Bandit (9 page)

“I
t’s ‘game over’ for the Super Mario Brothers Bandit, the Rochester man charged with allegedly robbing ten banks in Macomb and Oakland Counties since June 22 …”

Dad’s face hung on the TV screen over the shoulder of the newscaster. For weeks after his arrest the media followed the story, updating us on his charges—both state and federal. I wonder if they would have followed up at all if it hadn’t been for his goofy nickname.

Someone on his case at the FBI thought he looked like Mario, with the bushy fake moustache and suspenders under his jacket and the flat newsboy cap he’d sometimes wear to the robberies. Mario, from
my
game. Super Mario Bros. 3 was my favorite game at the very time he was arrested; I played it almost every day on my Nintendo after school.

I switched from the news to my Nintendo. I played it even more after his arrest. It was the best one of the Mario Bros., the one with the raccoon tail, the frog suit, the vivid blue skies, and faces on all the clouds and trees—the cheeriest installment of the series. Unlikely that I was looking for him; more likely that I simply wanted to withdraw even further from my few friends. Still, there he was, in the game, every time I turned it on.

There was the seriousness of what he did against the silliness of this detail, and how this nickname came to represent him in the media and among strangers as a clownish criminal. I wanted to join in this rousing dismissal of him too. I didn’t join in anywhere, though, not all the way. My sister remained on his side, hoping, somehow, that it would all turn out to be some kind of mistake like he said it was. Mom never was on his side, and seemed to feel comfortable with his dismissal. I just kept quiet.

Often I leave that detail about his nickname out of the story now when I tell people. Tonally, the story becomes confusing if I mention his nickname. I start to smile and laugh sometimes, and the listener feels confused in what emotion to present. I might have to explain how it was not just any video-game character they assigned to my father, but my favorite one, the
main one
in my world—what a coincidence. How could my dad’s arrest be both awful and hilarious at the same time? Two opposing sharp points, irreconcilable. It hurt. But it was absurd, so I could laugh.

T
he face of Mr. Blue, West Middle School’s choir teacher, was turning purple with rage, as usual. The altos were talking and it was now the eighth time we’d gone over this section of Chicago’s “You’re the Inspiration.” He wanted us to sing the notes straight, without bending them like the singer does in the recorded version we all knew. In the soprano section I was watching the clock; soon I’d be saved from this.

“Molly?” It was Mrs. B, school counselor, come to retrieve me for my weekly session. In 1993 my seventh-grade year was launched with a hush around school I could feel—people talking, but not talking to me. The only person who approached me directly—had to, I suppose—was the counselor. I was relieved to get out of choir and walk with her through the quiet halls to her office.

“Jeez. You have so much stuff in your pockets!” She looked at the huge pockets on the baggy men’s corduroy pants I was wearing, straight from Value Village, packed with stuff. “What’s in there,” she said more seriously.

“Oh, just … lipstick, pens, compact, gum, sunglasses …” How strange to hold the attention of an adult! But now, only out of suspicion. I was embarrassed.

In her office I was supposed to be a wreck, have a breakdown, or at least cry. “What Cold Pricklies have been visiting you this week?” she asked, handing me a navy blue plastic shape with points protruding from it and googly eyes glued to its center. This was the Cold Prickly. In her lap, the Warm Fuzzy, a pink furry ball with similar eyes glued to it, waited.

“I didn’t … meet any … Cold Pricklies this week,” I responded quietly. She looked blankly at me, holding a smile, as if I had not said anything yet. I looked at the photos of her kids hung on the walls, the bowl of autumnal potpourri below, the small teddy bears. She’d always wait as long as it took until I said what she wanted to hear, I knew. Eventually I’d just offer the narrative she was looking for so I could end these sessions. But this time, I held out.

“I can’t give you a Warm Fuzzy if you don’t let go of a Cold Prickly first!” she explained cheerily. I looked at the clock. Maybe this wasn’t better than the purple face of Mr. Blue.

