How Citigroup Courts Wealthy Young Heirs: Teach Them to Buy Art
How Citigroup Courts Wealthy Young Heirs:
Teach Them to Buy Art
by Margaret Collins
The team went all in on Kate
Moss.
One evening last month at
Citigroup Inc. in downtown Manhattan, a group of 20-somethings spent $95,000 in
a bidding war for a black-and white photo tapestry of the fashion model’s face.
They were confident that the work by the prominent New York artist Chuck Close
was worth the price.
That’s why there was a collective
gasp when Tash Perrin, a senior vice president at Christie’s, revealed that the
work didn’t sell when it was last auctioned in 2013.
The sale and money that the 40
participants used to bid with was fake, but the lesson on valuing and buying
art was real. The attendees, from wealthy families in 18 countries, are poised
to inherit enough money in coming years to purchase some of the items they were
shown at the event -- from Cartier earrings worn by Elizabeth Taylor to a Bjork
album cover photograph. For firms like Citi Private Bank, teaching them how to
invest in art is one tool to help retain the heirs when the family wealth is
passed on to them.
“You don’t have the birthright to
the next generation’s wealth,” said Money Kanagasabapathy at Citi Private Bank,
who directs such events for clients’ children. “We want to continue to have the
relationship with the family.”
Next Generation
In the past, wealth managers
haven’t been so successful at keeping younger clients. On average, firms have
seen almost half of the assets leave when a family’s wealth is being handed to
the next generation, according to the latest figures from a report on global
private banking by consulting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Banks are trying to reverse that
trend because an estimated $36 trillion is expected to transfer to heirs in
U.S. households alone from 2007 to 2061, according to a 2014 study by the
Center on Wealth and Philanthropy at Boston College. The figure swells when
including billionaires worldwide, a majority of whom are over age 60 and have
more than one child.
The U.S. economic recovery also
has accelerated parents’ desire to prime children for what’s coming, said Arne
Boudewyn, a managing director in Wells Fargo & Co.’s Abbot Downing unit.
“Company valuations are higher
than in past years, including family-owned and controlled companies,” said
Boudewyn, whose clients generally have at least $50 million. “Many families who
never seriously contemplated selling are now fielding offers they can’t
refuse.”
Training Camps
Citi Private Bank’s event
included a session on buying art because the asset class is increasingly seen
as an investment, with global art sales hitting a record in 2014 as new
collectors drove up prices for trophy works.
Yet art is an illiquid investment
and difficult to value, as the team betting on Kate Moss found out. The
millennials spent $95,000 of their fake $100,000 allotment on the piece in the
mock auction.
Other banks including Credit
Suisse Group AG, Deutsche Bank AG, UBS Group AG and Coutts, a unit of the Royal
Bank of Scotland Group Plc, run training camps for clients’ children. Held in
countries including Singapore and Switzerland, the programs usually span
several days to more than a week and participants often fly in from around the
world. The seminars -- which cover topics such as sustainable investing,
philanthropy, entrepreneurship or how to protect your family reputation and
brand online -- are free to attend while clients generally cover their own
travel and accomodation.
Reviewing Art
During the Citi Private Bank
event, experts from Christie’s helped participants review a mock catalog of
about a dozen works. They advised each team on criteria to determine value: a
work’s quality, rarity, condition and history of ownership.
Attendees then bid on pieces that
have been, or will be, auctioned including an Andy Warhol polaroid print of
Giorgio Armani and a pair of ear clips by Seaman Schepps formerly owned by the
Duchess of Windsor. Perrin then showed the teams what the works really sold for
so they could see if they spent their money wisely.
Wells Fargo’s Abbot Downing and
U.S. Trust, a unit of Bank of America Corp., have a financial education
curriculum with individual coaching instead of boot camps. Some parents or
grandparents require heirs to take it before telling them how wealthy they are
and what they will inherit, said Chris Heilmann, U.S. Trust’s chief fiduciary
executive. In June, the bank added a program for teenagers as young as age 13.
The young adults who attended
Citigroup’s event have jobs and even some master’s degrees, but their parents
want them to hone skills that are unique to their wealth -- such as bidding on
a Picasso or taking over a family business, said Kanagasabapathy.
“There is no tolerance today for
an incapable CEO,” he said.
Wealth managers like Citigroup
said they hope the trainings will strengthen both family profits and bank
loyalty.
“It’s easier to retain a client
than to get a new one,” he said.
The Art of War (Clever huh?): North Korea: A Passion for Propaganda Posters
The Art of War (Clever huh?): North Korea: A Passion for Propaganda Posters: Willem van der Bijl built an impressive collection of North Korean propaganda posters, until the regime had had enough. By Tessa H...
Hidden Monet Discovered Behind Another Drawing
Shaunacy Ferro
A previously unknown drawing by Claude Monet has
been uncovered, found tucked behind another pastel. The hidden artwork was
located behind the mount of an already-rare piece, and was only discovered
after London art dealer Jonathan Green brought the bargain pastel combo (along
with a third from the same period) home from a 2014 auction in Paris.
Though Monet was avid about drawing and
sketching, the Impressionist artist was best known for his paintings, and his
pastels are less common. The previously unknown pastel depicts the jetty and
lighthouse in Le Havre, the French town where Monet grew up. His famous
Impression, Sunrise—the painting that gave Impressionism its name—also depicts
a port in Le Havre.
