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Suddenly, before even a tweak of remorse set in, the owner, Mr. Biolos, appeared in the
doorway of the building. Furious. And craving justice: when they arrived from the city that
night, he-would-tell-our fathers!
Meantime, he told our mothers. My mother felt that what I had done was so monstrous
she would leave my punishment to my father. “And,” she said, “Daddy’s going to be very angry
about this.”
Artie’s father arrived first. When Mr. Biolos told him the news and showed him the
blighted casino, he carefully took off his belt and – with practiced style – viciously whipped his
screaming son. With the approbation, by the way, of an ugly crowd of once-gently people.
Eli’s father showed up next. He was told and shown and went raving mad, knocking his
son off his feet with a slam to the head. As Eli lay crying on the grass, he kicked him on the legs,
buttocks and back. When Eli tried to get up he kicked him again.
The crowd muttered: Listen they should have thought of this before they did the damage.
They’ll live, don’t worry, and I bet they never do that again.
I wondered: What will my father do? He’d never laid a hand on me in my life. I knew
about other kids, had seen bruises on certain schoolmates and even heard screams in the
evenings from certain houses on my street, but they were those kids, their families, and the why
and how of their bruises were, to me, dark abstractions. Until now.
I looked over at my mother. She was upset. Earlier she’d made it clear to me that I had
done some special kind of crime. Did it mean that beatings were now, suddenly, the new order of
the day?
My own father suddenly pulled up in our Chevy, just in time to see Eli’s father dragging
Eli up the porch steps and into the building.
Mr. Biolos, on a roll, started talking. My father listened...and followed Mr. Biolos into the
casino...
[After emerging from the casino,] amazingly, he got into his car and drove away!
Nobody, not even my mother, could imagine where he was going.
An hour later he came back. Tied onto the top of his car was a stack of huge Sheetrock
boards. He got out holding a paper sack with a hammer sticking out of it. Without a word he
untied the Sheetrock and one by one carried the boards into the casino.
And didn’t come out again that night.
The next morning, my father didn’t say a single word about the night before. Nor did he
show any trace of anger or reproach of any kind. We had a regular day, he, my mother and I,
and, in fact, our usual sweet family weekend.
Was he mad at me? You bet he was. But in a time when many of his generation saw
corporal punishment of their children as a God-given right, he knew “spanking” as beating, and
beating as criminal. And that when kids were beaten, they always remembered the pain but
often forgot the reason.
And I also realized years later that, to him, humiliating me was just as unthinkable.
Unlike the fathers of my buddies, he couldn’t play into a conspiracy of revenge and spectacle.
But my father had made his point. I never forgot that my vandalism on that August
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