 |
|
|
 |
Looking
south (and up) along Madison Avenue.
1:30 PM. Photo: JH.
|
|
It got a little chillier yesterday afternoon in
New York.
Last night at the BB King Blues Club & Grille down on 237 West
42nd Street (between 7th and 8th), Safe Horizon, the leading provider
of services for victims of violence in New York City, held their
seventh annual Fall Fundraiser. Safe Horizon is there “when
you need us” in the courts, in the community and at the other
end of a telephone at any hour of the day or night. You can find
them also at www.safehorizon.org.
Last night’s event was called “In Our Own Words: No
Laughing Matter.” And among the attendees were SNL’s
Colin Quinn, Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Wanda
Sykes, Last Comic
Standing’s Rich Vos and Bonnie McFarland; How
to Boil Water’s Lynne Koplitz, Caroline
in the City’s Adam Ferrera, The
Chris Rock Show’s Emmy winning writer Nick DiPaolo and the Chris
Rock Show’s Sherrod Small.
Event co-chairs were Mallak Compton-Rock, Stephanie March
and Bobby Flay, Jose Raul Perez, Allison and Neil Rubler. Dinner
Chairs were Brooke McMurray and John Fowler, Steve and
Diane Parrish. Honorary
Comic’s Circle was Joy Behar, Cedric the Entertainer,
Margaret Cho, Ellen DeGeneres, Whoopi Goldberg, Joan Rivers, Chris
Rock,
Ray Romano, Adam Sandeler, Garry Shandling, David Spade, and Karen
Williams. The evening was sponsored by Bloomberg (the
company). And a good time was had by all.
Although Safe Horizon is here for us, it’s an
ongoing battle. A Good Time is rarely had by many, thanks to the those who see
to it.
Street Scene. My father was a rager.
He could go on a tear at the drop of one solitary remark made by
my mother, usually having
to do with some bill that wasn’t paid or some other financial
obligation that went untended. The rage could take the form of
a fist on the dinner table that sent everything clattering and
sometimes smashing, or a foot crashing through a window or a door
panel; or a chair picked up by the back and slammed against the
floor, or just a ranting of epithets, slammed doors and the car
tires screeching out of the driveway as he departed for cooler
locales, leaving behind a dark cold cloud of confusion and fear
in the house.
Sometimes, although rarely, the histrionics rose to the level of
the physical. When I was a very small child, probably three or
four, they got into an argument (over what, I never knew – although
it was probably “money”) and he pushed her down a (short)
flight of stairs. However much she was injured, she was still able
to pick herself up, to get her coat and purse, and head out the
door. It was nighttime, I remember. He put a coat on me, picked
me up and we went out, into the car, so he could follow her down
the street.
When he found her somewhere along the sidewalk, he stopped and
rolled down the car window on my side, the passenger side. She
took one look at me, her youngest, her baby, and burst into tears.
And so did I. I knew at that moment, at that very early age, that
I was the bargaining chip – she had to come back. And I needed
her to.
Like a lot of our early memories, that one has no sequence; it
just ends. And has stayed in my mind’s eye forever. Their
altercations, which is a very polite word to cover a lifetime of
verbal and sometimes physical violence in their marriage, continued
well into my teen-age years, and presumably after I went away to
college, never to return to live (except temporarily) in their
house again.
From the time I was a very small child, I never understood why
my mother stayed with him, although she told me she didn’t
know where we would go. My father was a compulsive gambler, among
other things, and that issue seemed to rule our lives. My mother
was the breadwinner, as a result, and it was a brutal task which
she met more than admirably through sheer toil. It seemed to me
until I was well into my adult years, that money was at the root
of his problems (and ours). Money is often the mask, and an effective
one when it comes to identifying our problems in life. Much later
on I understood that the problems went far deeper.
My mother was of the generation of women who believed that they
had few choices on their own without a man. Furthermore she had
children (I was her last) who were totally dependent until she
was in her early 50s. Had she been born into a later generation
where women began to be inculcated with the notion that they could
do it on their own, without being legitimized by an MRS, she might
have chucked the old man in the beginning and got on with her life.
But, alas, she didn’t. It is also true, I also discovered
quite accidentally, after my father passed away in his mid-70s
(I was in my mid-30s), that the two of them had some kind of emotional
tie that bound them together, forever; a bond which I later came
to understand is one of those mysteries of life and love and many
human relationships.
My father’s anger was often daily and at times terrifying – especially
very late at night (when he’d come in from work on his night
shift) and I could hear them arguing in the kitchen which was right
below my bedroom. The child lying in bed in the dark is even more
vulnerable and defenseless thanks to his imagination and complete
lack of comprehension of what is going on between the two adults
in the heat of confrontation. The fear ultimately is death by that
awful hand. I don’t recall my mother ever raising her voice
during one of his rantings. Her method of fighting back was to
comment ironically and/or then maybe fall into weeping – another
turmoil for the child listening fearfully in the dark as his world
seems to be coming apart.
My father’s anger never, surprisingly, was directed at me
physically. He never raged at me, although he did yell at me if
he were angry about something I had done (and was in the wrong),
in a disciplinary way. I recall once when I got a spanking (as
a four year old) for playing with matches, although remember only
the gesture and not the pain (and never fooled around with matches
again). And even his harsh tones and words were never cruel or
unkind toward me. He was less restrained with my older sisters,
however, and completely unrestrained with my mother. I was lucky.
I grew up to have many elements of my father’s temper. When
I was a young married man, my wife and I got into some pretty loud
arguments and the rage which I identified as my father’s
even then was right there in the center of it. I hated that in
myself and hated the way it felt physically, let alone mentally.
