MAYBE THOMAS WOLFE WAS RIGHT…MAYBE YOU CAN’T – Part Two

 

“Make your mistakes, take your chances, look silly, but keep on going. Don’t freeze up.”

― Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again —

Continued from Part One -  

https://southernyankeewriter.blogspot.com/2021/12/maybe-thomas-wolfe-was-rightmaybe-you.html

It had all gone terribly wrong. The worst time of my life. 

I knew how bad it was for me, but not how bad it had been for my wife. While I’d been laid up in bed, the money had run out completely.

Our peso accounts were drained. We had a couple thousand dollars in US currency stashed away, but she was saving that for a rainy day—even rainier than the current one, that is. We had both worked at the newspaper, and when I walked out, I took Virginia with me, so we were both out of work at a time when there were no jobs to be had. She never talked about it. She merely kept finding ways to keep the house going. Among other things, she hocked all of her late mother’s jewelry. Family heirlooms, but she figured survival was more important.

And speaking of survival, she had no idea what was wrong with me. I had turned yellow from head to toe, including my eyeballs, and become gravely ill. I had no energy and couldn’t eat. My urine was the color of Coca-Cola. All I wanted to do was sleep.

They were exactly the same symptoms I’d had with infectious hepatitis when I was eleven. But I’d been told that you couldn’t have hepatitis twice. Once you’d had it, the virus stayed in your bloodstream for life, making you immune. Which was why, even in the Army, I had never been permitted to donate blood. There were, I’d heard, two infectious strains, A and B, but I’d never heard of anyone getting both. Whatever it was, I was no longer a kid. I was pushing forty and felt bad enough I wasn’t sure I was going to make it.

Just before it all went south, when I still
thought it would all last forever.

But despite Virginia’s insistence, I refused medical attention. I simply went to bed and stayed there. The only things I would let her feed me, when I could eat at all, were boiled potatoes, sweet-potato jam, and tea with saltine crackers. My weight plummeted, as did the muscle I’d worked so hard over the years to build.

One day I heard voices in the patio, Virginia’s and someone else’s, a man. I thought, perhaps, that it was her brother. I feigned sleep. I didn’t want to talk to anyone. But then I heard a soft rapping on the shutters of the doorway that led from the bedroom to the patio. I didn’t answer. Whoever it was, knocked a little harder.

“Who is it?” I asked.

“Carlos Baamonde, Dan. Can I talk to you?”

“Carlos Baamonde?” I thought. “The vet? What the hell does he want?” Carlos was the veterinarian for our half-dozen cats. Both Virginia and I had a lot of respect for him as a medical professional…for cats. Also as an animal rights activist. I had, in fact, first met him while doing a series of stories on the subject.

“What do you want, Carlos?” I asked the slats of the closed shutter.

“How about letting me in so we can talk?”

Reluctantly, I dragged myself out of bed and unlatched the shutters, then turned and immediately climbed back into bed, propping myself up to a sitting position with some pillows. Carlos was taken aback, I could tell, seeing me looking emaciated and ill, and with skin the color of the Vatican flag.

“¡Dios mío, Dan!” he said. “You look awful!”

“Is that your medical opinion?” I asked sarcastically.

“Virginia’s really worried about you,” he said, “and I see why. You are really quite ill.”

“Tell me something I don’t know, Doc,” I said.

“You should really see a doctor,” he said.

“Well, I am seeing one.”

“Who?”

“You, you’re standing right there!”

“I mean a human doctor.”

“You’re human enough.”

“This is serious, Dan.”

“You’re telling me!”

“So you should go to the doctor.”

“Tell me what a doctor would tell me…No, wait! I’ll tell you. No fats, no alcohol. Absolute bed-rest, because the liver is currently like gelatin and can be easily injured. And plenty of liquids. I’m living on saltines and potatoes and drinking tea and apple juice until they come out my ears and I only move from this bed to go to the bathroom.”

“But you should at least find out what type of hepatitis you have, or if it’s something other than hepatitis,” he reasoned.

“It’s not A, because I’ve had it and you can only get it once. I never knew you could get both A and B, but this must be B and the prognosis is the same as with A but takes longer. Hopefully, I’ll survive without permanent liver damage, but if not, there’s nothing anybody can do about it. And if it’s C, all I can say is that I have no idea how I could have contracted it, but if that’s what I have, basically, I’m fucked.”

The vet stood there looking quizzically at me for a moment, and then he said, “I hope you get to feeling better really soon, Dan. Take care.”

And with that he left the room and stepped back out into the patio. Out there I could hear him and Virginia speaking in hushed tones. I overheard him say, “Just let him be. He seems to know what he’s doing.”

I alternated for days on end between sleep and working on a novella I was writing. It was about and old-time lawman and an old-time tough guy in a small Ohio town. I was writing it sitting in bed with a ballpoint pen and a lined six by eight-inch notebook. I couldn’t write for long at a stretch without feeling exhausted. So I wrote in little intervals of half an hour to an hour, back-to-back with hour-long naps. I was in bed for so long that when I finally got well enough to get up, I had written the entire one-hundred-page novella.

