First They Tortured Him, Then, He Died

Photo credit: Upsplash Kateryna Hliznitova

This is part 1 of a 2-part series about a relative.

First They Tortured Him, Then, He Died.

The first time I met Jeffrey, he had just rounded the corner in the hallway of a special needs school in Brooklyn, New York. It was late September 1971. He appeared to be a pretty rugged guy. He wore a shirt with a set of pens in a pocket protector and carried a bunch of drawings on poster board. He had been drawing cartoons in one of the three classrooms of the private school, cartoons of Disney characters. Jeffrey would go on to finish four years in art school and get a single freelance job completing illustrations for the animated movie Fritz the Cat. I don’t think that his name is anywhere in the credits for his work and he never worked as an artist after that.

Jeffrey was born with a cleft palate and was protected during childhood in a way that made him overly dependent. An aunt observed that when Jeffrey was a young child, she had recommended that he receive counseling help.

Jeffrey spent the next 10 years or so, following art school, working at his parents’ deli in a Westchester suburb. It was hard work, as is all work associated with the food industry. He did not like some of the customers he dealt with in the area in which the shop was located. They were mostly poor people.

When the deli was sold, Jeffrey went to work in a bagel shop about a half hour from the apartment where he lived with his parents. He made a decent salary for that time. He left when he claimed that the father of the shop’s owner pulled a knife on him. The story seems far-fetched even with the passage of time. Like many of the benchmarks in his life, stories and experiences seemed to be enhanced to fit the demands made upon him to help support his family and take limited responsibility for his own development. He had become the good son. Jeffrey’s father was increasingly unable to meet the demands of working in the deli and also honed a hatred of many of the customers who came into the store to shop. When Jeffrey’s father died, his mother decided that there was nothing left for Jeffrey to do and began the process of leaving their apartment and buying a condo in Florida.

Jeffrey was 39 years old when he and his mother arrived in Florida. The community they settled in was for those 55 years old and older, which most people in the community were, and Jeffrey was an anachronism among the community’s residents.

Jeffrey’s work situation went from bad to worse with each passing year. The family went through the failed establishment of two delis and an ice cream shop, enterprises with which they were helped through the generosity of an aunt and uncle. They also tore through much of the money made by the sale of their Westchester deli. A footnote needs to be added: Jeffrey briefly went to work for a soft drink company upon arriving in Florida and soon left that work since he could not find his way to the stores the company had arranged for him to visit. A series of low-level fast food restaurants followed the failure of the two delis and the ice cream shop. He also tried to set up a candy store in the community where he lived, and that enterprise, the idea of some sort of entrepreneur, never opened its doors despite weeks of work by Jeffrey getting the shop ready.

During this part of his life, Jeffrey attended two years of culinary school, which was not inexpensive, then decided that kitchen work was too hot. There were opportunities to do that line of work on cruise ships, but Jeffrey in middle age was tied to his mother’s apron strings and was probably fearful of striking out on his own. Indeed, fear of striking out on his own was the hallmark of his life.