What do you call a tough old ball buster from Cleveland with no money, no shame, a lousy attitude, and crumbs all over his shirt? Dad.
I find my father everywhere--in the mirror, of course, in the cupid's bow of my four-year-old son's lips, in the tugging of my heart toward rage even as my hair goes white, and in the hate and hurt whetted in my family's soul. I find my father because I want to find him, because I grew up without him, starving for him, because I'm still greedy to redeem our love.
Mainly, though, I find him because Sandy Raab is hard to miss. See that three-hundred-pound, seventy-six-year-old guy with the Gabby Hayes beard, the stogie stuck in his pie hole, the pecker-tracked sweatpants, and the food-crusted turquoise T-shirt? That'd be him. That's my old man.
I'm in Laughlin, Nevada, back in 1997. I'm working on a story--nasty story, nasty town--but I have a couple of days to kill, so I call L. A. and invite Sandy to come gamble and pillage the buffets with me.
Don't forget Father's Day
"How far is it from Los Angeles?"
Five hours.
"You need cigars?"
No.
"How far is it from Los Angeles?"
I just told you.
"Don't be a wiseass. You said five hours. How many miles?"
Three hundred.
"You need cigars?"
Dad, I don't smoke cigars.
"Putz. You don't know what you're missing. See you in a couple hours."
The first thing we do is slay a herd of three-buck prime rib. Then Sandy lays his hands on quarter slots until he finds an adjacent pair that feel warm and giving. Two hours later, up a combined $190, we go strolling behind the row of casinos along the Colorado River.
Frankie Valli is yowling behind a fence. We can't see him, but we sure can hear him. Dead fish on the river's bottom can hear him. Coyotes foraging the bluffs at the edge of the desert sky can hear him. It is truly not a good thing to hear, but here's a bench--so here we sit.
Sandy torches a Macanudo. Soon, a pear-shaped security guard appears. "I'm sorry, folks," he says, "but you're going to have to keep moving."
"What?" My father has been honing this one-word, all-purpose snarl for years. It is loud and querulous, timed--like a snapping left jab--to land before his opponent has finished a sentence.
"I'm sorry, sir. You can't sit here." Polite, deferential. He sees my father's arms, like stanchions, sees the beard of white stubble, sees the cast of his eyes, the red glare that warns: I am insane.
"I'm smokin' a cigar."
"Yessir, but you can't smoke it here. Not during the concert."
Dad, let's go.
"I'm smokin' a cigar. I'm not listening to that little greaseball."
Let's go, Dad.
Back to the slots. We're surrounded by the living dead; even the cocktail waitresses are shriveled, their long wrinkles caked with powder, thighs bulging through their fishnets like forcemeat. My father looks glum. The belly of his T-shirt is ash-streaked and stained with the dried blood of his dinner.
Ready to cash in, Dad?
"What? You're tired?"
I've got an early interview with a cop.
He shrugs, frowning, scanning the room, the stump of his last cigar cold between clenched teeth.
"If you wanted a whore in this place," says my father, "you'd have to wheel her up."
My father is looking for his father. I'm helping. His way of looking is to ask me to look; my way of looking is to dick around for an hour on the computer, Googling a name my father can't spell, the name of a man I never met. Then I find something better to do, something more productive, like waiting for the mail.
His dad died in or about 1951, in or around New York City, and was buried in a potter's field--the old term for a paupers' boneyard. His first name in Yiddish was Velvel; he went by Willie in America. My father says he came from Poland via South America, with a lengthy, unpronounceable last name--devoid of any vowels except for y--that later became Piltz.
Willie used other last names. One, according to an undated, photocopied clipping from an old Cleveland newspaper, was Pelz. My father gave me the clip years ago. "William" Pelz had been shot in the chest and groin by a jealous man. Pelz's wife of four weeks--formerly the jealous man's lover--also had been shot, in the head. The shooter owned a steak house; the newlyweds were working in the restaurant kitchen when he shot them.
The jealous man was just out of prison, a bootlegger and arsonist. Pelz's new wife, Gertrude--not my dad's mom, although, as far as he knows, his parents never were divorced--also had done time in prison for bootlegging. As for Willie, the clipping says that he was fifty-seven when he was shot and that his criminal record dated back to 1915--twelve years before my father was born.
