Of all the characters I met during my eighteen years as my father’s sidekick, Crazy Eyes stands out as the most unpredictable. His violent death was not a surprise to anyone who knew him, but the irony of his meeting his demise at the hands of a mistrustful woman with a gun was not lost on many. The pursuit of illegal booze brought this gunrunner into our lives, and a scorned woman ended our affiliation. He had unknowingly poked a sleeping tiger.
In addition to running alcohol, my father also deprived the state of revenue from the mandatory annual state car inspection. For those who owned cars not up to state standards or those who dealt in stolen cars, Al provided ill-gotten state inspection stickers for the nominal fee of one hundred dollars. The stickers we sold were not counterfeit, but were reportedly genuine stickers printed by the state. I never knew my father’s source for the stickers, but I do know that he picked them up somewhere in the Strip District. While I was occupied with selecting produce for the store, he would disappear into the maze of warehouses and reappear a half-hour later with a large manila envelope filled with the coveted stickers.
While my father was occupied with sticking it to the state, my mother devised her own scam to stick it to the man—“the man” being big corporations. The scam? Grocery store coupons. Bonnie organized a team of women laid off from Jeannette’s downsizing glass factories to collect and clip coupons. Every month, loads of garbage bags, filled with coupons, were delivered to the apartment. Having finished our work hours at the store, Vanessa and I were now subject to hour after boring hour of sorting through piles of coupons. The coupons were sorted by brand and item, and each had to be checked for expiration. On more than one occasion, friends stopping by found themselves roped into helping out. Although used to the illegalities of the family business, Vanessa and I balked at having to do this type of work in the confines of the family apartment.
After all were sorted, my mother would pay the coupon collecting team a percentage of the total and tip any of our friends who had helped in the sorting process. The coupons were then sold to several grocery stores throughout Westmoreland County. My mother collected forty-five cents on the dollar and the grocery stores would collect the remaining fifty-five cents from the corporate manufacturers. For every $1000 of face value, she collected $450. Not a bad take considering all she did was organize and deliver. In the meantime, the added chore of coupon sorting cut into the little free time Vanessa and I had to pursue normal teenage activities.
Getting away from the store and our parents’ illegal activities was difficult. Our parents refused most of our requests for downtime with our friends. Although they did not mind us having friends to our apartment, they rarely allowed us to visit other homes. Considering the dangers we were exposed to while in our parents’ presence, we thought their restrictions ridiculous. Of course, my sister and I defied them by sneaking out of the house. Other than our annual weeklong vacation to our Aunt Virginia’s home in Michigan, we rarely escaped the chaos of the family businesses. Luckily, summer also signaled our parents’ annual pilgrimage to Las Vegas, which afforded us a full week of hard work followed by even harder play.
Even though we had little to no supervision for the duration of their absence, we managed to keep trouble at bay. Of course, it was not as if we had a full week to do anything we desired. We still had to keep the store open from nine in the morning to nine at night, and had to take over our father’s numbers business, although the sporting book was transferred to another bookie for the duration of their trip. Even with all our responsibilities, we thoroughly enjoyed our brief week of respite. Several nights, we rebelled and closed the store shortly after the daily number was drawn. With the number book closed for the day, we skipped out of town, treating ourselves to dinner and a movie. Because R-rated movies were anathema to our parents, they were the most desirable to us. On nights at home, we would have some friends over, crack open a couple bottles of Red Lady, and shoot off fireworks in the backyard.
On our last day of freedom, we scrambled to clean up the apartment, get the store in order, and sort our mother’s coupons. Al and Bonnie usually returned worn out from their days in the casinos. We had only to look at our father’s face to determine if he had been successful at the tables. Bonnie would chatter incessantly about her prowess at the slots and proudly show us her blistered hand, proof of the many hours she spent pulling the slot handle.
As with previous years, their homecoming from Las Vegas in the summer of 1978 signaled the return to business as usual. Midnight runs were the norm again and the long days of dealing illegal and legal wares picked up where they left off. In between the fireworks and booze, numbers running, sports book, coupon scam, poker games, and school, Vanessa and I were at first too busy to notice our father’s periodic and unaccounted disappearances. Although his demeanor told us that he was preoccupied with something outside of normal business, we were unprepared for his astounding announcement, which came on a Sunday afternoon. Having been missing in action since early in the morning, our father returned to the store and excitedly announced to everyone in earshot, “I found Jesus!”
Religion, God, and church were a significant part of my preschool years. We regularly attended church and faithfully observed Christian holidays, such as Easter and Christmas. As members of the Antioch branch of Eastern Orthodox Christianity, we celebrated the major Christian holidays according to the Julian calendar, with Christmas falling in January and Easter falling possibly weeks after the Western church’s observances. As a child, I delighted in attending church for the high rituals, icons, and incense. I delighted in the overall sense of awe one encounters in lushly decorated Eastern Orthodox churches.
Bonnie never accompanied us to church, having denounced God as a cruel, misogynistic, and destructive tyrant. She was not an atheist. My mother was an angry theist. God, she believed, had abandoned her when she was an abused and battered child. She saw no reason to visit His house.
My father, on the other hand, having been raised by a devout mother, understood God as a benevolent and loving force. Many Sunday mornings, he set aside his penchant for crime, and escorted his daughters to church. Over the years, our attendance began to decline as my father’s addictions intensified. His dark passengers came to obscure the solace once provided by his caring God. By the time I entered the third grade, our once regular church attendance had dwindled to religious holidays only. Eventually, preoccupation with the family businesses overshadowed the religious importance of Christmas and Easter, and our religious life slowly came to close. So my father’s sudden announcement of “finding Jesus” was a bit of a surprise to the women in his life. For a moment, we were stunned into silence. While my sister and I struggled to find a response to his sudden revelation, my mother stared at him stoically as she puffed on her cigarette.
