The Last American Martyr (4 page)

At first I tried to imagine how life would be without my soul-mate. All I could muster was fragmental thoughts, and I did not like them. With all the excitement the past few days, and the jetting back and forth, I couldn’t seem to hold onto any one thought long enough to complete it. I knew Elaina had a point about making us more financially stable, yet I knew I’d feel guilty if I didn’t allot most of the prize money and future royalties to needier causes. Such a gesture may seem irrational to most folks, I realize that. But the roots of my beliefs had been imbedded in my brain and soul a long time ago. As we continued to soar five miles above the Atlantic, I thought of just a few of the reasons why I’m so adamant about those beliefs.

While growing up, I walked the hardship walk. My family had very little. We knew all too well what it’s like to do without. My father, Frank Soles, worked as an elevator operator in Manhattan. My mom, Estelle, stayed home, raised me and my brother Stanley, and read an awful lot of Silver Screen and Photoplay magazines. I think she often wished, and sometimes imagined, she was Elizabeth Taylor.

Neither of my parents relished sticking around any one place too long. They moved us all over Queens like four carnival roustabouts. By the time I hit fourteen (and began insisting I be called Tom not Tommy), I’d lived in eight different apartments—each one dingier than the last. By the time I’d entered the eighth grade, I’d already taken up space in seven different public schools. Of course, my brother and I had trouble in every one of them.

Being the new kid in school every year was bad enough, but we had other problems. First of all, Stanley and I always wore hand-me-downs, courtesy of our cousins. Try going to a new school or even a familiar one with outdated, oversized clothes and shoes so big you need to stuff yesterday’s newspaper into the toes to keep them on your feet. The fact that Stanley was the studious type didn’t help us win any popularity contests either. Two years my senior, Stanislaus, as I affectionately called him, was your basic, run-of-the-mill bookworm. Kids made fun of the braces on his teeth (I have no clue how they were paid for), often saying there was more steel in his mouth than there was in the Brooklyn Bridge. He wore Coke-bottle glasses complete with a Band-Aid on the nose rest, and he had a frail body. Those ever-present books glued to his nose didn’t help matters either.

A late bloomer who didn’t shoot up until sophomore year in high school, I was not only skinny, but short for my age as well. But that never stood in my way. Born with an extremely low tolerance for injustice and unfairness, I would go up against any kid, no matter what their size, if I caught them being mean to my big brother.

One time in third grade, I walked into the asphalt schoolyard across from our apartment building with my usual hopes of getting a game of stickball going. Armed with a pink rubber ball and broomstick bat, I saw some sixth graders gathered over a grating, outside the gymnasium wall. These were the tough kids, the ones who always wore black jeans and white shirts. They were flicking ashes from their Marlboros and looking down into the metal grating beneath their feet.

I went over to investigate, and when I looked into the steel grid below, there was Sylvester, cringing, covering his face, trying not to cry. The big kids were all spitting and dropping ashes on him. This future Nobel Laureate went absolutely nutso. I charged the heartless bullies, swinging the broomstick like a madman. I clipped a few pretty good before they knew what was happening, and when they scattered, the last one left was the biggest. A full head taller than me, smirking at me as if I were some kind of joke, I cracked the kid a good one over the head. The broomstick broke, the bully lost his smile, and I chased the bawling kid out of the schoolyard with what was left of the bat. For the rest of that year, nobody in school gave Stanley a bad time. Unfortunately, my parents moved us to another neighborhood the following summer and the same old troubles cropped up all over again.

By junior year in high school, I had devolved into someone else. Our family had lived in the same apartment for a record two-and-a-half years. Six feet even by now, still very thin, I was a first-string guard on Flushing High’s basketball team. For the first time ever, I had plenty of friends. But things at home certainly hadn’t changed much. My mother still shopped on Fridays, still for the same old TV dinners and cold cuts. And as always, by the time Tuesday rolled around, if Stanley or I wanted a snack, all that would be left was a half empty mayonnaise jar and a loaf of white bread. Stanley handled it, but I did not. Sick to the gills of always being broke, I did some things I’ll regret for the rest of my life.

