Growing up Uncle Mack would come over to my grandparents’ house to visit and he was a great uncle. He would swim in the pool, toss us kids around and chase us through the back yard. When he was with the adults he would crack jokes but mostly held his opinion about topics that were more serious in nature. When he was around things were great, but then there would be long periods of time where Uncle Mack wasn’t around and didn’t stop by for visits. During these times my parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles would talk in hushed tones if Uncle Mack was brought up. It was eavesdropping on these conversations that brought the revelation that maybe there was something more to Uncle Mack. Through these snippets of conversation I learned that he wasn’t as nice as I knew him to be and he did some bad things for bad people.
As I got older I grew more and more interested in Uncle Mack, I began to snoop around about his past. Eventually I found out he got into a lot of fights as a kid and got tossed in and out of juvie a few times before he was formally arrested for assault at the age of eighteen. After that one arrest there was no more evidence of him getting into trouble with the law again. I knew that there had to be more to it than that because he was far older than eighteen when I was growing up and my family still talked about him being a bad guy. I became obsessed with finding out more and more, so I petitioned the local jail for their records under the freedom of information act and was surprised at how easy they just handed me copies of them. Through that initial digging I found the start of the trail that led me to this point. I found out in the records that my uncle had been cellmates with Thomas “T.T” Taglia, a low level thug for a known crime outfit.
I spent weeks on the internet searching for this “T.T.” and eventually found out that he had spent years of hard time in jail then was eventually paroled and was working as a mechanic about an hour drive from where I lived. I tracked him down and he flat out refused to talk to me, but I was persistent and eventually he agreed to tell me a few things. I asked him about Mack Schlage and he had never heard of him. I was deflated but as a last ditch effort, I took out of picture of Uncle Mack when he was younger and showed it to him. Taglia looked at the picture and smiled a gap toothed smile, and said “Sure, I know this guy. But I ain’t never heard of him being called Mack. The man in this picture is Naps.” I was shocked as I stuttered “Naps? Naps who?” and Taglia just chuckled and said “I don’t know. They always just called him Naps, even in the joint it was ‘Naps! Back in line’, ‘Naps, you got a visitor’. It was always Naps.” After that Taglia spoke more freely and told me he had only known my uncle a short time but from what he knew he was some sort of fighter that got called on by local “wiseguys” for “muscle work”. He gave me the names of some other people that my uncle had supposedly worked for and I thanked him and left.
I spent the next year tracking down these people. Some of them would talk to me and some wouldn’t. Some of them had long been dead from “occupational hazards” and most of the rest were permanently incarcerated. From the ones that would speak to me I heard tales of my uncle being a good guy, always with a joke or a kind word for a kid, but I also heard truly terrifying stories about him beating people for debts to torturing people or worse. I was horrified that the man I knew and loved could be the same monster that worked with these criminals. It was just too unbelievable, it was like watching a movie like Scarface or The Godfather. I couldn’t wrap my head around it, it was like reading a great story with double lives, twists and turns, deception and vindication. I just couldn’t believe it would be true it had to be a case of mistaken identity.
I had filled a notebook full of notes from my interviews with criminal element that said they knew my uncle. I sat on that notebook for a full month debating whether or not I wanted to ask my uncle about what they had said and whether or not I really wanted to know the truth or just leave the past in the past. One night as I laid on my bed reading and re-reading my notes they started to sound more and more like a dialogue out of a bad Mafioso movie. I must have been sleep deprived because the more I read the more I started to laugh at the ridiculousness of what I had written down. I figured that these guys had all just put me on to screw with me, they couldn’t have know Uncle Mack. That’s when I had an epiphany. I wanted to be a writer and well, I had a pretty outline for a crime drama right in front of me, even if it was all bullshit. I decided that I would ask Uncle Mack about these things and when he laughed and told me I was crazy, I would laugh with him and tell him about all I had done and how I was going to write a book based on these phony baloney “interviews”.
The next day I called Uncle Mack and asked if I could meet him for breakfast and ask him a few things about when he was young. He agreed to meet me at his favorite diner the following morning.
