During my 11th summer, in 1974, radios were still of the transistor sort, and WABC, 77 on your AM dial, was the most listened to Top 40 station in NYC. I loved music from an early age, and was a valued source for frustrated friends when they “just couldn’t remember” who sang “Billy Don’t Be a Hero” (Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods), or “Seasons in the Sun” (Terry Jacks). One song from that summer stays with me to this day: The one hit from the one-hit wonder Paper Lace: “The Night Chicago Died.” It was an account of a fictional shooting war between the Chicago Police Department and Al Capone’s army of gangsters during the Roaring 20s, as told by a policeman’s young son. I grew up a block from the beach in Coney Island, and the song seemed to be playing almost constantly on the radios that accompanied us to the beach, pool, and park that summer.
I could never let my friends see, and I sure wouldn’t have told anybody, but there was one line in that song that made me cry alone in my room. The boy and his mother anxiously await the safe return of his dad, the policeman, until, as the lyrics state: “The door burst open wide, and my daddy stepped inside, and he kissed my momma’s face, and he wiped her tears away.” Before I heard those lines on the radio, I seriously doubted whether such men existed. It was a revelation that not all men were like my father, and not all families were like ours.
You see, my father’s own arrival at home at the end of the work day was often an occasion for fighting, screaming, tears, and threats. He was a big man, 6 feet tall and 250 lbs, with door-width shoulders. Even in good times, I found my dad intimidating. What I didn’t know at the time was that Dad was a compulsive gambler, who couldn’t hold a job due to his gambling and the lying and stealing that accompanied it.
One night in particular still sticks out, from when I was about 10 years old. At the time, Dad had a good job driving a bus for a commuter line. On this night he came into the house with the canvas collection bag from his route. This was unusual, and dad claimed that he got back into the depot late and there was nobody there to collect the day’s receipts: Hundreds of dollars in small bills in that canvas bag. Mom did not believe him and accused him of taking the bag so that he could skim money for gambling. She was deathly worried that he’d lose another job. This sent him into a rage. He proceeded to take hundreds of bills out of the bag and rip them to shreds as my mother, my teenage sisters, and I cried and pleaded with him to stop. He then stormed out of the house. I spent the rest of that night sleepless, watching my mother and sisters completing the world’s saddest jig-saw puzzle, painstakingly taping the bills together so my father could deliver them back to the depot in the morning, hopefully saving his job.
So that is why I would sit in my room and cry when I listened to a silly pop song describing a fictional father, wiping the tears off of the face of his fictional wife, all while being observed by his admiring, fictional son.
When I was 20 years old, I became a New York City Police Officer. Nobody in my family had ever been a cop, and it was an unusual career choice for a Jewish kid. Perhaps that old song in my head had influenced my decision. I do really wonder about that. When I had 10 years on the job, I got married to a beautiful nurse, and four years later we had our first child, my son, who is now 18. I never got involved in anything as dramatic as a gun battle with Al Capone, but I did work in the streets, and my wife was always relieved when I came home safe from an evening shift. I never had to wipe her tears away, but I always kissed her face when I came in, and every chance that I got, I made sure that my son was watching.
KEITH HAYMES retired as an NYPD Lieutenant in 2006, after serving for 23 years. He now works for the Administration for Children’s Services as an Investigative Supervisor. He is a Brooklyn native who now lives in Staten Island with his wife of 22 years, Leslie, and their three children.