I’d lucked into a part time job at Saint Theresa’s church rectory, working Monday and Thursday nights, but a dollar-fifteen an hour only netted me around eight dollars a week. That was enough to take a girl to the Keith’s RKO movie theater, and maybe spring for pizza and Cokes afterwards, but that was about it. My friends fared much better. They always had plenty of “jingle,” even though their families weren’t much better off than mine. Instead of getting jobs they were always hustling and heisting.

Before I knew what hit me, I found myself compromising my staunch values. I started stealing—five dollars at a pop. When parishioners at Saint Theresa’s came to the rectory to buy Mass cards, I’d pocket the stipend. Since I only worked eight hours a week, there were times when I didn’t get the opportunity to steal anything. That’s when I found myself joining my friends on their money making escapades. As cool as they thought the easy money was, I always kept my feelings inside.

What I hated most was stealing donation canisters from store counters—taking considerable amounts of change and bills intended for kids with muscular dystrophy, polio or some other horrible disease. I didn’t enjoy robbing crates of empty bottles from the back doors of bars and restaurants either, but the deposit money added up. I knew the guys and I had stepped well beyond the realm of serious mischief when we progressed to stealing girls’ purses and wallets. This we would do at local dances or, in the summertime, at Rockaway Beach.

I detested myself for all of it, but tainted or not, I liked the unfamiliar feeling of money in my pockets. When I was very young and the ice cream truck came down the avenue there’d been far too many times when I was the only kid who did without. Then there were all those mayonnaise sandwiches, and a hundred other reasons for taking what didn’t belong to me. But the madness suddenly stopped about two years after it started.

It was late at night and virtually no one was on the streets. I was walking home with a friend of mine, Billy Shea, after sneaking into a college beer-racket. We’d gotten thrown out for fighting, but our bellies were still filled with beer. A tight chain of closely parked cars buffered one side of the sidewalk and wall-to-wall, towering apartment buildings lined the other. Billy, having the malicious streak he did, was wrenching every car antenna he passed, breaking them at their bases. I told him how “fucked up” that was, but he wouldn’t stop. That is until he spotted a very frail, very old lady one streetlight ahead of us.

“C’mon,’ he said, picking up his pace, ‘let’s catch up to her.”

“Whoooa,” I said, “What the hell have you got up your sleeve, Shea?”

It wasn’t until we were two steps behind the tiny, defenseless woman that Billy whispered, “I’m gonna snatch her purse, man.”

I told him he’d better not dare try something like that, but Shea said it was easy money and he was doing it whether I liked it or not. With that, he grabbed the purse and started to run. But there were two problems. One, the woman must have sensed what was about to take place because, tiny as she was, she would not let go of that purse. Number two, the strap was a metal chain that was very tough to break. Billy dragged the screaming woman in the darkness. She slid face first on the cement sidewalk for probably fifteen feet before the chain broke.

Having no other choice I beat heels with him around the next corner and ducked into the basement of an apartment building. Minutes later three police sirens shrilled past the basement’s small windows. I watched their red lights strobe across Billy Shea’s maniacal face as he happily fished his booty from the purse. I was eighteen, and that was the last time I’d ever be involved in a theft.

Thanks to a strong tailwind, Flight 1402 touched down at Kennedy eight minutes ahead of schedule. When we disembarked shortly after, Elaina and I still weren’t saying much. But that quickly changed when we reached the end of the exit ramp and stepped inside the terminal.

“Oh my god, Tom,” Elaina said as she surprisingly grabbed my hand. “Look at all those reporters over there.”

Beyond all the rows of blue plastic chairs in the waiting area were dozens of press people; CNN, ABC, CBC, MSNBC, and all the rest.  

“Oh shit, I didn’t want to go through this now,” I said.

“Just be careful what you say,” Elaina came back, “half the world will be seeing what takes place here. Don’t lose your temper.”

“Yeah, yeah, ye—”

“That’s him! There they are!” one of the press corps shouted. Then, as if on cue, all the cameras started rolling and clicking simultaneously. So did the questions.

“Mister Soles,” the heavyset guy who first spotted us shouted above everybody else, “with your humble background, how does it feel to be a million dollars richer?”

“Not a whole lot different than it did the first time. By the way, do you do background checks on the side?”

