The Neighborhood Watch

I never understood why my father, who was a lawyer, or at least had a law degree was never granted a concealed-carry permit by the city of Philadelphia. Unfortunately that never kept him from carrying his gun on him at times, most notably when he was doing his tour on the Neighborhood Watch.

The way the Neighborhood Watch worked back in 1980s in big cities such as Philadelphia was that the committee would assign two people every night to patrol the neighborhood. There were enough people in the group, usually from forty to fifty, which it usually amounted to one night a month patrolling the neighborhood from eleven p.m. to seven a.m.

The two-person nightly patrol was given flashlights, whistles and a cell phone, which at the time was quite uncommon and very expensive, paid for out of the modest budget of the Neighborhood Watch Committee.

One night as he prepared to go out on his monthly patrol he said to me, “Fuck the whistle. I’m packing heat,” at which point I reminded him that he didn’t have a concealed-carry permit for the 9mm automatic. He said that would only be an issue if he actually used it. That was exactly what concerned me. We’re talking about a man who recorded Death Wish on the Betamax and watched it dozens of times.

I was always concerned that the gun was going to get my father in trouble. He had such a short fuse and just about anything could set him off—a barking dog or people sitting on his stoop.

Predictably enough, after that night on his Neighborhood Watch patrol he was kindly asked not to return, that his services were no longer needed.

Fortunately, the only other time the gun came out, was the time he found his house was being burglarized while he was upstairs napping. When he was awoken by somebody in the house, he quietly called 911 and pulled the 9mm Luger out of the drawer of his nightstand. He quietly went down there stairs to find a burglar, nothing but ass and elbows, buried deep into his stereo cabinet pulling wires.

The click from my father’s automatic caused the burglar to hit his head on the top of the cabinet as he struggled to extricate himself. When he turned around he found himself facing my father seated in a chair holding the gun on him.

“In the state of Pennsylvania I could legally shoot you for unlawfully entering my home,” my father casually informed the burglar. “I’m debating whether to shoot or simply wait for the police to arrive, which should be momentarily.”

The burglar slowly raised his hands and said, “Oh, man, don’t shoot me. I’m only trying to make a living.”

“Have a seat,” my said, indicating the step up to his study.

Fortunately my father was able to control his anger long enough for the police to arrive and take the hapless burglar to jail. That was exactly how my father told me the story.

Two Hundred Record Albums

During my first winter break from college I was at my father’s house. I was going to spend the spring semester with him. But it was still a couple weeks away, so my father gave me some Richard Brautigan and Hunter Thompson books to read while I listened to the WMMR, Philadelphia’s best-known rock station, on the radio.

The last week of December WMMR was having a contest in which they were giving away the 200 best-selling record albums of 1976. To enter you had to mail in a postcard with your name and address. I mentioned the contest to my father because I knew he always had some angle on such contests.

Ever since he was a kid haunting the casinos of Las Vegas in 1949, while his mother waited out the six-week residency for a Nevada divorce, he was learning how to work different gambling games and machines. He was befriend by dealers who showed him tricks and other sleight of hand moves with cards and poker chips. He even figured how to rig an electronic horse-racing game to pay out every time he played it. All this at age of 12.

“You have to figure out a way to give yourself a slight edge over the next guy,” he would say. “If you have to mail in a postcard and you mail in two, you have twice the chance of winning than anyone else. Three postcards give you a three times greater chance and so on. Although one or two additional postcards won’t give you that much greater probability of winning overall you still dramatically increase your chances in comparison to any other person.”

“Yeah, but they only allow one entry per person,” I pointed out.

“Then you send a bigger postcard,” he said. “The same concept applies to size as well. If you send a postcard twice the size of a regular 3x5 or 4x6 postcard you still have twice the chance of winning.”

“Can you send bigger postcards through the mail?”

“Yeah, the mistake people, though, is putting only the postcard amount of postage on it. If you have a postcard that’s bigger than 4x6, you just have to put first class postage on it. And if it’s bigger than what they allow for first class, you have to put the postage for large envelopes on it.

“Where am I going to get a big postcard?”

“You make it,” he said. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

We went into his darkroom where he got out some artboard and an X-acto knife and preceded to cut out a large postcard.

 “It’s best to make it out of artboard and cut it into a parallelogram with sharp corners, so that when they reach in to the barrel to pull out entries, it will jab their hand and their natural inclination will be to pull it out and voilà!—they have a winner.

Three weeks later I was notified—by postcard—that I was indeed a winner.

The Paris Room

I called it the Paris Room because the entire wall space, such as it was, was covered with prints, maps and photos of Paris. But to call it a room was a family joke. It was more of a closet. To be more precise, a water closet that measured a mere 5' x 6'. It was the first floor bathroom of my father’s row house on Wallace Street in Philadelphia’s Art Museum Area.

It was occupied only by a toilet, immediately to your right when you walked in, and a small sink to the left of the toilet. The rest of floor space was unoccupied because of the simple, but curious fact, that underneath the carpeting and hidden by it, was a large trap door that lead to the basement. The carpeting could be pulled back and the trap door opened and leaned against the wall opposite the door. Steep wooden steps lead from just below the sink down to the basement. The most macabre aspect of the bathroom came from the fact that the edge of the trap door opening was within a foot of the entrance to the bathroom.

A photo showing the door (center) to the Paris Room
No photo exists of the interior.

The real treachery of the Paris Room came from the fact that my father had a bad habit of leaving the trap door open. If you lived in the house or spent enough time there, you would always be wary of stepping into the Paris Room, lest you step into the dark abyss and tumble headlong down the stairs into the unlit basement, which was notorious for harboring very large rats. So, theoretically, if you didn’t survive the fall, and there was high probability you wouldn’t and your body not discovered for a while it would provide a feast for the rats.

It was a bit unnerving, especially to us kids to be sitting on the toilet staring into the gaping black maw of a basement that none of us would have been caught dead in alone. The blackness of the basement fueled our imaginations to speculate as to what lay beyond. I’m sure my sisters never used the bathroom without closing the trap door first.

You might rightly ask if anyone ever did fall down the stairs and land in the basement. The answer is yes. There was one such case. Unfortunately, I don’t know all the details, but sometime in the 1980s when my father was dating again after his last divorce, he had a woman over to the house on their first date.

Of course my father had forgotten to close the trap door and hadn’t even remembered he had left it open when his date asked to use his bathroom. She opened the bathroom door and was quickly sucked into the abyss of my father’s basement.

An ambulance was called, as was, ultimately, a personal injury lawyer. My first fear at the time was that my father might have let his homeowner’s insurance lapse as he had done once or twice before since paying off the mortgage sometime in the late 1970s. I do vaguely remember an insurance company representing him though and ultimately the case was settled out of court for the vague, but often-cited, “undisclosed amount.”