“OK, um. Let’s see. I feel lonely.”

“Lonely! You aren’t lonely. You have friends! Your friend Lindsey. And your mom and your sister, and me, I’m your friend! Now, see, doesn’t the thought of all your friends around
you give you a Warm Fuzzy?” She moved the pink creature from her lap and placed it in mine while I perfunctorily offered the Cold Prickly back.

“Do you know what
alienated
means?” I looked at the clock. “It means you feel separated from your world. And your dad, well, I imagine how upsetting it must be to learn he committed such an out-of-character crime. You are feeling alienated from him right now, your own father, the person you trusted the most—snapped!”

And that was the story. She, along with everyone else, swallowed it whole. He was presented in the news, in court, and in conversation as a meek, diligent autoworker with no record who
must have
just suddenly snapped. They turned over reasons why such a normal man might choose to commit such an out-of-character crime: gambling addiction, his hours at the plant being cut, post-traumatic stress disorder from the Vietnam War, Detroit itself. At first I wondered if they knew something I didn’t.

“No,” I said.

“No?”

“No. That isn’t how I feel. And that’s not my dad’s story.
And
I know enough about therapy to know that you’re not supposed to tell me how I feel or don’t feel. My mom is a therapist, you know. I’ve been in therapy since I was six. I know the deal.”

Mrs. B squinted at me and smiled. I tossed the Warm Fuzzy from one hand to the other, waiting.

“You’re a smart cookie, Molly. But you don’t know the deal.”

The bell rang and a flood of students shuffled through the halls. I returned Mrs. B’s Warm Fuzzy to her and thanked her, joining the moving crowd.

I didn’t know the deal. I didn’t know anything. But I knew that the official story everyone else had bought about my dad wasn’t right. I thought about it through algebra, through chemistry. How does one do anything “out of character”? Character, I reasoned,
is
action. It is
exactly
defined by the actions one takes—especially in crisis. Dad had been fired. He was out of money. Bookies were calling in his debts—I tried to imagine the pressure, the fear. He could have asked for help. Right? That’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re in trouble—go to your brothers and sisters, your partners, your friends. I tried to imagine Dad humbling himself before anyone in his life and I couldn’t.
This
is
his character,
I thought.
There it is, plain as day.

At lunch I headed for the library, set in the center of the school. I walked through the stacks, looking for something new. If character is action, what does it say about
us
that we needed to construct this digestible story about him—mild man, suddenly snapped? My fingers ran along the spines of young adult fiction. The story means we are storytellers, that’s all.

The story makes things easier for us: solves a mystery, the problem of
why.
And maybe to call an act “out of character”
is to reveal
oneself:
how limited any one person’s knowledge is of any other person. Some people’s wall of privacy is quite opaque, but that doesn’t mean what’s behind it is not part of them. No, the “out-of-character” story is just a barren and cartoonish way of thinking about character.

I moved across the aisle to the poetry section and set my fingers on the oldest-looking book on the shelf.
Leaves of Grass.
I pulled it down and opened to the center of the book:

I snapped the book shut as if I’d seen something in it move. My life turned on a pivot point when I read these lines from the end of “To a Certain Civilian.” It seemed like
poetry itself
speaking to me in those lines, challenging me to come to new ground. I didn’t turn back to the fiction section that year. Poetry became my companion, starting with Whitman, then Dickinson, then the rest of that small section. It seemed to know a better way to the world—an approach more honest, more direct, sharper.

I enfolded a deep mistrust of stories into my being that year. It was personal. It was, in a way I didn’t know yet, political. I mean I saw this story on the news, this
same
story about my dad that my family and friends were telling themselves.

I watched the story spill forth. From the inner state of my particular sister and mom and grandparents came a certain
story about Dad to soothe themselves with, then the story made its way outward, to the cops, the FBI, the reporters. I saw how a public narrative starts with
one person
—my sister, for example, thinking, talking, grasping for old stories to lay atop new ones; then reinforcement occurs, corners are cut, subtlety lost, and the story becomes history: a story that doesn’t cultivate contemplation but preempts it, ends it, like a coarse mask.