That’s how I ended up sitting across from him drinking coffee in this crowded diner. The waitress takes our orders and we have some quiet small talk about my mother and father until the food arrives. He orders the short stack of pancakes which when they come do look like the “world’s largest pancakes’ as they are bigger than the plate and hanging off the edges. I order eggs and bacon and lustfully dive into them as soon as they are set down in front of me. In between bites of eggs, I mumble “So Uncle Mack, I ran into someone you knew when you were younger.” He finishes the last bite of his pancakes, pushes the plate to the edge of the table smiling and says “Oh yeah, Lo? Who is that?” I lower my voice to a little over a whisper and say “Thomas Taglia”. I watch a flash of recognition cross his eyes before he looks at me stonefaced and replies “Never heard of him. He must be confused, I don’t know anyone by that name.” I lean forward to whisper again “That’s funny because he said the same thing about you… Naps.”
The look my uncle stares at me with is enough to freeze me in my seat. Without taking his eyes off me he signals the waitress for the check. When she arrives with it the look on my face is enough for her to take the cash for the bill and not return. Uncle Mack looks at me as he stands up and says only “Follow me”. I stand up even though my legs feel like jello and my bacon and eggs are threatening to return. I follow him outside to the side of my car, he opens the door and tells me to meet him at his house. I watch as he climbs into his old ford farm truck, turns the key and leaves the parking lot in a cloud of dust. The whole ride to his house I am trying to control my breathing and the panic I feel rising in my throat.
We make it to his house, he gets out of the truck and motions for me to follow him to the barn. I park next to his truck and by the time I get out of my car he has already disappeared into the dark barn. A moment of panic seizes me, I imagine him doing the horrible things I had heard about to me because I know his secret. I feel like I have to move, I have to run, I just have to get the hell out of there but my legs won’t move. I am utterly frozen in the driveway until the panic finally forces the remains of my breakfast up and out into the driveway. I am bent over retching when I feel his large hand on my back as he shoves a cup of coffee under my nose. I stand up, wipe my mouth on my sleeve and gratefully take the coffee. He winks at me, turns back towards the barn and says over his shoulder “That diner always does make their eggs a little greasy, don’t they?” I take a moment to recollect myself and then follow into the barn to find him sitting at his workbench drinking coffee. He motions to the stool next to him. I sit down and endure what feels like an eternity of uncomfortable silence before he looks at asks “Well, what do you want to know?”
His nonchalant, matter of fact way of asking helped to put me at ease. He was still my uncle and I knew that he loved me but there was a matter of unpleasantness that he would rather not talk about was all conveyed in that simple sentence. I blurted out “Is it true? Is it true what all these people have said about you?”
“I don’t know what they said or who “they” are, but yes I have done many, many terrible things in this life. So let’s start with what you “know”.” He replied.
I went to pull out my notes and realized I had left them in the car. I apologized and ran to get them. He had just poured a second cup of coffee and was topping it off with a small bottle of whisky he had hidden behind a few paint cans when I returned. I sat back down on my stool and fished out my notebook and handed it to him. He flipped through the pages and read some of the notes, but mostly he scanned the names of the people I talked to. Sometimes he would smile as he read a name and at others he would simply scowl and take a long pull off his coffee. Once he reached the end of the notebook, he flipped it shut and handed it back to me. We sat in silence, sipping our coffee until he finally said “Most of those things are true, some are not and most of that is taken out of context even though that’s a poor excuse for those things.”
I was completely dumbfounded, I opened my mouth to protest but nothing would come out. His eyes looked heavy and sad as he stared at me waiting for me to say something, finally he broke the silence with a question, “Well, you’ve gone a long way to find out about Uncle Mack’s secrets, if you still want to know I guess I will tell you. But if I tell you there will be things that won’t be easy for me to say and they won’t be easy for you to hear. It’s up to you, what do you say?”
I mulled it over in my head, I had come so far to learn the truth about him. I really did want to hear his side of what happened for better or worse he was my family and I wanted to know. I nodded to him and pulled out my notebook and flipped to a page I had with questions for him but I couldn’t force myself to ask him one question. He sensed my inner turmoil and said “Well, I guess I will start at the beginning, but by the end I am hoping you won’t need what’s in that notebook and we can keep this between us. But it is ultimately up to you what you want to do, I’ve made my peace with God and I know an eternal punishment is waiting for me.”
I waited for him to refill his coffee and empty the last of his stash of whisky into it, then he began.
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