Willie was no kind of father. He was nothing but a small-time Cleveland hood--a shakedown artist, a bomb roller during the dry cleaners' war, a rumrunner, a playboy, a bigamist. The family--Sandy was the youngest of five children--ran from tenement to tenement in the tough-Jew Kinsman ghetto when they couldn't make rent. In 1937, when my dad was ten, Willie went to jail, to Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary--this, too, is in the clip--for "conspiracy to violate liquor laws."
Stone poor, hopeless, my dad's mother downsized, which is how my father became Sanford Raab. He went to live with his uncle, his mother's brother Julius Raab, who legally adopted him. This could've been a decent break for Sandy--Julius lived up in Cleveland Heights and was a medical doctor--but for two things: one, my father believed that his mother had sold him to Doc Raab, which wounded him terribly; and two, Julius was no picnic, despite his income and status. Rabinowitz was his surname when he got off the boat, and he was a prick.
Julius, too, was destined for Lewisburg--he had built a thriving abortion practice, and, ratted out by a competitor, pleaded guilty to tax evasion. By that time, my dad had enlisted in the Navy, fresh out of high school. He was going to classes at Kent State on the GI Bill when one of his sisters phoned from New York to say that Velvel was on his deathbed. She asked Sandy to come and say goodbye to his dad. He didn't.
My father wants to visit his old man now; he just can't find the grave.
A Depression ghetto child, Sandy had two basic choices: lay down and die, or be a tough guy. And though it's nice to think that you'll adapt when you get to a certain age or a different stage in your life--a happier place, maybe, with better choices and more resources--that hasn't happened with my father.
Not long ago, something his boss had said about him a few days earlier got back to him and pissed him off. So Sandy Raab--half deaf, diapered and diabetic, sleep-apneic and bipolar, incontinent and impotent after a bout with prostate cancer, with no pension, no credit, and nothing in the bank--rang his boss on the cell phone his boss pays for and asked if his boss had made the remark.
Yup.
"Fuck you, then," my father said. "I quit."
My father told me this story on the phone.
"You'd have done the same thing," he added.
Maybe not, I said.
"Well, he called me back the next day to apologize. So I'm still working for the sonuvabitch."
My first reaction was relief. In the last two years, my father has hit up two of my brothers for money--he always needs pocket money for books, cigars, and Viagra. Both brothers said no; one even had the gall to ask why he needed the cash, which hurt Sandy's feelings. I knew he was hurt because after he told me about the turndown, he added, "Fuck him."
"You woulda loaned me the money," he said.
Not without a promissory note and a repayment schedule.
"Fuhhhhck you," my father said.
The man is cranky, yes--so am I. But that doesn't make us any less sensitive or sincere. One way or another, we settle all accounts. When my father comes to visit us in New Jersey, I pay his way and he repays me, a chunk at a time. The checks come randomly--no note, nothing else in the envelope. On the last one he sent, he'd written "0 balance" on the memo line.
Zero balance: He had that right. For the plane fare. I'm still out for the hand-cut lox, the pastrami and corned beef, the rib roast, the pastry, the tube of denture-adhesive cream, the laxative, and the downstairs toilet he destroyed. He's a hard-nosed motherfucker, my old man. And so am I.
He never finished his degree from Kent State. In 1950, he married my mother, Lucille, and went to work selling clothes, first as a retailer--his dress shop on Superior Avenue was named Sandy-Lu's--and then, when the shop went belly-up in the early fifties, he sold wholesale on the road, ladies' foundational garments, bras and girdles, to shops in central and southern Ohio and northern Kentucky.
I arrived in 1952, firstborn of my parents' three sons, the nine-pound, five-ounce heir, King Sanford's brooding little prince. I missed him when he traveled, missed him bad. I'd watch the Friday-night fights on TV with him; he was a serious fight fan. He'd done some boxing in the Navy, when he was skinny, and he doted on the middleweights. Sugar Ray Robinson was his paragon, but it was a fine era for that weight class, and I remember sitting at my dad's feet as the Fullmer brothers, Gene and Don, and Carmen Basilio banged away, bleeding on the little screen.
