Lying for Bruce - Page 2
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 10: Family Politics
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Oren Siedler
THE SUN WAS JUST RISING WHEN WE LANDED IN SAN FRANCISCO. I pressed my nose up against the cold window and looked down into the thick grey fog. I wondered whether my father was waiting down there somewhere for me. I didn't know what to expect. On subsequent trips to visit my father I had a great fear that I would be stopped at immigration and interrogated in an attempt to elicit his whereabouts. By then I knew the consequences of sharing Bruce's family name, a name that was on both the Federal Police and Internal Revenue Service's "Wanted" lists. I would rehearse the story he had told me: "I have come to America to visit my uncle. ‘Do I know Bruce Siedler?' ‘Yes, he is my father but I have not seen him for years and I don't know where he lives.' " I knew the stakes were high; if I messed up, my father could go to jail and I would be responsible.
A woman in a uniform brought me to the front of the immigration hall. My knees felt shaky and I had a pain in my stomach. My father had told me that customs agents were trained to detect lies through body language so I tried hard to look casual and relaxed as I neared the booth. As I stepped up to another uniformed official, my heart began to race.
"Where are your parents?" He flipped through my passport without looking at me.
"I'm alone."
He looked up and glanced behind me and then motioned for me to pass with a bored wave of his hand.
I was taken to the baggage claim area and left to wait for my bag. I yanked it off the rotating silver machine and dragged it along the shiny floor, following the adults towards the exit. A man sitting on a stool asked me for my customs form.
"Are you by yourself?" he asked as he studied my card.
"Yes." He looked at me but I did not meet his eyes. He pointed to the exit and I felt relief rush through me.
As the doors slid open into the arrival hall, I searched the sea of faces for my father. Would he remember what I looked like? I wandered through the crowd, looking up at strange faces, and when I could not see him I felt a wave of panic. I pulled my bag through the big glass doors out onto the sidewalk and held back tears as I scanned the street. Bruce was standing near an old red car, looking anxious. He was wearing a checked shirt, crumpled slacks and old, ratty sneakers.
"You made it," he smiled.
"Yeah," I said quietly, not looking at him. "But I thought you'd forgotten to pick me up."
Bruce lifted my bag into the car. "I don't like to waste money on the parking lot."
WE PULLED AWAY FROM THE CURB AND WOUND OUR WAY OUT of the airport onto the highway. Shiny new cars overtook us and I wished I were sitting in one of them instead of my father's rusty, noisy car.
"Where are we going?" I asked.
"Oh, we'll go down to Santa Cruz for a few days first. I've got some business to take care of. Then we'll go on a trip to New York to see your grandmother. Then maybe we'll take a drive down the east coast of Mexico."
"How far is Mexico?" I asked.
"Well, if we average 50 miles an hour to the border and drive for eight hours a day, it should take us about three days. Then maybe another five days driving in Mexico. But we'll do plenty of stops along the way, so it might take us ten days."
I looked at my father incredulously. "But it will be boring," I whined.
"Nah, we'll stop at hot springs and visit people. You'll get to see some nice places."
I didn't care about nice places. I wanted a house and friends and a dog.
"Can't we just stay in one place instead?"
"Nope, that would be boring!" Bruce chuckled.
We drove along the narrow, winding road that hugged the Pacific Ocean. Occasionally, Bruce would pull the steering wheel hard to one side to avoid fallen rocks from the steep cliffs above the road. I sat back in my seat and looked at my father. I had forgotten so many things about him: the way he dressed differently from my friends' fathers and the way his beard grew only along his jaw. People said he looked like President Lincoln. I didn't know who he was but I knew he was important. But my father didn't seem important. He didn't have a job and I didn't really know how he made money. I knew he had some money because he often sent me travellers' cheques to pay for my clothes and my violin lessons in Australia. Mum had told me many times that he stole the money. But I didn't know how he stole it or whom he stole it from. I was a little afraid of him. Mum said he was "trouble", but I didn't really know what that meant, either.
"Mum said that you steal money," I blurted.
Bruce glanced at me and took a moment to answer. "I guess you could say that." He kept his eyes on the road, but he was smiling.
"I believe that there are some very terrible things happening in this country and I don't want to be part of these things that the government and companies are doing. So one way I can avoid becoming involved is to not support their evil little empire."
"What kind of bad things?"
