Part of the Family

I was watching a gangster movie on TV. It opened on a residential street lined with matching bungalows painted in a variety of bright pastels, their yards enclosed with picket fences and landscaped with flower bushes blossoming in colors that complimented the houses. A paper boy flung a paper into one of the yards, and then rode out of frame ringing his bell. All the telltale signs of a nice suburban neighborhood. The movie then cut to an interior shot of a man sleeping in his upstairs bedroom beside his wife, the sounds of birds and the occasional passing car drifting in through the open window.

The man woke up groggy eyed and smacking his lips, and then he jolted awake when he noticed the mob boss standing at the foot of his bed. He went to reach for his glasses on the bedside table, but two of the mob boss's goons grabbed him by the ankles. The wife woke up then and started screaming, and the man was shouting and reaching for her as he got dragged past the foot of the bed. The mob boss and his goons got the man on the floor, and they were kicking at him and spitting at him and yelling. And all the quiet of the morning was shattered in the commotion.

More goons appeared at the window, staring into the room and grinning. The goons in the bedroom hoisted the man up and fed him through the window to the goons outside on the balcony, and they took him out over the railing of the balcony and down into the front yard. All the while, the man and his wife were urgently yelling things at each other, final goodbyes, last minute details of their lives that they needed to relay to one another, since they both knew he wouldn't be coming back. The goons just kept kicking at the man, telling them both to shut their mouths as they carried the man away.

The goons got the man out onto the front walk and even as they carried him off down the street, he was still shouting things back up to his wife where she had poked her head out from the upstairs window. The mob boss came strolling out of the house behind his men with a big satisfied grin on his face. He stopped under a tree in the front yard to light the stub of a cigar that he pulled from his pocket. He looked up and down the street and nodded, as though he were contemplating buying a house in the neighborhood.

A few houses down he noticed an old lady standing on her front walk, clutching her white robe closed at her chest and staring off down the street in the direction that the goons had taken her neighbor. She turned to the mob boss as he strolled over to her, and she lifted a shaking finger at him to ask what was going on. But before she could say anything, he pulled a wad of money from the pocket of his shirt. He laid the money in her bewildered hands, telling her, "Get yourself a new pair of slippers. Alright, sweetheart?" The woman just looked at the money and then down at her bare feet, and then she turned and went back into her house, shaking her head.

The mob boss's son was actually there on the couch next to me, watching the movie along with me. I jolted when I looked over and noticed him there. I told him that he was in the movie too, and I pointed out a scene that he was in. He was just a boy then, and there was a shot of him sitting at a table by himself at a garden party outdoors. It was a Sunday afternoon, and the boy was dressed in his suit that he had worn to church. People were slow dancing on the stone patio and mingling among the rose bushes, and the boy just looked around from person to person, blinking his eyes.

Now that he saw himself in the movie, the mob boss's son perked up and took a renewed interest in it. He even moved closer to the edge of his seat. This was like lost footage of his family's life that had been edited out of his childhood. He never knew about any of this. He saw his father brutally torturing and disfiguring a man, and then he saw him literally come walking into the next room with the kindest smile in the world on his face. And in the son's memory there was only his father walking into that room smiling as the boy had looked up with his birthday hat on just as he was about to blow out the candles on his cake. These missing pieces were an unsettling revelation.

I saw that the movie had piqued the son's interest, and I started to enthusiastically tell him how and why I liked the movie so much. I talked about how it engendered this constant, unnerving feeling that something bad was just about to happen. But I was still just thinking of it all as a movie and evaluating its merits on those grounds alone. He was looking at it differently. He just responded to what I was telling him with a few distracted nods. His whole mind, his ego and his identity, were recalibrating around this new information. The rapid shifting of his eyes and a few sharp twitches of his jaws betrayed all the cogs and wheels that were cranking away inside.