One Million Dollars
My father received a certified letter from the State Attorney’s office. Ask him what the letter said and he’ll highlight only the most the essential details: We still have your guns. You can come get your guns. Please bring the necessary paperwork. For my father, the letter served both as a reminder that they still, in fact, had his guns, and as a notification that now, after over 25 years, he could finally have them back.
It all started in Grove City, a suburb of the fading steel industry, in a house purchased in part with a 1978 Mazda RX-7. This wasn’t the house with the inground pool and the room where we stored the slot machines. And it wasn’t the house with the exercise room filled with boxes of “Italian” stiletto knives. No, the house in Grove City was the one where the Attorney General’s Bureau of Narcotics Investigations came in and searched every inch, while I sat on the waterbed watching Indiana Jones and The Temple Doom. They went room to room looking for kilos of cocaine. They left with a few dozen of my father’s guns. The year was 1990. That’s where it started for me.
Ask my father where it started, how it came to be that those loud but nice men came in and took his guns, and he’ll say it all started at the Canadian border. More specifically, he’ll say it started with one million dollars, in cash, confiscated on the U.S. side of the Canadian border.
And so this is the point in the story where I start to change some details, mostly because that is what my father would want and partly because some of the details are a bit unclear. Those words just now — “what my father would want” — seem to imply that my father is dead, and thankfully he is not. Rather what those words mean is that if he knew I was writing this, which he doesn’t, he would most likely want me to change some of the details, even though he has made it clear that we are well beyond any statute of limitations.
The idea, up above, that my father doesn’t know I’m writing this seems to hint at a strained relationship. Thankfully, though, that is not the case. Regardless of the image that this story might project of him in your mind, as a person or as a father, and while he is certainly not without his faults in either regard, please know that the man is, in a word, fantastic.
Though I do not call him nearly as often as I should, I cherish him and the fact that he is part of my life, partly because I have had a life that has forced me to cherish those that are still here, and partly because he is my father and he is electric.
A few weeks back, I was sitting next to him on the couch, in the living room of the house we moved to after Grove City, the same couch where I would lay my head on his chest and fall asleep on Friday nights as we watched whatever movie I had picked out, and we were somehow discussing the scars on our hands. I have a small one on my right thumb from a dog bite, and he a small one on his left thumb from a cat scratch. As we talked, I reached out to grab his hand, to hold his thumb, to get it into the light to better see this scar, and as I did I was overcome with this incredible surge of energy. There was an instant heightened sense that I was touching his skin, that I was holding his hand, that we were connected. And maybe it was only because as adults there is rarely any physical contact beyond a hug, or maybe it felt like it was something more because it was.
My father has this theory that he and I emit what he sometimes describes as an invisible bright yellow light, and other times as a powerful magnetic field. His evidence includes things like the regularity in which street lights go out as we walk or drive beneath them, and our mutual inability to wear a watch that keeps steady time. Or there was that time on an orienteering course that I could not get a compass to show north — the needle just slowly rotated — and yet in other people’s hands it was fine. As I write this, I fully understand how ridiculous it all sounds. And yet, I can’t say I don’t believe it. Because frankly, believing it feels good.
That’s what my father did — he got me to believe that I was special. We saw each other every other weekend for most of my childhood, and he got a small, scrawny, unathletic kid of divorced parents to believe in himself. And it was more than just strange ideas based loosely on plot points from the Indiana Jones movies (he has a crystal skull), it was a constant knowing that he was proud of me. To this day I’m not sure how he did it, but in between the smuggling of casino machines and illegal knives, the mid-level drug deals, the search warrants, and the surveillance equipment, somewhere in there my father convinced me I was special, and since then, no matter how much I’ve hated myself, I could never completely shake that feeling.
So when did it start? Did it start in that country home, the one with long gated driveway at the base of the mountain? The one where that nice young man Hawk stayed with us, with the long red hair and blonde moustache that I would later learn was a hitman hired to kill my father. Hawk was either not very good at or just not very committed to his craft, because he lived with us for at least a few months, and like I said earlier, my father is still alive.
Maybe it started in first grade. It was that very first D.A.R.E. presentation, where they showed us the green plants and white powder that I somehow already knew about and I remember raising my hand, about to share what I knew, but the teacher called on another student, a girl that sat in the front, and she shared what she knew, something about her uncle, and the teacher quickly quieted her and I knew to put my hand down and to keep it down.
Perhaps second grade then? I found that white pill in the street outside a friend’s house and promptly crushed it with a rock and snorted it. My mother shouted down the street for me to come home; we had a family wedding to get ready for. I went home, changed into my dress clothes and promptly fell asleep in my bed. I woke up to my pillow and dress shirt covered in blood. My mother, the nurse, assumed it was just a nosebleed at an inconvenient time; I had another dress shirt, so the inconvenience was minor.
