment of Scrabble, public television, and the reading of large and improving books. They even dressed formally. And although they were citizens of a vanished type, they showed forgiveness toward people who weren’t. For example, when my stoned-out mother gave birth to me, on an ashram in India in 1977, then wanted to go on to Rome with her boyfriend (my father), my grandparents flew over and took me back to New Jersey, where they raised me.
Still, it would be dishonest to place the origins of my becoming a doctor in my love and respect for my grandparents, since I don’t believe I even considered going to medical school until eight years after they were murdered.
They were killed on October 10, 1991. I was fourteen, four months away from being fifteen. I came home from a friend’s house around six thirty at night, which in West Orange in October is late enough that you need the lights on. The lights weren’t on.
At the time, my grandfather was doing mostly nonsurgical, though medical, volunteer work, and my grandmother was volunteering at the West Orange Public Library, so they both should have been home by then. Also, the glass pane next to the front door—the kind of glass they call “pebbled”—was broken, like someone had smashed it to reach in and open the lock.
If this ever happens to you, leave and call 911. There could be someone still in the house. I went in, because I was afraid someone would hurt my grandparents if I didn’t. You’ll probably go in too.
They were on the border between the living room and dining room. Specifically my grandmother, who had been shot through the chest, was on her back in the living room, and my grandfather, who had doubled forward after being shot in the abdomen and hence was face down, was in the dining room. My grandfather had his hand on my grandmother’s arm.
They’d been dead for a while. The blood in the carpet sucked at my shoes, and later, when I was lying down in it, at my face. I called 911 before I went and put my head down between theirs.
In my memory the whole thing is in vivid color, which is interesting, because I now know that we don’t actually see color in low-light situations. Our minds imagine it for us and paint it in.
I know I put my fingers in their gray hair and pulled us all together. When the EMTs finally got there, the only thing for them to do was pull me off so that the cops could photograph the crime scene and let City Services remove the bodies.
The particular irony of my grandparents’ story is that they had survived a much more elaborate attempt to murder them fifty years earlier. They had met, legendarily, in the Bia?owie?a Forest in Poland in the winter of 1943, when they were fifteen, barely older than I was when I found them dead. They and a bunch of other newly feral teenagers were hiding out in the snow and trying to kill off enough of the local Jew-hunting parties so that the Poles would leave them alone. What this precisely involved they never told me, but it must have been pretty ferocious, because in 1943 Hermann G?ring had a lodge at the southern end of Bia?owie?a where he and his guests dressed as Roman senators, and he must have been aware of the situation. There’s also the question of a straggler platoon of Hitler’s Sixth Army that disappeared in Bia?owie?a that winter en route to Stalingrad. Where, to be fair, it would have been wiped out anyway.
What finally got my grandparents caught was a scam. They got word from a man in Kraków named W?adys?aw Budek that my grandmother’s brother, who had been working in Kraków as a spy for the Bishop of Berlin,* had been captured and sent to the Podgorze “Ghetto,” which was a holding pen on the rails to the Camps. Budek claimed he could get my mother’s brother out for 18,000 zlotys, or whatever the f*ck money they were using then. Since my grandparents had no money, and were suspicious anyway, they went to Kraków themselves to check things out. Budek called the police and sold them into Auschwitz.
It was typical of my grandparents that they later described being sent to Auschwitz as a stroke of luck, since not only was it better than being shot by Polish crackers in some forest, it was better than being sent to a death camp.* At Auschwitz they were able to contact each other twice through smuggled notes— which, to hear them tell it, made surviving until liberation easy.
Their funeral was near my Uncle Barry’s place. This was my mother’s brother, who had freaked out and become an Orthodox Jew. My grandparents had certainly considered themselves Jewish—they had visited and supported Israel, for example, and were dismayed by the world’s quick demonization of it—but to them being Jewish meant they had certain moral and intellectual responsibilities, not that religion was anything other than a bloodstained hoax. My mother had burned through every traditional form of rebellion before Barry could even get started, though, so dressing like a shtetl dweller in 1840s Poland was probably his only recourse.
My mother attended the funeral and asked me if I needed her to stay in the U.S., and whether I wanted to move to Rome. My father did me the favor of not pretending: he just sent me a rambling, slightly touching letter about his relationship with his own grandparents and how as you go through life you never really feel any older.*
Barry adopted me to keep Child Protective Services off my back, but it was easy to convince him to let me stay in my grandparents’ house. At fourteen I was physically enormous and had the mannerisms of an elderly Polish Jewish doctor. I liked to play bridge. Plus, Barry and his wife weren’t crazy about exposing their own four kids to someone who’d been abandoned at birth and then come home one day to find his foster parents dead by violence. What if I became dangerous?