When I got up, I was thin and pale and weak. I had to force myself to eat because I wouldn’t have any appetite for several months following my recovery. Once I began regaining my awareness of anything but my long illness, I started realizing the dire straits we were in, I started scouting around for free-lance work and landed the translation to English of a scholarly work on Argentine economic history. It was by a renowned Argentine academician with whom I had served on the Fulbright Scholarship Committee. I had been appointed to the committee while I was general news editor of the Buenos Aires Herald by then-Ambassador of the United States Theodore Gildred, and was later re-appointed to it while I was the paper’s managing editor by US Ambassador Terrence Todman. That was how the author had learned of my reputation as a Spanish to English translator.

We agreed that he would pay me three thousand dollars for the job, which, at that impoverished moment, sounded like a fortune. I got him to spot me a third of the fee up front and then worked day and night to finish the job in a month and collect the rest. Suddenly, we were out of the hole, if just barely. We didn’t know how long we’d have to make that money stretch until I could scare up some more work for hire.

Virginia hadn’t wanted to have this conversation with me. She didn’t know how to broach the subject. But eventually she said, “I think you ought to give your father a chance to help you out.”

Back in the day, as a young reporter
and free-lance correspondent

I gazed at her dumbly. It wasn’t a possibility that had ever entered my head. Having tired of being turned down every time I’d asked Whitie for anything, I had only asked him for help once since I was twelve and had started making all of my own money for everything except the roof over my head and food on the table, whenever I was home for meals, from that age on. By the time I was a junior in high school, I was making as much per week as a lot of breadwinners in my town. And I was seldom home to do anything but give some private percussion lessons in my basement studio, or to sleep a few hours a night.

The only time I’d asked Whitie for a favor since then had been in 1971, while I was in the Army and living in California. It was only the beginning of my second year in service. I was a Spec 4, just married, making one hundred ninety dollars a month and paying rent of a hundred twenty in Los Angeles. Whenever my Army schedule allowed, I gave drum lessons at a local music institute to supplement our income, but the pay was paltry.

We needed a car—everybody needs a car in LA. So naturally—naturally, that is, for most guys I knew, but not really for me—I called Whitie and asked him if he thought maybe he could spot me five hundred bucks until I got out of service or made enough rank to pay him back, so I could buy a used car.

Silence…

“Dad? Are you there?”

“Yeah. Um…you’re catchin’ me at a kind of bad time, Dan. I mean, we’ve got our income tax coming up, and…” he trailed off.

“I’ll pay you back, Dad,” I said. “You know I’m good for it.”

“Here’s an idea,” Whitie offered. “You’ve got that drum set sitting here in our basement collecting dust. I mean, you’re not doing anything with it. If you want me to, I could sell it for you.”

Gretsch tangerine sparkle drums
and Zildjian cymbals - my pride and joy

In my mind, I saw the beautiful tangerine-sparkle Gretsch jazz set with a carefully selected set of hand-made Zildjian cymbals that were my pride and joy after the beaten-up used drums with crappy generic cymbals I had played before I could afford it.

I had to talk around a knot in my throat when I answered. “Well, I’m using the Army’s drums right now,” I said. “But I was thinking it’d be nice if my drums were waiting for me when I got out so I could go right back to playing clubs and teaching…”

“That’s kinda what I’m sayin’,” Whitie said. “You’ll start working right away and can buy new ones.”

“Working with what, Dad?” I said getting ever more exasperated. “If you sell them, I won’t have any goddamn drums to work with!”

“Well…” he paused, sighed a hissing, irritated sigh, and said, “you do whatever the hell you want, Dan. I’m just trying to offer you a solution to your problem.”

“So no loan, then?”

“Nope, can’t do ‘er, Dan. Sorry.”

I hadn’t felt like this since I was twelve and was suddenly reminded of why I had decided back then never to ask him for anything again. Just like when I was twelve, I felt like crying and could barely trust my voice.

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay what?”

“Okay, sell my goddamned drums. I don’t give a shit. I need the money.”

Whitie ended up selling a set of drums and cymbals that, at the time, would have cost six hundred dollars new, as “used” for three hundred seventy-five. He proudly wired me the money—proud of his celerity and salesmanship (he could sell anything).

Back then, in Ohio, I could have bought a fairly decent six or seven-year-old vehicle for that money. In LA, I ended up having to settle for a broken-down “vintage” Austin 1100 that nobody wanted and that they were only too glad to have off of the used car lot. I was always grateful when it decided to run. The rest of the time I had my more mechanical Army buddies tinkering with it to get it limping along again.

As I say, I was standing there staring dumbly at Virginia as all of these hurtful old images ran through my head.

“No,” I said finally.

“No what?”

“Hell no!”

“You’re being stubborn. You never give your dad a break. You’re so hard on him.”

“Because I already know what to expect. In short, nothing.”

“I’m asking you to do this. Please! We need help until you can get back on your feet. And you should give your dad a chance to help us, to show he’s not the selfish man you always try to make him out to be.”

General news editor and second to Herald
EditorJames Neilson - times were good

Reluctantly, I decided to acquiesce. Even though it would again mean admitting that I’d failed. After relative success throughout my youth and in my early middle years in the fields of my own choosing, pride and intransigence had placed me in a crisis situation at age forty. It was humiliating to have to run to Daddy. Especially when I felt his response, even if he didn’t express it out loud—which, perhaps, he would—was likely to be, I told you so.