Monet himself gave the three pastels as a wedding
present to his art dealer’s granddaughter in 1924, and the works had stayed in
the family until appearing at the Paris auction last year. The unknown pastel
was authenticated by the Wildenstein Institute, a French art research center.
All three pastels are thought to be from 1868, when Monet was just starting out
as a young artist.
Art for the Pop of It: How a Los Feliz Nun Became the Anti-Warhol of Pop ...
Art for the Pop of It: How a Los Feliz Nun Became the Anti-Warhol of Pop ...: Sister Corita Kent fought for food justice with visuals Sister Corita Kent was ahead of her time. A radical nun, activist and arti...
Album Art. So Cheesy it's good: Exhibit of iconic vinyl album covers on display at...
Album Art. So Cheesy it's good: Exhibit of iconic vinyl album covers on display at...: ROBIN MILLER| ROMILLER@THEADVOCATE.COM There was a time when the cover of an album was almost as important as the music inside. An...
Quotes from “No time to say goodbye: memoirs of a life in foster care” by John William Tuohy.
Quotes from “No time to say
goodbye: memoirs of a life in foster care” by John William Tuohy.
On sale now at Amazon.Com,
Border Books and direct from LLR Books.Com
http://www.amazon.com/No-Time-Say-Goodbye-Memoir/dp/
********************
In 1962, six year
old John Tuohy, his two brothers and two sisters entered Connecticut’s foster
care system and were promptly split apart. Over the next ten years, John would
live in more than ten foster homes, group homes and state schools, from his
native Waterbury to Ansonia, New Haven, West Haven, Deep River and Hartford. In
the end, a decade later, the state returned him to the same home and the same
parents they had taken him from. As tragic as is funny compelling story will
make you cry and laugh as you journey with this child to overcome the obstacles
of the foster care system and find his dreams.
http://www.amazon.com/No-Time-Say-Goodbye-Memoir/dp/0692361294/
http://amemoirofalifeinfostercare.blogspot.com/
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John William Tuohy
is a writer who lives in Washington DC. He holds an MFA in writing from
Lindenwood University. He is the author of numerous non-fiction on the history
of organized crime including the ground break biography of bootlegger Roger
Tuohy "When Capone's Mob Murdered Touhy" and "Guns and Glamour:
A History of Organized Crime in Chicago."
His non-fiction
crime short stories have appeared in The New Criminologist, American Mafia and
other publications. John won the City of Chicago's Celtic Playfest for his work
The Hannigan's of Beverly, and his short story fiction work, Karma Finds Franny
Glass, appeared in AdmitTwo Magazine in October of 2008.
His play,
Cyberdate.Com, was chosen for a public performance at the Actors Chapel in
Manhattan in February of 2007 as part of the groups Reading Series for New York
project. In June of 2008, the play won the Virginia Theater of The First
Amendment Award for best new play.
Contact John:
MYWRITERSSITE.BLOGSPOT.COM
JWTUOHY95@GMAIL.COM
From Professor
William Anthony Connolly
This incredible memoir,
No Time to Say Goodbye, tells of entertaining angels, dancing with devils, and
of the abandoned children many viewed simply as raining manna from some lesser
god.
The young and
unfortunate lives of the Tuohy bruins—sometimes Irish, sometimes Jewish, often
Catholic, rambunctious, but all imbued with Lion’s hearts— is told here with
brutal honesty leavened with humor and laudable introspective forgiveness.
The memoir will have
you falling to your knees thanking that benevolent Irish cop in the sky, your
lucky stars, or hugging the oxygen out of your own kids the fate foisted upon
Johnny and his siblings does not and did not befall your own brood.
John William Tuohy, a nationally-recognized
authority on organized crime and Irish levity, is your trusted guide through
the weeds the decades of neglect ensnared he and his brothers and sisters, all
suffering for the impersonal and often mercenary taint of the foster care
system.
Theirs, and Tuohy’s,
story is not at all figures of speech as this review might suggest, but all too
real and all too sad, and maddening. I wanted to scream. I wanted to get into a
time machine, go back and adopt every last one of them. I was angry. I was
captivated.
The requisite
damning verities of foster care are all here, regretfully, but what sets this
story above others is its beating heart, even a bruised and broken one, still
willing to forgive and understand, and continue to aid its walking wounded. I
cannot recommend this book enough
“I am here because I worked too hard and too
long not to be here. But although I told the university that I would walk
across the stage to take my diploma, I won’t. At age fifty-seven, I’m too
damned old, and I’d look ridiculous in this crowd. From where I’m standing in
the back of the hall, I can see that I am at least two decades older than most
of the parents of these kids in their black caps and gowns.
So I’ll graduate with this
class, but I won’t walk across the stage and collect my diploma with them; I’ll
have the school send it to my house. I only want to hear my name called. I’ll
imagine what the rest would have been like. When you’ve had a life like mine,
you learn to do that, to imagine the good things.
The ceremony is about to begin.
It’s a warm June day and a hallway of glass doors leading to the parking lot
are open, the dignitaries march onto the stage, a janitor slams the doors shut,
one after the other.