My brother Dave came along in 1955--don't ask me why; the last thing I wanted was competition--and my dad got off the road and took a job in someone else's clothing store. After he quit that, he managed a carpet-and-tile barn. He hated retail--his bosses, his customers, the dead hours and dead air, the crap pay. He hated himself, too, and toughed out long spells of melancholy.
He wanted me tough. I understood that from the get go, from watching him. He pumped a pair of iron dumbbells until his biceps became rock. He wasn't much bigger than your average Joe--a shade under six feet, 190 pounds or so--but his shoulders and chest were tight and thick; his forearms, too. Sandy Raab was a bull. I worshiped him, the muscle and the smell of him--Old Spice and smoke and sweat. My dad smelled like man. Not a man: Man.
I wanted to be tough, but I was too young to understand what it meant or what it cost: the isolation from feeling, the pure hurt of it. One day, I went at it tooth and nail with the bully of the block while my dad sat in his chair on the concrete slab we called a porch and read his paper. I was five or six--the same age as the bully, and no smaller--and I took a whupping. I was furious with my father for not budging.
"You have to fight your own battles," he said. "Anyway, you held your own."
Not long after, I whined about some other kid picking on me.
"Hit him back," he said.
But he's bigger than me.
"Then pick up a rock and hit him with that," he told me.
Funny thing is, my dad was no primitive. He had a .38 and a lot of hard-guy friends, but he also kept a stash of books from his brief college days--a Freud biography, some Hemingway and Henry Miller, and a one-volume collection of Shakespeare. He was tough and he was bookish, but in reality he was just a guy in a carpet-and-tile store, in his thirties now, feeling the walls of his life closing in a little more every day.
Meanwhile, Julius Raab had done his time, lost his medical license, and gone west to Los Angeles. He had money and real estate connections, and he offered Sandy a house in the San Fernando Valley, which was ranch- and farmland in 1960. Millions of people were headed there--walls were closing in on a lot of guys my dad's age--and my father persuaded my mother to make the move. She had just given birth to my brother Bob a few weeks before we packed up and left Cleveland.
My dad and I left first, by car. My mom and brothers flew out a couple of weeks later. I was eight, my father was thirty-three, and that trip with him was paradise. Whatever Sandy was searching for then, I was by his side.
We took Route 66--the Mother Road--and read aloud the signpost poetry of Burma Shave. We stopped to see caverns and Indians, taverns and cafés, purple mountains, fruited plains, the Mojave Desert, and motels with swimming pools. One night, as we pulled out of Albuquerque just before sunrise, the moon hung in the sky so big and bone white that he stopped to get out and look up at it. It filled the sky and I fell down. I fell down on my back right there beside the road, trembling with awe.
Beyond any and all of this, there was my dad. I was his beloved son, and he--he was all mine. We were together. We were on the road. He loved me: It was knitted in my soul. And I loved my old man, with a love more primal and helpless, more powerful and fierce, than I'd know again for nearly forty years--until the afternoon I kissed my newborn boy, my own sweet son, Judah Raab.
When I'm working in L. A.--two or three times a year--I'll spend as much time as I can with Sandy, which has come to mean only as much time as I can stand. If we're on our way to eat, or eating, or driving home from a meal--fine. Everything else is a crapshoot. We argue, then he falls asleep.
A while back, before his prostate cancer, I was staying at a swank hotel on Sunset, waiting three days for my two hours with Nicolas Cage. My father came down to wait with me one day. We ate a big room-service breakfast, then an enormous room-service lunch. From the trays and platters dead on the bed, you'd have thought we'd been holed up for weeks.
I needed the bathroom for a number two. While I was in there, Sandy had to go number one. Had to go, bad. But he didn't knock on the john door or say boo--he just took himself a nice, long pee in the wastebasket by my desk. And laughed about it, too.
He's not senile yet, my old man: He just doesn't give a damn. He'll tell a waitress that her service sucked. He'll flip the bird if you cut him off, and he has been known, even in his Medicare years, to pull over if you'd like a piece of him. His inner gangster, the shade of Willie, never went away. Sometimes now I'll go out there and never let him know I'm in town. When I'm on the road working that cruel celebrity beat, I need to be clear and sharp, ready to go at a moment's . . . Ahhhh, fuck me. Truth is, I can't handle L. A., the capital of empty-head, self-serve bullshit, and I can't handle my father, either. I'm not proud of not calling him, nor am I ashamed. Nobody taught him how to be a father or a son. And as for what he taught me--well, that's for Judah to judge when his own search unfolds.
