Bandit (2 page)

F
rom under the bed I pull a plastic bin stuffed with notebooks: thousands of pages of writings, days I set down, starting at age eight. I would give anything to see the artifacts again—the actual days I spent with my family—to turn them over in my hands and catalogue their facts with my grown-up faculties. Who doesn’t wish for this? Now those days exist only in this bin of paper versions, each entry skewed in the grasp of a child, absent of context.

The earliest diary is a black-and-white, static-print composition book. The beginning pages are covered in unicorn and rainbow drawings and sketches of bulbous fancy dresses done in crayon and neon-colored pencils. Then some pages stuck in from school writing activities:

Other pages about puddles or balloons or Halloween are happy and fine, with plenty of exclamation points and normal childhood engagement with the world. I read “Shoes” over and over. I leave it next to me while I pile the rest of the diaries onto my bed, searching farther. My eyes get caught on the
By Molly
a few times until I let myself look at the page again. I have been ignoring myself for so long. All of this personhood here, catalogued in plodding blindness and thrown into a bin and hidden.
My Shoes are always filled with sand.

I open the composition book again. The first real entry is dated June 25, 1988.

Tiny squares of Swiss cheese and mini marshmallows for dessert, I remember that, putting food out for fairies. I don’t remember the rest of this. At that point I was old enough to see that our survival was threadbare compared to the other kids I knew, which explains the remarks about stealing my sister’s portion of tuna casserole as soon as she
stromed
away, and the feeling of almost sickening marvel at new shoes in the other entry, which seemed too nice for me. And I remember my sister grating against Mom and me, the feeling of grating in my chest when we were together, that exact verb,
grating.
I kept turning away and away,
today Im don’t care, today Im don’t care,
but the grating stayed.

Michigan did see a hot summer in 1988. And it was the last year we’d all live together as a family: Mom, Dad, sister, me. I look at the bin of diaries again, feeling overwhelmed. There’s so much to learn there, so much I don’t know about my family.

I didn’t know Dad gambled. Sports betting mostly, on football, baseball, or college basketball, point spreads, totals, any angle. Bookies, calls to Vegas, two or three TVs at once.

I want to say plainly everything I didn’t know. I have a little of it now, and I want to hold it up and out. I can’t help but hold it up and out.

I knew there were little paper slips and crazy phone calls and intense screaming about sports games—more intense than seemed appropriate—but it only added up to a private tension orbiting around him, buffeting us away. In the dark, I grew up.

The last entry in the black-and-white composition book from 1988 says:

No one home. Today I went

It ends there.

S
ports betting is so different from card games or other gambling because the player doesn’t actually
play
the game he’s betting on. His “game” is in the analysis of its information—knowing which players might secretly be hurt or sick, which refs favor which teams, the particular mood of one stadium over another, the specific combination of one pitcher with a certain kind of weather—and the synthesis of hunches, superstitions, wishes, and loyalties. Beyond that, there are the odds the bookies are offering, which reflect what everyone else is predicting, also a factor to weigh for or against. A perfect game for someone who thinks he’s smarter than everyone else.

Before Detroit built big casinos downtown there was Windsor Casino right across the border, so there was always blackjack, too. But nobody knows much else about this—my mom, my sister, his coworkers, his brothers and sisters—no
one saw his gambling, no one was invited to come along, to share strategies, or even to wish him luck. It was totally private. Mom’s experience of his gambling came to her only in cold losses: an empty savings account, the car suddenly gone, bills and debts, threatening phone calls. Sometimes he’d come home with broken ribs, or a broken nose not to be discussed. The rare big win must have been wasted immediately in private, usually on more gambling, or something showy and useless like a new watch for himself. Or, of course, his debts, eternal debts.

Outcomes shake out fast in gambling. In real life, big risks take years to reveal themselves, and the pressure of choosing a career, a partner, a home, a family, a whole identity, might overwhelm an impatient man, one who values his own control, not fate’s. He will either want all the options out of a confused greed—hoarding overlapping partners, shallow hobbies, new alternate selves—or he will refuse them all, risking nothing. And really, the first option is the second option. Keeping a few girlfriends or wives around effectively dismisses a true relationship with any one of them. Being a good, hardworking dad and a criminal at the same time is a way of choosing neither.