That banging sound.
It’s Christmas Day 1961 and
three Waterbury cops are throwing their bulk against our sorely overmatched
front door. They are wearing their long woolen blue coats and white gloves and
they swear at the cold.
They’ve finally come for us, in
the dead of night, to take us away, just as our mother said they would.”
********************
“Otherwise, there were no long
goodbyes or emotional scenes. That isn’t part of foster care. You just leave
and you just die a little bit. Just a little bit because a little bit more of
you understands that this is the way it’s going to be. And you grow hard around
the edges, just a little bit. Not in some big way, but just a little bit
because you have to, because if you don’t it only hurts worse the next time and
a little bit more of you will die. And you don’t want that because you know
that if enough little bits of you die enough times, a part of you leaves. Do
you know what I mean? You’re still there, but a part of you leaves until you
stand on the sidelines of life, simply watching, like a ghost that everyone can
see and no one is bothered by. You become the saddest thing there is: a child
of God who has given .”
********************
“As I said, you die a little
bit in foster care, but I spose we all die a little bit in our daily lives, no
matter what path God has chosen for us. But there is always a balance to that
sadness; there’s always a balance. You only have to look for it. And if you
look for it, you’ll see it. I saw it in a well-meaning nun who wanted to share the
joy of her life’s work with us. I saw it in an old man in a garden who shared
the beauty of the soil and the joy he took in art, and I saw it in the simple
decency and kindness of an underpaid nurse’s aide. Yeah. Great things rain on us. The magnificence of life’s
affirmations are all around us, every day, everywhere. They usually go
unnoticed because they seldom arrive with the drama and heartbreak of those
hundreds of negative things that drain our souls. But yeah, it’s there, the
good stuff, the stuff worth living for. You only have to look for it and when
you see it, carry it around right there at the of your heart so it’s always
there when you need it. And you’ll need it a lot, because life is hard.”
********************
“As sad as I so often was, and
I was often overwhelmed with sadness, I never admitted it, and I don’t recall
ever having said aloud that I was sad. I tried not to think about it, about all
the sad things, because I had this feeling that if I started to think about it,
that was all I would ever think of again. I often had a nightmare of
falling into a deep dark well that I
could never climb out of. But then there was the other part of me that honestly
believed I wasn’t sad at all, and I had little compassion for those who dwelled
in sadness. Strange how that works. You would think that it would be the other
way around.”
********************
“In late October of 1962, it was our turn to
go. Miss Hanrahan appeared in her state Ford Rambler, which, by that point,
seemed more like a hearse than a nice lady’s car. Our belongings were packed in
a brown bags. The ladies in the kitchen, familiar with our love of food, made
us twelve fried-fish sandwiches each large enough to feed eight grown men and
wrapped them in tinfoil for the ride ahead of us. Miss Louisa, drenched with
tears, walked us to the car and before she let go of my hand she said, “When
you a big, grown man, you come back and see Miss Louisa, you hear?”
“But,” I said, “you won’t know
who I am. I’ll be big.”
“No, child,” she said as she
gave me her last hug, “you always know forever the peoples you love. They with
you forever. They don’t never leave you.”
She was right, of course. Those
we love never leave us because we carry them with us in our hearts and a piece
of us is within them. They change with us and they grow old with us and with
time, they are a part of us, and thank God for that.”
********************
“One day at the library I found a stack of
record albums. I was hoping I’d find ta Beatles album, but it was all classical
music so I reached for the first name I knew, Beethoven. I checked it out his
Sixth Symphony and walked home. I didn’t own a record player and I don’t know
why I took it out. I had Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony but nothing to play it on.”
********************
“The next day, when I came home from the
library, there was a small, used red record player in my room. I found my
mother in the kitchen and spotted a bandage taped to her arm.
“Ma,” I asked. “Where did you
get the money for the record player?”
“I had it saved,” she lied.
My father lived well, had a
large house and an expensive imported car, wanted for little, and gave nothing.
My mother lived on welfare in a slum and sold her blood to the Red Cross to get
me a record player.
“Education is everything,
Johnny,” she said, as she headed for the refrigerator to get me food. “You get
smart like regular people and you don’t have to live like this no more.”
She and I were not hugging
types, but I put my hand on her shoulder as she washed the dishes with her back
to me and she said, in best Brooklynese, “So go and enjoy, already.” My father
always said I was my mother’s son and I was proud of that. On her good days,
she was a good and noble thing to be a part of.
That evening, I plugged in the
red record player and placed it by the window. My mother and I took the kitchen
chairs out to the porch and listened to Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony from
beginning to end, as we watched the oil-stained waters of the Mad River roll
by. It was a good night, another good night, one of many that have blessed my
life.”
********************
“The next day I was driven to
New York City to take the physical. It was one of the strangest things I’d ever
seen. Several hundred young men, maybe even a thousand, in their skivvies,
walking around an enormous room, all of us lost, dazed, and confused.
Some of these guys had dodged
the draft and were there under the watchful eyes of dozens of federal marshals
lined against one of the walls. After
eight hours of being poked, prodded, stuck, and poked again, I was given a
large red envelope. I had been rejected. I had the respiratory problems of an
old man, high blood pressure, partial loss of hearing, very bad teeth, very
flat, very wide feet and I tested positive for tuberculosis.
