Vigilante Dad
This was in the late eighties, right around the time the first Batman came out. I was six years old. Perfect time to see Batman in a little movie theater on Queens Boulevard with my dad.
The movie affected me deeply but looking back, it was my dad who really started doing things that were Batman-like.
First though, we made our own Batman movie. I played Batman, of course, and my friends from Sunnyside played Joker, Riddler, and Superman. My parents told me I was the director, but, of course, I was six. I mean I did dictate the script to my dad. But he filmed it and put it together. He was a professional filmmaker and he really went above and beyond with this Batman movie. For instance, he used the movie trick of spinning his camera in circles while holding my Batmobile Hot Wheel with a black sock in a room full of soft lights to make it look like Batman driving at night–and that was just for the credit sequence! Yes, there were credits. My dad taped episodes of the Adam West show and cut in the “KABLAM!” titles for the fight scenes, though he mostly relied on Danny Elfman’s music for Tim Burton’s movie. It was very, very well done. My mom directed the actors–she was an actress-turned-theater-director and had, albeit briefly, directed some soaps–and though I was technically the director, she’d often kick me out of the room if I was being a nuisance.
My parents had split up for years. When I was one, my dad moved to Astoria with a new girlfriend–“I loved your father but I was never in love with him,” my mom told me later and she also told me this girlfriend was in love with him–but then he came back (though not for long) when I was three, then left again and moved into a different apartment in Astoria for another two years; I remember that one, an expansive (to me) basement apartment, a bat cave, that opened to a concrete wall; whether that girlfriend was still in the picture, I don’t know; my mom said what pissed her off the most about his leaving was how happy he seemed, returning to his artist life, unencumbered by a family. But then, for whatever reason, he came back. So this Batman movie was a reunion of sorts.
But that was just the art stuff. Then my dad started acting like Batman. I don’t know if this was conscious or not, but looking back, it does seem like one thing led to the other.
On our little block, 46th Street–or Bliss Street–my downstairs neighbor and I were selling lemonade on a little table and two teenage boys came up and hurled it into the air. Joker stuff. They didn’t steal our earnings (if there were any) but I remember watching my dad chase them down the street, full throttle.
From there, the story goes–if you believe my dad, and I choose to–that he chased the teenagers two more blocks and, when they reached Queens Boulevard, he followed them up the stairs to the 7 train and when the teenagers saw my dad was still coming for them, they hopped off the platform and onto the tracks and my dad did the same, kept chasing them halfway to the 40th St. stop where he finally caught them. He brought them all the way back to our overturned lemonade stand on Bliss Street, holding the teenagers by the backs of their shirts, and made them apologize to my friend and me.
Like Bruce Wayne, my dad was loaded. My lemonade-selling neighbor was a tenant. “We gentrified Sunnyside when we bought that house,” my mom said.
My mom had been almost-mugged one night walking home from a performance; she was saved by her loud actress scream. I remember hearing it. I was awake in bed, waiting for her to come home. The whole block must’ve heard her.
Still though, she insisted we get a garage; parking in Sunnyside was that much of a nightmare that she’d risk another mugging.
The garage was on 39th Ave. and 43rd St. Part of a square of garages, maybe forty in all.
Once, during the day, the three of us had just parked. As we were coming out, a trio of teenagers, standing atop the line of garages, pelted us with rocks. The glee of their sneak attack; I remember their laughing. And even as a six year old, I didn’t think what my dad did next was warranted. He chased them, same thing as last time. After locking up, my mom and I followed behind. When we caught up with my dad, he was in Skillman Park holding a blubbering teenage boy by his shirt sleeve. The teenager couldn’t stop crying, though he seemed relieved when my dad gave him something to do: to apologize to me and my mom.
This is weird, no? That my dad, who left his family for four years, comes back and starts doing all this hero shit, getting teenage pranksters to say to his family what he couldn’t say himself: “I’m sorry.”
Horror Sleaze Trash 