When I was doing well and feeling flush, I had started calling my parents often. My father would talk on the main phone upstairs and my mother would rush down to the basement and converse with me from the downstairs extension. But now I hadn’t called in months. They knew nothing of my illness, or that I’d left my job, or the situation we were in. International calls back then were complicated and very expensive. Our finances were such that I really couldn’t afford to call. So not only was I calling to put the bite on Whitie, but I was also doing it collect!

When the operator asked if he would accept the charges, I heard Whitie say, “Uh…yes…I guess so.”

I tried to sound cheerful and upbeat. Asked them how they’d been. Said I was sorry it’d had been such a long time between calls. Then added, “Oh and sorry about the collect call!”

“Yeah,” said Whitie, “I was wondering…what the hell? Is he in jail, hahaha?”

I heard Reba Mae say, “Norman!” in an admonishing tone.

“That’s kind of what I’m calling about,” I said.

And then I launched into a long and detailed account of the vicissitudes of the past year, my leaving my job, trying new ventures, miscalculating the depth of the Argentine economic crisis, falling ill, losing everything but the house and my VW van, and, in short, of how, after a successful career of more than thirteen years, I now found myself basically penniless.

Along the way, my mother stopped me to ask questions. She was particularly worried about my having had a second bout of hepatitis.

“I didn’t even know that was possible,” she said.

“Me either,” I told her.

“What did the doctor say about your liver?”

“Um, I haven’t been to one.”

That really worried her.

“Don’t fret, Mom,” I said. “I’m okay now. I just have to get back on my feet.”

Whitie was getting antsy. This was all well and good, but it was taking a long time. “Well, Dan,” he said, “we’re gonna let you go now, because this is, you know, long distance, and our phone bill’s gonna look like the national debt…”

Managing Editor, a job from which I planned to retire. But
pride, intransigence and adherence to my journalistic
principles meant that this would be the last photo of
me at the head of the Herald. 

“Just a damned minute, Norm,” Reba Mae said into the extension. “Was there anything else, you wanted to tell us, honey?”

I sighed involuntarily. I felt that lump in my throat again. It was hard to talk. Finally, I said, “I need help. Just till I can get some work and get back on my feet.”

“Of course,” Reba Mae said.

Whitie said, “How much help?”

“I was thinking like maybe…five thousand?”

“Five thousand!”

“Just to tide us over a little bit until I can get going again.”

“Oh hell, Dan!” Whitie said. “I could maybe loan you five hundred for a while, but five thousand!”

“It’ll be a loan, Dad. You can charge me interest until I can pay it back…”

“Yeah, but how do I know you’ll be able to?”

“I guess for once maybe you’ll just have to believe in me and trust me,” I said.

“Well, but…five grand. That’s a lot of trusting, Dan, y’know?”

I felt dirty having this conversation with my father. Especially knowing that he had worked hard, invested wisely, and had plenty of money to live on comfortably for the rest of his life. But it was, after all, his money. He had never had a lot of use for me. Why should he feel obliged to help me?

“Besides,” he went on. “We’ve never done anything like this for your brother and sister, and…”

I stopped him.

“Look, it’s okay,” I said. “Forget I called. I’m really sorry I bothered you with this. You’re right. It’s up to me to get out of this mess. It’s all right. Just forget it.”

“I don’t mind sending you a few hundred, if that’ll help,” he went on, “but it’s not like life isn’t tough for everybody, Dan, and I sure never got any help of the kind you’re asking me for.”

I was thinking, “Yeah, except the business your dad had waiting for you when you got home from service and that you made a good living with for twenty-three years,” but I bit my tongue.

“It’s okay Dad,” I said. “Forget I asked.”

“Well, it’s not like that, Dan,” he said. “All I’m saying is…”

Suddenly, I heard Reba Mae say, “Shut up a minute, Norman!”

Then to me, she said, “Danny, I have more than half that money in my personal savings right now, and your father will come up with the rest. Don’t worry. We’ll send it right away. Always remember that you can come to us. Stuff happens. I want you to feel that we’re always there for you. We love you.”

I felt relief. It was the first time since I was twelve that I didn’t feel like I was walking the high wire with no net below me.

 

…To be continued

 

MAYBE THOMAS WOLFE WAS RIGHT…MAYBE YOU CAN’T – Part One

 

In 1940, after Thomas Wolfe’s death in late 1938, his editor posthumously published the writer’s more than seven-hundred-page novel, You Can’t Go Home Again. The book, in a nutshell, tells the story of writer George Webber, who has written a critically acclaimed novel about his family and hometown. But when he returns to his town, he finds that there is no hero’s welcome awaiting him. On the contrary, he comes back to a town embroiled in their sense of outrage at the revelations that his book has exposed. The same is true of his family, who feel that he has stripped them naked in front of the world and they drive him from their home.

 Thomas Wolfe - You can't go home again...

A veritable pariah, Webber strikes out to find his own identity, divorced from the town and family that have been his main topic. The journey takes him to the hectic social and literary scene in New York, to Paris where he falls in with a bohemian group of artistic expats, and finally, to Berlin, where he finds out first-hand, what it feels like to live in the shadow of the Nazi reign of terror. Eventually, he returns to America, where he rediscovers and embraces his native land with a combined feeling of love, pain, and hope.

