The Call Nobody Else Was Going to Make

I was eighteen when the phone rang at home and a police chief asked me to come to the station because they had my father in custody and had a problem.

He didn’t need to say anything else. I already knew what kind of problem it was.

I found out later that he’d been sitting alone in a café in one of Lisbon’s main shopping centers. A security guard approached him — for what reason I never found out, and with my father the reason rarely mattered anyway, because the trigger was almost never the point. The conflict started. The security guard called for backup. The shopping center police came. They tried to arrest him on charges that amounted to not cooperating, which is not a charge, which tells you everything about how the situation had already escaped anyone’s control.

Nine officers ultimately responded. They took him to the station and tried to frisk him.

Until they realized who they were dealing with. And then they called me.

I was walking to the police station. I could hear him before I reached the entrance. Still outside, still on the street, and the sound was coming from somewhere below ground level inside the building — a man screaming in a way I can only describe as how I imagine possession sounds. Not anger, exactly. Something past anger, something that had gone through anger and kept going until it reached something that didn’t have a name in any normal register.

For some reason I still don’t fully understand, the officer at the door knew instantly that I was the one who’d been called. I didn’t look much like my father — fortunately, I’d say. I wasn’t in uniform. I was eighteen. And the officer took one look at me and sent me downstairs without asking who I was.

Nine officers stood in a circle. My father was in the middle of it.

I want to try to describe what I saw, because I’ve seen him do many things — raging, threatening, violent, unpredictable — and I’ve never found any of it easy to look at. But I had never seen him like this. His mouth and chin were completely covered in foam. He was literally drooling with rage — a physical response to whatever had taken over, his body producing something beyond what bodies normally do in anger. He didn’t look like a man who was angry. He looked like a man who had become something else temporarily, something that had been waiting for the right conditions to surface.

The officers weren’t moving. Nine of them, standing in a circle, and none of them were moving.

I walked into the circle.

I started talking to him. He didn’t recognize me. He didn’t respond to his name, to my voice, to anything I said. He was somewhere else — inside whatever this was — and no language was reaching him.

I kept going anyway. And then he slapped me. And then he punched me.

The officers didn’t move.

I want to sit with that for a moment, because I think it’s the most specific detail in this entire story: nine officers watched a man assault his son in their station, in their custody, and not one of them intervened. I don’t know what that was — whether it was a calculation about making things worse, or shock, or something about what they already knew about who they were dealing with and what getting further involved would cost them. I don’t know. What I know is that I was in the circle, and he hit me, and they stood there.

I pushed him. Not hard — enough. And I told him, in whatever tone I could manage in that moment, that I didn’t care, and that he could either come with me right now or I would leave without him and whatever happened next was going to happen without me in the building.

Something in that reached him. I don’t know if it was the words or the tone or the fact of me specifically, or some combination of things that added up to just enough signal cutting through whatever was running in him. He snapped out of it — not all the way, but enough. I grabbed him by his shirt and started moving him toward the stairs.

The officers opened the circle.

He walked, still screaming at them, still threatening, but walking — and I kept a hand on his back and kept moving him forward, through the station, up the stairs, past the officer at the door who’d sent me down without a word, out onto the street and down into the metro.

In the metro he cleaned himself up. He seemed to realize, as if registering something he’d missed while he was gone, that he was no longer at the station. And that seemed, more or less, to be that.

What Doesn’t Make Sense

I want to ask the question plainly, because I think it’s the one this entire story is actually about: how was any of this possible?

A man foaming at the mouth assaults someone in a police station. Nine officers stand in a circle and don’t intervene. The same man is walked out of the building by his teenage son, screaming threats at the officers as he goes, and nobody stops him, nobody follows, nobody charges him with anything. He gets on the metro. He goes home.

This doesn’t happen. Not for anyone. Not under any normal set of circumstances. And the fact that it happened for him — that day, and in so many other configurations across so many years — tells you something about the specific shape of what was behind him. Not just personality. Not just local connections or the ability to intimidate people. A structure. Something that made institutions, when they encountered him, consistently decide that the cost of proceeding normally was higher than whatever they’d gain by it.

