angry. And he fought like a berserker, using all his strength and all his will. He had to because he was small, because it took everything he had just to stand up to people who were bigger than he was. So one day, when his two foster brothers started taunting him in the small backyard of their New Jersey home, after months of beatings and verbal abuse, Harley went away and Jake took up a big, sharp stick. When the older of the two boys grabbed for him, Jake took the stick and drove it into his eye.
“I can still hear him screaming,” said Jake. “It makes me sad now. But back then, it was the sound of victory. It was the sound that let me know I didn’t have to be anyone’s victim anymore.”
He was, of course, removed from that foster home and labeled as a problem kid, disturbed. One shrink noted in his juvenile record, which Jake later gained access to, that he had a disassociative disorder because he’d started calling himself Jake.
“But I wasn’t disassociating. I knew who I was. I just had this sense that I had to get real hard real fast or I wasn’t going to survive. Harley was a little kid’s name, to my seven-year-old mind. Jake, which I got from the first syllable of my last name, was a man’s name. I knew that’s what I needed to be.”
The rest of his childhood was a veritable carnival of abuse. In one home, he was made to sleep in a sleeping bag under another child’s bed. “They called it a bunk bed,” he said with a short, hard laugh. In this home, he ate cheese sandwiches for every meal for about three months. “It wasn’t bad, though. Looking back, it was probably the best of all of them. No one bothered me.” Eventually they turned him back over to the state because he kept wetting his bed and was sick often, coming down with cold after cold. The abuse he endured in subsequent foster homes ranged from neglect to physical violence, and he had the scars all over his body to prove it. There was the foster mother who made him kneel on the broken glass of a window he’d broken while playing ball in the yard. And the man who burned him with a cigarette when he discovered Jake had finished off the last of a carton of milk. There were knife fights and fistfights at school, nearly every week.
“My foster home ‘tour of duty’ ended when I was fourteen,” he said, glancing up at me. I held his eyes for a second and he seemed to find what he needed there. I was riven by what he was telling me, shredded. I wanted to climb inside his skin and comfort him on a cellular level, erase all memory of his suffering. But of course you can never do that for someone, and it’s a folly to imagine you can. Besides, he seemed whole, solid. A man who’d walked through the gauntlet, survived, and healed his own wounds. He was strong.
“My foster father, a man named Ben Wright, shot me. He seemed okay at first. I mean, really like a nice guy. He took me to a couple of baseball games at Yankee Stadium. His wife, Janet, was cool, really pretty. I was their only foster kid. It was a pretty good gig for a while.
“I was really big by then. I mean, ripped. I worked out every day. It served a couple of purposes. I think I was channeling my rage without really knowing it at the time. And it made me look hard. People stayed away from me. I think I looked more like sixteen or seventeen. I had a couple of tattoos by then; some pretty nasty scars. People had stopped fucking with me. I think everything about me said,
“Then Janet got pregnant. I thought, Great, I’m so out of here. But she said no, I could stay as long as I wanted.
“The thing was, Ben, I guess, was sterile. Only Janet didn’t know it. She’d fucked around and got herself pregnant, not realizing. Ben went nuts. Got it in his head that it was
“You were fourteen,” I said.
He laughed without any humor. “Yeah, I know.”
“I was sleeping one night and woke up to see Ben standing over me tapping me on the head with a gun. He goes, ‘You fuck my wife, punk?’ I said, ‘No, Ben. No way.’
“And I remember feeling so sad in that moment, more than scared. Because Ben had been nicer to me than anyone had ever been. And it made me feel bad that he’d think I’d do that to him. I said to him, ‘Don’t send me away. I like it here.’ It just felt so unfair. They’d been kind to me. I’d been better behaved because of it. I was doing all right in high school, getting good grades, and still everything was going to shit.
“Anyway, I tried to sit up and he shot me in the shoulder. He meant to kill me but he missed.”
The rest of his adolescence was spent in an orphanage for boys. And it was there of all places that he found a mentor and a friend. A counselor by the name of Arnie Coel.
“He taught me how to face my demons, express my anger in healthy ways. He made me keep a journal and then discuss the things I wrote with him. He taught me about art, encouraged me to get in touch with the creative part of myself. Paid out of his own pocket for me to take classes in metalwork and sculpture when I expressed an interest. He’d grown up in the system as well. And he used to say, ‘Just because people treat you like shit, just because you may feel like shit sometimes, doesn’t mean you
“He was the one who suggested I enlist, so that they’d pay for my education. It was a hard road but I think the right one for me. Without that discipline after I left the orphanage, I think I might have headed down some wrong roads. Isn’t that what they say about soldiers, if they weren’t in the armed forces, they’d be in prison? I moved to the city when my time was up, went to John Jay College. I liked the idea of law enforcement, but I didn’t like the NYPD.”
“That’s why you got your PI license?”
He nodded, looked at the floor.
“The police were here. A detective told me everything,” I said. And he nodded again.
“Why didn’t you tell me about it?” I asked.
He shrugged. “It doesn’t define me. I’m more defined by my art. The more money I made with my sculpture and the furniture, the less PI work I did. I primarily did insurance fraud investigation, checked up on some cheating husbands, did some work for the NYPD following around people on probation for DUI.”
He paused a second, rubbed his eyes. I wasn’t sure how well this answer sat with me. It seemed incomplete, a little vague. But he seemed frayed from the telling of things and I didn’t want to push him for more and better answers. I had a lot of other questions, too, but it didn’t seem like the right time for asking them. There’d be time for that later, I thought.
“I felt like as a private investigator I could right some wrongs and still play by my own rules,” he went on when I didn’t say anything. “So I got my PI license in ninety-seven. But it felt low. You catch somebody cheating on his wife, or some poor slob trying to make ends meet while on worker’s comp, and then you fuck up his life. I don’t know. Maybe I had a fantasy about what it would mean to be a PI. Thought I could use those skills to find out what happened to me, what happened to my parents. But I never got very far with that, either.”
He sighed, looked up at the ceiling. I saw the tension in his shoulders relax a little.
“I stayed close with Arnie until he died a little over a year ago. Colon cancer. He was the one always pushing me to find out about my parents. But when he died…” He let his voice trail off. He was finished talking; I could see that. He leaned back and looked at me, as if trying to decide what kind of impact he’d had on me. He looked a little uncertain, as if he thought I might ask him to leave. I crawled into his arms and we stayed holding each other like that for a long time. I could hear his heart beating in his chest, and the sound made me feel an overwhelming wash of gratitude. In spite of all the things and all the people that had tried to break it, even stop its rhythm, it was strong.
“I’m sorry,” he said after a while. “I’ve never really told anyone all of that. Except for Arnie. It was too heavy to lay on you. Especially with everything you’re dealing with.”
I sat up. “I’m stronger than I look,” I said with a smile.
“You look pretty strong,” he said, smiling back and looking relieved. He reached out to touch my hair, but I took his hand and placed his palm to my mouth. I kissed him there and he closed his eyes.
“Thank you,” I said to him.
He shook his head and frowned. “For what?”
“For sharing yourself with me, for telling me that.”
“I—” he said, and stopped. “I don’t want you to feel sorry for me. That’s not why I told you.”
“Believe me, Jake,” I said, looking at him dead in the eye. “That’s the last thing I feel for you. You’re a strong man who was dealt a shitty hand and came out a winner, anyway. I admire you. I respect you. I do
When you start to really know someone, all his physical characteristics start to disappear. You begin to dwell