I liked L. A. fine as a kid, but it didn't last long. Less than two years after we moved out there, I came home from school one day and my mother told me we were going back to Cleveland. Without Dad.
This was 1962, when divorce was rare, and it was not amicable. There was a villain named Sandy, a victim named Lucille, and three innocent boys. We hadn't heard them fighting. Nobody suggested counseling. It was over just like that. Done. I was ten.
I don't remember saying goodbye to my father. I don't remember anyone explaining one damn thing to me. What I do recall is my mother saying we couldn't take our dog back to Cleveland with us because the climate change would kill him. I was smart enough to realize that she was lying, that the Cleveland weather wasn't going to kill the dog.
I don't know what happened to the dog, but for me--and for my father and me--life ran downhill fast. Lucille took us back to Cleveland and her folks took us in. I didn't merely miss my dad; I ached for him. There was no money for long-distance calls, and his letters were few and far between. I'd see him for a week or so in the summer if he came to Cleveland, or a couple of weeks if Dave and I were sent out to L. A., but it wasn't every year and it wasn't nearly enough.
I did hear a lot about him. Not by eavesdropping--direct from my mother. Sandy slept around; he made lousy money and threw away the little he made buying things for himself--a hi-fi, beer, steaks; he was a bastard and I was just like him. I heard it all.
To say that my mother, too, was shocked and hurting and afraid--stigmatized as a divorcée, penniless and unprepared for any type of job, saddled with three sons and forced back under her parents' roof--is not to deny that this was poor parenting. It was ugly stuff, cruel, fanged with a full measure of female venom. The worst was when she told me that my father didn't really love me.
Didn't love me? I wasn't buying that, but, my God, it hurt to hear it--and it didn't endear my mother to me. Don't get me wrong: I'm grateful to Lucille for not selling me. But I always felt like if she'd had a decent offer, she wouldn't have turned it down.
I got bigger and stronger, and I got tough. My brothers paid the physical price for that; I paid the rest. I stopped giving a shit about school or much of anything. I had sports, boxing in particular, rock 'n' roll, and books--as long as they weren't any of the books I was supposed to read. Then I started writing. Later, drugs. I'd dabble in crime, guns, and women, but only with drugs and writing did I ever feel truly tough enough to be in charge.
As for Sandy, he was back in California. It didn't take him long to remarry and to sire another son, my brother Michael.
Sandy flew into Newark in December 1999 to see Judah for the first time. I met him at the airport, alone. I was feeling pretty proud--a forty-seven-year-old man with an infant son tends to feel that way.
Newark's not an easy airport. By the time we got his bags and started circling for the Garden State Parkway ramp, he was telling me how proud he was of me, and of my work, of how I stuck with writing, of how I never gave it up even though I got no help from anyone.
It's tricky, getting on the parkway. Miss the first ramp, you're on your way to New York City; miss the second, you're on Interstate 78. Luckily, I can drive and seethe at the same time. My stomach began churning: I knew what was coming, because I'd heard numerous versions of the same crap from him. Don't get me wrong: I want my dad to be proud of me. But we've both read better writers, and we both know the road to Stockholm isn't paved with magazine profiles.
"I'm disappointed, though," my father said, "that you haven't written a book."
If you're disappointed, how the fuck do you think I feel?
"Hmp," my father said.
I don't want to hear any of that shit. We're not even out of the fucking airport loop yet.
"I'm hungry," my father said.
Me, too.
By the time I started college, my dad and I were hardly in touch. Whatever I was searching for, I had no idea how to begin. Women scared me. School bored me. But the drugs were cheap and excellent, and the dorm vending machines were full of loose change if you hit them hard enough with a crowbar.
Past forty now, Sandy was going to college, too. He was working at RCA, and he'd ridden an employee tuition-assistance program to a bachelor's degree--and started night law school while working full-time.
I went out to L. A. to see him in the summer of '71, between my freshman and sophomore years. Whatever shell of tough I'd made for myself was cracking. I had moved from wine and weed to Jim Beam and 'ludes, and from vending machines to burglary; my best friend broke open my skull during a fight, then drove me to the ER and waited while I got stitched up; my GPA was headed south of 1.0. I needed a firmer hand than my own.