I had been away from Wapakoneta for almost eighteen years at the time. And before that, there had been almost four years that I had been around precious little. I had made my first journey to South America the day I turned nineteen. That same year, when I got back, I enrolled at Ohio State. I was going to do what everyone, including myself, expected me to do—study music education and become a high school band director.

By the end of that first year, I had figured out that this probably wasn’t at all what I wanted to do. It was a traumatic revelation. Since junior high school, it was what I had always wanted to do—or thought I did. It was what I focused my greatest effort on, what I had sacrificed for. Moreover, it was what everybody else expected of me.

In concert - that's me, third from left in the
percussion section, back row.

At Wapakoneta Senior High, I had been the pet of two successive band directors and had been a working musician and percussion teacher as well. I had headed the percussion sections in the high school band and the All-Area Band, directed the high school pep band, and helped write some of the arrangements we played at half-time during the football season my senior year. Also that year, I was elected band president. At Band Camp the summer before my senior year, I was both a high school band student and a junior high band instructor at the same time. I had worked for the biggest music store in nearby Lima and gotten to know high school band directors and professional musicians from that city and the surrounding area. They too took it for given that I would go get my diploma and be back in a few years as their colleague. As if to prove it, in the summer between my junior and senior years, I had been granted one of two scholarships offered by our school to attend an Ohio University music workshop for gifted young musicians from all over the state. There too, I had headed the percussion sections of both the symphonic band and the symphony orchestra.

Directing the Pep Band

How could I just turn my back on that? And on all of those people who saw my future already laid out for me? How could I just suddenly walk away and say, “You know what? I don’t want this as badly as I thought I did.” I just wanted to play music. And, to an ever-increasing degree, I wanted to write. The ideal future that I saw for myself was as a nightclub or stage musician by night and a novelist by day.

What kind of an irresponsible fool did that after so much effort and after raising such great expectations? Worst of all, how could I let my father, Whitie, down…again! Whitie and I didn’t have the greatest of relationships. We were always at each other’s throats, but, deep down, I pretty much figured that the fault was mine alone. I hadn’t measured up. I hadn’t embraced what he wanted for me—to be a son he could be proud of, a high-school sports star who would go on to win a full sports scholarship to a top university and end up being an enormous success in business once I graduated.

But that wasn’t in the cards. It wasn’t me. I couldn’t be those things. Had no ambition to

One of two OU Workshop
scholarship winners

be. I couldn’t even be what I’d set out to be, much less what Whitie wanted me to be.

So I dropped out, joined the Army, eloped, and spent more than a year in Europe, courtesy of the US Army, with my new bride, doing a lot of what I wanted to do—playing music, reading, writing and traveling to some of the places I had long dreamed of seeing.

During that time, I discovered that what I most wanted was to be a bohemian, an artist, a vagabond, and for most of my adult life, that would be the dichotomy that plagued me. That constant tug-o’-war between being a rolling stone or a responsible member of traditional society. In the end, I found it impossible to do either. Which made me a loose cannon, someone people thought of as highly dependable and efficient until a culmination of factors would carry me to the point of getting fed-up and simply walking out. Nor was I docile even if I was professional and effective at a job. I was immune to the normal pressures employees undergo, the fear of “losing my job”. If there was a conflict of ideas or ethics between myself and upper management, my answer to any threat of dismissal was always, “Do whatever you feel most comfortable with. I was looking for a job when I found this one.”

Dan in dress blues with the Army Bands

Years earlier the father-and-son relationship with Whitie had reached the point at which, when asked for advice or an opinion, Whitie would say, “Do whatever the hell you want, Dan. You will anyway.”  He had pretty much given up on my “ever making anything of myself.” I was a good team leader, but not a particularly good team player. I was a maverick, and that usually ended up standing in the way of a decades-long career working for anybody but myself.

Whitie figured that was my perennial problem, that I would build a good position for myself and then walk out on it. Throw it all away, as he said. I was a hothead. But, truth be told, if I was, I came by it honestly.

During World War II, Whitie was such a disciplinary problem that his superiors in the Army were appalled at his utter lack of subordination. But they were equally impressed by his ability to do a great job whenever he was placed in charge of a project and left to his own devices without having somebody over him breathing down his neck. A wise captain—who had been a schoolteacher in another life—decided to put that quality to good use. He got Whitie a field promotion to technical sergeant (what today would be a spec-5), placed him in charge of a nine-man demolition squad, and sent him on his way. From then on until nearly the end of the war, he and his team, activated with the Eighty-Second Airborne and attached to the Seventh Army, would be given a set of orders and would be sent out on their own to destroy abandoned Nazi ordnance, vehicles and anything else the enemy might be able to use again, in case they managed to come back after being driven from an area by the Allies. Sometimes Whitie and his team even blew up bridges or rail trestles to make sure that didn’t happen. He was now an effective member of the Army and there was never another disciplinary problem with him.

Demolition Tech-Sgt Whitie

In later life, as a route salesman for a cheese manufacturer and wholesaler, Whitie was provided with a sixteen-ton truck and a mandate to build a territory that, until then, had been a dead loss. Within a few short years he bolstered that route from yearly sales revenues of a scant hundred thousand dollars to one that generated millions. All the company had to do was pay him a small commission and get out of his way, and they suddenly had a major money-maker.