I laughed about it with my friends—Lindsey and Lauren, and my best friend Noah. They watched me carefully and wanted to know how they could help, but I offered nothing, and they gave up their concern eventually. I started to know then what I know now:
why
is a hard question. Sometimes it’s the wrong question to try to work out.

Still, I’ve tried working on
why
ever since. I dug up old court records from his first trial, looking for transcripts, for things he said on record that could explain his actions. I wasn’t surprised when I came across his lawyer’s sentencing memo from the trial, in which he used this exact reasoning in asking for lighter sentencing from the judge: “This is one of those rare cases where an individual who would otherwise be the last person you would suspect of threatening harm to others, did something completely out of character for reasons that are hard to fathom.”

The reasons weren’t that hard to fathom. He wanted to keep going. What everyone wants. I felt certain I didn’t know him, but I knew there was a lot I couldn’t see. Or, I should say, I knew there was a darkness. I was around his darkness.
I was as close to it as a child could be to her father’s darkness without seeing it.

I carried on with West Middle School, keeping quiet, reading poetry. Others had it worse, I knew, much worse. Therapists have told me it is not productive to compare trauma and rate its value as “worse” or “better” than other trauma, but I am just being practical. I was not raped or starved or maimed, just ignored, and I lived OK in that empty space. I can come up with lots of reasons to make it OK.

My mom and I took my sister back to their condo to get more of her belongings. Over the next few weeks we’d go back there to take things to keep or sell. When we first arrived the FBI had just sacked the place again looking for the money or evidence. The money was all gone, though, paid to his debtors, spent on overdue bills, or wasted. Eleven banks, and all together he’d stolen only about $44,000.

It seemed like the FBI had cut open everything possible: the couches, pillows, mattresses, suitcases, boxes of food, bags of whatever, all of her stuffed animals. Photo albums were flung open in a pile on the kitchen table. All of my sister’s clothes were thrown from her closet and drawers into the center of her room. His room was worse. Nothing was OK. The white stuffing from his comforter had been pulled out like guts. It was awful for my sister, to see her home ripped open in every way, all for money. It seemed cruel, weirdly vengeful, although it probably wasn’t. I felt guilty for not being her. I felt sick that I lived with Mom instead of Dad and this didn’t
happen to me. It did happen to me—but I was on the farther side of things. I hated that about myself.

She packed up her clothes and things of hers that weren’t destroyed. She cried, the destroyed one, plucking framed photos of her and Dad together from the wall and hugging them like a war widow. Most of the rest of the stuff would be thrown out. The only things I took were a cheap record player and his Italian opera records. I also took what I thought were blank cassettes, but later I discovered they were full of recordings from the radio or CDs he liked. One had the Simply Red version of “If You Don’t Know Me By Now” recorded over and over, back-to-back, the entire tape.

T
hey let my sister keep the Firebird because, she argued to the FBI, he owed her money. They couldn’t exactly trace the car to stolen money anyway. She kept the Firebird all through high school until she got into a fight with some girl over a boy, and the car’s paint job ended up disfigured after being dotted with bologna in the school parking lot. She sold it for almost nothing.

She stayed with our grandparents for a few weeks, then came to stay with us. For the one year we went to the same high school—her as a senior and me as a freshman—she’d sometimes drive me to school in that car. At 7:15 a.m. I’d squash myself into the backseat and push my nose into my coat sleeve or cardigan or whatever I had to filter the overpowering stink of shitty perfume she’d just doused her entire upper body in moments before plopping
into the driver’s seat, barely awake, sometimes hungover. In the cold dark mornings I’d go with her like that, my whole chest vibrating from the dumb bass of 2 Live Crew chanting “pop that pussy” or “put your back into it” while I tried to cover myself from all of it, especially her, her like this. Mostly I walked to school.