“Well?” my father inquired. “Did you hear me? I found Jesus.”
Vanessa and I looked to our mother, who again drew heavily on her cigarette and glared at my father. She finally exhaled the blue smoke into the air. “I didn’t know the bastard was lost.”
My mother’s reaction, although it might seem callous at best and blasphemous to many, was born out of years of frustration with God’s perceived abandonment and my father’s chosen criminal path. We were, after all, a family waist deep in crime. Where and how would Jesus fit into our criminal world?
Soon after his excited announcement, my father began to distance himself from all criminal activities—leaving the illegal side of the family business to his wife and daughters. Like a good addict, he embraced his new religious conviction with the same fervor he once reserved for a marathon poker game. According to his new “spiritual advisor,” our family lifestyle was rife with sin and any money made from gambling, fireworks, alcohol, and the numbers business was Satan’s doing. We were sinners who needed saving.
While my father reveled in his newfound religious convictions, my sister and I found ourselves disconcerted with the man responsible for bringing our father back into God’s fold. “Reverend Hellfire” began making regular visits to the store, where he would pray with Al, preach hellfire and brimstone, and pick out merchandise for his needy church. Over the next months, my father delivered truckload after truckload of merchandise and food to Reverend Hellfire’s rural church. It was not lost upon us that, although denouncing our financial gains as sinful, Reverend Hellfire had no problem accepting ill-gotten merchandise. He criticized our family’s actions but willingly profited from that which he denounced. Having been raised with gamblers and con men throughout our lives, we suspected the worst even as we hoped for the best.
Eventually I accompanied Al to Reverend Hellfire’s church for Sunday service and Bible study. I had always loved going to church with my father and looked forward to recapturing the experience. I attended services with an open mind, but left bewildered and disconcerted. The loving God I had encountered in my Eastern Orthodox upbringing was seemingly absent in Reverend Hellfire’s church. Satan was forefront and terrifying. I was baffled but determined to stay by my father’s side. In the following weeks, I returned often, but these visits only added to my sense of confusion. How could two Christian churches be so different?
The events surrounding a subsequent visit would ultimately push my father into a crisis of faith and trigger my lifelong quest to understand what it means to be Christian. After services, while Reverend Hellfire conducted a one-on-one scriptural discussion with my Al, I went off to watch a movie in Bible study class. Little did I know that the movie, or should I say horror film, would end my father’s membership in, though not his affiliation with, Reverend Hellfire’s church.
I do not remember if the movie had a title, but it should have been something like
How To Fuck Up Your Kids for Life
. The film began with a young man and woman exiting a nightclub. Obviously drunk, they quickly jumped onto a motorcycle and drove off down the road. An accident occurs and both are decapitated. The rest of the movie consisted of flashing images of demonic figures, war, and fire. It showed sadistic scenes of torture featuring the young couple who had died, punctuated by maggots eating “human” flesh. All the while, the narrator quoted from the Book of Revelation and entreated his audience to prepare for the coming apocalypse.
As the grotesque plot played out on the screen, many of the children began crying hysterically in fear. Some vomited. When the lights came up, I jumped from my seat and confronted the Bible study instructor. All hell broke loose (pun intended). After being denounced as “Eve’s daughter and Satan’s handmaiden,” I was taken upstairs to Reverend Hellfire’s office, where my father was informed that I had misbehaved and was no longer welcome in class. I told Al what had occurred and watched as Reverend Hellfire tried to justify the film. After months of following the good reverend’s spiritual advice, my father now found himself doubting his methods. He was more than a little perturbed with the treatment of his youngest daughter.
The meeting went from bad to worse. The Sunday school instructor began to list the crimes I had committed over the last few months. I asked too many questions, challenged the meaning of scripture, insisted that dinosaurs once really existed and were not “tricks” planted by Satan, had refused to wear appropriate dress to church (ankle length skirts and long-sleeved shirts), and so on. As my list of crimes was put before us, I watched my father struggle to maintain control of the temper he usually kept in check. Surprisingly, neither the good reverend nor the instructor was aware of his growing anger until it erupted forth, when suddenly he roared, “That’s enough!”
A hush fell over the room as God’s men realized they had pushed my father too far. Rising up from the chair, Al loomed over the two terrified men. “You owe Heather an apology,” he ordered. Looking at the now frozen men, he motioned to the instructor. “Apologize! You called her Eve’s daughter and Satan’s handmaiden. You will apologize. Now!”
Caught off guard and obviously a bit frightened, the instructor stammered around, finally finding his tongue. Half looking at me while trying to keep an eye on the angry giant in the room, the instructor issued a forced apology. “I spoke hastily. I am sorry to have caused offense. Of course, she is welcome to attend future classes.”
Turning, my father looked quizzically at me and awaited my response. I knew I could speak freely, and did. “No thanks, I won’t be coming back. I need peace in my life, not more crazy shit.”
Picking up my book bag, I told my father I would wait for him in the car. As I walked down the hall towards the front door, I could hear Al’s voice raised in anger. I felt some remorse for being the catalyst of this confrontation, and for disrupting his relationship with Reverend Hellfire. Still, I felt vindicated by my father’s defensive stance. As I have so many times before, I climbed into the car, opened my book, and waited for Al to finish his meeting. About a half hour passed before he opened the door and settled into the seat beside me. “Are you okay?”
“Sure, just a bit disappointed,” I sighed. “Dad, I miss going to church like we used to do in the old days, but this crazy place isn’t for me. I’m thinking about going back to our old church. Or maybe we can try a different church? What do you think?”