One day, however, in the mid-afternoon, Whitie had to stop by home for some reason—to pick up his route book or to retrieve an order, something he would rather not have done because it was sure to put him behind. Once there, however, Reba Mae was home, had just brewed a fresh pot of coffee, and talked him into having a cup before he was again on his way. It was while he was taking five and having that cup of coffee that the CEO of the company happened to drive by the house and saw his truck in the driveway.

Oblivious to this, Whitie finished his coffee, got back into his truck, and completed his route a bit later than usual, He drove out to the plant, parked his truck and plugged the refrigeration unit in for the night. The next morning when he climbed into his truck again, he saw that there was a note tucked under the windshield wiper. He climbed back down out of the cab, walked around front, retrieved the note and read it.

It was addressed to my father’s given name, and read:

Norm,

“Let this be the last time that I drive past your house at 2:30 in the afternoon and see your truck parked in the driveway!”

It was signed by the CEO.

Incensed, Whitie turned off his engine, plugged the truck back in, strode inside the building and directly to the management offices. He marched past the secretary as if she weren’t there.

“Good morning, Norman,” she said to his back. And then, as he reached the CEO’s door and placed his hand on the doorknob, the secretary said, “Hey wait, Norman! You can’t just barge in there. He’s in a meeting!”

“Don’t worry,” Whitie said over his shoulder. “This’ll only take a second.” And with that, he marched into the room.

Surprised, the CEO was sitting behind his desk, clearly caught in mid-sentence, talking to several men in business suits who were seated in armchairs in front of him.

“Norm! Can’t this wait? As you can see, I’m in a meeting here,” the boss said.

Whitie made his way on over to the desk, muttered, “’xcuse me,” to the three guests, then tossed the CEO’s note, which was now a paper-wad, on the desk in front of him and, in a confidential tone, said, “Just came to tell you this. Next time you put a little note scoldin’ me on my truck instead of comin’ and talkin’ to me like a man, I’m gonna come in here and personally shove it up your ass!”

Then he turned on his heel and walked out of the office, out of the building, back to his truck and was off to sell cheese like he’d never sold it before. Whitie bowed to no man, and in that sense, I was clearly my father’s son. But it didn’t always work out.  

In my office at the newspaper, 1981

Three years before I returned to the US, after reaching the post of managing editor at the newspaper where I worked in Buenos Aires, I abruptly walked out on a thirteen-year career. It was a job I loved and from which I had planned to retire after a couple more decades at the daily’s helm. But ever-increasing policy conflicts between myself and the new CEO made my continuing there untenable, unless I was willing to compromise my ethics and my vision for the paper. So, from one day to the next, I walked. And except to go collect my severance pay, I never went back.

It was a huge loss, as much emotional as financial. But the whole time I had been at the paper, I had also been a free-lancer, and in the process, had written for a lot of well-known newspapers and magazines in the US and Britain. There didn’t seem to be any reason I couldn’t keep doing that. Besides, I had my severance pay and a little money saved. I figured we would be all right.

But it seems that there are always extenuating circumstances—and in Argentina, extenuating circumstances are a given. It was no longer the seventies when Argentina’s bloody military regime placed the country on international news schedules daily. Nor was it the early eighties, when the Falklands War between Argentina and Britain, the subsequent fall of the military regime, and the country’s return to democracy made headlines worldwide. I couldn’t have walked out on my job at a worse possible time.

It was the very end of 1987, and the Southern Cone of South America was barely a blip on the international news radar. Free-lance work all but dried up, and if it weren’t for a few translations I picked up to do here and there, I would have had no work at all.

But I still had some money left. I devoted my mornings to writing fiction and my afternoons to planning what I hoped would be my breakthrough into adventure tourism. I made trips to the wilderness in Patagonia with a well-known nature photographer and created a folder of photos and write-ups to carry to independent tour operators in the Midwestern US. Once I had polished my pitch, I flew back to the US and visited more than thirty of those tour operators and got positive feedback from a dozen of them. If I could deliver on my proposal of Patagonian adventure tours for groups of no more than six people at a time, they would market it as an exclusive product for discerning travelers.

But I hadn’t counted on the Argentine political factor. I returned to a country that had plunged into a sudden economic crisis, in which currency was being devalued against the dollar by the day and in which annual hyper-inflation soared to nearly a thousand percent. We lost everything but our home, which, thank heaven, was paid for. I fell ill, was bed-ridden for a month, and with nothing to do but mull my life over during those days, decided that it was time to go “home”.

To be continued… 

GANGSTER SQUAD…THE REAL ONE

 The other night, I watched—again—the 2013 Ruben Fleischer film Gangster Squad, starring Josh Brolin, Ryan Gosling, Sean Penn and Emma Stone. I often watch late-night movies. It’s a habit I got into when I had a great deal more work for hire than now, and was under constant stress during the day. My work is all “mind work”—research, writing, editing and translation—and when there’s too much of it, it can be exhausting. By night-time my eyes are usually pretty well shot for any heavy reading, although I do always read a chapter of whatever book I’m into, before shutting off my bedside light. So relatively mindless movie-watching is basically a way to chill out before going to bed, where, otherwise, I might spend a lot of the night staring at the ceiling in the dark. And as it is, at least officially tucked into bed, I can only sleep about four hours.