"Well, there was an atrocious war recently that went on for many years. Our government was responsible for killing millions of people, little kids, too, just like you. We spent billions of dollars making bombs and guns to kill innocent people. Do you know where the government gets all that money from?"
"No...the president?" I had never thought about where money comes from.
"Well, no, the president can control money, but he needs to get it from somewhere. Everybody who has a job has to give money to the government. The government collects all this money and then decides what to do with it. The people who give the money to the government don't get to say where they want the money to be spent. So then if the government decides to use the money to kill people, some people feel really terrible. So I decided that I would never give any money to the government. Do you understand?" Bruce took his eyes off the road and looked at me.
"Kind of ..." I reply. "But how do you get money?"
"Well, it's a little complicated, and may be hard for you to understand. Do you know what a credit card is?" Bruce reaches across me and takes his wallet out of the glove box. I see a pile of plastic cards, stacked in a tiered row in his large wallet. He takes one out and hands it to me. I look at it and run my fingers over the raised numbers.
"It says ‘Robert Carrol', who's he?"
"He's dead," my father replies.
I look straight ahead out the window. My head is spinning. Did he kill someone and steal his credit card? I suddenly think about my mother and I hear her voice, "He's a sociopath". I never understood what that meant. Maybe this is what she meant. Maybe all those cards in his wallet come from dead people. Maybe he killed them, or maybe he robbed them after they died! I am scared. The man sitting next to me is a stranger. I am holding the credit card tightly in my hand, eyes fixed on the road.
Bruce looks over at me. "Oh, I see. You think I killed these people?" he asks, amused. I don't answer.
"Naw, I didn't kill them. I just take their identities after they die natural deaths. I have never even met any of these people," Bruce assures me.
I am relieved to hear my father is not a murderer. "But why do you use their names?" I ask him.
"Because then I can open bank accounts using someone else's name and then I can get lots of different credit cards, which I don't have to pay."
I thought hard about what my father was telling me, trying to put all the pieces of information together. "So, you're kind of like a ... bank robber?"
"Yeah," Bruce chuckles, "I guess you could say that. Except I don't have to use a gun."
LIFE CHANGED FOR ME THAT DAY TWO YEARS LATER when my father ran out the back door, leaving me to face the intimidating wrath of two cops hell-bent on locking up that "scum-parasite-menace-to-society crim" also known as my father. I lost my sense of trust and safety. I realised that he would not always be able to protect me. The tables turned that day; suddenly I had to protect him and this planted a seed in my mind that if I didn't look after myself, no one would.
We were living alone together in Santa Cruz California. Bruce, believing mainstream education ‘dulled a child's mind', enrolled me in ‘Gault Open', an alternative elementary school focusing on freedom of expression, which included no discipline, no dress code, and by my happy estimations, no real codes of any kind. I was overjoyed; for once, I felt like I belonged.
During my school day, Bruce went about his clandestine activities; creating fake identifications; stealing VW Beetles; setting up fake bank accounts or planning insurance scams. At the end of the day he would always be on time to pick me up from school.
"What'd you do today?" I often asked as we drove home.
"Oh, just the usual ...a little scam involving a big greedy bank."
Fearing my academic abilities were lagging, Bruce took great pleasure in helping me with my education in the evenings. I sat with him at the kitchen table while he created a daily list of vocabulary which he placed in front of my bored face and then asked me to recite their meaning, in much the same way I was tutored to recite his various aliases. Although I was eleven years old, I had only just learned to read. His choice of vocabulary was impossibly advanced with five and six syllable words quite likely unknown to any educated adult. I had no interest; I fidgeted and twitched my legs with irritation under the table, wishing I was outside playing with my friends.
I knew my father was different, that my life was not like my friends' lives. No one else travelled all the time or lived alone with their dad or had no TV or took avocado and alfalfa sprout sandwiches to school or took frequent road trips around Mexico or helped their dad steal cars.
But it was not until I began staying at friends' houses that I realised just how different my life was. Seeing my friends' families behind closed doors gave me a reference point. My friends were normal; they had brothers and sisters, and mums and dads; they stayed in one house; they watched TV together, their dads went to work in the morning; the kids took peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on white bread to school. They wore normal clothes instead of the hand-me-down, ill-fitting thrift-store garb my father favoured.
But at this age, I was not resentful of my father or envious of my friends' lives. I was too young to make such judgements; I just accepted that I was not like everyone else. Feelings of extreme embarrassment, followed by total rejection of my father, would take several more years to manifest. ♦