“Frankly,” the doctor said, “I
don’t know how the hell you’re even standing ,” and that was when the sergeant
told me that if they bottled everything that was wrong with me “we could take
over the world without a shot.”
********************
“I had decided that I wanted to
earn my living as a writer and the only place in Waterbury where they paid you
for writing was at the local newspaper. My opportunity came when the paper had
an opening for a night janitor. Opportunities are easy to miss, because they
don’t always show in their best clothes.
Sometimes opportunities look like beggars in rags. After an eight-hour shift in
the shop tossing thirty-pound crates I hustled
to the newspaper building and cleaned toilets, with a vague plan that it
would somehow lead to a reporter’s .”
********************
“One Friday afternoon at the
close of the working day the idiot bosses in their fucking ties and suit coats
came and handed out pink slips to every
other person on the floor. I got one. They were firing us. Then they turned
and, without a word, went back to their offices. Corporate pricks.”
********************
“There is a sense of danger in
leaving what you know, even if what you know isn’t much. These mill towns with
their narrow lanes and often narrow minds were all I really knew and I feared
that if I left it behind, I would lose it and not find anything to replace it.
The other reason I didn’t want to go was because I wanted to be the kind of
person who stays, who builds a stable and predictable life. But I wasn’t one of
the people, nor would I ever be.
I had a vision for my life. It
wasn’t clear, but it was beautiful and involved leaving my history and my
poverty behind me. I wasn’t happy about who I was or where I was, but I didn’t
worry about it. It didn’t define me. We’re always in the making. God always has
us on his anvil, melting, bending and shaping us for another purpose.
It was time to change, to find
a new purpose.”
********************
“I was tired of fighting the
windstorm I was tossed into, and instead I would let go and ride with the winds
of change. How bad could it be, compared to the life I knew? I was living life
as if it were a rehearsal for the real thing. Another beginning might be rough
at first, but any place worth getting to is going to have some problems. I
wanted the good life, the life well lived, and you can’t buy that or marry into
it. It’s there to be found, and it can be taken by those who want it and have
the resolve to make it happen for themselves.”
********************
“Imagine being beaten every day for something you didn’t do and
yet, when it’s over, you keep on smiling. That’s what every day of Donald’s
life was like. His death was a small death. No one mourned his passing; they
merely agreed it was for the best that he be forgotten as quickly as possible,
since his was a life misspent.”
********************
“Then there are all of those
children, the ones who aren’t resilient. The ones who slowly, quietly die. I
think the difference is that the kids who bounce back learn to bear a little
bit more than they thought they could, and they soon understand that the secret
to surviving foster care is to accept finite disappointments while never losing
infinite hope. I think that was how Donald survived as long as he did, by never
losing his faith in the wish that tomorrow would be better. But as time went
by, day after day, the tomorrows never got better; they got worse, and he
simply gave . In the way he saw the world, pain was inevitable, but no one ever
explained to him that suffering was optional.”
********************
“In foster care it’s easier to
measure what you’ve lost over what you have gained, because it there aren’t
many gains in that life and you are a prisoner to someone else’s plans for your
life.”
********************
“I developed an interest in
major league baseball and the 1960s were, as far as I’m concerned (with a nod
to the Babe Ruth era of the 1920s), the Golden Age of Baseball. Like most
people in the valley, I was a diehard Yankees fan and, in a pinch, a Mets fan.
They were New York teams, and most New Englanders rooted for the Boston Red
Sox, but our end of Connecticut was geographically and culturally closer to New
York than Boston, and that’s where our loyalties went.
And what was not to love? The
Yankees ruled the earth in those days. The great Roger Maris set one Major
League record after another and even he was almost always one hit shy of Mickey
Mantle, God on High of the Green Diamond.”
********************
“For the first time in my life,
I was eating well and from plates—glass plates, no less, not out of the frying
pan because somebody lost all the plates in the last move. Now when we ate, we
sat at a fine round oak table in sturdy chairs that matched. No one rushed
through the meal or argued over who got the biggest portion, and we ate three
times a day.”
********************
“The single greatest influence in our lives
was the church. The Catholic Church in the 1960s differs from what it is today,
especially in the Naugatuck Valley, in those days an overwhelmingly
conservative Catholic place.
I was part of what might have
been the last generation of American Catholic children who completely and
unquestioningly accepted the sernatural as real. Miracles happened. Virgin
birth and transubstantiation made perfect sense. Mere humans did in fact,
become saints. There was a Holy Ghost. Guardian angels walked beside us and our
patron saints really did put in a good word for us every now and then.”
********************
“Henry read it and said, “A
story has to have three things. They are a beginning, a middle and an end. They
don’t have to be in that order. You can start a story at the end or end it in
the middle. There are no rules on that except where you, the author, decide to
put all three parts. Your story has a beginning and an end. But it’s good. Go
put in a middle and bring it back to me.”
I went away encouraged, rewrote
the story and returned it to him two days later. Again he looked it over and
said, “It’s a good story but it lacks a bullet-between-the-eyes opening. Your
stories should always have a knock-’em-dead opening.” Then, looking with
exaggerated suspicion around the crime-prone denizens of the room with an
exaggerated suspicion, he said loudly, “I don’t mean that literally.”
