144: Where Words Fail
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
When Mark was 15, his father was shot, and he reacted like a 15-year-old. He went up to each of his relatives, to anybody who'd listened, actually, and he declared, someday when he grows up, he would become a pro football player, and he would find the man who shot his father. It's really, you know, when I look back at that kid, that 15-year-old kid making that promise, it's pathetic, in a way. Well, it's such a particular vision of what a pro football player is, which is to say, as a kid, you're trying to conjure the notion of somebody who's very powerful, but also pure somehow. Yes. And I remember even then some friends saying, "Now, Mark, you know, pro football is kind of a lofty goal, you know, just maybe high school football." And I thought, years later, when I reflected back on that, I thought, "You know, geez, the kid's dad just was killed, you know, why disabuse him of some vision he's got?" Mark's dad was a bar-runner in Fresno, California. Two men came into the bar, played a game of pool, ordered two beers, then came into the back room and shot him. They didn't take any money. It was a gangland-style hit. And there was talk that Mark's father must be caught up with organized crime. So at 15, Mark started calling around until his mother made him stop. 17 years later, he moved back to Fresno, by this time he was a reporter for the LA Times, and he wanted to write a book investigating his dad's murder. He was so skittish that he and his wife got their home under assumed names, did not tell people where they lived. It's hard to make sense of all that, but there was a great deal of paranoia. I didn't want family to really know what I was doing, and I thought that if there was some way to, if someone got nervous about the questions I was asking, I wanted to make it difficult for them to try to find me. And I remember changing my sleep patterns, saw that I was awake all through the night. I was guarding the house. I had actually a gun that I had under the couch, I was sleeping on the couch. But in a way I became very childlike again. I really had to become a 15 year old again in some ways to get at this thing. Like, how do you mean? Well I think it wasn't terribly adult to try to think that you could come back to your hometown and try to hide your identity. I don't think that was really adult. While somebody close to us dies, part of us can remain suspended there at the moment it happened, and we stay there, part of us stays there, turning the whole thing over and over in our heads. Mark spent three years talking to informants about his father's murder. He went through police files, analyzed phone records, and in the end found credible evidence that his father was murdered just as he was about to blow the whistle on a drug ring, one with local police on its side, Mark believes. When he read his book about it, it's called "In My Father's Name" and still that was not enough. He's still not at peace. Have I been liberated by some of those answers? I don't know, liberation's the right word.
Transcription truncated.