My father knew nothing about any of this, of course. He hooked me up with the worst job I've ever had, in a plating room, 6:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. six days a week for two bucks an hour. There were bikers, ex-cons, wetbacks, and me. I did amphetamines every day, got my first two tattoos on the Pike in Long Beach, and lost seventy pounds I needed to lose. My dad and I hardly ever saw each other; when we did, my head was buzzing so loud I couldn't hear a word he said.
I dropped out of college that fall, hitched from Cleveland back to L. A., and moved in with my dad. He was forty-five, and becoming a lawyer was life and death to him. I was nineteen and out of control. I needed my old man, and he took me in, no questions asked. But even if he'd known how, he couldn't father me through the ten years we'd already lived apart. The lessons he'd taken from Willie and Julius--how to be tough, followed by how to disappear--would have to do.
I lasted six months under his roof. He was pissed when I left, and I didn't blame him a bit. He was humping for the bar exam; I was dropping acid on the beach and
staying gone three days at a stretch without calling. It was past time for me to go, but he wasn't about to make it easy on me. He bought my car for what I'd paid for it--$150--and I wound up calling my mother for the rest of the cash for a plane ticket back to Cleveland.
I remember saying goodbye to my father then. "Go," he sneered. "Run back to your mommy."
Sandy passed the bar. I didn't stay two weeks with my mommy: I got a job selling shoes.
My son's afraid of dragons, dinosaurs, and skeletons.
"Will you protect me?"
I will protect you. That is part of my job, to protect you. No dragons. No dinosaurs. No skeletons. If we see one, I will pinch its head like a grape.
"Thanks."
You're welcome.
I can handle the dragons, dinosaurs, and skeletons, and I've got my pistol-grip Mossberg 12-gauge to deal with the other stuff. Still, I find myself unable to sleep, worried sick, full of fear. I'm fifty and a father now, and given the lessons of fatherhood I learned from Sandy--how to be tough, followed by how to disappear--who'll protect Judah from me?
My old man resigned from RCA, went into practice with a night-school pal, and snapped like a twig. What should have been a glorious march--from poor boy to attorney-at-law--collapsed into Sandy sitting in a rented office on Ventura Boulevard, unable to answer the ringing phone. It was Sandy's first round with full-blown organic depression--and depression knocked his hard ass down and out.
If I knew about his breakdown then, I don't remember; I was busy keeping numb. Man, oh man, I was tough. I rented a forty-dollar-a-month room in a creaky old house and carried a .22 when I stepped out. I think I saw my dad once in L. A. during the rest of the seventies--I've got a photo of myself and Michael in L. A., dated 1975--and I guess he came to Cleveland once. I was loaded all day every day for a lot of years.
I moved to Texas in '78, washed out as a drug dealer there, and caught a train back to Cleveland in '80, a step ahead of guys much tougher than me and my old man combined. I returned to college--Cleveland State University, the Harvard of Euclid Avenue--and when I got married for the first time in 1982, I called my dad to invite him.
We hadn't spoken in years, but he came to the wedding. It was good to see him. He was a businessman, not a lawyer, working for an electronics company. It was a short visit, and it was low-key. I was very glad he'd come, and so was he.
Next time I saw him wasn't good. I was in Iowa, in grad school; he came to visit for four days in 1985. He'd been in Singapore for a year, negotiating contracts, overseeing production, living large--too large. Sandy was the size of Colonel Kurtz, and his head was exploding. After driving him from the Cedar Rapids airport to the Iowa City Holiday Inn--the ritziest lodging in town, fifty-five dollars per night--I carried his bags up for him and sat on the bed as he went to the bathroom. He didn't bother closing the door, and while my father moved his bowels, he told me about a woman he was deeply, madly in love with.
When he emerged from the toilet, he said that if a word of this ever got back to my stepmother, he would kill me.
What are you gonna do--shoot me?
"Probably," he said. "I will hunt you down, and I will kill you."
He was serious. Me, I was stunned. I went home, got my wife, and drove back to meet him for dinner. We found him at the hotel bar, buying drinks for two women he'd already invited to join us for the evening. In four days at the Holiday Inn in Iowa City, he ran up a bill of $800. He talked incessantly about his Singapore adventures and how the natives there paid homage to him. He was going back, he said, maybe never to return.