My sister moved in with us on a Sunday and the FBI came to see her the next day. I remember letting them in. It was sunny and warm and the two men filled the door completely with darkness. Mom led them to the kitchen table, where my sister was waiting for the interview, this same kitchen where Dad had sent a singing gorilla just a few months before. Not needed, I sat secretly on the steps to listen. “Do you recognize the man in this photo?” one of them began.

“Yeah that’s my Uncle Mike.” My sister’s voice was icy.

“Your Uncle Mike has been coming around a lot lately, hasn’t he?”

“No.”

“You saw him visiting your dad a lot last week, didn’t you? Answer calls from him too?”

“Um no, not at all.”

“Do you recognize the man in this photo?”

“No.”

It was an army buddy Dad knew in Vietnam. They showed her a yellowy photo of them in fatigues, smoking, clasped to each other over a machine gun on a tripod as if the three of them were posing for a family portrait. Mom watched the interviewers and my sister with concern.

“And this man here, next to your dad, you recognize him, don’t you?”

“I already told you, that is Uncle Mike,” she said, angry now.

“And here?”

“I. Don’t. Know.” She was muffling tears. They kept asking her over and over to identify either Uncle Mike or the war buddy, or sometimes Dad in surveillance video stills. Mom was getting agitated too.

“OK, that’s enough. She doesn’t know anything, for Christ’s sake, she wasn’t
there
,” Mom interrupted. “She’s just a child.”

Dad told the investigators he’d been framed, that it was either this old war buddy or his brother who’d done the robberies, not him. He blamed his own brother. There was the money in his car, the disguise, the security camera photos of him coming and going from the banks, his face clear as day.
Framed.
Nothing much came of this claim, ultimately, except a couple of hour-long FBI interviews my sister pressed herself through.

Our first trip back to Dad’s condo Mom saw a fake ID he was making on his desk, the materials laid out plainly, almost comically obvious: an X-Acto knife, a new name, another photo. He must have been planning to take off. There is no return to a normal life after a crime spree, is there? I can’t imagine he thought he could just quit robbing and go back to a real job, back to normal. I also don’t know why he didn’t split sooner. He could’ve brought my sister to us, to get her out
of the way at least. He could’ve taken his money and moved away, to start over as a new man. But he just came home, kept coming home after the robberies, pretending everything was normal. Perhaps he was hesitating, or waiting to save up more money. Maybe he didn’t want to leave my sister. Or he was lazy, or scared.

I didn’t go to any of the trial or court appearances with my mom and sister. I never saw him at all during that time. The news covered the story, and I’d see photos of him in the paper or the court sketches on the local news. Dad’s face looked sour, saggy. I threw myself harder into school and tried to forget the mess. I wanted to become a chemist. I loved the formulas and codes. It seemed grand and safe, things to know, plain and tidy and logical.

I could forget. I forgot.

There seemed to be nothing to gain from thinking about it. I couldn’t help him, or my sister, or myself, by thinking about it, so I turned away.

The local media continued to cover the drawn-out trials, dragged out by Dad’s insistence on a psychological evaluation, then rounds of firing his lawyers. It would pop up sometimes on the news or in newspapers. My sister followed them more closely.

He wanted to plead insanity, claim that the trauma from PTSD caused his actions, which he described as out-of-body experiences, with no memory of them. His first lawyer was fired for strongly urging him not to take this course of action. After all, he had kept a neat list of the robberies, which was
in his wallet when he was arrested, noting the time, date, and amount of money procured from each one. Not exactly consistent with an “out-of-body experience.”

After long delays, constant objections, and legal stalling, he was evaluated by a court psychiatrist, deemed competent, and had to drop his insanity defense. He was sentenced to ten years for felony bank robbery, but would serve only seven with good behavior.

He never gave in. Never admitted his crimes, never apologized. Not publicly nor privately, not to anyone. His story of being framed dropped away, as did the story of the amnesia and war trauma, until there was just silence, just him there with his crimes, with no stories to explain them, just silence.