As a man with so many balls in the air at the school, my father had a key ring rivaled only by the custodial staff themselves. He could get into the rifle range, the gymnasium, equipment lockers, storage rooms, locker rooms, A/V storage, you name it. This key ring offered us pretty unlimited access to the trove of athletic equipment that characterized a significant period of our childhoods, especially for the few weeks in summer that my father was free from work. He would load bats, balls, gloves, rubber bases, and even a volleyball net into the back of our old, beat-up station wagon, which was covered in dents and dings, with bald tires and a worn paint finish. My parents would fill a cooler with eggs, bacon, bread, orange juice, tuna salad, bologna, and cheese, and pack paper plates, silverware, frying pans, a cheap grill and charcoal briquettes, and anything else needed to prepare and serve both breakfast and lunch to eight people. The image of us hauling all of this from the parking field to the shore of Jones Beach would later make me think of what it must have been like to film Lawrence of Arabia. We’d set up, cook, eat, and then swim and play some kind of ball game until around four o’clock, while my parents alternately watched us or read—the Sunday Times for my father, the latest from Sidney Sheldon for my mother. We baked brown in the sun. My sister Beth, the eldest, not one for sports, was usually overwhelmed or fatigued by her four brothers’ incessant activity. She typically sat and read magazines, or would elect not to come and would go off and visit friends instead. On the way home, we’d stop at Marjorie Post Park, one of two spacious community parks in Massapequa. My father would herd us through a quick shower in the pool-area locker room. “I’m not gonna have six children backing up my septic tank when they can shower here,” he would toss at my mother, who always seemed to sigh at all the corners we had to cut.
My mother grew up in Syracuse, New York, as one of seven children: six girls and one boy. Her father was a relatively successful businessman, and they lived in a nice home in downtown Syracuse. They weren’t wealthy in the sense that they spent all of his money, but they lived well, with maids and nannies. I never knew my grandfather, who died when I was one year old, but I’m told that he was a generous and loving father, always coming home from business trips with gifts for his children. My maternal grandmother was ill during my earliest childhood and I never knew her either, as she lived out her last years in a nursing home, spending any money her husband had left behind for her nursing home care. Many of my mother’s siblings and their families, a large group, lived in the Syracuse area, and we visited them many summers when I was a small child. We rented a moldy house adjacent to Lake Ontario in a spot called Sandy Pond, where the houses had names like Camp Rendezvous. We swam in Lake Ontario or rowed a boat in the small pond for a couple of weeks, during which time the grown-ups drank, gossiped, and traded war stories about raising children with little money. These were the only family vacations we ever took. Not to Manhattan or Disneyland. We went to Pulaski, New York.
My father had two brothers, one of whom retired from the NYPD and convinced my father to cosign a loan for him to buy a small inn on Lake Wallenpaupack in Pennsylvania. He defaulted on the loan, and my father was hit with a judgment to pay a few thousand dollars. The bank threatened to garnishee his salary to collect. I think that was the financial hit that my father never quite recovered from. My uncle essentially vanished after that. My father’s youngest brother, Charles, was a figure out of either a Ken Kesey novel or a Wes Anderson film, depending on the circumstances. Family legend was that Charles had a remarkably high score on his army IQ test. He enrolled briefly at Syracuse University, where both my parents went, and met and married my mother’s sister. That was my family: two brothers married two sisters. Within a few years, my uncle Charles left his wife, my aunt Becky. She arrived on our doorstep with her three girls, Ruth, Marion, and Louise. My father was her ex-husband’s brother. My mother was her sister. These girls were my double first cousins, the blood in their veins nearly identical to mine. My father, whose Christ complex would surface at the most inopportune times, let them move in. He enrolled them in school. He fed them and clothed them. They stayed with us for almost a year. My father, who had one hand tied behind his back with the loan default from one brother, was now raising the other brother’s three kids. I look back and realize that this is not the recipe for a long life—an honorable one, maybe, but not a long one.
My father had grown up in Brooklyn. As children, we visited my grandparents often on St. James Place, in the Fort Greene area. In the 1960s, the neighborhood was blighted. Unemployed men, nearly all Hispanic or African-American, sat on stoops or sofas that had been left on the sidewalk while drinking beer or liquor from paper bags. I’d walk with my grandfather to the newspaper stand to get all of the daily New York papers, perhaps six or seven of them. Next he’d pick up a carton of Chesterfields and a few quart bottles of Ballantine or Schaefer beer. Once he was stocked, he went inside and hit the sofa and, exactly like the guys outside, smoked and drank all day. The only thing separating them was a law degree and a navy pension.
My father would bring us to his parents’ house on a Sunday afternoon, and my grandmother would cook dinner. She was a world-class cook who spent the better part of the afternoon preparing the perfect turkey, the perfect mashed potatoes, and the perfect cookies. My grandparents had no money, but they made sure we felt special by buying us Cokes in the old glass bottles. I have countless memories of watching television in their living room. There was The Jackie Gleason Show (“Live, from the fun and sun capital of the world, Miami Beach, Florida!”), Candid Camera, and The Ed Sullivan Show. I met Paul McCartney on that couch in Brooklyn in August of 1965, during one of his later appearances on the Sullivan show. Around 9 p.m., my father would gather up my siblings and begin to load them into his station wagon. In summertime, with no school the next day, my grandfather would mouth to my father, “Let him stay,” pointing at me. As my grandfather’s namesake, I was the Dauphin. My father would roll his eyes and sigh. Granting this request meant he’d have to drive back to Brooklyn the next day, but he’d agree, and everyone would trudge off except me. “Why do you and I get along so well, Grandpa?” I’d ask. “Because we have a common enemy,” he’d reply.