I am to this day capable to feeling that intense violence although
it feels deeply uncomfortable to the point of atrophy. I still
sometimes fall into it when I am by myself and harrassed by someone
or something. I usually take these self-diatribes to the bathroom
mirror where I can get a good look at myself in my serious hollering:
the mere sight of my face contorted by anger leads directly to
revelations of the absurd, as well as laughter at the recognition
that it doesn’t matter. I learned this lesson in a variety
of ways – through therapy, through smoking marijuana (which
I no longer do) and through one particular relationship with someone
who used to laugh (from the amusement of it) when he saw me go
into my deep snit.
My father never got that far in his life. Eventually illness and
age reduced him to a point of physical weakness where even he had
to concede that he had no power to negotiate by fear. Life had
stepped in and he was on the ropes. He was not, to my knowledge,
an introspective man, and so I don’t know how he felt about
his anger that tormented and terrified us for so long. Surely it
tormented him too. In his fifties he developed serious stomach
problems, some of which were ameliorated although not cured by
extensive and debilitating surgery, and that marked the beginning
of a long, lingering end to his life.
I tell this story because although in the many years that have
passed since I left my father and mother’s house, and I have
been blessed with an adult life mainly unencumbered by the ravages
of temper and rage; and although I am still quite sensitive to
its possibilities in those lives I see around me – such as
the children and the animals, and in many cases, the adults --
it all came home to me again one mid-afternoon last week, in my
neighborhood when I was walking my dogs.
I live on a corner between two of the poshest private girls’ schools
in New York. And at about three o’clock in the weekday afternoon,
when both these schools are letting out, the sidewalks and the
streets are filled with children, some adults and lots of cars,
taxis and school buses.
On this particular afternoon, amidst the crowd moving along on
the corner, I saw a man whom I know -- a man who is very well-known,
even famous in some quarters, especially as one of the richest
men in New York – get out of his big black chauffeur-driven
SUV and run across the street (narrowly getting hit by an oncoming
car which he was obviously unaware of). He was followed by two
bodyguards, very big, tall muscular men, far taller than he, and
they were chasing, through the gaggle of little girls and some
mothers and nannies, a woman walking with her arm around her child – a
girl of about eight or nine.
I recognized him, as did everyone else on the street because he
is well-known. The woman he was chasing was his ex-wife (from a
well-publicized and contentious divorce of several years ago) and
the child was theirs. She turned away from him, as if to escape
his rancor (I could not hear what he was yelling at her as she
moved away from him). Trying to get away from him, the mother and
child crossed the street in my direction. But he and his henchman
followed like storm troopers. The little girl was sheltered tightly
under her mother’s arm, whimpering in fear. I understood
her fear. I had felt that fear many times myself when I was her
age. Large, looming, raging adults – fathers in this case – terrifying
and dangerous beyond comprehension, threatening a child’s
mother and protector.
As the mother moved closer to me (quite serendipitously in her
random direction of escape), our eyes met. Hers were red with fear
and alarm. She turned away in another direction, moved again back
across the street, hailing a cab. A cab stopped, she opened the
door, but the man and his men had caught up with her and the child,
and before the two could get in the cab to escape, he and his henchmen
slammed the door and blocked their getting in.
He then stood before her, one hand on his waist, the
other jabbing in her direction, yelling something which was out
of my earshot
(but not out of the earshot of many others standing right next
to them). He seemed unaware or unconcerned about the presence of
the public in his private rage. She, the ex-wife with her child,
seemed to be just listening, saying nothing; she was cornered.
His actions looked as if they were getting hotter and hotter. The
fear factor rose up within me. I could see what could be coming
down – such
as a fist or a shove or a slap.
The child kept protesting to her father to stop but he ignored
her, caught in the heat of his rage. Finally, while the small crowd
watched, and at the same time tried not see, for there was fear
all around us by now, he stopped, turned away, walked across the
street with his bodyguards, got into his great big car, and drove
off. The object of his scorn, with her child, their child, was
then joined by another man, possibly an assistant or a butler,
who hailed another cab, which the three – mother, daughter,
and the man – got into, and drove away.
The scene provoked all kinds of rage within me. And memories. And
the feeling of impotence – my impotence, his impotence, the impotence — possibly
the same feeling that had provoked his rage in the first place.
For there was nothing I could do, anyone could
do. Except call the police.
Suddenly it was over and they were gone. I was left thinking about
the child with her mother. Her angry father, directing his anger
at her mother and not at her, was probably completely unaware of
his child’s experience throughout this drama. There she was,
in the center of this melee, all happening in front of her classmates
who were witnessing her own private horror. There she was, at the
effect of the anger of this man, her father, and his two enormous
bodyguards, fearing she might be in harm’s way.
Children
go directly to the results with their imagined fears. How did she
know that she was free from harm? How did she know that her father
would ever stop threatening her mother and even take her mother
away, preventing her from getting to a safe place away from him?
I thought about the father, and former husband. I have no idea
what the roots of his anger are. Unlike my father, it undoubtedly
isn’t “money.” Unless it is. Neither party is
new to marriage or divorce. He is famous for his anger, both public
and private, and, ironically famous, at least privately for his
devotions and philanthropy. He is a man who in his quieter moments
is good company and a reasonable companion. But then there are
the demons, and these demons that seem to haunt him also haunt
and taunt others. When it comes to the adults within the sphere
of his terror, they have choices: they can leave. When it comes
to the children, they do not. They can only learn to live with
it.
Many children never survive these torments of their fathers and
mothers. And they very often grow up to despise the parent or parents
who perpetrate this violence on them. I thought about the father,
the former husband. And my own father. Life comes along eventually,
and takes away the power that we can inflict with the energy of
youth. Then there is nothing to stand in the way of nature’s
verdict, not even the natural love of a child for a parent. Pity
all around us who cannot see and do not know the safe horizon. |
|
|
|
|
