From The Long Island Press

Bonded

By Michael Depp

Around the obstacles of time, distance and the cleverest calculations of evasion, our obligations and our past will always find us. We might be sitting vacantly in our living room one night, watching HBO, for instance, and something familiar flickers across the screen: A vinyl-sided tract house with an addition grafted abruptly on to its side, too many cars in the driveway and a sudden, staccato burst of sounds, a man yelling – “Awwllll right!!!” – his vowels plucked and stretched an extra half beat, the resonance of exclamation, Long Island-style.

Or maybe something more percussive, insistent. Tom Evangelista’s flashlight beating on your apartment door, his bail bondsman’s badge mooning your keyhole. The same voice: “Open up! Don’t make me break down this dawwr!” You’ve skipped your court date. Moved without telling him. You might be a flight risk. You’re going with him to jail.

Methodologies of escape might differ, a span of miles or a change in mindset employed to dodge him. (In the short run, there is the apartment window and the fire escape.) But Tom Evangelista knows that his patience and your proclivities will ultimately ensnare you. “Human beings are creatures of habit,” he tells me later. “As long as they have some kind of habit to track down, you can pretty much find them.”

So one day you won’t notice him until he’s putting his hand on your shoulder, calling your name, collecting you to account for your unfinished business from which he has insured (and sworn before the court) that you will not run away.

Only now, television has become involved since documentary cameras began following Evangelista, his family business and his family’s business for a 10-part HBO series, “Family Bonds.” Which has meant for some bail jumpers unexpected celebrity in their capture, a public display of their caught-off-guard moments of reckoning – pants down, sleepy, stoned, vulnerable.

Which has also made, for the moment, a public pageant of the Evangelistas’ home life in Medford, Long Island – a noisy swirl of extended relations; nail salons; tattoos and nipple piercings; drunken family fights spilling out on to the front lawn; angry crescendos too easily, unselfconsciously reached in front of the cameras; voices, cursing, heard from the street.

Which has made me shift uncomfortably on the living room couch, 1,200 miles away, with a sudden constriction and a flinch of recognition, surprised to be called back to my hometown and family language by, of all things, a television bounty hunter.

The Evangelistas moved to Medford in 1977, the same year my own family moved in two blocks away in an area built by Sid Farber, a William Levitt-inspired developer who put up more than a thousand other houses in the town. Most were minor variations on a common theme – split-level ranches for those on the slightly lower end of the middle class with young children who could run themselves to exhaustion on quarter-acre yards and safely circle their BMX bicycles on wide, flat streets. Each house was allotted a solitary, quasi-mature oak on the front lawn, three tiny bedrooms with low ceilings and a washer/dryer in the kitchen. Often as not, the family room was upstairs, necessitating loud parental summonses at dinnertime and bedtime; architecturally, it was a curious reversal of the older, paradigmatic suburban house with upstairs bedrooms, privacy with escalation. The home, deprived there of its traditional hierarchy, lent itself to family members yelling between disconnected common rooms, which was always easier than getting up.

Medford itself was first carved out of scrub oak and the dry expanses of pine barrens in 1844, when the Long Island Railroad cut a line across the island’s middle from New York City extending out to Greenport. It was an ideal midway point between Patchogue, to the south, and Port Jefferson, to the north, and so it came to fall along the side of the Stage Road – later Route 112 – that connected the two villages. A post office was slow to follow, in 1886, and a considerable stock of permanent residents lagged even further behind, as homeowners only ventured there in any sizeable number after 1899, when the O.L. Schwerke Land & Investment Co. took possession of a four-mile tract of land in Medford that it divided into four-acre plots, which it then marketed and sold for $30-75 to urban dwellers who were induced to come east for the bargain.

Conceived as a way station between older villages, each with its own entrenched sense of identity, Medford never really shook off its transititory roots, never took on any semblance of a traditional downtown, never incorporated nor instigated any kind of village governance short of a chamber of commerce and, briefly, a taxpayers association. Along the way, it never even bothered to record its own history.

(The Stage Road, however, evolved into a major north-south thoroughfare on the island, and over the ensuing decades filled in with various purveyors of Long Island necessities reflective of the accumulating years – agricultural suppliers, auto dealers, banks, bagelries. It became, by the 21st century, an anonymous but vital commercial artery on the eastern half of Long Island.)

Farber’s developments prompted a population infusion to Medford from points further west on the island in the 1970s, those again lured by the prospect of affordable housing in the realm of $35,000 for a respectable starter home, a competitive school district and a 90-minute commute to Manhattan by train. Among its new denizens was Tom Evangelista, who worked then as an investigator for Times Square Stores, and his family. Two blocks over I moved in with my father and mother. Two brothers came later, and I stayed until I was 18, off to college, and, as I knew always growing up, never to return.

