The Note in the Brass Knocker

In the summer of 1979, at the age of 20, I found myself once again sharing a house with my father. My father was single again and I had just finished my junior year of college. He would be leaving for Europe after teaching the first summer session, which ended in the latter half of June and asked me to mind the house until his return.

In the meantime, we had to spend a month and a half trying to live together somewhat harmoniously, which, with my father, was never easy. I had a job at a private club downtown called Élan, which was Philadelphia’s equivalent to New York’s Studio 54. I didn’t see him that often as I worked nights as a buffet runner, porter and bar-back and my father was teaching during the day.

The trouble first began when he complained I was eating too much. I would come home from work at about 3:30 am ravenously hungry and raid the refrigerator. Then one day my father said I had to contribute more groceries as I was eating more than half the food in the house, but buying considerably less than half.

I tried to keep up with the grocery buying, but apparently it wasn’t enough because one day I came home late at night, or rather, early in the morning to find a bicycle chain lock around the refrigerator door handles. A typed note was stuck to the door inviting me to take my meals elsewhere until he was gone.

I had bought some of the food that was in that refrigerator and, damn, I was hungry and bicycle chain locks are notoriously easy to crack. It took me all of about two minutes to open it. I tried not to eat so much that it was obvious I’d been in there and when I was finished I wrapped the chain lock back around the handles.

This cat and mouse game went on for about a week and then one afternoon I came home to get ready for work and found the lock was off the refrigerator. I figured he had finally come to his senses and felt some sense of obligation to feed his son. So I probably was a little less conscientious about how much I ate.

That night I came home from work as usual in the middle of the night to find the front door locked with the chain on the inside. It was at that moment I saw a typewritten 3x5 index card in the brass knocker. It read:

IF YOU WON’T LIVE BY MY RULES
YOU CAN FIND SOMEWHERE
ELSE TO SPEND THE NIGHT.

I remember smiling and thinking at that moment, even in the heat of anger, my father took the time to sit down at his IBM Selectric and type the note. This I viewed as only a minor inconvenience. I ran through all the options in my mind, none of them having to do with looking elsewhere to spend the night.

No one knew that house better than I—from the cellar crawl space to the roof—I knew every inch of it. There was a hatch in the ceiling of the back third-floor bedroom that was never locked, so I knew I would have to get on the roof. 

I went around to the narrow alley in the back, saw that it was easier to get on to the roof of a neighbor’s house two doors down. All the houses on the block were attached row houses so I could walk across the roofs to my father’s house. I climbed up a drain pipe and then tip-toed across to my father’s roof, opened the hatch, and dropped down quietly.

Once inside the house I went down the staircase, which was in the back of the house, to the kitchen on the first floor. I unlocked the chain lock, which was back on the refrigerator, and ate my fill. When I was done, I took the 3x5 index card my father had left in the knocker, folded it in half and wrote on the other side:

I then took the tent-folded index card and put it on the top shelf of the refrigerator and locked it back up. I went quietly upstairs to my room, which was next to my father’s, closed the door and went to sleep, expecting to be woken up by his rage.

True to form he hammered on my door so hard I expected it to come off the hinges. He didn’t wait for a response, but barged in as I had not locked it.

“How did you get in?!” he demanded, holding up my note.

I opened one eye and said, “A magician never reveals his secrets.”

At that moment he must have come to the realization he’d been one-upped and nothing he said or did was going to change that fact. He turned around and stormed back out. He would be leaving for Europe in a week. There were no more arguments about food and the lock never went back on the refrigerator.