********************
“A few days after I began my
short story, I returned to his desk and handed him my dates. He pushed his
wire-rimmed reading glasses way on his
nose and focused on the two pages. “Okay, you got a beginning; you got yourself
a middle and an end. You got a wing-dinger opening line. But you don’t have an
establishing paragraph. Do you know what that is?”
He didn’t wait for me to
answer.
“It’s kinda like an outdated
road map for the reader,” he said. “It gives the reader a general idea of where
you’re taking him, but doesn’t tell him exactly how you intend to get there,
which is all he needs to know.”
********************
“I don’t know’,” he said.
“Those three words from a willing soul are the start of a grand and magnificent
voyage.” And with that he began a discourse that lasted for several weeks,
covering scene-setting, establishing conflict, plot twists, and first- and
third-person narration. [ I learned in these rapid-fire mini-dissertations that
like most literature lovers I would come to know, Henry was a book snob. He
assumed that if a current author was popular and widely enjoyed, then he or she
had no merit. He made a few exceptions, such as Kurt Vonnegut, although that
was mostly because Vonnegut lived on Cape Cod and so he probably had some
merits as a human being, if not as a writer.
I think that the way Henry saw
it was that he was not being a snob. In fact I would venture that in his view
of things, snobbery had nothing to do with it. Rather, it was a matter of
standards. It was bout quality in the author’s craftsmanship.”
********************
“The foundries were vast, dark castles built
for efficiency, not comfort. Even in the mild New England summers, when the
warm air combined with the stagnant heat from the machines or open flames in
the huge melting rooms where the iron was cast, the effects were overwhelming.
The heat came in unrelenting waves and sucked the soul from your body. In the
winter, the enormous factories were impossible to heat and frigid New England
air reigned sreme in the long halls.
The work was difficult, noisy,
mind-numbing, sometimes dangerous and highly regulated. Bathroom and lunch
breaks were scheduled to the second.
There was no place to make a private phone call. Company guards, dressed in
drab uniforms straight out of a James Cagney prison film [those films were in
black and white, notoriously tough, weren’t there to guard company property.
They were there to keep an eye on us.
No one entered or the left the
building without punching in or out on a clock, because the doors were locked
and opened electronically from the main office.”
********************
“So he sings,” he continued as if Denny had
said nothing. “His solo mio, that with her in his life he is rich because she
is so beautiful that she makes the sun more beautiful, you understand?” And at
that he dropped the hoe, closed his eyes and spread out his arms wide and with
the fading sun shining on his handsome face he sang:
Che bella cosa è na jurnata 'e
sole
n'aria serena doppo na
tempesta!
Pe' ll'aria fresca pare già na
festa
Che bella cosa e' na jurnata 'e
sole
Ma n'atu sole,
cchiù bello, oi ne'
'O sole mio
sta 'nfronte a te!
'O sole, 'o sole mio
sta 'nfronte a te!
sta 'nfronte a te!
It looked like fun. We dropped
our tools and joined him, belting out something that sounded remarkably like
Napolitano. We sang as loud as we could, holding on to each note as long as we
could before we ran out of breath, and then we sang again, occasionally
dropping to one knee, holding our hands over our hearts with exaggerated looks
of deep pain. Although we made the words , we sang with the deepest passion,
with the best that we had, with all of our hearts, and that made us artists,
great artists, for in that song, we had made all that art is: the creation of
something from nothing, fashioned with all of the soul, born from joy.
And as that beautiful summer
sun set over Waterbury, the Brass City, the City of Churches, our voices
floated above the wonderful aromas of the garden, across the red sky and joined
the spirits in eternity.”
********************
“It didn’t last long. Not many
good things in a foster kid’s life last long. One day, Maura was gone. Her few
things were packed in paper bags and a tearful Miss Louisa carried her out to
Miss Hanrahan’s black state-owned Ford sedan with the state emblem on the door,
and she was gone. The state had found a foster home that would take a little
girl but couldn’t take the rest of us. There were no long goodbyes. She was
just gone. I remember having an enormous sense of helplessness when they took
her. Maura didn’t know where she were going or long she would be there. She was
just gone”
********************
“After another second had
passed I added, “But you’re pretty, pretty,” and as soon as I said it I
thought, “Pretty, pretty? John, you’re an idiot.” But she squeezed my hand and
when I looked at her I saw her entire lovely face was aglow with a wonderful
smile, the kind of smile you get when you have won something.
“Why do you rub your fingers
together all the time?” she asked me, and I felt the breath leave my body and
gasped for air. She had seen me do my crazy finger thing, my affliction. I
clenched my teeth while I searched for a long, exaggerated lie to tell her
about why I did what I did. I didn’t want to be the crazy kid with tics, I
wanted to be James Bond 007, so slick ice avoided me.
“It’s okay,” she said. “I bite
my nails, see?” and she showed me the backs of her hands. Her finger nails were
painted a color I later learned was puce.
“My Dad, he blinks all the
time, he doesn’t know why either,” she continued. She looked her feet and said, “I shouldn’t have asked
you that. I’m really nervous and I say stid things when I’m nervous. I’m a girl
and this is my first date, and for girls this really is a very big deal.”
