Part 50 (2/2)

LEISURE HABITS: Spent most of his time reading, attended movies once in two weeks, dramas once in six months, attended football games, took long auto rides for pleasure, and smoked. Read cla.s.sics.

PERSONALITY AND TEMPERAMENT: Introverted temperament, chronic but benign; depression with occasional suicidal moods; emotional instability with suggestion of sensory pet.i.t mal; tendency to worry and anxiety; general neurotic failure to achieve happiness.

Except for the business about reading, and smoking, Reporter doesn't recognize in this Interesting Narrative the Sutton he knew. Which doesn't mean it's inaccurate. All we can have of Sutton, of each other, is Interesting Narratives.

Last week Reporter visited the Farm Colony, and Attica, and Sing Sing, and Eastern State, where he suffered an attack of claustrophobia in a cell exactly like Sutton's. Eastern State is now a national historic landmark, and though the curator didn't know exactly which cell was Willie's, they were all alike, all equally squalid and inhuman. Reporter left with a new appreciation of Sutton's grit, and more questions than ever about why Sutton wasn't able to put his good qualities to better use.

Reporter didn't set out to become such a hard-core Suttonologist. He doesn't know why he feels compelled to acc.u.mulate all this information, enough for fifty articles. Last night on the phone his editor, losing patience, called it jerk-offery. Reporter answered coolly, in a tone Sutton would have commended, that at least it wasn't cl.u.s.terf.u.c.kery.

Reporter tells himself that he wants to know all he can about Sutton because he's a reporter, driven by curiosity, and because he's an American, t.i.tillated by crime. But mainly he wants to know because of Bess. She's only part of Sutton's story, but for Reporter she's the central part. It doesn't matter if the old clips seem to suggest that Sutton's love for her was delusional. All love is delusional. What matters is that the love endured. Near the end of Sutton's life he was still talking about Bess, still describing her to his ghostwriter. There were other women in Sutton's past-he married at least twice-but he wrote about them with detachment, in contrast to the delicacy and melancholy with which he recalled Bess. Whether or not Bess returned Sutton's love, in any portion, she's the key to Sutton's ident.i.ty. And maybe to Reporter's. As a writer, as a man, Reporter has spent much of his life in two vaguely related quests-storytelling and love. Sutton never gave up on either. Through all his confinements and wanderings, he was a storyteller and a lover to the end. Reporter finds this inspiring. He finds it sad. Maybe Reporter is only projecting his psyche onto a dead bank robber, but so what? Storytelling, like love, requires some degree of projection. And if someone, someday, wants to project their psyche onto Reporter, so be it.

Closing Sutton's memoir, Reporter clicks on the TV. The news. A story about John Lennon's murder two weeks ago in New York. A story about President-elect Ronald Reagan promising to deregulate banks. A story about rising unemployment, and another about global population nearing five billion. A confusion of people. Finally, a feature about Christmas celebrations at a local roadside park, the oldest roadside park in Florida, called Weeki Wachee. A bizarre little rabbit hole, it's a gla.s.s dome built on an underwater spring, with pretty girls in mermaid costumes performing underwater acrobatics.

It sits just five miles down the road from where Sutton died.

Reporter jumps off the bed.

In the morning he heads south on Fort Dade Avenue, turns right on Cortez, left on U.S. 19, follows the signs until he sees plastic flags along a wall. Then a tall turquoise statue of a mermaid. It looks like the Statue of Liberty. Reporter never realized how much the Statue of Liberty looks like a mermaid.

Reporter buys a ticket and a program, which says one hundred million gallons of water bubble up daily from vast underground caverns beneath the park. Just fifty feet down the water surges up so violently, it will rip the face mask off a diver. Which is why no one knows just how far down the caverns go. No one, the program says, has ever gotten to the bottom of it.

Reporter enters a small theater. Instead of a stage there's an enormous gla.s.s wall. Music starts up, a sheer curtain rises, revealing an enormous canyon of blue-purple water. Suddenly on the other side of the gla.s.s are two mermaids. They wave at Reporter, and he forgets that they're pretending to be mermaids. They're too beautiful to be pretending. They swim backwards, sideways, upside down, their long blond hair twirling in their wake. They twist, tumble, waggle their fins, exult in the absence of gravity. Every few minutes they swim to the side of the tank and take a long suck on an air hose. The only break in the vivid dream.

After the show Reporter runs backstage, finds the dressing room. A sign on the door reads: Mermaids Only. He approaches the first mermaid who emerges. He introduces himself, says he's a reporter writing about Willie Sutton. The mermaid, now wearing her walking-around fin, made of s.h.i.+mmering aquamarine skintight fabric, like a pencil skirt that goes a foot past her feet, gives him a blank look.

You know, Reporter says, Willie Sutton? The bank robber? He died last month?

Blank.

Anyway, Reporter says, I just have this hunch that Sutton might have spent a lot of time here-at the end. That he might have stopped by this dressing room. Maybe spoke to you or one of the other mermaids?

She runs her fingers through her long wet hair, trying to untangle it. Guys come back here all the time, she says.

