Free Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn Page B

getaway, the money. Lifted from obscurity to sensation, a level of fame that a writer of his talent deserves falls into her lap. Huck Finn , Catcher in the Rye , his novel the equal of these masterpieces, but who would kidnap him, where would they send the ransom note, who would even notice if he was gone? A few months later my father walks into a bank, passes his first forged check. Never shy in front of a camera, he allows himself to be photographed. This first time he even uses his real name, Jonathan Robinson Flynn. Setting himself up for a fall, laying his own end. In subsequent forays he will use an alias, his favorite being “Millard Fillmore,” the president who abolished debtor’s prison.
    If you ask him how he got into the checking business, my father will tell you that Dippy-do Doyle and Suitcase Fiddler heard about his head injury and came looking for him. Doyle, in this version, spends his days playing tennis and orchestrating scams—the brains, apparently, behind a few small-time local hoods. Doyle arranges a meeting at the Dorchester HoJo’s on the Southeast Expressway. Does my father read about Watergate while waiting? About Patty? Is he drinking buddies with Doyle? Has he boasted about his small-time exploits, his nerve, his willingness to do anything? Doyle and Suitcase arrive with a check made out to my father for $8,800, drawn on the John Hancock Insurance Company. Doyle says he arranged for it because of my father’s accident. My father knows it’s shady but can’t resist going along. Suitcase drives him to the Prudential Bank in downtown Boston, just as Doyle ordered, and my father opens an account with the check. On days when my father is the dupe, not the mastermind, he will say, I looked at the check, I had no doubt—I’m him, I’m Flynn. Thus began two and a half years in the checking business . My father will say that by the time he passed the second check he knew it was illegal, but he was “already cooked” after the first one. Asked why he didn’t go to the police, he’ll say that Doyle knew about his kids and threatened to blow our heads off if he didn’t go along. In one version Suitcase Fiddler is the driver, a low-life hood who robbed banks by gunpoint in Canada but now merely drives. He admires my father for never using a gun. In another version Suitcase is a “paper-hanger,” a master, the one who forges the checks, a true artist . The three of them continue to meet at HoJo’s over the next couple years, now Suitcase drives my father straight there after each job. Doyle takes the count, gives everyone their cut. My father claims he never got more than twenty percent, an amount which still irks him, considering he took all the risk— If I had a loaded Magnum I’d walk up to Dippy-do Doyle right now and put it to his head .
     
    Patty’s an heiress, I have a route. All our money comes from newspapers. I earn so much per paper, very little, all told. My real money comes in the form of tips, left in envelopes between the doors. On Sunday I leave the envelopes, write how much they owe on the outside, always hoping for more. Eventually I even take to putting a little plus sign after what they owe, as a hint. I am saving my money to buy my mother a new car. The current model is a Dodge Dart, the same color as our refrigerator, avocado green, it coughs and sputters in the driveway before it warms up. Summer shuffles into fall. Still gone, our heiress. Experts draw lines on the photograph of Patty in the Hibernia Bank, lines along where her gun was aiming to show it was aiming at no one. From this they determine that the gun was unloaded, though it could also mean that at that moment her mind strayed briefly from its purpose. Or maybe when robbing a bank it is enough to simply brandish a gun, generally, in the direction of the money. Another expert draws a line from one SLA member’s gun, to prove that this gun was aimed at Patty the entire time, that she was, in fact, a