I understood completely. I was
so nervous I couldn’t feel my toes, so I started moving them and to
make sure they were still there.
“It’s all right,” I said. “I
don’t know why I do that with my fingers; it’s a thing I do.”
“Well, you’re really cute when
you do it,” she said.
“I know,” I said, and I don’t
know why I said it, but I did.”
********************
“So began my love affair with
books. Years later, as a college student, I remember having a choice between a
few slices of pizza that would have held me over for a day or a copy of On the
Road. I bought the book. I would have forgotten what the pizza tasted like, but
I still remember Kerouac.
The world was mine for the
reading. I traveled with my books. I was there on a tramp steamer in the North
Atlantic with the Hardy Boys, piecing together an unsolvable crime. I rode into
the Valley of Death with the six hundred and I stood at the graves of Uncas and
Cora and listened to the mournful song of the Lenni Linape. Although I braved a
frozen death at Valley Forge and felt the spin of a hundred bullets at Shiloh,
I was never afraid. I was there as much as you are where you are, right this
second. I smelled the gunsmoke and tasted the frost. And it was good to be
there. No one could harm me there. No one could punch me, slap me, call me
stid, or pretend I wasn’t in the room. The other kids raced through books so
they could get the completion stamp on their library card. I didn’t care about
that stid completion stamp. I didn’t want to race through books. I wanted books
to walk slowly through me, stop, and touch my brain and my memory. If a book
couldn’t do that, it probably wasn’t a very good book. Besides, it isn’t how
much you read, it’s what you read.
What I learned from books, from
young Ben Franklin’s anger at his brother to Anne Frank’s longing for the way
her life used to be, was that I wasn’t alone in my pain. All that caused me
such anguish affected others, too, and that connected me to them and that
connected me to my books. I loved everything about books. I loved that odd
sensation of turning the final page, realizing the story had ended, and feeling
that I was saying a last goodbye to a new friend.”
********************
“I had developed a very
complicated and little-understood disorder called misophonia, which means
“hatred of sound.” Certain sounds act as triggers that turn me from a Teddy
bear into an agitated grizzly bear. People with misophonia are annoyed,
sometimes to the point of rage, by ordinary sounds such as people eating,
breathing, sniffing, or coughing, certain consonants, or repetitive sounds.
Those triggers, and there are dozens of them, set off anxiety and avoidant
behaviors.
What is a mild irritation for
most people -- the person who keeps sniffling, a buzzing fly in a closed
room—those are major irritants to people with misophonia because we have
virtually no ability to ignore those sounds, and life can be a near constant
bombardment of noises that bother us. I figured out that the best way to cope
was to avoid the triggers. So I turned off the television at certain sounds and
avoided loud people. All of these things gave me a reputation as a high-strung,
moody and difficult child. I knew my overreactions weren’t normal. My playmates
knew it”
********************
“Sometimes in the midst of our
darkest moments it’s easy to forget that it’s
to us to turn on the light, but that’s what I did. I switched on the
light, the light of cognizance.”
********************
“I don’t know what I would have done if they
had hugged me. I probably would have frozen in place, become stiff. It took
most of my life to overcome my distaste for physical contact and not to stiffen
when I was touched, or flinch, twitch, fidget, and eventually figure out how to
move away. I learned to accept being hugged by my children when they were
infants. Their joy at seeing me enter a room was real and filled with true love
and affection and it showed in their embraces. Like a convert, when I learned
the joy and comfort of being hugged by and hugging those I loved, I became a
regular practitioner.”
********************
“Most people don’t understand
how mighty the power of touch is, how mighty a kind word can be, how important
a listening ear is, or how giving an honest compliment can move the child who
has not known those things, only watched them from afar. As insignificant as
they can be, they have the power to change a life.”
********************
“They were no better than common thieves. They
stole our childhood. But even with that, I was heartbroken that I would not
know the Wozniaks anymore, the only people who came close to being parents to
me. I would be conscious of their absence for the rest of my life. I needed
them. You know, if you think about it, we all need each other. But even with
all of the evidence against the Wozniaks, I had conflicted emotions about them,
then and now. They were the closest I had to a real family and real parents.
But now I was bankrt of any
feelings at all towards them at all.
I felt then, and feel now, a
great sense of loss. I felt as if I were burying them. when I never really had
them to lose in the first place. Disillusioned is probably a better word. In
fact the very definition of disillusionment is a sense of loss for something
you never had. When you are disillusioned and disappointed enough times, you
shoping. That’s what happens to many foster kids. We become loners, not because
we enjoy the solitude, but because we let people into our lives and they
disappoint us. So we close and travel
alone. Even in a crowd, we’re alone.
Because I survived, I was one
of the lucky ones. Why is it so hard to articulate love, yet so easy to express
disappointment?”
********************
“My first and lasting
impression of the Connecticut River Valley is its serene beauty, especially in
the autumn months. Deep River was a near picture-perfect New England village.
When I arrived there, the town was a typical working-class place, nothing like
the trendy per-income enclave it became. The town center had a cluster of
shops, a movie theater open only on weekends, several white-steepled churches (none
of them Catholic), the town hall, and a Victorian library. It was small, even
by Ansonia standards.”