Besides, an addict is already faithfully committed to something he prioritizes above all else. Gambling addiction, particularly, is easy to start; it usually requires no elaborate or illegal activities, no troublesome ingestion of substances, and programs the body using its own chemicals: adrenaline, endorphins, spikes of joy. Only once did I see Dad’s face after a night of gambling. I was eight. It was early Sunday morning, before
Mom or my sister were awake. I was belly down on the carpet with a small arrangement of Legos, singing to myself, light still gray in the living room. The front door unlocked and opened and I looked, petrified with fear. Dad, obscure in silhouette, but shining somehow, his hair wet, face wet. Stony expression: eyes set steady, mouth drawn in. His shirt hung heavy on him. I stared from the floor, silent. He didn’t see me. He turned, still blank, and disappeared down the hall. A dark V of sweat running down the back of his shirt. Quietly I turned back to my Lego arrangement, looking at it, but not seeing, quiet.

What did I know about gambling? Even as I grew older, I avoided sports, avoided casinos and card games, avoided even the lottery. As an adult I wasn’t equipped to understand him, having no understanding of gambling.

At first I thought gambling was about chance, just the possibility to make something out of nothing, to multiply money just through pure cleverness. He’d like that: something from nothing.

And that is the first charm. But I know now that gambling is about certainty, not chance. Outcomes, whether win or lose, are certain, immediate, and clear. In other words, there
will
be a result to any one bet, a point in time when this risk will be unequivocally resolved and the skill and foresight of the gambler can be perfectly measured. A shot of adrenaline will issue into the bloodstream, win
or
lose. It’s not messy, not indefinite or uncontrollable, like love or people, things Dad labored to control. The space of gambling absorbs its players away from uncertainty, the unknown: how the world works.

M
y dad was born August 19, 1945, in a refugee camp set up for the survivors just liberated from Nazi concentration camps. This is how he first lived: being carried by his mother, in secret, while she worked silently as a slave for the Nazis in Kempten.

The previous year his mother and father and five siblings were moved out of their home in Szwajcaria, Poland, by the Nazis and forced to board a train. My Aunt Helena, a few years older than my dad, told me she remembers the train. She recalls their mom, Stanislawa, hopping off the train when it stopped to hunt for wood to start a cooking fire. Stanislawa’s parents and three of her siblings had died a few years before in Siberia, having been shipped there to cut trees for the Russian supply. “The trees would shatter if they hit the ground because it was so cold. No one had enough clothes or food,
so most people died there,” Aunt Helena told me in a recent letter replying to my inquiries about our family history. She has memories of their life during the war, “but they don’t seem real,” she told me. She remembers the mood of the train: the animal-like panic any time the train stopped, the worry of the adults, and her worry when her mother would disappear. They were taken to the Dachau concentration camp, where my grandfather was beaten and interrogated daily because they suspected him of being a partisan, like his brothers.

My dad’s dad was separated from the family. The rest of them lived and worked together, hoping he’d be returned.

After a few months all of them were transferred to a subcamp in Kempten, Germany, where they worked the farm that fed the captives. This is where my grandmother became pregnant with my father. She hid her pregnancy because she was afraid she’d be forced to abort it, so she worked like everyone else and hid her body. Everyone had to work to be fed, even the children and the sick. My aunt remembers little about this time, and won’t say much. “There were horrors every day,” she says. I don’t press her. The war was over in April and my dad was born in August.

After the war they were moved to a refugee camp while trying to find a way out of Germany. My grandfather felt strongly that they should move to Australia, since he liked the idea of working a homestead and living freely, as a farmer. But a few months before they were to leave, he died, and Australia no longer welcomed a widow with five children. They were offered a passage to America through a Catholic sponsorship
program, and they took it. My dad’s first memories were of this ship: troop transport, cold and gray all around, the sea and metal smell.

They arrived at Ellis Island on December 4, 1951, and Dad’s name was changed from Jozef to Joseph. They traveled by train to Detroit. Their sponsor took them to St. Albertus Church, on the corner of St. Aubin and Canfield Streets, on the other side of I-75 from Wayne State University, an area that used to be called Poletown. They lived on the top floor of the adjacent school, built in 1916, until my grandma found work in the cafeteria of the
Detroit News
and rented an apartment for them. Now St. Albertus, no longer a parish as of 1990, stands among abandoned buildings and urban prairie.

