I never had a father. This is the way I always felt; even if it wasn’t literally true, it was figuratively so. I grew up without a father and never learned all the things a boy is supposed to learn from his father. In 1962, when I was three years old, my father, a professor teaching Criminology at Loyola University in Chicago, died. He was thirty-seven. After her husband’s early demise, my mother packed up her three kids and moved back to the Bronx to live with her mother in a one-bedroom apartment in a four-family house my grandfather had built in 1925. One year after we moved in, my grandmother died badly, but quickly, from cancer. The next year my mother’s best friend died as well -- some people just cannot catch a break. We moved upstairs to the apartment I grew up in, another 1-bedroom. It was smaller than her mother’s apartment, but we all squeezed in. I lived there until I graduated college at twenty-one years old. It was the 60s and a...(Read Full Article)