Some nights, and more and more often, as tastes in movies change and most of the films I’d like to see again go into the “obsolete box” at the distributor’s, I can’t find anything appealing to watch and end up sitting in front of the TV with my headphones on (so as not to keep my wife up) staring at the backs of my eyelids. But now and again, there’s something to hold my interest.

Examples? Ranking high among the least, but still occasionally, shown are what are now considered to be of almost Jurassic vintage: The Magnificent Seven (the one with Yul, not Denzel, although the remake will do if the other one isn’t available: just pretend it’s an entirely different movie…because it is); The French Connection (I or II, makes no difference, both great rogue cop stories, and no one can make you believe it like Hackman); The Great Escape (whenever Nazis are being outsmarted by their prisoners, I’m there, and nobody ever rode a nine-hundred-pound German motorcycle quite like Steve McQueen); Gunfight at the OK Corral (Burt Lancaster’s habitual stiffness made him a decent Wyatt Earp and Kirk Douglas was a convincing if too healthy-looking Doc Holliday), although I prefer Hour of the Gun (basically the same story but with a much more human Earp—James Garner—and with a stunning performance by Jason Robards as the moribund but still dangerous Doc Holliday), and Bullit (again, raw, quintessential Steve McQueen at his implacable finest).

I always have a real dichotomy running in my mind while I read books or watch movies involving street justice. As an op-ed writer and editorialist, I always had an unwavering stance in favor of strict adherence to the rule of law and pro civil and human rights. I still do. I support the idea that no matter how bad a criminal is, he or she has a right to an unbiased trial and proper defense. The law, I tell myself, should be steadfast and unwavering. If not, you get police abuse and kangaroo courts. You get Rodney King and George Floyd. And more recently, you get Kyle Rittenhouse and his (not) victims.

But when I hang up my journalist hat and sit down to read or to watch TV and find myself in the midst of a narrative about tough gangsters and even tougher cops, there’s a hidden savage that takes over and finds great satisfaction in the street justice that those stories dispense. Perhaps the best example is the 1987 Brian De Palma film, The Untouchables. In point of fact, I for one have always believed that Prohibition was the most flawed, most hypocritical and most self-righteously puritanical federal law ever enacted. It was, furthermore, a law that, far from ending vice, did an incredibly efficient job of promoting it by making mafia bootlegging a multi-million-dollar business. And yet, there is something really appealing to me about Eliot Ness and his handful of “Untouchables” taking on Al Capone, at the time not just a ruthless gangster but also the most powerful man in Chicago.

My wife is appalled by the fact that I can accurately recite by rote most of the lines in the script along with the actors as they say them. More appalled still is a writer friend and avid cinema buff who hates De Palma and despises David Mamet, who wrote the screenplay. His idea of truly great classics includes Stanley Kubrick’s 2001—A Space Odyssey and, by the same director, the 1975 film Barry Lyndon. I’d have to beg off if he ever invited me to see either of them with him. My snoring would make it impossible for him to enjoy the performance. 

That said, I never miss a chance to see Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, a really extraordinary Vietnam Era story, in which the whole first half is devoted to the military training of the era and in which R. Lee Ermey—who once served as a drill sergeant in real life—not only plays the part of the platoon’s trainer well, but is, precisely, a carbon copy of my chief drill instructor in 1970 when I took Basic Combat Training at Ft. Bragg, NC. I so identify when I see the film that I find myself sweating right along with the other recruits as I watch him put them through their paces and tear them a new hole to breathe through.  

R. Lee Ermey, quintessential DI

But, with regard to The Untouchables, those lines that I’ve committed to memory are just so good! Like when the tough Irish beat cop, Malone (Sean Connery) takes Ness (Kevin Costner) to church—because, he says “these walls have ears” when they meet in the police precinct—to talk to him after the not yet famous Treasury agent asks him to help him “get Capone”. Malone asks Ness, in order to nail Capone, “What are you prepared to do?” Ness tells him, “Everything within the law.” To which Malone asks, “And then what are you prepared to do?”

He elucidates. “You wanna know how to get Capone? Here’s how. They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue! That’s the Chicago way, and that’s how you get Capone.”

When he asks Ness if he’s ready to do that and Ness says he’s sworn to get Capone using all legal means at his disposal, Malone sighs and says, “Well, the Lord hates a coward.” And then, “Do you know what a blood oath is, Mr. Ness?”
“Yes,” Ness answers.
“Good, ’cause you just took one.”

Later, as Malone, twelve-gauge pump in hand, is leading Ness to Chicago’s South Lasalle Street Post Office to carry out their first successful raid on Capone’s operations, which work out of the backroom warehouse of that federal property, the tough Irish cop says, “How do you think Capone knew about your raid the other night?”

To which Ness says, “Somebody on the cops told him.”

“Right,” says Malone. “Welcome to Chicago. This town stinks like a whorehouse at low tide.”

Malone convinces Ness that he can trust no one on the police force.

“Then, where are we gonna get help?” Ness asks.

“If you're afraid of getting a rotten apple, don't go to the barrel. Get it off the tree.”

And THEN what are you prepared to do?

