Atlas
Authors: Teddy Atlas
From the STREETS to the RING:
A SON'S Struggle to Become a MAN
and Peter Alson
To my wife, Elaine, thank you for giving
me the two best things in my life. To
my children, Nicole and Teddy III,
thank you for giving me two reasons to
never again close the door on things like
faith and love.
O
F ALL THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE AFFECTED MY LIFE,
and influenced the choices I've made, none has been more important than my father.
Dr. Theodore Atlas, Sr., was legendary around Staten Island. A Hungarian Jew, originally from the Bronx, he was the kind of doctor that doesn't exist anymore. He wore a bow tie and a rumpled old raincoat and he drove an old wreck of a car to go on his house calls. He traveled all over the island, taking care of people, no matter what time of the day or night. If his patients couldn't afford to pay, he didn't charge them, and when he did charge them, the most it would be was about five dollars. Sometimes they paid him with pies or cookies. In the 1970s, when I was a teenager, my mother started calling him Columbo, after the character in the TV show, because of the way he dressed and because he always seemed distracted and preoccupied.
Besides his medical practice, my father somehow found time to found and build two hospitals, Sunnyside and Doctor's Hospital. He also built over a hundred houses on Staten Island, including the two we lived inâa small one-family home, and, later, a larger Colonial that he built across the streetâplus some Winn-Dixies and condos down South. Think of it: here was a doctor who owned a crane and bulldozer, and on Sundays,
to relax after spending an eighty-hour week practicing medicine and taking care of people, he bulldozed the empty lots on the hill where we lived so he could build houses. He even built the sewer system for the whole neighborhood.
Because my father poured all of his time and energy and feeling into his work, my mother and I and my four younger siblings, Tommy, Meri, Todd, and Terryl, often felt shortchangedâif not consciously at least in our hearts. Maybe it was easier for him to express emotion toward his patients than his family. I don't know. Even today, I run into people who were patients of his, and they all talk about how compassionate he was with them. But at home it was hard for him to show anything. He considered emotions a sign of weakness. I remember one time we were in the car and he made fun of us kids for crying over something. He started going “Wahhhh!” in this loud, mocking way. After that I never cried again, even many years later at his funeral.
Of all the kids, I was always his favorite, which made for an odd kind of tension in the house. In some ways it was like we were two families. One family was my mother, Tommy, Terryl, Todd, and Meri. The other family was my father and me. It wasn't as if I didn't have to work hard for his attention. I did. I showed an interest in science because he liked science. I'd get him to take me out on house calls with him, because that way I could be with him and spend time with him. You have to understand, this was a man who left the house every day at six-thirty or seven a.m. and came home at ten-thirty or eleven p.m. Any time that I got with him was time that I had to steal. He never asked me to go with him. I just went. Occasionally, he would get a call in the middle of the night, and I would hear the phone and wake up. By the time he was coming out of his room and down the stairs, I was sitting there, ready to go. He would tell me to go back to my room, but sometimes he would give in and let me go with him. I remember going with him on New Year's Eve once, around 1964 or '65, for a maternity case. I must have fallen asleep in the doctor's waiting room. At midnight, one of the nurses woke me up. They were all pouring soda and champagne, saying, “Your father just delivered the first baby of the New Year.” Half-asleep, I joined the celebration, knowing that it was a special thing to be there, even if my father's full attention wasn't focused on me.
My mother, Mary, suffered from my father's inattention more than any of us. She was Irish and very beautiful. She'd been Miss Staten Island in 1940. Part of the prize that went along with the honor was a screen test in Hollywood. But her mother, my grandmother Helen Riley (called Gagaâthe nickname I'd given her when I was young), had refused to let her go. “That's for tramps,” she said. Who knows what direction my mother's life would have taken if she had gone? I'm sure she thought about that over the years. My mother was the complete opposite of my father: very social, talkative, outgoing, used to getting attention, and with a fondness for nice things. My father, meanwhile, was driving around in jalopies and wearing shoes until there were holes in them, caught up in his own world, and his very different concerns.
