Thinking Out Loud: On The Personal, The Political, The Public And The Private (v5.0) (13 page)

Not an imperfect mother.

The Mother’s Day that means something, the Mother’s Day that is not a duty but a real holiday, is about the perfect mother. It is about the mother before she becomes the human being, when she is still the center of our universe, when we are very young.

They are not long, the days of construction paper and gilded rigatoni. That’s why we save those things so relentlessly, why the sisterhood of motherhood, those of us who can instantly make friends with a stranger by discussing colic and orthodonture, have as our coat of arms a sheet of small handprints executed in finger paint.

Each day we move a little closer to the sidelines of their lives, which is where we belong, if we do our job right. Until the day comes when they have to find a florist fast at noon because they had totally forgotten it was anything more than the second Sunday in May. Hassle city.

The little ones do not forget. They cut and paste and sweat over palsied capital letters and things built of Popsicle sticks about which you must never say, “What is this?”

Just for a little while, they believe in the perfect mom—that is, you, whoever and wherever you happen to be. “Everything I am,” they might say, “I owe to my mother.” And they believe they wrote the sentence themselves, even if they have to give you the card a couple of days late. Over the phone you can say, “They don’t make breakfast the way you make it.” And they will believe it. And it will be true.

SUICIDE SOLUTION
September 20, 1990

It was two days before Christmas when Jay Vance blew off the bottom of his face with a shotgun still slippery with his best friend’s blood. He went second. Ray Belknap went first. Ray died and Jay lived, and people said that when you looked at Jay’s face afterward it was hard to tell which of them got the worst of the deal. “He just had no luck,” Ray’s mother would later say of her son to a writer from
Rolling Stone
, which was a considerable understatement.

Jay and Ray are both dead now. They might be only two of an endless number of American teenagers in concert T-shirts who drop out of school and live from album to album and beer to beer, except for two things. The first was that they decided to kill themselves as 1985 drew to a close.

The second is that their parents decided to blame it on rock ‘n’ roll.

When it was first filed in Nevada, the lawsuit brought by the families of Jay Vance and Ray Belknap against the members of
the English band Judas Priest and their record company was said to be heavy metal on trial. I would love to convict heavy metal of almost anything—I would rather be locked in a room with one hundred accordion players than listen to Metallica—but music has little to do with this litigation. It is a sad attempt by grieving grown-ups to say, in a public forum, what their boys had been saying privately for years: “Someone’s to blame for my failures, but it can’t be me.”

The product liability suit, which sought $6.2 million in damages, contended that the boys were “mesmerized” by subliminal suicide messages on a Judas Priest album. The most famous subliminal before this case came to trial was the section of a Beatles song that fans believed hinted at the death of Paul McCartney. The enormous interest that surrounded this seems terribly silly now, when Paul McCartney, far from being dead, has become the oldest living cute boy in the world.

There is nothing silly about the Judas Priest case—only something infinitely sad. Ray Belknap was eighteen. His parents split up before he was born. His mother has been married four times. Her last husband beat Ray with a belt, and, according to police, once threatened her with a gun while Ray watched. Like Jay Vance, Ray had a police record and had quit high school after two years. Like Jay, he liked guns and beer and used marijuana, hallucinogens, and cocaine.

Jay Vance, who died three years after the suicide attempt, his face a reconstructed Halloween mask, had a comparable coming of age. His mother was seventeen when he was born. When he was a child, she beat him often. As he got older, he beat her back. Once, checking himself into a detox center, he was asked, “What is your favorite leisure-time activity?” He answered, “Doing drugs.” Jay is said to have consumed two six-packs of beer a day. There’s a suicide note if I ever heard one.

It is difficult to understand how anyone could blame covert musical mumbling for what happened to these boys. On paper they had little to live for. But the truth is that their lives were not
unlike the lives of many kids who live for their stereos and their beer buzz, who open the door to the corridor of the next forty years and see a future as empty and truncated as a closet. “Get a life,” they say to one another. In the responsibility department, no one is home.

They are legion. Young men kill someone for a handful of coins, then are remorseless, even casual: Hey, man, things happen. And their parents nab the culprit: it was the city, the cops, the system, the crowd, the music. Anyone but him. Anyone but me. There’s a new product on the market I call Parent in a Can. You can wipe a piece of paper on something in your kid’s room and then spray the paper with this chemical. Cocaine traces, and the paper will turn turquoise. Marijuana, reddish brown. So easy to use—and no messy heart-to-heart talks, no constant parental presence. Only $44.95 plus $5 shipping and handling to do in a minute what you should have been doing for years.

