It's a Mad, Mad, World! Part 2

His sisters say the decline began with their father and his abusive ways. All of them tell similar tales of a father more often cruel than loving. The man they feared and the man I adored bore the same name and body, but no other likeness. My beloved grandfather and their abusive father were worlds apart. So perhaps I just resist believing the blame began with him. Particularly since he has his own story. I, for one, believe, the decline began at birth in his mother’s womb. Nothing I’ve learned these 52 years has convinced me otherwise. I’ve tried to fill in the gaps of the story I know. But my father had secrets. My father was also an open book. Contrasts, a study in contrasts was he. It is strange to me, intriguing even to learn from his sisters of his childhood. Although abruptly ended when he left, I had no idea my well-read father, whose vocabulary rivaled those of college professors, had ever been the cotton-picking, badly dressed, barefooted boy of his youth. I could hardly marry the image of a boy terrified of his father with the fearless, dangerous man I knew. My father could cuss like a sailor yet had exquisite taste. Well-spoken and well-read no one used profanity so creatively as he. He was a man with an explosive temper which often erupted in violence. A man who beat his wife but couldn’t bear to see a hungry child or an abused elder. He was vengeful. I once witnessed him make a Molotov cocktail and blow up the car of a neighbor who insisted on taken a parking space he’d marked for himself (after being warned he would do so). He was kind. I’ve witnessed him take off his coat to a homeless or instruct my mother to take grocery to an impoverished family. He never forgot a slight. Nor a kindness. He repaid both with lavish swiftness.

Tyler McCormick was a good-looking brother, who during the day was fastidious with his appearance. He often got manicures. Then went to work in New York’s Hunts Point market ruining his beautiful hands, working, lifting, loading trucks. He and my mother worked hard. And our home never lacked anything…except peace. There was never true peace in our home. How could there be with the ticking bomb of his madness always at play? I remember a father who had an infectious laugh. His voice was so deep his words were sometimes an indistinguishable rumble. He sometimes spoke in cryptic parables, with little regard for the hearer’s age or mental prowess. The problem with that was if you missed his meaning it could be detrimental to your health. For whatever he said to you he held you responsible for knowing later. Often as a child I carefully marked his words, then sought understanding in books and dictionaries, not wanting to chance the risky business of asking him to repeat himself. He didn’t like repeating himself. Once while explaining to me why I was never to bring a white man home as a mate he looked me in my eye and merely said “What self-respecting Jew would bring a German home to his mother?” I trudged my 9 year old self off to the library to learn of the connections between Jews and Germans as much seemed to hinge on me grasping it. With his propensity for corporate punishment, you’d think free thinking was frowned upon, but it was quite the contrary. He despised group think and insisted we reason for ourselves even though we all knew disagreeing with him was problematic. Because you were damned if you did and damned if you didn’t living in this world of contradictions forced me to think for myself, stand up for my views, and not give a damn who disagreed. It sometimes even made me reckless as he’d often shared the quote ‘A coward dies many deaths, a brave man only once. I now suspect that may have been his objective. I’ll never know for sure, but here I am today firm in my own belief. Most likely it was this which fostered I and my brother's love of reading and language.