What indeed. Smart move, Barry and Mrs. Barry!
I sought out the dangerousness and refined it. As any other American child would, I picked Batman and Charles Bronson in Death Wish as role models. I didn’t have their resources, but I didn’t have much in the way of expenses, either. I hadn’t even had the carpets changed.
I felt I had no choice but to take on the case myself. I still feel that way, really.
I know from experience, for instance, that if you go into the woods and shoot a handful of survivalist pedophile pimps—men who have destroyed the lives of literally hundreds of children—then the police will go apeshit trying to find you. They will check the drains in case you washed your hands after running them through your hair. They will cast for tire tracks.
But if the two people you care about most get brutally murdered by some scumbag who rifles a couple of cabinets and takes the VCR, it will all be a f*cking mystery.
Did they have any enemies?
Any enemies who needed a VCR?
It was probably a crackhead.
A crackhead with transportation, and gloves, and a f*ck of a lot of luck not to be seen by anybody.
We’ll ask around.
We’ll let you know.
And it will be obvious to you just how justice will get served: by you or by nobody.
What kind of choice is that?
The different martial arts all share an interesting gimmick. (I went from tae kwon do to sho ryu karate to kempo, one foot-smelling dojo much like another, as I followed the traditional Japanese directive to spend more time training than sleeping.) You’re supposed to act like an animal. I don’t mean in the abstract: you’re supposed to model your strategies on those of real, specific creatures. Using “crane style” for precise, fast, distance attacks, for instance, or “tiger style” for aggressive, in-close slashing. The underlying idea is that the last animal you’d want to emulate in a violent situation is a human being.
This turns out to be true, by the way. Most humans are instinctively terrible fighters. They flinch, they flail, they turn away. Most of us are so bad at fighting that it has actually been an evolutionary advantage, since before the mass production of weapons people had to think to truly hurt each other, so the smart had a fighting chance. A Neanderthal would kick your ass and then eat it, but try finding one to test this.
Alternately, consider the shark. Most species of shark hatch live inside their mothers and start killing each other right then and there. The result is that their brains have stayed the same for 60 million years, while ours kept increasing in complexity until 150,000 years ago, at which point we became able to speak, and therefore human, and our evolution became technological instead of biological.
There are two ways of looking at this. One is that sharks are vastly evolutionarily superior to humans, since if you think we’ll last 60 million years, you’re insane. The other is that we’re superior to sharks, because they’ll almost certainly be extinct before we will, and their demise, like ours, will be thanks to us. These days a human’s a lot more likely to eat a shark than vice versa.
On the tiebreaker, though, sharks win. Because while we humans have our minds and our ability to transmit the contents of them down through the generations, and sharks have their big ol’ teeth and the means to use them, sharks don’t appear to agonize about the situation. And humans sure as hell do.
Humans hate being mentally strong and physically weak. The fact that we get to take this planet down with us when we go brings us no joy whatsoever. Instead we admire athletes and the physically violent, and we loathe intellectuals. A bunch of nerds build a rocket to the f*cking moon, and who do they send? A blond man named Armstrong, who can’t even say the line right when he lands.
It’s a weird curse, when you think about it. We’re built for thought, and civilization, more than any other creature we’ve found. And all we really want to be is killers.
Meanwhile, around Thanksgiving of ’91 I started f*cking Officer Mary-Beth Brennan of the West Orange Police Department. In her Crown Victoria, since she was married and cops don’t like to leave their “cruisers” when they’re on duty. Hers was infested with not just roaches but rats, because the f*ckheads on the other shifts kept shoving the bones from their fried chicken down between the hard leather seats. The thing was a f*cking habitrail.
I don’t mean to say I didn’t appreciate the sex. I’d never had sex with anyone before, and it was a nice relief from that. And I had no reason to think sex could be better, since it was already so different from anything I’d seen in a movie or read in a book.
But I did realize there had to be more to it than smacking your head on a radio while someone who seemed impossibly soft and old (she was younger than I am now, and all breasts turn out to be soft, but who knew?) squirms on you with her uniform shoved past her knees, and all the time you’re wondering how much harder you can push her to get some real, usable information from the Detective Grade 3’s and 4’s who must know something about who killed your grandparents. Plus it’s winter, so everything outside of her is freezing.
