Stand Together, Fall Apart

The day after John was arraigned at the courthouse on Chambers Street, I quit my job at McGrath & Swinburne and broke the lease on my two bedroom apartment in West Chelsea. People at the office wanted to know which of our loathsome downtown competitors had lured me off, no doubt with a better title and bigger bank. No one believed me when I said that I didn’t have a great new gig lined up. “That’s what you have to say,” they said, “to avoid the third degree from Smoky, right?”

Sure enough, the boss came down that afternoon, sat behind my desk, and chewed an unlit Cohiba while I filled a banker’s box with my personal effects. I’d spent a decade at the firm, but I didn’t have much to pack: an old Sony radio that only picked up AM stations, a potted cactus that got less water from me than it would in the Mojave desert, and a complete set of Chandler novels that I’d ordered online and had delivered to the office but never brought home. 

As I boxed this paltry collection of goods, Smoky remained quiet but watchful. I think he wanted to catch me stealing confidential client materials, if only because that would have given him an excuse to fire me rather than let me resign. But I gave him no cause. “You’re a lot dumber than I thought, Mejeur,” he muttered, after I finished. “You’ve got it good here. Who’s ever going to give you what we gave you?” 

“I’m sure you’re right,” I said.

He scowled and pointed at me with the cigar. “Is that supposed to be sarcasm?”

The doormen in my apartment building all said they were sorry to see me go – proof that I was tipping correctly at Christmas time, I suppose. Even people who did not know me well seemed to know that I had decided to leave. One of my neighbors, a tiny old Sicilian lady, knocked on my apartment door and told me that I would sleep a lot better on the sunset side of the river. She sounded more than a trace jealous, as if she would get out of town herself if she could.

This was, of course, not quite six months after a vile crew of terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center using jet planes; and she assumed that I, like so many other professionals, had decided to decamp to Hoboken or Jersey City because I was afraid of another soft-target strike by a band of scoundrels. She kissed both of my cheeks and gave me a silver medallion with St. Christopher’s face on it. I let her think whatever she wanted. Sort of like I let people at work come up with their own rationale for what I was doing. No one would have known what to make of the truth, even if I had been ready to tell it.

On a bright Sunday morning in January, I left the city with all the belongings I could fit in a rented Ford Taurus with the St. Christopher medallion dangling from the rear view. The day was unseasonably warm, and as I drove along the Hudson River I noticed the joggers on the promenade; and at the Tunnel, a man with a lightweight rain coat tapped on my window offering sky blue roses for sale, $2 each. The city was fighting back, was stirring with life despite the winter dangling its cold broadsword overhead. I was tempted, for a moment, to backtrack on my plans, to stay. But in the end I rolled forward and down into the mouth of the Tunnel.

Like so many others before me, I was disenchanted with the false, glittering surfaces of the East Coast; but unlike most people I wasn’t leaving because I wanted to escape the mirage. That morning, I drove down underground and beneath the river and then out into New Jersey because if I stayed in my old life, if I kept my old habits, if I continued as if nothing else had gone terribly wrong, then someday when I came home late from work someone quiet and merciless would be seated on the sofa in the dark and waiting for me. And, unlike the New Yorkers who were afraid of faceless nameless scoundrels, I was well acquainted with the person who was coming for me; I knew his name, knew his methods, and knew what he was capable of if given the chance. And so I left.

Aimless and alone, I put five thousand miles on the odometer of that rented Taurus. I signed countless pseudonyms into the guest books of decrepit motels along winding and lightless highways. Day after day for months I performed only the simplest rites of life: eating, changing shirts, washing my face, staring at television. I spent most of the daylight hours driving the long miles from one place to the next.  A man constantly on the run is a man who slowly erases his own identity; in time all that’s left are stale habits and memories of a better life.  I was relieved when I heard that John’s trial had ended because it meant I could stay in one place long enough to feel like myself again – at least for a little while.