********************
“While I may not have been a bastion of good
mental health, many of these boys were on their way to becoming crazier than
they already were. Most couldn’t relate to other people socially at all,
because they only dealt inappropriately with other people or didn’t respond to
overtures of friendship or even engage in basic conversations.
Some became too familiar with
you too fast, following their new, latest friend everywhere, including the
showers, insisting on giving you items that were dear to them and sharing
everything else. They also had the awful habit of touching other people,
putting their hands on you as a sign of affection or friendship, and for people
like myself, with my affliction and disdain for being touched unless I wanted
to be touched, these guys were a nightmare. It was often difficult to get word
in edgewise with these kids, and when I did, they interrted me—not in some
obnoxious way, but because they wanted to be included in every single aspect of
everything you did.
The other ones, the stone-cold
silent ones, reacted with deep suspicion toward even the slightest attempt to
befriend them or the smallest show of kindness. If you touched some of these
children, even accidentally, they would warn you to back away. They didn’t care
what others thought of them or anything else, and almost all their talk
concerned punching and hurting and maiming.
I noticed that most of these
kids, the ones who were truly damaged, were eventually filtered out of St.
John’s to who knows where. Institutions have a way of protecting themselves
from future problems.”
********************
“Jesus,” I prayed silently,
“please fix it so that my turn to read won’t come around.”
And then the nun called my
name, but before I stood I thought, “I’ll bet you think this is funny, huh,
Jesus?”
I stood and stared at the
sentence assigned to me and believed that, through some miracle, I would
suddenly be able to read it and not be humiliated. I stood there and stared at
it until the children started giggling and snickering and Sister told me to
sit.”
********************
“My affliction decided to join us, forcing me
to push my toes on the floor as though I were trying to eject myself from the
chair. I prayed she didn’t notice what the affliction was making me do. I half
expected to be eaten alive or murdered and buried out back in the school yard.
“I’m not afraid of you, ya
know,” I said, although I was terrified of her. The words hurt her, but that
wasn’t my intent. She turned her face and looked out the window into North
Cliff Street. She knew what her face and twisted body looked like, and she
probably knew what the kids said about her. It was probably an open wound for
her and I had just tossed salt into it.
I was instantly ashamed of what
I done and tried to correct myself. I didn’t mean to be hurtful, because I knew
what it was like to be ridiculed for something that was beyond one’s control, such
as my affliction, and how it made me afraid to touch the chalk because the feel
of chalk to people like me is overwhelming. If I had to write on the
blackboard, I held the chalk with the cuff of my shirt and the class laughed.
“You look good in a nun’s
suit,” I said. It was a stid thing to say, but I meant well by it. She
looked at the black robe as if she were
seeing it for the first time.”
********************
“Jews were a frequent topic of
conversation with all of the Wozniaks, which was surprising, since none of them
had any contact at all with anything even remotely Jewish.
While watching television,
Walter would point out who was and who was not Jewish and Helen’s frequent
comment when watching the television news was, “And won’t the Jews be happy
about that!” To bargain with a merchant for a lower price was to “Jew him ,”
and that sort of thing.
Walter’s mother and father were
far worse. They despised the Jews and blamed them for everything from the start
of World War I to the Kennedy assassination to the rising price of beef.
I didn’t pay much heed to any
of this. It wasn’t my problem, and if I were to think through all the ethnic,
racial and religious barbs the Wozniaks threw out in the course of a week, I’d
think about nothing else.
After being told about a part
of my mother’s heritage, the Wozniaks began their verbal and cultural assault
against us. As odd as it sounds, they might not always have intended to be
mean.”
********************
“Explaining the Jews in a
Catholic school when you’re Irish is like having to explain your country’s
foreign policy while on a vacation in France. You don’t know what you’re
talking about and no matter what you say, they’re not going to like it anyway.”
********************
“You could read the story of his entire life
on his face in one glance.”
********************
“As interesting as that was, it didn’t inspire
me. What did was that here was a Jew who was tough with his fists, a Jew who
fought back. The only Jews I had ever heard of surrendered or were beaten by
the Romans, the Egyptians, or the Nazis. You name it, it seemed like everyone
on earth at some point had taken their turn slapping the Jews around. But not
Benny Leonard. I figured you’d have to kill Benny Leonard before he surrendered.”
********************
“One afternoon Walter brought
Izzy to the house for lunch and, pointing to me, he said to Izzy, “He’s one of
your tribe.”
Dobkins lifted his head to look
at me and after a few seconds said, “I don’t see it.”
“The mother’s a Jew,” Walter
answered, as if he were describing the breeding of a mongrel dog.
“Then you are a Jew,” Izzy
said, and sort of blessed me with his salami sandwich.”
********************
“Sometimes a man must stand for
what is right and sometimes you must simply walk away and suffer the babblings
of weak-minded fools or try to change their minds. It’s like teachin’ a pig to
sing. It is a waste of your time and it annoys the pig.”
********************
“Father, I can’t take this,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because you’re a priest,
Father.”
“And my money’s no good because
of it? What are you? A member of the Masonic Lodge?”
“Naw, Father,” I said. “I just
feel guilty taking money from you.”
“Well, you’re Irish and Jewish.