In the Judas Priest lawsuit, it’s easy to see how kids get the idea that they are not responsible for their actions. They inherit it. Heavy metal music is filled with violence, but Jay and Ray got plenty of that even with the stereo unplugged. The trial judge ruled that the band was not responsible for the suicides, but the families are pressing ahead with an appeal, looking for absolution for the horrible deaths of their sons. Heavy metal made them do it—not the revolving fathers, the beatings, the alcohol, the drugs, a failure of will or of nurturing. Someone’s to blame. Someone else. Always someone else.

CRADLE TO GRAVE
December 7, 1991

He still had a trace of those delectable cheeks that dominate the face in babyhood, those round apples just below his eyes. In the photograph he is smiling. Despite it all.

Adam Mann was on television this week. For fifty-two minutes his story unraveled in a devastating
Frontline
documentary made by a producer named Carole Langer. She had followed him from cradle to grave; in Adam’s case, the journey took only five years. He was beaten to death in March 1990 for eating a piece of cake. The last frame of the film was the little boy, the cheeks still round, in his casket. The caskets for kids are smaller. They cost less.

Who Killed Adam Mann
? the film was called. His parents were charged with second-degree murder. His father pleaded guilty to manslaughter, his mother to assault. Both of them are in jail.

But Adam Mann had a guardian, too, and that guardian was supposed to be the City of New York and its Child Welfare Administration. Ms. Langer met the Mann children for the first
time in 1983 when she was doing a documentary on caseworkers who investigate child-abuse complaints. The child in that film was Keith Mann; in one fourteen-month period he would suffer fractures of the face, ribs, arms, and skull. From the moment he was born and held in protective custody in the hospital nursery, Adam, Keith’s younger brother, would be part of the city’s vast child welfare system.

Reporters who cover the Child Welfare Administration know the drill. When you call about a case you are given a boilerplate response: Because of state laws of confidentiality, officials cannot provide any information. We go through the motions but we know that it is in vain. And we know that, no matter what the intent of the state law, the effect of it is to protect from scrutiny an agency that has historically served its citizens as poorly as any in the City of New York.

Ms. Langer obtained confidential documents on this case. To read them doesn’t compromise these kids, Adam and his three brothers—it merely indicts the system that spends hundreds of millions of dollars every year, allegedly to care for children like them.

The Fatality Review Board report described caseworkers who failed to visit the home for months, who mistakenly filed the case away, who reported that the children seemed to be happy at around the same time that one was brought to the hospital, badly beaten, with a broken leg. Adam Mann’s autopsy report detailed so many injuries that it looked like an annotated illustration from some medieval medical text. Doctors said that at one time nearly every bone in his body had been broken. His liver was split in two by his final beating.

The C.W.A.’s own confidential report concluded that the agency “completely failed to assess the nature, cause and seriousness of the family’s problems and the danger to these children.” No wonder it was confidential.

Who failed Adam Mann? A system that obviously needs a massive overhaul and independent oversight. A system that explains
its failures to no one, even when its clients die. (In news stories about Adam’s death, a representative of the C.W.A. “declined to say whether the agency was involved with the Mann children.”) Robert Little, who has been its commissioner for a year now, says the Mann case “represents all that we came here to correct.”

Adam Mann’s mother is eligible for parole soon. A representative of the C.W.A. said at a recent hearing, according to those involved in the case, that it was the agency’s intention to reunite her with her children. Commissioner Little says that decision will be made not by one person but by several. He talks about “family-friendly” procedures, and I think about broken bones. If Michelle Mann gets her children back, will there be regular visits from a caseworker? Will there be family therapy?

Will someone mistakenly put the file into the out box or become so overworked that, once again, the Mann children will become regular visitors to the emergency room? Will these kids, who are so damaged that one says he wants to join his brother in Heaven and another has run in front of a car, finally manage to keep a light burning in someone’s mind? Who killed Adam Mann? And did anyone learn anything from his death within the system that so grievously failed him?

WITH BABIES ON BOARD
June 3, 1990

They say that travel broadens a person, and I believe it. This may seem strange, considering that I have gone beyond the continental boundaries of the United States only twice in my life. Once I spent two weeks on the Caribbean island of St. Barts, which was a little like going to heaven. Once I spent two weeks in the Soviet Union, which was a little like going to Mars.

Nevertheless I have traveled a good deal, most of it in a large car with small children. None of the three children currently traveling with me are babies, although as recently as last year one of them was. There are two kinds of baby travelers. One kind equates the rumble of a moving car with the constant quiet stirring of the amniotic fluid. These are called ignition babies, and they are crackerjack travelers. You can turn the key in the ignition, and at precisely the same moment the engine will turn over and the baby will fall asleep, its big head flopping onto its bandy chest so that it looks even more misshapen than usual.