I don't remember what my wife said, but his reply was, "Fuck you."
Hey--don't talk that way to my wife.
"Fuck you, too," my father said.
The fallout from that visit lasted for years. I sent him an angry letter; what I heard back, from my stepmother months later, was that my father had been diagnosed as manic-depressive and was doing well on medication--and, oh, by the way, the doctors tell us that this thing runs in families, so you need to be aware of that.
I wrote him off. We'd talk on the phone once or twice a year; he sounded comatose. He came back for a few days four years later, sleepy, stripped of energy, a tranquilized bear mumbling vague apologies for his conduct in '85 but recalling none of it. His apologies meant nothing to me, anyway. I didn't know what to make of this drugged old piece-of-shit father of mine. Maybe I was crazy, maybe not, but at least I was independent: I needed nobody else to tell me what drugs to take.
On his last day in Iowa, I squeezed his groggy carcass into my Ford Festiva and drove to Dyersville, where they'd made Field of Dreams the year before. Snow flew, but the baseball diamond was still cut and cleared, and we got in ten minutes of playing catch. Shoeless Joe never emerged from the withered cornstalks. No Costner, no Velvel--just Sandy and me in the blowing snow. It wasn't a movie: It was life. Everybody fades a little more each day, then disappears for good.
I broke in 1993. I wrecked my marriage beyond fixing and almost did the same with work. Part of it, no doubt, was biochemical, some was circumstance, and a lot of it was the twenty-plus years of drug studies I'd been conducting on myself. You could go nuts parceling out and weighing all the factors, and there was no need for that--I already was full-blown crazy.
I still have a copy of the letter I wrote my dad early in '93. "Dear Sanford Raab," it began, and it was ice all the way, full of formal, impersonal contempt. I closed with, "If you have something more to say, you really ought to try putting some of your thoughts into words on paper. Show me some guts."
I was desperate, falling fast, but still a long way from hitting bottom, and scared to fucking death. I needed my daddy bad--and if you're searching for Sandy Raab, the best way to find him is by challenging his guts. He came through the only way he knows how: I got back a howl scrawled on yellow legal paper.
"Let me tell you about guts . . ." it began, and went on for the full page. "You don't have the balls to face me," he wrote. I was "too much of a coward." "Keep on hiding, sonny boy," he wrote, and he included this invite: "If you are ever in Los Angeles, come see me and an old man will teach you what guts are."
So I called him up and told him I'd be glad to break his jaw, wherever, whenever. I meant it, but I also was crying pretty hard when I said it, and we stayed on the phone for a good, long time. We ended up making plans to meet in Las Vegas a few weeks later to watch Michael Carbajal and Humberto "Chiquita" Gonzalez duke it out for the light-flyweight championship.
It was a great fight, and it was a fresh start for me and my old man. There was nothing storybook about it--I was too busy destroying the rest of my life to focus too much attention on my father--but in the next letter I got from him, after Vegas, he wrote, "I have never felt so close to another human being in my life." He signed it, "Everlasting love, Dad."
I didn't read that letter from him for a long time, because I knew that it would touch me where I could no longer stand to be touched. I was plenty tough enough to shut the door on love, but I wasn't tough enough yet to put aside the hurt and anger and drugs, open it back up, and walk through like a full-grown man instead of a helpless boy. My father taught me by precept and example that pain and rage, properly distilled, can carry a man a long way in this world, but he couldn't teach me how to love. I'm learning that now from my son. Judah gives me lessons every day.
Things got much worse before getting better. That's the way addiction goes. If you're lucky, you don't kill anybody else and you don't French-kiss your Mossberg. If you're lucky, you find your old man when you need him bad. If you're really lucky, you have a son someday. And if you're both lucky, he knows how and where to find you.
If you're smart, you know the balance between a father and his son is never zero. I owe the hard-nosed motherfucker, and always will. I am the fruit of his loins--same flesh, same blood. I still go looking for the old man. Lucky for Sandy and me, I know just where to find him. I bust his ancient, shrunken balls--and he busts mine. Sure it hurts. Where we came from, that's love.
Happy Father's Day, tough guy.
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