What Officer Brennan eventually found out for me was this:
The detectives didn’t think it was Nazis, neo or otherwise, since those people tend to target Hasidim. Nor was it much of a robbery, since so little was taken, and burglars avoid old people on the grounds that they’re home all the time and don’t tend to keep cash in the house anyway. The few things that were stolen, like the VCR, probably constituted either impulse shopping or a calculated attempt at misdirection.
“So who?” I asked Mary-Beth Brennan.
“He didn’t say.”
“You’re lying,” I said.
“I just don’t want you to get hurt.”
“F*ck that.”
She told me. The murders had probably been the point of the whole event. Old people may not make great burglary victims, but they’re fantastic homicide targets. They move slowly, they have a better chance of lying around for days before they get discovered, and, like I say, they’re usually at home. Anyone determined to commit murder who doesn’t care who the victim is wants someone like my grandparents. And that kind of person falls into one of two categories: serial killers and auditioning mobsters.
In West Orange, New Jersey, in early 1992, you’d be a jackass to bet on serial killers.
So most likely this was someone looking to prove he could kill, and to give the mob leverage over him as an initiation fee. Or rather it was two people, since there was a victim for each, and my grandparents had been shot with bullets from different guns.
According to one of the detectives Officer Brennan hit up for me, this meant there was a good chance that eventually these guys would be caught. Mob omertà bullshit runs both ways—the old guys blackmail the new guys, and the new guys finger the old guys. So eventually the police would hear about two particular f*ckheads who’d gotten made at the same time, and they’d have their suspects.
But that might be decades from now, and there might or might not still be evidence, or interest, by then. And it assumed that these guys actually managed to get “made,” and didn’t get rejected, or choose to just go back to their jobs at Best Buy or whatever.
The whole thing was weak. It was thin. Maybe it had been a serial killer after all. Or some junkies.
But the hounds don’t shun the fox for being mangy. The mob theory was all I had to go on, so I chased it.
And nothing else was coming. I’d pushed Mary-Beth too hard one day, and she had cried on my chest and said she worried that I didn’t really love her.
When you grow up in northern New Jersey you hear a lot of bullshit about the mafia and whose fathers are in it. But you also hear about a military academy day school in Suffern, where every time you meet someone who goes there he’s some smug dipshit with an Iroc-Z and a gold necklace that looks like it’s going to break his cocaine mirror. And where, when you look up luminaries of the Five Families in Who’s Who in New Jersey, a f*ck of a lot of them turn out to have gone to school.
I won’t name it. Suffice to say it has the same name as one of the more famous military academies in England, despite having been founded 150 years after the Revolutionary War.
I’d been expecting a Catholic school, but it didn’t make much difference. I was already doing the push-ups.
I transferred over the summer. The school was expensive, but I still had money from the wills and the insurance settlement. And, like I say, I didn’t have too many other needs.
As a military school it was a hoax. Reveille at “07:30” and “14:30,” forty minutes a day of parade class, parade show once a month. There was a core of dipshits who took it all seriously, and went out for the sports teams and so on, but everyone else smoked pot in the bathrooms and snuck out to the Pizza Hut on the highway to hook up with the girls from the girls’ school, which was on the other side of the tennis courts and the woods. The bathrooms at the Pizza Hut were coed.
You had to wait in line.
I chose Adam Locano to make friends with because he was so popular, not because of his mafia connections. I wasn’t even sure those existed until later, when I asked him how he got his nickname, which was “Skinflick.”
I’d heard it was because he’d made a porn movie with his babysitter when he was twelve.
“I wish,” he told me. “It was a hooker in Atlantic City. Dude, I don’t even remember it, I was so drunk. Then some a*shole from my dad’s social club stole the tape and made copies for everyone. It sucked.”
Bells went off, and I knew I’d stepped knee-deep into mafia. But before then I couldn’t be sure, because Locano was different from the other mob kids.
Like me, he was fifteen. Unlike me, he was pudgy, with puffy, diagonally creased nipples and a Droopy Dawg face with jowls and eye bags. His lower lip was too fleshy. Also unlike me, he was cool. He made looking like he did a point of pride, managing to appear—even in the dumbass uniforms we had to wear on parade—like he’d been out all night drinking. In Las Vegas. In 1960.
Another part of his charm (and another part I could only wonder at) was that he seemed to speak his mind with absolute freedom. He’d talk casually about whacking off or taking a crap, or about how he was in love with his first cousin, Denise. The second he got angry or frustrated he said so—including, inevitably, when he was annoyed at how much better I was at sports or fighting than he was.
