Dad’s Rap Sheet
A snippet of my father’s criminal record
When I still lived in New York, after quitting a job that had been sucking my soul (which took the form of an ectoplasmic smoke) from every orifice on my person for years, I finally had the time to write for myself. Various projects that I’d been idly tinkering with had the stones rolled away from their tombs and were summoned back to life. One of these was the amorphous, shuddering, non-fiction or roman à clef depending on the day, piece of some kind of something about my father. It still isn’t done, 15 years later. It’s a whole thing. A beast. A bête noire that I secretly love.
My father was a junkie, a criminal, yeah yeah yeah boo-hoo you’ve heard this one before. So anyway, one of the first things I did in preparation back in 2010 was drive a Zipcar to the Bucks County courthouse in the part of Pennsylvania in which I was born and pay the county clerk’s office like $20 to locate and make me photocopies of my father’s arrest records. What follows is a selection of the earliest hits. It goes on for decades, but I’ve been focused, in my writing, on the first utterances of that inchoate, bumbling, violent, human sack of heroin. My pops! These reports, which I’ve barely edited (just changing his legal name to “my father,” adding little details from the future, things like that) and never embellished, are deeply funny to me. Maybe sad or angering too, if I’m feeling poor-me enough, but foregrounded are the absurd guffaws I find in the details. So, here we go as I expose some of the framework for a piece of writing that I might die before I finish. If that happens, let this stand as a testimony to the fact that, you know… I tried.
On or about the thirtieth day of January, 1973, my father was nineteen years old and he did enter the residence of one Douglas Syp with the intent to commit a crime, to wit, theft. My father did unlawfully, feloniously, and maliciously take, steal, and carry away various brands of liquor, a 19” portable Magnovox TV, a Sears console record player, an AM/FM radio combination, a Sony 8-track tape player, a Lloyds clock radio, twenty five record albums, a Hamilton Beach electric knife, a Hoover vacuum cleaner, and a woman’s cultured pearl ring. He was caught for this crime along with his best friend and coconspirator Gary, a.k.a. Peaches, who he would around ten years later accidentally overdose with a hot shot of extra-strength dope on Christmas Eve.
On or about the twentieth day of February, 1973, my father did willfully, feloniously, and maliciously enter the premises of one Nathaniel Ranzer, where he committed larceny by taking a Capitan brand portable radio, a maroon shirt (size 15) and one maroon tie, a Kodak camera, and a glass jar containing numerous coins and pennies.
On or about the eighth day of May, 1973, my father did willfully, feloniously, and maliciously enter the premises of one Edna Kain with the intent to deprive her of her property, to wit: two sets of earrings, a gold pin, twenty five blank checks, a clarinet, a rhinestone pin and necklace, a topaz necklace and earrings, and a Gruen watch.
On or about the tenth of April, 1974, my father did willfully, feloniously, and maliciously enter the residence of one Sheldon Rosen with the intent to commit a crime, to wit, theft. He stole a portable color TV—a 17-incher with a wood grain case—and twenty-five personal checks with the name Sheldon Rosen on them, and then later he, my father, wrote one of those checks out to CASH for $130 and tried to exchange it for actual money at the Fidelity Bank in Levittown, Pennsylvania.
On or about the sixteenth day of August, 1974, my father (along with uncle Peaches) stole moveable property, to wit a 1966 Dodge Coronet, from one Marguerite O’Connor. For this offense he was sentenced to not less than 6 months and not more than 3 years in the Bucks County Correctional Facility.
My father, the petty criminal, committed many little transgressions against square society. They were relatively small as crimes go, but they were crimes nonetheless and, since he was almost always caught because he was an idiot, he served time for them. His life, as I knew it, was a series of short stays in the county jail or the state prison depending on the crime’s severity and its execution’s egregious obviousness. Six months, a year, two years. Small bids that added up to a jailbird.
He got into heroin when he was 16 years old. That’s what he told me. His story goes like this: He was a big pothead, having been introduced to weed by his older brother upon his return from fighting in Vietnam. But one day, during a weed drought, an older couple who he used to score from offered him some heroin instead. Hey, he thought, I need to get high and this will do that to me. So he took it on that day in 1969 and then he didn’t stop taking it—or some other form of opiate—until he died in 2009, piles of Oxycontin and Vicodin blister tabs stacked up on the knitted placemats on the kitchen table where he lived with his mother in rural Arkansas.
I swore I’d never take heroin, never assume the mantle of my father, but I still did everything else that was handed to me or that I bought or stole, from pot and acid to crack and PCP—this is when I was a kid, when I was in high school and college. Then one day in a corner at a loud, dark party, a friend asked me if I wanted a bump and I, anticipating cocaine, said sure but then I got a little bit of powdery heroin up my nose. I started scoring the next day and then I didn’t stop for a mercifully short time. Like three years hard on the grind but okay yes with a few relapses here and there afterward too like the time in the Tenderloin in San Francisco when I basically died but then a Dr. Feelgood kept on call by the hotel I was expiring at came and shot me up with something magical that brought me back around. When I told my dad that I had been a junkie too he said he was glad that we had that common ground now and then he bragged about a beautiful set of glass works he used to have.
Hey, I’m back. I never know where to end excerpts so I’ll just do it abruptly like I did above. I’ve just, yet again, dusted off the reams, both physical and digital, of work I’ve done on this project. Maybe exposing a tiny part of it here will be the kick I need to move it along to whatever it will end up being. I’ll keep you posted! Or not!