You have to feel guilty over somethin’, don’t ya? Take the money and be happy
ye have it.”
― John William Tuohy, No time
to say goodbye: memoirs of a life n foster care
********************
“I caddied—more accurately, I drove the golf
cart—for Father O’Leary and his friends throughout most of the summer of that
year. I was a good caddie because I saw nothing when they passed the bottle of
whiskey and turned a deaf ear to yet another colorful reinvention of the words
“motherless son of a bitch from hell” when the golf ball betrayed them.”
********************
“Weeks turned into months and a
year passed, but I didn’t miss my parents. I missed the memory of them. I
assumed that part of my life was over. I didn’t understand that I was required
to have an attachment to them, to these people I barely knew. Rather, it was my
understanding that I was sposed to switch my attachment to my foster parents.
So I acted on that notion and no one corrected me, so I assumed that what I was
doing was good and healthy.”
********************
“I felt empty a lot and I
sometimes had a sense—and I know this sounds strange—that I really had no
existence as my own person, that I could disappear and no one would notice or
remember that I had ever existed. It is a terrifying thing to live with. I kept
myself busy to avoid that feeling, because somehow being busy made me feel less
empty.”
********************
“Denny thought our parents
needed a combination of material goods and temperamental changes before he
could return home.
“If Dad buys Ma a car, then
she’ll love him, and they’ll get back together and she won’t be all crazy
anymore,” he said. For years he held out the possibility that those things
would happen and all would change. “If we had more things, like stoves and
cars,” he told me at night in our bedroom, “and Ma wasn’t like she is, we could
go home.”
********************
“Because we were raised in a bigoted and
hate-filled home, we simply assumed that calling someone a “cheap Jew” or
saying someone “Jewed him ” were perfectly acceptable ways to communicate. Or
at least we did until the day came when I called one of the cousins, a
Neanderthal DeRosa boy, “a little Jew,” and he told me he wasn’t the Jew, that
I was the Jew, and he even got Helen and Nana to confirm it for him.
It came as a shock to me to
find out we were a part of this obviously terrible tribe of skinflint,
trouble-making, double-dealing, shrewdly smart desert people. When Denny found
out, he was crestfallen because he had assumed that being Jewish meant,
according to what his former foster family the Skodiens had taught him, a life
behind a desk crunching numbers. “And I hate math,” he said, shaking his head.
So here we were, accused Jews
living in a hotbed of anti-Semitism. Not a good situation. Walter’s father was
the worst. Learning about our few drops of Jewish blood seemed to ignite a
special, long-held hatred in him. He became vile over nothing, finding any
excuse to deride the Jews in front of us until Helen made him stop. We didn’t
know what to make of it, except to write it off as another case of Wozniak-inspired
insanity, but as young as we were, we could tell that at some point in his life
he had crossed swords with a Jew someplace and came out on the losing end and
we were going to pay for it. But because we really didn’t feel ourselves to be
Jews, it didn’t sink in that he intended to hurt us with his crazy tirades. As
I said, it’s hard to insult somebody when they don’t understand the insult, and
it’s equally hard to insult them when they out and out refuse to be insulted.
Word got around quickly.”
********************
“I hit him for every single
thing that was wrong in my life and kicked him in a fierce fury of madness as
he sobbed and covered his face and screamed. I hit him because Walter hit me
and I hit him because I hated my life and I hit him because I just wanted to go
home and I hit him because I didn’t know where home was.”
********************
“I also told him about the dramatic, vivid
verbal picture of God that the nuns drew for us—an enormous, slightly dangerous
and very touchy guy with white hair and a long white beard.
“It’s all the talk of feeble
minds,” he whispered to me in confidence. “Those nuns know as much about prayer
as they do about sex. Listen to me, now. God is everywhere and alive in
everything, while them nuns figured God is as good as dead, a recluse in a
permanently bad mood. Well, I refuse to believe that to my God, my maker and
creator, my life is little more than a dice game.” He stopped and turned and
looked at me and said, “Never believe that a life full of sin puts you on a
direct route to hell. Even if you only know a little bit about God, you learn
pretty quick that he’s big on U-turns, dead stops and starting over again.”
As each day passes and my
memories of Father O’Leary and Sister Emmarentia fade, and I can no longer
recall their faces or the sounds of their voices as clearly as I could a decade
ago, what remains, clear and uncluttered, are the lessons I took from them.”
********************
“Eventually, many years later, I came to see
him the way everyone else saw him—a nice guy who, despite all the damage he did
to us, wasn’t a bad man, not inherently bad, anyway. He just wasn’t very
bright, and was in over his head on almost every level of life. He was capable
of only so much and not a drop more, and because he seemed so harmless and
lost, people not only liked him, they protected him.
My mother, despite her poverty,
left the opposite impression. She left no doubt that she was psychologically
tough and mentally sharp, and because of that the Wozniaks disliked her.
And that was another difference
between my mother and father. My father was a whiner, a complainer, a
perpetually unhappy man unable to comprehend the simple fact that sometimes life
is unfair. My mother never complained, and yet her poverty-stricken life was
miserable. She never carried on about the early death of her raging alcoholic
mother, or the father who raped her, or of a diet dictated by the restrictions
of food stamps.”
********************
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