My father had no money to buy things, and thus no power to manipulate us by withholding those same things. The parents of other kids owned boats or second homes in some Connecticut woods (“Who the hell has the money for two homes?!”). There were finished basements with pool tables and jukeboxes and popcorn machines. Some parents also provided cash for skating, to go out to eat, to go to a movie or bowling, you name it. We had none of that. Deprived of these more effective means of disciplining a child, my father had only one card to play: the Fear Program. “What time are you going to be home?” he would say, smoldering in a way that I had never seen in a person, before or since. “Ten thirty,” I’d reply, my body stiffening slightly in a half wince. “You better be home by ten thirty or you know what’s gonna happen to you, don’t you?” In came the iron finger. This was his index finger (and you’d swear he had a thimble on the end of it) driven into your chest muscle. That was it: the stare, the iron finger, the genuine threat in his voice. We would reenter the house by 10:30. This was a man who had failed to broker or outright win the respect he wanted outside this door. He would be damned if he were denied it here.
Even at a very young age, I already had a suspicion about how desperate my parents were financially. They were always receiving notices about the electricity or phone being shut off. The garbage carters would drive down our block on Monday mornings and skip our house, leaving a nonpayment slip in the mailbox: “Your service has been halted . . .” By the time I was twelve, a significant realization dawned on me. I understood that if I wanted money, if I needed money for anything, I’d have to go out and get it. Given the ever-looming shadow of the iron finger, selling marijuana or other drugs, as some enterprising kids in the neighborhood had resorted to, was clearly out of the question. At twelve years old, I’m walking the streets of my neighborhood with a bucket, an oversized sponge, and a bottle of dishwashing liquid. I’m soliciting people in their driveways and offering to wash their car for five bucks. (Or four. Make it three.)
I’m the first squeegee man to hit Nassau Shores. My father saw that I needed a backer, so he bought me a lawn mower. God knows how. The deal was I had to give him a cut of my earnings till he was paid back. I cut eight lawns per weekend. That came out to forty bucks gross. Subtract half for my dad, plus gas and oil, and in the first summer I netted fifteen bucks a week. I was rich. By the following summer, the lawn mower was paid off and I was pocketing thirty a week. The more money I netted, however, the more these funds were subject to another form of taxation, which was my mother.
These were times when it was like we were in a Cagney movie. I would come into our kitchen to find my mother staring out the window. I’d ask her what was wrong and she’d answer with a muffled “Nothing . . . nothing.” Then she’d cry. My favorite such scenario was when she would say that she had spent my sister Jane’s Girl Scout cookie money. The forty or fifty dollars she was short was, uncannily, the amount of money I had in my pocket at that moment. And whoosh, out it came, she took it, no more tears. This happened countless times, and a powerful die was cast in these moments. For the rest of my life, I was enslaved by the belief that there were few problems that could not be solved by applying money or even more money.
When my grandfather died, he left me boxes of the coins he had collected in, perhaps, fifty books. I was also given a simple gold signet ring that bore our common initials, ARB. One day, my sister asked if I would lend her my ring to wear on a date. I might have thought that request was strange, but I just handed it over, refusing to see anything odd. The next morning, she wasn’t home and I didn’t see her again until that night, when she looked at me strangely and said, in a matter-of-fact way, “I lost your ring. I’m sorry, but it must have fallen off my hand during the night and I’ve looked everywhere and it’s gone.” Her words and tone deflected any serious inquiry. Eventually, I learned it had been sold in some pawnshop. I went into my closet, which was filled with my clothes and sneakers. There I kept the coin collection, in boxes, under my guard. I had never assumed it needed protection, but some of the boxes were now nearly empty. No one had ever said a word.
My father, with an almost haunting sense of timing, called me into the den of our house, a room my mother rarely entered. “What’s the situation with the coin collection?” he asked.
I will never forget the look in his eye. “Here it is,” he seemed to say. “Here’s your chance to get a whiff of what I’ve been dealing with all these years. Go ahead, lie to me. Tell me that it’s all intact up in your closet. You won’t throw your mother under the bus, but just look me in the eye and know that I know you’re lying.”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s all there.” He stared at me for a long beat. I thought I heard a blood vessel of his rupture. He sagged a bit more than usual. He couldn’t win. Some of this was his fault, he must have known. But he was just so fucking tired of all of it.
Everyone in my home seemed to be moving apart. My younger siblings had their friends and sports or other activities. Beth seemed overwhelmed from always helping my mother around the house, and would run off with her boyfriend, who could buy her little things and give her some much-needed attention. Meanwhile, I wandered between three groups of people, none of which completely satisfied me. One was the group of rock-and-roll-worshipping, drug-and-alcohol-abusing, street-fighting tough guys. My way into this pack was my friend’s older brother. Most of these guys were older, some around eighteen or nineteen and a few in their early twenties. Almost none were in college, and most still lived at home, waiting for a shot at some type of job. My group, the younger siblings and their friends, buzzed around them like apprentices, begging them to buy cigarettes and beer. The owner of the local delicatessen announced that anyone passing beer on to minors would be reported to the police. Thus, we got a lot of “Get fucked” from our elders, until finally one of them relented, recalling his own desperate pleas on many such cold nights. He told us to walk way down the block, where he would hand us the bag. Every night that I spent with them in this way, I knew at that very moment, was wrong.
Standing on the corner of Unqua and Suffolk Roads, the temperature freezing, bundled up and begging someone I hardly knew to buy me beer and cigarettes, I thought, “I don’t know what I want, but I know it’s not this. I’m acting as if I’m happy, as if I belong. But this is just like the black guys on the couch on St. James Place. Or more like my grandfather, inside the walls of his apartment—now the suburbs themselves were the wall. And these guys are my grandpa-in-training: white, getting by, unfulfilled, bitter.”