Enter a young Andy Garcia as Stone. Ness and Malone go to the pistol range where police recruits are practicing and Malone asks the instructor to send out the consistently two best shots. But one at a time.

The first guy is a straight-arrow blithering idiot who, when asked why he wants to be a cop, stutters, stammers, searching for the textbook answer and finally says he thinks maybe he could help…the force. Malone thanks him and sends him back to class before turning to Ness and saying, “There goes the next chief of police.”

Now wise-guy Andy Garcia comes out. 

“This kid's a prodigy,” says the instructor.

“Why do you want to join the force?” Malone asks.

Stone, with an ironic grin, “To protect the property and...”

“Oh, please, don't waste my time with that bullshit! Where are you from, Stone?” asks Malone, cocking his head and scrutinizing the recruit.

“From the Southside.”

“Stone? George Stone, that's your name? What's your real name?”

“That is my real name,” says Stone.

“Nah! What was it before you changed it?”

“Giuseppe Petri.”

“Geezus, I knew it! That's all you need, one thieving wop on the team!”

Cuffing the towering Malone on the shoulder, Stone says, “What's that you said?”

Malone, shoving his clipboard into the other man’s chest: “I said that you're a lyin' member of a no-good race.”

Standing toe to toe with Stone, as Malone feels him making a move, he pulls a sap from his coat to hit Stone with, but Stone already has his .38 drawn and the barrel shoved against Malone’s throat right under his chin. “That's much better than you, you stinkin' Irish pig,” Stone says.

“Oh, I like him!” says Malone with a grin over his shoulder to Ness.

“Yeah,” says Ness, “I like him, too.”

“Congratulations, son,” says Malone. “You just joined the Treasury Department.”

This is classic cop-story cinema, and excellent writing. And the outcome is a classic ending of good triumphing over evil. Ness bends the rules he said he would uphold. He even, technically, commits murder by throwing gangster hitman Frank Nitti (chillingly played by Billy Drago) off the roof of the court house to his death, but only after the other man has murdered two members of his team, one of whom is Malone. We get the feeling that the end has justified the means, a corrupt judge is forced to do the right thing, and Capone goes to jail. It’s a question of fighting fire with fire.

The real Eliot Ness

Gangster Squad is the same kind of story, but with way fewer constitutional guardrails. The Untouchables is, in the end, almost totally fictional, except that there really was an Eliot Ness, who after Prohibition, became Cleveland’s Safety Director, placing him in charge of the police and fire departments. There he had as remarkable a career as he had in the Treasury Department, but when he started flirting with a mayoral run, his career went south, he divorced his wife Edna and he became a notoriously heavy drinker. He did work for the federal government out of Washington after leaving Cleveland but never recovered his past glory, and died of a heart attack in 1957, at the age of fifty-four.

There was indeed also an Al Capone who was every bit as flamboyant and larger-than-life as Robert De Niro played him in the movie. Even the scene where De Niro-Capone bashes one of his men’s brains out with a baseball bat is a reasonable facsimile of a real-life occurrence. And, as in the film, Capone did actually go to prison on tax fraud charges. But the rest of the film is almost totally a fabrication.

Capone...not exactly De Niro

For instance, the only time Capone and Ness actually met in person was when Ness was one of the federal officers who accompanied the convicted gangster to prison after sentencing. And in real life, Ness had nothing to do with Frank Nitti’s death. After a grand jury was convened to look into allegations of his organization’s extorting the Hollywood film industry, many years after Prohibition, Nitti, who didn’t want to die in prison, committed suicide—incredibly, by firing three shots from a .32-caliber revolver because he was so drunk that he missed his head with the first shot, fired the second through his jaw, with the small-caliber bullet exiting his skull but not killing him, and finally,  firing a third shot directly into his brain and finishing the job.

De Niro as Capone...baseball!

But Gangster Squad is a much more grim and true-to-life film. There’s no scintillating dialogue or memorable quotes. It’s pure action and raw violence. There’s no bending the rules—they get broken all to hell. And—exception made for certain literary license—it is a true story.

The LA Gangster Squad—Organized Crime Intelligence Division or OCID—has been rendered legendary thanks to writers like James Ellroy, Paul Lieberman and Donald H. Wolfe, in all of whose works the special-ops division has figured prominently. The squad was formed in 1946, on secret orders from then-LA Police Chief Clemence Horrall (played in the film by Nick Nolte). It was indeed headed up by Sergeant Jack O’Mara (played by Josh Brolin), with the specific aim of running members of the East Coast mafia out of Los Angeles. Among the most high-profile of these were, indeed, Mickey Cohen (played by Sean Penn), Jack Dragna (John Polito), Jack Whalen (Sullivan Stapleton), and Johnny Stompanato (James Carpinello)—who was, famously, movie star Lana Turner’s boyfriend, and who, just as famously, was shot to death by Turner’s daughter while he was in the process of beating the actress within an inch of her life.

The real squad. Sgt. O'Mara seated on the far left

Again, however, unlike in the movie, Cohen never had Jack Dragna killed. In real life, Dragna, who was born in legendary Corleone, Sicily, died of a heart attack in Los Angeles in 1956, at the age of sixty-four. Nor was Cohen beaten to death with a lead pipe in prison, as suggested in the film. He was actually released from prison shortly before he died of cancer at age sixty-two. But beyond these historically inaccurate details, Gangster Squad is largely true.

