Johnny Case in Wonderland . . . hopelessly adrift in popular culture

When I was in college I worked as an intern for the F.B.I., solely because I didn’t have to undergo a background check because at that time the Bureau had in place a nepotistic system through which the offspring of Agents were given summer jobs if their parent vouched for them.  In a decision that probably went against his better judgment, my dad vouched for me.  It was about as good a summer job as anyone could ever hope to have.  I ran the mail room and was also an evidence tech, meaning I got to check evidence in and out and to transport various essential items from office to office as needed.  The Agents were deadly serious and whip smart and, in many cases, more than a little scary.  They were also uniformly kind, generous, rascally, and a hell of a lot of fun to drink with.  I don’t know how much money I spent learning to play liar’s dice with Agents in bars of varying quality in the hours after work, but it was worth every cent.  Never have I had so much fun losing so much cash.  They teased me mercilessly, but in time I was accepted, if not exactly as one of their own, then at least as someone who could hold his liquor and didn’t talk out of school, two traits that were highly valued.  Plus, in addition to my proving a valuable asset to their softball team, there was also the fact that my dad was the boss.  Not just mine, but theirs too.  Now I know what comes to mind—oh, they had to be nice to me but behind my back, and my dad’s, they said horrible things.  While that may have been true in my case—it didn’t take a rocket scientist to know I was never going to be in the Bureau—it surely wasn’t in my dad’s, who they almost to a person adored, with the only exceptions being the straight arrow super religious types, who rightly knew an enemy when they saw one. 

Dad was a great boss.  He gave you enough rope to hang yourself and expected you to do the damned job you were hired to do—efficiently and without complaint—and so long as you did he’d leave you alone to excel and make sure you got ahead.  He revered folks who were motivated and creative self-starters.  But if you didn’t pull your weight, he’d come down on you like a ton of bricks.  People who aren’t soft love working for a boss like that and before long my dad had cultivated an intensely loyal workforce that would happily run through a wall for him.  And that’s not metaphorical, as in his line of work (he was heavily involved in S.W.A.T. for years) they occasionally did run through walls.  While brandishing a boatload of high-powered weaponry.  The F.B.I. is serious business.  They don’t catch people accidentally and if they knock on your door it’s not because they’re suspicious; they’ve been watching you for months or years, they have a ridiculous amount of hard evidence against you for violation of any number of major Federal laws, and you are officially f***ed. 

But people also loved him because he was hell on wheels.  When he worked, he worked harder than anyone, and when he played he played harder than anyone too.  He smoked like Bogart, drank like Hemingway, and swore in heretofore untold ways.  I still occasionally shiver when I think of making the nightly commute home from the city to the suburbs with him.  We’d pull into 7-11 and my dad would give me a $10 bill and say, “Get the king cans, boy.”  I’d run in and grab the Coors tall-boys he wanted, or, on special occasions (like Friday nights, when the commute took forever), a pint of whiskey, and oftentimes a pack of L&M smokes too, and he’d proceed to smoke cigarettes with his left hand, drink beer with his right, drive with his knees, and talk the whole way home while looking at me in the passenger seat instead of at the road in front of him.  It always scared me to death, and it wasn’t made any easier by the fact that he didn’t believe in seat belts, a belief underscored more intensely by the fact that in the one major accident he was in he was rear-ended while at a standstill by a car going 60 MPH.  Dad saw the car coming in his rear view mirror and braced himself by locking his arms against his body.  The car was totaled, including the steering column, which as a result of my dad’s death grip on it was bent up and to the right a good foot upon impact.  Dad walked away unscathed.  No whip lash, no being thrown through the windshield, no injury of any kind.  Nope, in my dad’s mind it was just further proof that seat belts are for p****ies.  

My dad loved being an F.B.I. Agent, but for him the single most important thing about his being in the Bureau is that he fell on the right side of the demarcation line, by which I mean he came in under Hoover.  Dad wasn’t, and isn’t for that matter, loquacious, and in fact more often than not when asked details about a particular incident in which he was at least tangentially involved—the search for D.B. Cooper, the Wounded Knee Incident, the Patty Hearst case, the DeLorean sting, the manhunts for serial killers Leonard Lake & Charles Ng, etc.—he wouldn’t say anything.  He’d just look at you with only the tiniest hint of a smile and nothing else.  But the one thing he would always tell people, that mattered to him that people knew, is that he joined the Bureau under Hoover, which he, and others with similar tales, viewed as a much, much more significant accomplishment than being hired on to work at the F.B.I. in the post-Hoover era.  My dad is neither dumb nor an apologist and in recent years in his still rare moments of repose he’ll acknowledge Hoover’s indiscretions with power, but it doesn’t undercut the fact that Hoover did build the F.B.I. into a mighty institution from the ground up, and that’s no small accomplishment and Dad is certainly justified for being proud of having made the toughest of cuts in being selected to be a part of Hoover’s Bureau. 

I’ve been aware of Hoover my whole life—indeed he might have been the first “famous” person to enter my consciousness—and as I grew older and began reading and hearing things that undercut the myth with which I was raised—Hoover was a gay cross dresser, obsessed with other people’s sexual peccadilloes and the keeper of an immense store of secret files chock-full of illicitly obtained information to be used for blackmailing purposes as he saw fit and so on and so forth—the monumental idea of Hoover didn’t diminish; rather, he only became more interesting, more complex, more compelling.  Surely this is a man about whom a great movie could be made.  Unfortunately, Clint Eastwood’s J. Edgar is not that movie, which is a damn shame.  The performances are uniformly magnificent, especially Armie Hammer as Clyde Tolson and Leonardo DiCaprio in the title role, but they just don’t have a lot to work with, which is rather stunning given the juiciness of the source material.  But screenwriter Dustin Lance Black’s script, at least as it shows up on screen, is a mess.  It touches all the bases as concerns the varying incidents, known, believed, and conjectured, in Hoover’s life, but it just doesn’t get beneath the surface.  I don’t feel like I know anything more about Hoover’s psychology than I did before seeing the film and, more damning of Black’s script and Eastwood’s trademark funereal pacing, I was bored throughout, left sitting there in the dark to wonder what the game cast could’ve done with better material.  

Given the role of Hoover’s mother in the movie (played by Judi Dench), it was hard not to think of Scorsese’s The Aviator, in which another mother’s influence is also shown as a driving force in the adult life of the protagonist, in this case Howard Hughes, a larger than life historical figure also played by DiCaprio.  But that movie wisely covers a much shorter period of time—from Hughes’ foray into filmmaking with Hells Angels to the lone voyage of the Spruce Goose—and it does so with much more energy and verve.  It’s dark to be sure, but it’s also a fun and exciting movie that revels in the stories, true, apocryphal, and otherwise, that have become part and parcel with Hughes’ legend, whereas J. Edgar, with its creaky dictated memoir flashback structure and jumping around over a vast swath of time, never gives us enough to satisfy our desire to know more.  I really wanted to love this movie and was predisposed to do so, but its many flaws were just too much for me to get past.  Luckily for me, I still have my dad and his Hoover and all that conjures up and while in a lot of ways it’s not any more concrete than what the movie offers us, it’s more than enough.