Teddy Atlas - Atlas: From the Streets to the Ring: A Sons Struggle to Become a Man

From the STREETS to the RING:

A SON'S Struggle to Become a MAN

O F ALL THE PEOPLE WHO HAVE AFFECTED MY LIFE, and influenced the choices Ive 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 doesnt 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 couldnt afford to pay, he didnt 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 Doctors Hospital. He also built over a hundred houses on Staten Island, including the two we lived ina small one-family home, and, later, a larger Colonial that he built across the streetplus 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 shortchangedif not consciously at least in our hearts. Maybe it was easier for him to express emotion toward his patients than his family. I dont 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 wasnt as if I didnt have to work hard for his attention. I did. I showed an interest in science because he liked science. Id 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 Years Eve once, around 1964 or 65, for a maternity case. I must have fallen asleep in the doctors 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 fathers full attention wasnt focused on me.

My mother, Mary, suffered from my fathers inattention more than any of us. She was Irish and very beautiful. Shed 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 Gagathe nickname Id given her when I was young), had refused to let her go. Thats for tramps, she said. Who knows what direction my mothers life would have taken if she had gone? Im 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 daughters 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? Didnt you know his son died today? Her daughter was devastated. I didnt 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 Todds 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 Todds grave site and sleeping there. Truthfully, I dont 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 mothers drinking really became a problem. It probably wouldnt be fair to lay the blame for her drinking on Todds death or my fathers neglect, since alcoholism ran in her family, but those things certainly didnt help.

Ten oclock on a Wednesday. Im in my room, doing homework. From downstairs comes a scream.

You bastard. You dont 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?

Its 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. Ive cleaned up all the evidence.

The next day in school, I dont say anything to my friends. I dont want anyone to know. Its 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 didnt understand. Nobody in my family was getting what they wanted or needed. We were just splintered, all going off in our own directions.