Josh Brolin actually reached out to the family of his real-life character, Sergeant O’Mara, while he was making the movie. It was a great experience, as Brolin describes it. As it turned out, “He was a guy like me,” Brolin told LA Times reporter Paul Lieberman. “He's in love with California, but came back from the war to a ton of corruption in the LAPD. When Mickey Cohen moved in and monopolized and began to poison Los Angeles, he took personal offense to it. He was the Serpico of his time. He refused to be bought and he wanted to get it done.”

Brolin as O'Mara

How he got it done, however, had little to do with due process. In the movie, O’Mara holds up his LA sergeant’s shield and tells his squad that when they go after the mob, “leave these at home.” They basically act like a rival gang, breaking up Cohen’s operations by any and all means necessary, including attacking, extorting, beating and killing anybody and everybody in the mafia food chain and destroying the infrastructure that feeds Cohen’s fortune, while illegally wire-tapping and surveilling his organization.

By all accounts, O’Mara and his crew did very much the same. While the film was being shot, there was a sole surviving member of the OCID who was in contact with the movie’s production. Consulted about the squad’s standard operating procedure, he assured Brolin and others that if their methods were employed today, “we would have been indicted.”

In an interview with the LA Daily News, Brolin recalled: “I met one guy from the actual Gangster Squad, who was in his eighties. To be able to talk with him, I think, was more informative than anything because he was a tough guy and he was very stoic and elusive, which I loved, and I found him very intimidating…True, they were doing the right thing, but they did it in a way that didn’t necessarily follow all the rules,” Brolin says. “The fact that fifty years later, he wouldn’t tell me anything, I thought, was so bizarre. Like, who’s going to care now? But I’d ask him a question and he’d just look away.”

Last Squad member, Sgt. Lindo Giacopuzzi, died
in 2018 at one hundred years old.

It’s no coincidence that this Gangster Squad code of silence remained as entrenched as the same code, known as omerta, that prevails in the cosa nostra. Clearly, there are parallels, and the code of silence isn’t the only one. While Jack O’Mara was, by all accounts, an unbending straight arrow who never broke a rule for his own benefit, but for the higher benefit of society as a whole, the mob-busters that James Ellroy—one of the most meticulous historical crime-novelists in America—writes about tell a different story. It is the topic, and LA is the setting, for many of his works, none more typical than LA Confidential, which became a contemporary cinema classic, starring James Cromwell, Guy Pierce, Kevin Spacey, Russell Crowe and Kim Basinger, when director Curtis Hanson took the story to the screen in 1997.

Cromwell - a chilling Capt. Smith

In it, Cromwell plays a truly chilling Captain Dudley Smith, whom Ellroy fans have known ever since he was a tough and less than honest LAPD detective-sergeant. In LA Confidential, the now-Captain Smith has formed a mob-squad, the main purpose of which—as in Gangster Squad—is to run the likes of Mickey Cohen and company out of LA and back to Chicago or the East Coast where they belong. But there’s nothing altruistic in Smith’s ambitions, which tend toward running out the mobsters so that he can take over their illicit operations and use the LAPD to guard his interests. For his squad, the corrupt police captain has carefully chosen men who represent both brains (like Spacey) and brawn (like Crowe) with their common factor being their moral flexibility. Enter a rookie prodigy (Pierce), who looks like a by-the-book sort of fellow, but who is, barely beneath the surface, every bit as ambitious as Smith.

The story Ellroy tells isn’t (in this case or in that of any of his extraordinary noire-genre police novels) one of a clear-cut struggle between good and evil. His stories are about two evils that violently clash in a death-battle until only one is standing. In neither case is society or the rule of law the undisputed winner. Not by a long-shot.

Cromwell, Crowe, Pierce and Spacey - LA Confidential

Is street justice sometimes a brand of true moral justice that feels utterly satisfying to our moral outrage? Absolutely. It’s also true that all of the score-settling and contempt for procedure can, in the end, lead, as in The Untouchables and Gangster Squad, to a legally reached outcome—in short, the removal from society of dangerous criminals, circumventing their often-incredible power and influence, and convicting them of whatever is possible (in fiction as in real-life, tax evasion in the cases of both Capone and Cohen). This, as an alternative to insisting on the moral obligation to seek punishment for their higher crimes—extortion, corruption, murder—when evidence is too scant to bring them to trial.

In these cases, our moral satisfaction is surely better placed than when “justice” is merely dispensed from the barrel of a gun, as is the case of Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry franchise, the series of righteous avenger films created by and for Charles Bronson, and all of the copy-cat motion pictures to follow since then. Because, as Ness—through the words of David Mamet and in the voice of Kevin Costner—points out in The Untouchables, when we take the law into our own hands, no matter how noble our purpose, we “become what we have forsworn.” One who kills in the name of “justice”, in other words, is no less a killer than the one who kills with malice. And vengeance isn’t the same as justice, because it isn’t based on what we can prove beyond the shadow of a doubt but on what we “believe”, and what we think we know.   

Ignorance can indeed be bliss. Because, if you can’t help being aware, as I am, of your contradictions and your moral conundrums, then it almost takes all the fun out of watching street-justice movies. Almost…but not quite.