Part of what I want to do here, from afar, is pre-empt your judgments of Medford as the lives of the Evangelistas unfold over 10 half-hour installments this fall and the town, for the first time in its largely anonymous (unrecorded) history, is thrust into a small spotlight. I want to acknowledge the spectacle of their tastes, the excesses that might be seen as obvious and easy targets – the long, curling, compulsively manicured acrylic nails, the skin suffering from toxic amounts of tanning, the boasted-about breast implants, the expensive but questionable decorating choices. The Evangelistas make no apologies for their tastes – nor should they – and if their aesthetic choices, or their lifestyle, for that matter, is judged disapprovingly by the viewer through a prism of class, the family can probably bear the offense with good humor and scads of confidence.

Watching the first few episodes of “Family Bonds,” it’s something else altogether that strikes me as the salient feature of the show, its dramatic center. To me, this is the Evangelistas’ default setting to hostility in every interaction: Tom’s mean-spirited teasing of Chris, his divorced, live-in nephew and fellow bail bondsman, over his weight, for instance; or Tom’s wife, Flo, casually calling him a motherfucker over breakfast, their casual, expletive-laced frankness with each other, their easy lapses into pitched argument at the slightest provocation.

It is a family dynamic that caught even the documentarians off guard. “I think at first we were all stunned by it,” says Steven Cantor, the director. “We were like, ‘Oh my God, they’re going to get divorced and they’re never going to speak to each other and their son is going to be disowned.’ In 20 years I haven’t had as much drama as they have every week.”

Tom Evangelista accounts for it this way: “Look, all my family’s Italian. I grew up in an Italian household my whole life. My father was always a yeller, a screamer and a curser. That’s what I grew up around, and I guess it kind of wore off on me.”

Of course, it’s this dynamic that gives me the shudder of the familiar. Family dinners at my house were, more often than not, a casual round robin of hurling insults, the barbs not unlike those traded by the Evangelistas. “Shut the fuck up!” was the final salvo in most arguments. Curses became simply adjectives, or adverbs, or just the handiest emphatic tool.

We were not Italian, like the Evangelistas, and from experience, I find his ethnic explanation lacking. The Jewish family around the corner whose house I frequented through my childhood spoke the very same language, pitched in the same key. And so did the German family and the family across the street. In fact, I saw a variation of the Evangelista idiom in almost every house I knew growing up, and took for granted then that this was how people spoke to each other. Sooner or later, the yelling would reach the street from somebody’s house, and we would all recognize it for what it was: Nothing unusual.

My father now toys with the notion of moving to warmer climes, possibly South Carolina. My wife and I put the kabosh on his plans without a pause. They are not going to get you, we warn him. You’ll be hanging by a tree in a week the way you talk to people. He laughs it off, switches his voice to a Foghorn Leghorn drawl: “Whuut? They don’t lahke people from Lahwng Ah-land in the South?”

Not from Medford they don’t.

It took me years of self-conscious training and a massive geographic shift to take my personality off the ledge, to steer clear of obscenity-laced tantrums that would’ve been dismissed as meaningless to friends or family, but were disorienting or appalling to those I would meet outside of my hometown. Outside its borders, people took extremity at face value. I had to recalibrate my settings, acculturate to softer temperaments, change my jokes.

Was it something about Medford that caused this? Was it a class issue, spurred by the scope of all that affordable housing? (Like all of Long Island, it is, of course, not so affordable anymore.) Was it the anonymity of the landscape, the dull, spindly stretches of pines with their scaly barks, punctuated only by stationers, pizza parlors, Sam’s Club and Home Depot, other developments with split-level ranches just like our own?

If I interrogate the landscape now, from a distance, does it yield any satisfactory explanations as to why we were so volatile? Against a tableau devoid of idiosyncrasies, landmarks or history, were we obliged to assert ourselves more than others? Could we put ourselves on the map by force of our personalities alone?

I only know that in the end there was the toll of our extremity, the violent combustion of families. Including my own.

A fate that has exempted the Evangelistas, the filmmakers attest (and they have logged the hours to be authoritative on the subject). “What’s amazing is that they stick together,” Cantor says. “They’re together for all the family members’ birthday parties and all the holidays and constant extended family dinners. They just happened to deal with each other very dramatically.”

In a language that reaches me, across half the country and sitting on the couch one night, in a familiar and discomfiting way, as abrupt as one of Tom Evangelista’s late night retrievals of a bail jumper. I certainly didn’t see him coming, but I knew him by his voice, right away. Like anyone who has fled something, I recognize the sound of a loud, fateful rap at my door, and recall some bonds I’d naively hoped could be evaded.