The dark was a mild worry. What kept me awake and afraid was me. Something about me. I scared myself. Lots. Grow up. My thinking-inside-myself voice told me off. Stop being a baby. I’d abandon the couch, slip into his grown-man’s bed, straddling his chest, gently, gently alighting my fingers along his lash-lines. Softly, softly, and firmly, too, I’d press his lids up and open, until I saw his red-webbed eyes’ whites, and I asked, I begged, “Dad? Are you in there?”
“Of course, Bee,” he’d mumble sleepily. As if the answer was a certainty beyond all doubt, that his still being in there, inside himself, whole within his own intact body, as planned, as promised, would always be the case.
NEW YORK CRIMINAL LAW STATUTES: PENAL LAW, PART 3.
Title O. Offenses against Marriage, the Family, and the Welfare of Children and Incompetents.
Article 260. Offenses Relating to Children, Disabled Persons, and Vulnerable Elderly Persons.
§ 260.10. Endangering the welfare of a child
A person is guilty of endangering the welfare of a child when:
1. He knowingly acts in a manner likely to be injurious to the physical, mental or moral welfare of a child less than seventeen years old or directs or authorizes such child to engage in an occupation involving a substantial risk of danger to his life; or
2. Being a parent, guardian or other person legally charged with the care or custody of a child less than eighteen years old, he fails or refuses to exercise reasonable diligence in the control of such child to prevent him from becoming an “abused child,” a “neglected child,” a “juvenile delinquent,” or a “person in need of supervision,” as those terms are defined in articles ten, three and seven of the family court act.
Endangering the welfare of a child is a class A misdemeanor.
If caught, that’s a year or less in jail. No one with even half a brain in his head gets caught.
Canarsie Pier’s stink of briny rot rendered plausible what otherwise seemed unlikely: that Canarsie had once been a sleepy fishing village. Ninety years before Dad and I stood at our jump-off point for more sophisticated practicing — “a whole new level,” he’d said — most of the neighborhood’s few thousand residents, mainly Italian immigrants, made their living fishing, crabbing, clamming, or oystering Jamaica Bay’s rich waters and beds. By the 1920s pollution and the Great Depression had destroyed Canarsie’s shell-fishing industry. Shellfish, aquatic homebodies, were loath to travel far from home, and they generally remained inside the calcareous houses they built for themselves. Food was delivered to their bodies by built-in siphons that drew water into their shells for filter-feeding: first capturing food, then spitting out water. I’d guiltily consider the attachment of shellfish to their houses whenever Dad and I collected shells at Brighton Beach: Every shell in our dry, deadly hands was once someone else’s house! How selfish to bring back to our home, for frivolous ornamentation, the self-made homes of other beings who’d have preferred to stay put, soft bodies encased under solid cover, however temporary and illusory the protection might be.
If sedentary living made clams and other shellfish susceptible to accumulations of high concentrations of human-made poisons — bacterial coliforms from sewage, polychlorinated biphenyls from industry — the Bay’s fish traveled for food, in mobile homes of skin and scale, to mixed and open Atlantic waters, so fish weren’t as vulnerable to dire accumulations of pollutants. In warm weather, crag-faced, gravel-voiced old-timers would cast long for eel and fluke or snag butterfish or samplings of Jamaica Bay’s increasing population of Canarsie White Fish — floating used condoms — right off the Pier’s decaying edges. Word on the Pier, from above, state and federal environmental officials, and from below, locals, people like us, was: “You can fish, but you can’t clam.”
Canarsie Beach Park was part of Gateway National Recreation Area — not a National Park, as if a park was too much to wish for; we needed to maintain realistically low greenery expectations — but a Recreation Area Still, the place was Federal enough to have behatted, uniformed rangers. And rules. The Department of Health had officially and consistently declared Jamaica Bay unswimmable for fifty years: No primary-contact recreation — activities in which bodies made direct contact with raw water, especially total bodily submersion — allowed. Secondary contact recreation, like fishing or boating, where skin contact with water was minimal and ingestion improbable, was permitted. Clamming, I guessed, was ultra-forbidden because it required getting the whole body into the water to dig.
Practicing here, jumping off Canarsie Pier into Jamaica Bay, to simulate the worst potential payout of our gamble with gravity — falling together off a bridge into deep water, which he risked every day, just not while toting me along — required forbidden primary contact recreation. Immersion in Jamaica Bay “violated Federal rules,” Dad warned, voice somber, conspiratorially soft, “As in, the Feds You get it?”
“I got it.”
“Good.”
Bench-pressing hadn’t been practicing; it was pre-training, basic conditioning, a barely callisthenic, chicken-feed beginner’s warm-up leading us to this. To Canarsie Pier. For the for-real practicing — if those particular words, strung together and placed next to each other, made sense. Which they didn’t.
Dad started when he was fourteen. Until his death at forty-five, every workday of his life, he was scared. Two kinds of work were obtainable in the world: the safe and the dangerous. Experience and practice never made Dad unafraid. Silently, without fanfare, he tolerated extreme fear-states and accepted the probability of grave injury or death as standard workaday inevitabilities, like lunch with the gang or alone up on a scaffold, like fatigue, like fumes. His morning routine: get into whites, shave, shower, shit, like a military man, brush teeth, drink pot of coffee, slap on boots and cap, drive to site, start working, get crushingly, heart-stoppingly, fittingly panicked about dying in the coming hours. Dad did frightening things that other people didn’t want to do; other people didn’t have to do them, because people like Dad did. Blood poisoning did him in after twenty-four years of exposure to industrial chemicals, mostly paints containing an odorless, oily, poisonous benzene derivative, absorbed through skin: aniline blue. Aniline blue sounded like a song title or poem, the name of a daughter or lover. Lyrical, sing-song aniline blue killed him, but before that happened, I’d planned on his dying in a bridge fall.
There were laws against it.
Child protection laws with tucked-in bylaws that defined bringing children to dangerous workplaces as criminal offenses. Take Our Daughters to Work Day wasn’t designed for the daughters of pile driver, jack hammer, or forklift operators. Taking kids to perilous worksites violated child endangerment laws, laws ratified and upheld — lackadaisically, since the continuance of selected human genera wasn’t a big deal, even when specimens were found in bulk — for protection I didn’t want.