“This time, maybe,” he said.
“I have to make a decision about something. I have this case, the one I’ve been on television with.”
“You been on television?”
“Don’t act like that, you’ve seen me. I know you have.”
“I thought it was you but I wasn’t sure. You look better on TV.”
“So I should have been a television star, then?”
“You’d be better than that Bryant Gumbel, I’ll tell you that,” he said. “There’s a bum if ever I saw one.”
“In this case I have a client who’s in serious trouble. It’s a criminal case and it looks like he is going to lose, but he doesn’t want me to do anything about it. Now I think I know who did what he is supposed to have done, and I think I know how to prove it, but it would cost me.”
“Cost you? How much?”
“I’ve been offered a job, a really good job, a job like I’ve always wanted, but the job will come through only if I don’t rock the boat. And I’ve been offered a lot of money for another case, enough money that I could pay you back with interest, but again only if I let my client go down. There are deals that I’m on that I won’t be on if I do it. And the group who is paying me to represent this guy probably won’t pay me if I cause trouble, or that’s just the way it seems. So the whole thing could mean a lot to me, the money and the job. But on the other side of the ledger, I’m like a lawyer and my client is going down and I feel that I have to do something about it, anything, even if it costs me. So I’m not sure what to do.”
There was a long silence between us, ably filled by the television set, an interview with an old entertainer, Morley Safer shaking his head over and over in amazement. Then, without turning from the television, my father spoke.
“Take the money,” he said.
He coughed loudly, hacking something big and weighty into the paper towel.
“Take the money,” he said. “It don’t come around that often.”
There was another long pause as a string of commercials played out and then the annoying skirl of Andy Rooney. My father switched the channel, surfing to find something, ending back in failure with Andy Rooney. Rooney had a pile of products before him and he was reading the labels.
“That’s what you could do on television,” he said. “You could whine as good as him.”
“You ever have a chance for real money?” I asked.
There was a long pause before he said, “Marty Sokowsky.”
“I don’t know him.”
“Sokowsky Chevrolet and Subaru out on 611. I grew up with Sokowsky in Logan. Right out of high school he had a proposition for me. Meat. He was going into the meat business, you know, not growing meat or chopping meat but selling meat. He wanted to be a salesman.”
“What kind of meat?”
“Pigs, cows, chicken, meat. The whole thing was a little shady, you know, selling second quality as first, bait and switch, it wasn’t nothing about meat, really, it was about sucking out the money. I wasn’t sure about it and the idea of telling your grandfather that I was selling pork was too much. I had decided on the army anyway, so I said no. Well, Sokowsky just misses getting indicted but he makes a ton, goes on to buy a car dealership where he is minting money, just minting money, and I come back from the army and start cutting lawns for that schmuck Aaronson. I missed out. It could have been Sokowsky-Carl Chevrolet and Subaru, that could have been me. Everything would have been different had I had a car dealership. I been waiting here for another chance ever since, but nothing never came. So what I learned is that with screwups like us it only comes around once and when it comes take it. No matter who you have to fuck.”
When the slangy little music for Murder She Wrote came on I told my father I had to leave. He followed me to the door.
“Take the money,” he said.
“Yes, I heard you.”
“You ever hear from her?” he asked quietly.
“Now and then. She’s taken up golf.”
“I’m not surprised,” he said bitterly. “I think her whole life she aspired to golf. She wanted me to join Philmont Country Club, the ritzy Jewish place down Huntingdon Pike. You know what that fucking place costs? Sokowsky belongs there.”
“She tells me to say hello.”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
“I know.”
“The bums are in Dallas next week. They’re going to get killed in Dallas.”
“Are you inviting me?”
“No, I was just saying.”
“’Cause if you’re inviting me.”
“I’m not inviting you. Shut up. I’ll be busy anyway.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I got a tee-off time at Merion. Tell the bitch I’m taking it up too.”
It was a sad drive out of Hollywood and the suburbs and back into the city. My father was dying but that wasn’t what was sad. I drove right up Broad Street, through the worst parts of North Philadelphia, bombed-out moviehouses, boarded-up stores, congregants of the homeless under elevated train bridges. I drove through Temple University and past the Philadelphia Inquirer building and then right around City Hall, past that building that had been decimated by fire but was still standing, a high-rise shell with plywood for windows, and I felt sad the whole way. It wasn’t my father’s certain future that was upsetting me so, it was the uncertainty of his past. But it had been a good visit; it had clarified things. My father had always been a barometer for me, the rebellions of my youth only mattered in relation to him. He was quiet, so I talked too damn much. He was uncomplaining, so I complained. He wore his hair in a crew cut, mine flowed past my shoulders all through high school. He was a laborer, I became a lawyer. He was poor, I would be rich. But I wouldn’t be rich his way. “Take the money,” he had said, and in those three swift words he had pointed out my direction as clear as a road sign. “Take the money,” he had said, and I would, but not his way. I wanted nothing of my life to be his way.
Jimmy Moore had killed Zack Bissonette. I knew that with as much certainty as my father knew the Eagles were bums. Jimmy had gone to that club looking for Zack Bissonette and when he found him he grabbed a baseball bat from a display on the wall and with it he beat Bissonette senseless, faceless, comatose, beat him to death. Even as I cleaned up the dachshund mess, scrubbed the bloodstains from Tony Baloney’s wooden desktop and leather blotter with Murphy’s Oil, even then I could see it all, the flashing bat, the fury in Jimmy Moore’s face, the blood bubbling as Bissonette breathed through it. And with a little luck I could prove it all happened just like that, too. I knew what it would cost me. Blaine, Cox, Amber and Cox would not be calling. The Bishop brothers would not be calling. My sweet forty-thousand-dollar cut of the Saltz settlement would not be resting gently in my bank account. From affluence to poverty in the blink of an eye.
But all my life I had resented the fact that what I had wished for had not been bestowed upon me. My father had not been rich, the law firms had not been hiring, that slam-bam-in-your-face case had never come walking in my door. I had been waiting too long for someone to give me my share. Enough already of waiting. Jimmy Moore had said America was not about what was bestowed but about what was grabbed, and now I was grabbing. Make no mistake, I still wanted it all, the money, the prestige, the best tables, the best cars, the youngest and prettiest women. But I wouldn’t end up like my father, embittered because the myth of opportunity had not come knocking on my door. By going up against Jimmy Moore I would surely be losing that which was being bestowed upon me by William Prescott, but I didn’t want to be given anything by anybody anymore. What would Clarence Darrow, the greatest trial lawyer of all time, what would Darrow have done in my situation? What would Lincoln have done, or Daniel Webster, or Andrew Hamilton, the first of the great Philadelphia lawyers? They each would have spit in Prescott’s eye and then gone out and taken what was rightfully theirs. They didn’t rely on gifts bestowed, and no longer would I.