We didn’t know what that structure was, not then. We knew its effects. We’d been living with its effects our entire lives.

What He Did Next

He didn’t let it go. Of course he didn’t — this was my father, and letting things go was not available to him in any form.

In his reasoning, the person responsible for all of it was the owner of the private security company that the original guard had worked for. This is the reasoning of a man whose logic has its own internal consistency that bears no relationship to anything anyone else would recognize as logic. The security guard reports to a company. The company has an owner. The owner is therefore responsible. Simple.

The owner was one of Portugal’s most significant businessmen.

My father sent him an envelope with a bullet inside, challenging him to a duel. A standard practice of his, I should say. Then he sent letters demanding money. He threatened him, consistently, over a period long enough that the man ended up moving through public life with a substantial private security operation around him at all times. A major businessman in a small country, unable to move freely, because my father had decided he was the responsible party for what happened in a café one afternoon.

This went on for years. And eventually — this is the part that surprised me, because I had largely stopped expecting consequences — it produced one. Charges were filed. My father was tried. He managed, through whatever combination of ability and remaining influence he still had, to negotiate a six-month sentence in one of the facilities where important people served time when they had to serve time. Comfortable, relatively speaking. Populated by people who understood hierarchy.

My mother and sister visited. The other inmates respected him, did favors for him. The guards told my mother and sister, with what sounded like a kind of exhausted humor, that he talked so much they were tired of having him there. He read. He worked the room, the way he worked every room he’d ever been in — learning about people, offering things, accumulating what he’d eventually use as leverage.

He was released early, on the commitment of psychiatric treatment he never intended to honor. His age and his accumulated toll were slowing him down by then. And some of what had protected him — the influence, the contacts, the specific shape of what was behind him — had been spent in the process of getting to this outcome. Not destroyed. Spent.

He came out mostly unscathed.

The Prosecutor

Years later — my father older, weaker but still active in whatever ways he remained active — a special prosecutor asked to speak with my mother and sister. Not about the businessman case. About him, more broadly.

The special prosecutor told them that he was a shark. That he held too many secrets and too much sensitive information. That they couldn’t imagine who he really was, what he had done, the countries he had been to.

My mother and sister came home knowing something they hadn’t known before, and not knowing most of it, and understanding, probably correctly, that not knowing most of it was the right outcome.

The work trips we’d never asked about. The disappearances that lasted days or weeks, with no explanation given and none expected, because we’d learned not to expect explanations about things in that category. The influence that had made nine officers stand in a circle and watch. The phone call of a police chief who needed a teenager to come solve a problem they couldn’t solve with nine people in uniform and guns.

We only ever knew, it turned out, about 0.1% of the story.

I’ve made my peace with not knowing the rest. Some information is better carried as an outline than as a complete picture, and I’ve had enough complete pictures in my life to know the difference.

What I’ve Thought About Since‍ ‍

The call came to me. Not to an adult, not to someone whose job it was, not to a person with any formal standing to go into a police station and retrieve someone in custody. To me. Because I was what was available, and because the police chief who called already understood, somehow, that the problem they had was not one their institution was equipped to solve, and that what was required was someone who had been, for his entire life, closer to the problem than anyone else in the building.

I was eighteen. I walked in. He hit me and I stayed. I pulled him out by his shirt and I got him to the metro.

Nobody assigned me that job. The phone just rang, and I went.

I’ve thought about that a lot — not with bitterness, not even particularly with sadness, just with the specific attention you give to something that shaped you in ways you’re still discovering. Being the one who goes in. Being the one who doesn’t leave the circle when the expected thing would be to leave. Being the one who, when he hits you, doesn’t stop.

I didn’t learn that from him. I learned it despite him, in reaction to him, in the specific crucible of having been his son for long enough that certain things calcified into certainties.

The circle opens, eventually, if you don’t leave it.

I still believe that. I’ve had to believe it in situations more serious than a police station. It’s held up every time.

This is the formation behind Surviving a Psychopathic Father and the capacity described in When You See Evil, Do Your Worst — not theory, but something built in rooms like this one, at eighteen, with no one else available.