Inspired by the family history illuminated by my aunt, I emailed Dad asking him to tell me about his life growing up in Detroit. I had no idea where he was born, and I had no inkling of the incredible ordeal his family shuffled through. He’d never told me any of this. Was it shame? Would he even reply? Quickly he wrote back to say he’d write me a letter, two letters in fact, since he was sure he wouldn’t be able to fit it all in one envelope. I waited a month, two months: it wasn’t like him. I thought maybe he was sick or worse. Eventually it came—he’d gotten in trouble at his job, he said, for disobeying an order, and had been in solitary confinement for the past few weeks.

The first letter, written on yellow lined paper, was long and cheery. I was suspicious. I’ve always been both suspicious and suspicious of my suspicion when listening to Dad. What
if it wasn’t all lies this time? What if he let me in—would I be strong enough to follow? But mostly I knew it would be what it was: an innocuous and slightly heroic vision of himself, his official story, nothing deeper.

He described the neighborhood, a tight-knit, mini Eastern Europe: small blocks of varied ethnicities grouped around their churches, family-owned shops, and split homes. They were terribly poor, living off charity and the small salary that his mom made washing dishes in the cafeteria of the
Detroit News
office downtown. He described her as “superstitiously religious.” Every day before school he attended service at St. Albertus, and also on Sundays, leaving only Saturdays without church. His whole world was built on the church—his family, his neighborhood, his education, his citizenship in this country. When they did move out of the school, they lived only a few blocks away. He said he was almost never too far away to hear the church bells chime every fifteen minutes. He said he loved the church. The overwhelming detail of the stained glass, the painted ceiling, the enormous organ, the grand, formal rituals—all of it must have been a steady comfort to him, to all of them, in a new country.

It was nice to hear, I must admit, and it made sense. I didn’t much see the impression of the Catholic Church on him, but for his love of luxury. It contrasted with the moral tone of my upbringing by Mom: the blue-collar, midwestern work ethic that identifies laziness, indulgence, and shortcuts as serious sins, having nothing in common with Catholicism besides guilt as a motivational technique. Luxury disgusted
me. It all seemed false, however real the materials, however deep the ostentation, or honest the funding—it was all predicated on the notion that money itself meant something
big,
was glorious. I know if I had grown up as poor as my dad I would most likely see this differently.

Dad’s mom eventually remarried, to an older Lithuanian man whose money helped the family enormously. They moved into a real house, out of the fleabag apartments they’d been moving through, and he suddenly had a stepdad. He would only describe his stepdad as “crabby.” His brothers fought with him regularly, and so he kept his distance. In one letter he tells me his stepdad carved for him a toy wooden rifle—the one and only present he ever gave him—and how much he loved it. My dad devoted one whole letter to describing him, the houses they lived in, and which of his siblings moved out when. The second letter is colder and hesitant. Dad was the last to leave home. I can see him there, with his mother to whom he could hardly relate, and his distant stepfather, a non-dad, for whom there was no real role in his life. He turned inward. I know how that works. Perhaps he felt abandoned or lonely.

By the time he was leaving elementary school his neighborhood started to change too. As the Polish immigrants moved to Hamtramck and other white neighbors moved to the suburbs, black folks replaced them—people whom my father had, until this point, never met. “With them,” he wrote, “came crime and drugs. It was demoralizing, to see these strange black people that I previously saw at a distance now living
next door to us.” His childhood world, as small and culturally monolithic as most childhood worlds, was cracking open. The Polish family on the corner moved out and the property became a post for drug dealers in just a few months. The family-owned businesses he grew up with closed or moved. Tensions boiled. Newly established black-owned businesses were torched. Vigilante “patrols” were established to keep one group away from another group’s street. White immigrant families abandoned entire blocks together, chasing hopes for reestablishing homogenous neighborhoods elsewhere. This is the story all over Detroit throughout the fifties and sixties, White Flight, how abandonment began to build a “white noose” around the city. In his letter he says most people do not have a “good reason” to dislike black people, but he does. I am ashamed by this and I wonder what potential warmth was cut from his personality in his turn toward hatred of his neighbors.

He stayed in Detroit until he left for Vietnam in the midseventies. When he returned, he moved to a flat just a few blocks away from St. Albertus with his first wife and their daughter, my half-sister. And every letter he has ever written to me about his life story ends there. Perhaps this is just practical—he thinks I know the rest of the story. But, this is important. This part of his life—everything before he met my mom—this is the part he can present as wholesome. He was innocent then, not a criminal yet—or at least, could
say
he was innocent then.
All
the letters end there.