Perhaps third grade, or maybe fourth? I could keep going on with more grammar school indiscretions, and then move on to my comparatively uneventful teenage years, followed by the loss, grief, and guilt of my twenties; but right now, that’s not the story.
Right now, the story is, in no particular order: one million dollars cash, confiscated at the Canadian border; a box of guns at the Attorney General’s office, waiting to be picked up by my father; and a few missing kilos of cocaine.
And so: that house in Grove City, the one paid for with a car, was purchased from a fellow named Mack. Those slot machines I mentioned earlier, the ones my father used to keep in a side room in a previous house, those slot machines that never hit, my father had purchased those from Mack, too. Eventually, those slot machines made their way to New York, via a man named Billy. Billy ran a few businesses in the City, owned a few bars, and was a good friend of my father’s. One of the guns my father got back from the State Attorney’s office, a gold plated Colt 1911, was a gift from Billy.
And it was Billy’s million dollars that was confiscated on the U.S. side of the Canadian border.
While that million dollars sat in a room somewhere and the good guys worked to prove it was Billy’s money and that Billy made this money via the drug trade, miles away, in another state, two other guys got picked up for a slightly more than minor drug offense. Those two guys happened to be former associates of my Uncle Joe. Those two guys tell the good guys everything they know about my uncle. One of the things they tell the good guys is that my uncle, like my father, is good friends with Billy.
And so the good guys let out those two guys to go make a play on my uncle. The play is that they want to buy multiple kilos and then the hope is that my uncle will roll over on some more guys and eventually the good guys get to Billy.
My uncle goes to my father, and then my father goes to Billy. Everything seems to check out, so Billy okays the sale of three kilos to the two guys that are now working for the good guys. The good guys go get the appropriate paperwork, search warrant, or whatever, so that their two guys can buy the three kilos from my uncle.
But in the days leading up to the transaction, my father starts to feel a little suspect about the whole thing. Billy’s girlfriend is still in jail from the incident at the border and when Billy goes to bail her out, he also gets arrested. And so when the courier arrives with the three kilos for my father, he only takes one and sends the other two back to New York. He tells my uncle: only give the two guys one kilo, and if that goes smooth, we will do the other two kilos 24 hours later.
Obviously, it doesn’t go smooth.
My uncle is arrested but won’t talk. The other problem: there is only one kilo at the scene. Where are the other kilos? All the good guys’ paperwork is for three kilos. And so the searches begin. First my father’s business, a salvage yard in Western PA. Then some other places, in which my father and my uncle are minor partners. Then the Grove City house, while I was watching Indiana Jones and The Temple Of Doom.
Nothing. The searches turn up nothing. The other kilos simply don’t exist, at least not in Pennsylvania. They confiscate all of my father’s handguns, as a consolation prize.
From there, the case against Billy falls apart. He and his girlfriend are released. The case against my uncle, not so much. But Billy bails him out and helps him leave the state, maybe the country. He’s gone. And he’s been gone. I haven’t seen him since I was twelve, or maybe thirteen.
He was a wonderful uncle. He taught me a lot of things. That it was okay to keep notebooks filled with lists of your favorite things. Movies. Books. Quotes. That it was okay to carry a notebook everywhere you go. Maybe now that my father got his guns back, maybe that means my uncle can come back. Or maybe there are some things you just can’t come back from. Or rather, maybe there are some things you’d rather not come back to.
But that’s all bullshit, that stuff about my uncle. Not the part that he was wonderful. He was. Not the notebooks. That was a thing, too. But he hasn’t been gone. Sure, Billy sent to him out west. Set him up with a place and job. He was taken care of. But he didn’t like it. So he came back. Maybe a year later. Maybe two. He had the same look and a new name and he lived with my father in that house we were in when I grabbed my dad’s thumb and felt electricity. And he, my uncle, had notebooks and notebooks of lists and lists and we layed on that white comforter with two sets of rainbow stripes along the sides, on the floor in front of the television, and we went through those lists.
And I said, I never heard of that movie. And he said, you never heard of Night of the Comet? What he really meant was: so you’ve never seen Catherine Mary Stewart?
But I had, because she was in Weekend at Bernie’s, and more importantly, The Last Starfighter.
Regardless, I was glad he was back. Mostly because he was a great uncle, but also because it meant that the punch that I threw and landed in Grove City, the one that bloodied his nose just a few weeks before those loud but nice men came through the house looking for kilos of coke but only found my dad’s guns, it meant that that punch wasn’t the reason he left.
And so I asked him. Why did you leave? Why are you back? He said he was back because that is what people do, people come back. And I was young and had pink lungs and hope; and so that explanation seemed plausible.
So then I asked him again, why did you leave?
“Well,” and he paused. He paused for a long time. So long that my adolescent mind moved on to other things, most likely Catherine Mary Stewart. So long that when he finally started talking, his words barely registered as anything more than background noise.
He could have said one million different things. And maybe one involved the Canadian border.