When my brother Todd died at the age of five, it pushed us all further apart. With some families it might have helped draw them closer; not with ours. Todd had been born retarded and with an enlarged heart, and my father, who read all the medical journals and was always up on all the latest procedures, felt that open-heart surgery, which was relatively new at the time, could help him. It was the kind of thing where if nothing was done, Todd would die by the time he was sixteen. So my father made the decision that he should have the operation, and he was there in the operating room watching when Todd died on the table.
Years later, a woman named Sally Cusack told me that her daughter's baby had gotten sick later that same day, and my father had gone over to their house and treated the baby. When Sally Cusack found out that her daughter had called my father, she was upset. She said, “You called Dr. Atlas? Didn't you know his son died today?” Her daughter was devastated. “I didn't know,” she said. “He came and he never said a thing.” That was my father to a tee.
He never said a thing.
My mother was devastated by Todd's death, and she held it against my father that he had pushed for the operation. In the aftermath, she had what I would now call a breakdown. For a while she was even taking a blanket down to Todd's grave site and sleeping there. Truthfully, I don't remember much about that time. But I think about the irony of it: how in our family, where feelings were neglected, this kid, my brother, had an enlarged heart, and it turned out to be a death sentence for him.
There was a period after Todd died when my brothers and sister and
I lived with relatives and friends. It was around that time that my mother's drinking really became a problem. It probably wouldn't be fair to lay the blame for her drinking on Todd's death or my father's neglect, since alcoholism ran in her family, but those things certainly didn't help.
Ten o'clock on a Wednesday. I'm in my room, doing homework. From downstairs comes a scream.
“You bastard. You don't even care.”
I hear the sound of dishes being broken. I close my eyes, wishing it would stop. It keeps going, the yelling keeps going, the crash of dishes. Finally, a door slams, and there is silence. I go out of my room and down the stairs. My father comes out of the kitchen, looks at me.
“Dad?”
“It's okay. Go back to your room.”
He walks past me and up the stairs. I stand there for a moment, then go into the kitchen. The entire floor is covered with broken dishes. The overhead cabinets are open. I get some paper shopping bags out of the drawer by the sink and start picking up shards of china and crockery. By midnight, the kitchen is spotless. I've cleaned up all the evidence.
The next day in school, I don't say anything to my friends. I don't want anyone to know. It's better if I keep it inside.
B
Y THE TIME
I
WAS IN MY LATE TEENS,
I
WAS STARTING TO
get into trouble. At Curtis, the public high school, I was a decent student and I played on the football team. But I got into fights. I was an angry kid. I had this rage inside me that I didn't understand. Nobody in my family was getting what they wanted or needed. We were just splintered, all going off in our own directions.
My father was extraordinary in so many ways, but he had been led by his own difficult childhood to keep everything bottled up inside, and it had become his code, his sense of how everyone should be. This was a guy who stayed up all night reading books, who read so much he broke blood vessels in his eyes when he got older, but who only read nonfiction because he considered fiction a waste of time. (Not that he didn't believe in the imagination or think about what was possible. It's just that he was
of the opinion that going into places that didn't exist was, for the most part, a luxury and a weakness. The world was what was in front of you, and everything else was frivolous.)
His own father had committed suicide. He never talked about it, and I didn't know about it until much later, when my mother told my wife. From what I was able to learn, my grandfather was a gambler, and my grandmother threw him out of the house for gambling and then he hanged himself.
I'm sure my father held that against my grandmother in some ways, but at the same time he respected her. She was a tough woman. She had three sons and she told each of them what he was going to be when he grew up. “Theodore, you're going to be a doctor. Eugene, you're going to be an orthodontist. Reynold, you're going to be an engineer.” And each of them became what she'd told them they'd become.
My father once told me a story about how he was driving in a car with his mother to the hospital to see Eugene, the middle brother, who was undergoing an emergency appendectomy. My father was driving fast, and the roads at that time were mostly dirt. The car went around a curve and the door swung open and my father's mother fell out. He didn't even realize it at first. When he finally did realize it and went back to get her, she didn't act the way most women would act. She got up out of a ditch and brushed off the dirt. When she opened the door of the car all she said was, “Theodore, are we lost?”