Elaina tightened her small grip on my hand.

The entire assemblage chuckled from the remark, but the reporter fired right back, “What do you plan on doing with the money this time?”

“Don’t tell me you’re into financial planning too.” There was another round of hearty laughs before I added, “It will be put to good use, I assure you.”

A tall, handsome, blonde woman with spectacles, a necktie and a no BS demeanor asked, “I don’t know if you’ve heard yet, Mister Soles, but a major book retailer here in the U.S. announced just hours ago that they are going to take your book off their shelves. Does that bother you?”

“No I haven’t heard, being so busy and all. But yes, of course that bothers me. It also doesn’t surprise me.”

“Why doesn’t that surprise you?” someone from the back of the still clicking, filming mob shouted.

“Have you yet read
Enough is Enough
, my friend? If you have, you know darned well there are some people in high places who are going to resent the truth.”

“Mrs. Soles,” a very familiar female face in the media world began, “do you support your husband’s mission one hundred percent? And by the way, you are a very pretty lady. You
must
like nice things—jewelry, clothes, cars. How do you feel about him giving so much to charitable organizations?”

Elaina’s grip on my hand loosened a bit, I felt my face heat up, but she said, “Yes, I’m behind him all the way. Now is not the time, and this isn’t the place, for me to go into the pitfalls and evils of the present distribution of wealth in this country, which as you all know is the basis of his book. But I’ll say this; Tom’s beliefs should be irrefutable to anybody who is fair-minded, anybody who is capable of a rational, untainted thought process. Every worker in this country, and all others,
should
be paid enough to take care of themselves and their families before any corporate profits are taken. He is on the right…”

“Excuse me, Elaina,” I then said while hitching up my blue jeans a bit, “let me interject one thing. Do any of you people here, in this room, think it’s perfectly fine that corporations raise prices and take larger and larger profits every year while their workers have their incomes and paltry benefits frozen or cut? Is it not sacrilegious that the huge majority of mothers in this country are forced to abandon their babies—their own flesh and blood—in daycare, because their husbands are no longer paid a livable wage? Should big shareholders who have more money than should be legal—shareholders who couldn’t possibly spend their fortunes in thirty lifetimes no matter how hard they tried— get much, much more while the people who work for them can’t afford to fix the holes in their teeth?”

When the next newsman shouted, “Well what do you think about…?” I waved him off saying, “That’s all we have folks. Elaina and I are very tired. We need to get home.”

“But Mrs. Soles,” the lady who asked the last question shouted above the now mumbling crowd, “you haven’t answered the second part of my question. How do you feel about your husband giving away most of the money?”

“I can’t answer that right now,” Elaina said as we leaned our way through the media circus.

When we finally escaped and headed for the luggage carousel, one last question followed us across the shiny, bustling airport floor, “Although your book may not be fiction, some people are calling it a modern day
Grapes of Wrath
. Is that a fair assessment?”

With Elaina still in tow, and neither of us bothering to turn around, I raised a clenched fist high in the air, pumped it a few times, and said, “I’d sure like to think so.”     

During the cab ride home, Elaina and I didn’t say much. The Middle Eastern driver, looking so stately in his clean white turban on the other side of the bullet-proof glass partition said nothing. For most of the trip, Elaina and I stared out our respective windows seeing little, enduring the gnawing tension hunkered in the back seat between us. Jet-lagged, exhausted, and uneasy, we both ruminated over our conversation on the plane. Silently, we watched the frenzied parkway traffic as if we were in trances.

The falling sun on this fine autumn Sunday afternoon splayed magical light on the towering oaks near Little Neck Bay. Their glowing leaves—gold, orange and crimson—lit up as if neon had replaced their lost chlorophyll. A jumbo jet low overhead roared as it descended toward the tarmac at nearby LaGuardia. Fifteen minutes from home now, Elaina finally said something, but I couldn’t hear with the jet so close to the roof of the cab. When I asked her what she’d said, she just looked at me and slowly rotated her head. Seeing the sadness in her eyes tore at me, and it didn’t let up after she looked back out the window. For the rest of the way home, I tried to think of an amiable compromise, and I came up with a few ideas. I would do almost anything to prevent my Elaina from leaving.