I did my best to avoid those kinds of situations, but, being kids, and particularly kids at a so-called military academy, they came up. And I was permanently impressed by how gracefully Skinflick dealt with them. He would bellow in rage, then laugh, and you knew he’d been honest in both responses. On top of which, despite the way he acted, and his claim that he had read only one book cover to cover in his life, he was the smartest kid I’d ever met.
He was also self-assured enough to be friendly with all kinds of people—geeks, cafeteria workers, everybody—and this made it possible to get close to him.
Not that I didn’t have to work for it. I cut down on the Old Europe mannerisms and started dressing shaggy-preppy, with Vuarnets and a coral necklace. I slowed my speech down and lowered it, and spoke as seldom as possible. Every loner high school kid should be given a deadly serious incentive to fit in. It cools you up fast.
I also started dealing drugs. I had a connection through a nerd I’d known at my old high school, before my grandparents were killed and all my friends had stopped speaking to me because they didn’t know what to say. The nerd’s older brother was making a business of it, and got me eight-ounce bags of weed and full-on ounces of cocaine for a good rate. I think the two of them thought I was self-medicating.
I ended up having to sell for below cost anyway—it turns out buying friends is not the world’s most unique idea—but it worked. It was through pot that Skinflick and I met.
He passed me a note in class one day that said, “Brother, can you spare a dime?”
I am surely God’s original a*shole—a monkey in the Mayan ruins, shitting on what I can’t understand, worse than a Neanderthal. But of all the shameful things I’ve done, the easiest for me to understand is falling in love with Adam Locano and his family when I was fifteen years old.
Years later, the Feds tried to break me down with it: with how only a complete dipshit could go from finding his grandparents killed by mob scumbags to living with mob scumbags, and working for them, and sucking up to them, and needing them. But the reasons were obvious.
There are cops who go bad for 70,000 dollars and half a kilo of cocaine. The Locanos took me into their family. Their literal family, not some mafia movie bullshit. They took me skiing, for f*ck’s sake. They took me to Paris, and afterwards Skinflick and I went to Amsterdam on the train. They were not fundamentally kind people, but they did have empathy toward others, and they were remarkably kind to me. Besides Skinflick and his parents, there were two younger brothers. And no one in that family had haunted looks, or a constant awareness of mass murder. They all seemed to face forward, into a world of life, instead of backwards into a deathtrap they couldn’t explain. And they seemed like they wanted to take me with them.
I wasn’t even close to strong enough to pass it up.
David Locano, Skinflick’s father, was a lawyer at a four-partner law firm near Wall Street. I later learned he was the only partner who did mob work, though he was also the one who kept the firm afloat. He wore sloppy expensive suits and had black hair that winged down off the back of his head. He never managed to fully hide how sharp and competent he was, but around his family he seemed mainly befuddled, and in awe. Any time he needed to know something—about a computer, or whether he should take up squash or go on the Zone diet or whatever—he would ask us.
Skinflick’s mother, Barbara, was thin and humorous. She made appetizers frequently and either actually cared about professional sports or did a reasonable job of pretending to. “Oh please,” she liked to say. Like “Oh please, Pietro—now you’re calling him Skinflick?”
(Pietro was my actual name, by the way. Pietro Brnwa, pronounced “Browna.”)
And then there was Skinflick. Hanging out with him was not exactly like being brainwashed, in that brainwashing usually tries to get you to accept as desirable a reality that is, in fact, shitty, whereas hanging out with Skinflick was fun. But it had the same effect.
Tell me this, for example:
What is the value of one night at a bonfire party on the beach? How about if you get to be sixteen years old at the time? And you can feel the fire on one side of your face and the wind on the other, and the cold sand on your ankles and through the butt of your jeans, but the mouth of the girl you’re kissing and can barely see is hot and wet and tastes like tequila, and you feel like you’re communicating with her telepathically, and furthermore you have no regrets or disappointments in life, because for all you know the future’s going to rock, and you’ve had losses, sure, but it seems only right to expect to gain just as much as time goes on?
What are you supposed to give up for that? And how do you weigh it against your obligation to the dead?
It isn’t complicated: you take one look and walk away. You shake your head and go back to being a giant, lonely geek whose grandparents are dead. You be happy you’ve kept your soul.
I didn’t do that. I stayed with the Locanos long after I’d gotten what I’d set out to get from them, until my life became a mockery of my original mission. I could say being raised by my grandparents had given me lousy defenses against people for whom lying and manipulation were ways of life and forms of entertainment. But I could also say that being with the Locanos made me sick with happiness, and I didn’t want it to end.
And the truth is, I’ve done plenty of worse things since.