I heard the news while I was waiting at an old-fashioned barber shop in the downtown section of Huff, Ohio.  The man in the seat next to me opened his copy of USA Today and I saw the headline of a short article on page three.  JAIL TERM FOR 9/11 SCAM ARTIST. A few days earlier, John Logan Marion, 22, of New York, New York, had been convicted on all counts; these counts included conspiracy, fraud, and grand larceny.

I had expected the news, but I still stared at the paper with disbelief.  Manhattan’s ambitious new district attorney was making a reputation for himself by bringing deviants like John down hard.  He was the kind of prosecutor who liked to make grand pronunciations in court, complete with sharp chops of his soft, manicured hands.  I’d read his opening statement in another newspaper in another town a few weeks earlier: he’d told the jury that the defendant, John Logan Marion, was an amoral thug with a history of violence against the weak and the innocent and the elderly.

“This man,” he said, “embodies what’s wrong with society today.”

During the trial, John took the stand to speak in his own defense; he was characteristically bold till the very end, and I have no doubt he showed flashes of his old charm, despite his orange prison jumper and his new buzz cut.  He knew how to talk a fine line, and I suspect a few of the jury members were nodding along, ready to follow his lies wherever they led.  But then during cross examination the prosecutor asked John why his own mother was not willing to testify on his behalf.  The judge interrupted here rather angrily – “Rank speculation isn’t admissible as evidence, Counselor!” – and the prosecutor dutifully abandoned the question, but the knife had already made its killing cut.  One could not help but watch John’s mother after that: she sat behind the defense table each day but she did not once look at her son directly.  A mother’s shame is not objective proof of guilt; but it is a sign of something just as bad.

According to the USA Today article, the jury convicted John after just ten minutes of closeted deliberation.  Some of the reporters missed the foreman’s reading of the verdict because they’d gone out for lunch.  John was on the hook for up to fifteen years of hard time, but the judge, perhaps out of a sense of pity, knocked the sentence down to thirty-six months, the absolute minimum required by law. His Honor was quoted as saying that he believed John Marion had showed real remorse for his actions in the end; the judge also said it would do no good to clog up the prisons with people who were willing to take a stab at rehabilitation.  (No kidding, he really said stab.) If I had been present in the judge’s chambers when he made his decision, you can bet that I would have pointed out that John Marion’s remorse looks real, yes, but he’s not upset about what he did – he’s upset that he failed.

“But what do I know,” I muttered to myself. “He hustled me, too.”

My turn had come up in the chair.  The barber swept clipped hair off his padded seat.  I left the newspaper on the waiting room table.  The barber noticed the hesitation in my step; I was clearly a man who’d been both relieved and saddened by what he had read.  He pointed with his scissors toward the black and white photo of the handsome prosecutor on the steps of the courthouse. 

“You read about that kid on trial?” 

I didn’t respond, couldn’t really speak.  I was thinking about John, seated in a white Department of Corrections van, his hands and legs in shackles, and winding through the last weary mile of the causeway toward Rikers Island, where he was to be held before transfer to a prison upstate; I imagine him staring out the window as they pass beside the La Guardia tarmac with its long rows of runway lights and planes lifting off in a rattle of engines – how awful it must be to see and hear all of the commotion of an airport and yet to know that for you any kind of escape is impossible.

The barber began to snip at the hair behind my ears. “Sick,” he said. “Just sick. It’s living in a place like New York City that does it to people. Drives them to things like that. You wouldn’t see that out here. Out here people don’t try to escape who they are. They know there’s no running. God sees everything out here. No buildings to hide under. Nothing but skies.  You can see a lie from a mile off. This is the only place to live. At least if you want to live free.  Ain’t that the truth, man?” 

I smiled and said yes, although I didn’t agree with him. You couldn’t blame the city for what had happened.  The city was the setting, not the cause.  And that was when I realized that someday I would have to tell John’s story, if not for his sake then for my own.  Because I had seen John’s rise and fall, and I knew the extenuating circumstances of his life; don’t misunderstand me, he was guilty, he deserved what he got, but that’s just a part of the whole picture.  And then there’s my role in all this, too. If we’re passing out blame, then I need to take my share, too; there will be plenty enough to go around.

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Continue with Chapter 2

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