Right, Reporter says. But this guy would have referred to himself in the third person. Willie thinks you're beautiful. Willie thinks you look like a girl he knew in Poughkeepsie. That kind of thing.

The mermaid adjusts the waistband of her fin. I don't know what to tell you, mister. The name doesn't ring a bell.

Maybe you could ask some of your fellow mermaids?

She takes a deep breath, as if sucking on the air hose. Hold on.

She pivots-not easy in her fabric fin-and waddles back into the dressing room.

Reporter leans against the wall. A minute pa.s.ses. Two. He's never smoked in his life, but he has the strangest craving for a Chesterfield.

The dressing room door opens. A different mermaid emerges. She's not quite as pretty as the other mermaid. But-blond hair, blue eyes-her beauty seems more wholesome. More old-fas.h.i.+oned. Willie's type, Reporter thinks.

She too is wearing a fabric fin. Skin-tight. Gold-specked. She sashays toward Reporter, smiling.

Reporter knows, he sees it in her blue eyes, she's got an envelope containing a letter from Willie. Or else the ma.n.u.script of The Statue in the Park. She'll say Reporter's name, and Reporter will ask how she knows his name, and she'll say: Willie-he had a hunch you'd be stopping by. Then she and Reporter will go for coffee, and discover a thousand things in common, and eventually fall in love, and get married, and have babies, and their life together will be Willie's everlasting gift to Reporter. He can see it all. He reaches out his hand, starts to speak, but the mermaid sidles around him, past him, into the arms of a young man just behind him.

You look beautiful, the young man tells her.

Uck, she whispers, I can't wait to go home and get out of this stupid costume.

Reporter walks slowly out to his car. He drives to the airport. Along the way he turns on the radio. A story about the first-ever s.p.a.ce shuttle, which is due to blast off in six months, directly east of Spring Hill. Reporter looks out over the black swamps and the dense woods and pictures the launch. He knows Sutton would give anything to see it. He suddenly remembers something Sutton said. Though it was eleven years ago, almost to the day, he hears that craggy voice, that smoke-cured Brooklyn accent, filling the car, clearer than the radio, and it makes Reporter smile.

Hey kid-did you know that when the astronauts got back to earth, Collins was a mess. He couldn't eat, he couldn't sleep. He'd drift off in the middle of a sentence. The man could not function. Finally he told the docs at NASA that after gazing at the moon all that time, after orbiting it again and again and never actually touching it, he'd fallen hopelessly in love. His words, not mine. In love with the moon-imagine kid? Imagine how f.u.c.kin lonely you have to be to fall in love with the moon?

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

Deepest thanks to Andre Aga.s.si, Hildy Linn Angius, Ellen Archer, Spencer Barnett, Violet Barnett, Lyle Barnett, Aimee Bell, Elisabeth Dyssegaard, Fred Favero, Gary Fisketjon, Rich Gold, Paul Hurley, Bill Husted, Mort Janklow, Ginger Martin, Eric Mercado, McGraw Milhaven, Dorothy Moehringer, Sam O'Brien, J. P. Parenti, Joni Parenti, Kit Rachlis, Derk Richardson, Jaimee Rose, Jack La Torre, and Peternelle van Arsdale.

Readers Group Guide.

Introduction.

Willie Sutton was one of the most notorious, infamous and frequently quoted figures of the twentieth century-yet little is known about him. From the 1920s to the 1950s he robbed dozens of banks, made off with perhaps two million dollars and escaped three maximum security prisons-but how? And why? Who was Willie Sutton and what drove him?

From scattered facts and widely conflicting accounts J.R. Moehringer builds a cohesive narrative of Sutton's life and an intriguing portrait of his psyche. Charming, gallant, loyal, romantic, honor-bound, self-deluded, Moehringer's Sutton is essentially driven by two things-an indomitable will to survive and the boundless memory of one lost love.

Discussion Questions.

1. How is Willie Sutton an atypical criminal, unlike those more commonly found in gangster movies and noir novels?

2. Before they set out on their journey, Sutton tells Reporter that newspapers deal in myths, as do ”comic books, Horatio Alger, the Bible, the whole American Dream.” Sutton adds, ”I used to buy in . . . That's what got me so mixed up in the first place.” What does Sutton mean? What myths have been highly influential in your own life?

3. For good or ill, how did growing up in Irish Town shape Willie? What did he learn from the neighborhood code of honor? From seeing his parents struggle financially? How did his abuse at the hands of his brothers forever alter the trajectory of his life?

4. Discuss Willie's best friends Eddie and Happy. What do they provide for Willie, and what do they cost him? How do they mirror his brothers?

5. What's the larger significance of the brutal scene at the slaughterhouse? Does it come to mind at other moments in the book, such as when Willie crosses paths with Arnold Schuster?

6. Sutton tells Reporter and Photographer that the ”real hero” of the 1969 moon landing was Mike Collins, the one astronaut who never set foot on the lunar surface. What does Sutton mean? In what ways does this remark open a window into Willie's worldview?

7. What role does Daddo, a relatively minor character, play in Willie's development and later life?

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