This was what formed him. He was a guy who, if you talked about certain things and he thought it was wasteful, he would tell you. He'd say, “You're talking in too many words.” In a way he was almost like a machine. No emotions, just principle and action. He suppressed all his emotions, and he got very uncomfortable when anyone else, any one of us, expressed ours. He couldn't handle it. The frustration of trying to get emotion out of a man like that was maddening. It was in part what drove my mother to drink. And me to do the things I did.
I was in my teens when I started hanging out with the kids down the hill in Stapleton, which was a rough section of town. There were housing projects down there, a needle park where all the drug dealers hung out, and plenty of ways to get yourself into trouble. I was still trying to get my father's attention, but in a different way than when I'd gone out on house calls with him, a much angrier way.
I don't know if he was aware of the extent of it, but I was cutting school a lot. For a while he used to force me to get up in the morning, and he'd drive me to school before he went to work. Maybe he didn't have the time or the patience to be a real parent and get involved in a more active way. He thought that if he made me go, the rest would take care of itself. He didn't understand there was more to it. He didn't understand that as a parent it took more than throwing a glass of water on your son in the morning when he didn't wake up. He should have known that something was wrong on a deeper level. As a doctor he certainly knew that he had to do more than inject medicine into a patient; that he had to take time to talk to people, to help them recover. But as a parent, he just didn't get that.
Halfway through my senior year, in 1974 or 1975, I stopped going to school entirely. I dropped out. I was hanging around with the Sullivan brothers down in Stapleton. I'd met Genie Sullivan first. He was about my age, with the Irish gift of gab, and funny, always making people laugh. One time, he and I stole these little manila envelopes from a stationery store and filled them with oregano, then stood on the corner, selling them as nickel bags of marijuana. We were so stupid we stayed on the same block for hours, until eventually some of the guys we sold them to came back. I mean, we were standing there three hours later
in the exact same spot,
and this car full of Puerto Rican guys drove up, and the driver threw the manila envelope in Genie's face. “Who you guys think you're fucking with?” Genie, who knew I was there backing him upâand by then I'd already developed something of a reputation as a street fighterâsmiled and said, “What's the matter? It wasn't any good? Don't you know you have to put it
on
the sausage before you cook it?” These guys went crazy. One of them got out of the car and came at me. I wound up decking him. We were just lucky they didn't have guns.
Later on, I got to be friends with Genie's brothers. There were five of them altogether, and they kind of adopted me. Even though they were screwed up in various ways, drugs and alcohol and other things, they were a family, they were together. I wasn't seeing the problems, I was just seeing that they were a family. Over time, I got really close to Billy Sullivan, who was about eight years older than me, twenty-five or twenty-six, and who had a wife named Linda and two young kids in Jersey. Billy was a skinny guy and a sharp dresser, very charismatic and likable.
He knew his way around. He taught me stuff like craps and blackjack. He had all the odds down, knew all the numbers, and I was impressed by that. We'd play craps with guys in the street. Billy was also a very good pool playerâI was pretty good, but he was very goodâand we'd go into bars and hustle money that way.
There were other things that drew me to him. He had a good singing voice. I loved to hear him sing “Under the Boardwalk.” We'd be in a bar, and I'd play it on the jukebox and get him to sing along with it. I'd say, “Sing, Billy,” and he would. He got a kick out of the fact that I liked his singing. If anyone in the bar didn't appreciate it as much as I did, I'd tell 'em, “You better start clapping and smiling or else get the fuck out.”
I looked up to Billy. When I think about it now, I can see he was giving me something I wasn't getting at home, a kind of interest and attention that I was starved for. He wasn't just a criminal, either. There was this other side to him. He coached a Little League team in Stapleton, and he asked me to come down and watch. So I went one day, and there he was, standing in the third base coaching box, wearing a uniform, talking to the kids. When he saw me, he winked. I'll never forget that. It had an effect on me, seeing him in that setting, watching him with those kids. Of course, he had to play the tough guy, too, so he said to me, “I wish there was a line on
this
fuckin' game.”