Please welcome our first storyteller Leal Leibowitz
I grew up in Israel in
the 1980s and my father's mission in life was to make sure that his only son,
me, grew up to be a real man and so as soon as I turned four every Saturday he
would take me shooting, which was funny because my arm was exactly the size of a
Smith & Wesson 45, and two or three years later when I was six or seven my father
would take advantage of Israel's surprisingly relaxed car rental
insurance policies and he would rent a car to take me on driving lessons which
we're terrifying because even sitting on his lap I didn't really reach the wheel.
And every two or three weeks there was a special treat, we would stop the rental
car by the side of the road and my father would make me go out and change
tires whether the car needed it or not because in his mind knowing how to
change a tire it was the epitome of manhood. And I really hated changing
tires and I really hated spending the Saturday afternoons with him but he
didn't really care because he was inducting me to the international
brotherhood of macho men. And so every chance he got he would take me to the
movies to see his heroes, men like Sylvester Stallone or Chuck Norris or
Burt Reynolds. And I didn't mind these guys too much but they were not my
idols. My real idol was a real live person named the Motorcycle Bandit. He
appeared on the scene shortly after my 12th birthday
robbing bank after bank after bank all over Israel. He was in and out of the
bank in under 40 seconds never leaving behind any clue as his real name or
identity and he just drove people insane. He got so popular that
Isael's most famous comedy sketch show, sort of like the local version of Saturday Night
Live, devoted an entire episode to the Bandit, speculating in one bit that he
probably never robbed the bank in Jerusalem because he didn't particularly
care for that city. So you can imagine what happened the next day when in an
apparent tribute to his favorite television show the Motorcycle Bandit
robbed his one and only Jerusalem bank. People went insane. Women who worked at
banks would write their names and phone numbers on little notes so that if the
sexy heartthrob robber happened to hit them up maybe when he got off work he
would find their number and give them a call. But the people who loved the Bandit
most were us teenage boys. For us he was a complete hero, and on Purim, which is
more or less the Jewish equivalent of Halloween, we all dressed up like him in
a leather jacket and a motorcycle helmet and the big shiny gun. So about a year and a
half later I'm 13 and a half I'm walking home from the eighth grade and no one's
home so I sort of mosey over to the kitchen to make myself a snack and I
hear a knock on the door but it's not a tap tap tap, it's a boom boom boom. So I opened
the door and there are three police officers standing there and they're not
looking at me and none of them are saying anything and finally about half a
minute later one of them looks up and says "Son, we arrested your father a while
ago with a motorcycle helmet and a leather jacket and a big shiny gun." When
I remember my first thought was "No way! You think
you think my dad, with a beer belly and the receding hairline and the terrible jokes,
you think that guy is the Motorcycle Bandit?" But in the hours and the days and
the weeks that passed, I learned that he was.
The real story as I soon came to learn began about two years earlier when my
father, who is 35 at the time and the son of one of Israel's wealthiest families, was
summoned by his father to have the talk. Now if you've watched a couple episodes
of Dallas or Dynasty or Knott's Landing you know of the talk, it's when the rich
guy calls his wayward playboy son over and says "Son it's time for you to grow
up and be a man, take responsibility for your life and get a job," and my father
didn't like that at all. So he stormed out of my grandfather's
office and he hopped on his motorcycle because of course, and he drove to the
beach and he's sitting there watching the sunset over the Mediterranean and
he's thinking really about his life, and you know my father grew up in the 60s so
he believed in sayings like "Do what you love" or "Follow your heart" so he decided
to follow his heart and his heart led him to robbing banks. Now as it turns out
he was good at it, he was great at it, he was an inventor and innovator, he was the
Elon Musk of the stick up job. And later I learned how he did it and how he did
it was incredible. He would rob a bank in under 40 seconds. He would run out, jump
on his motorcycle, drive around a corner up a ramp he had custom-built and into a
van where he would pause and like some mad philosopher king he would ponder the
seminal existential question of bank-robbing which is "Where is the last
place you would ever look for a bank robber?" and the answer is and now is the
point in the story or any of you contemplating this line of work may want
to pay attention, the answer is that the last place you would ever look for a
bank robber is the bank. And so my father would take off his jacket and his helmet
and tuck the gun back into his pants and walk out of the van calmly around the
corner back into the bank which at that point was a crime scene sprawling with
police officers and one of these police officers would inevitably run up to my
father and say "You be here sir this is a crime scene!" and my
father would look at him this dopey look and say "Oh can I please just make a
quick deposit? My wife will kill me if I don't." And the police officer would say
something like "Sure but be quick about it."
And my father would walk up to the bank teller and deposit the same exact cash
he had robbed three minutes earlier and this being the 1980s and computers were
still kinda knew he made the cash virtually untraceable. It was a work of
genius. He was so good at it and he became so popular that eventually he got
cocky. He robbed one bank a day and then and then two and then two banks in two
different cities. One time he was riding in a cab on his way to the airport when
the urge struck. He told the cab driver do please mind stopping, I promise I'll
only be a minute. It was literally true he was only a
minute. He robbed the bank, hopped back into the cab, drove to the airport and
flew off for an all-expenses-paid vacation in New York. But do you know how
this story ends? Eventually he was caught and after he was arrested life got
really weird. In no small part because Israel as you may have heard being a
small state surrounded by enemies has its own ideas about prison and one of
them is that prisoners get the one weekend out of the month off to go home
on vacation, the logic being that since the country only has one really secure
airport if you want to go ahead and try to escape to Gaza or Syria be our guest.
And so every fourth Friday I would go to the prison to pick my
father up and we would go out and have ourselves a weekend on the town and
people would come up to him and say you know high-five him and pat him on the
back and say things like "Bandit, we love you, you're cool" but to me he wasn't cool
and he wasn't even the Bandit, he was my dad
who had just done something so incredibly stupid that lent him with a
20-year prison sentence. But even weirder than that one weekend a month together
were the three weekends a month apart, because here I was and it was Saturday
and there's no shooting practice, there was no driving lesson, no changing tires,
no Burt Reynolds, and I didn't know what to do. So one afternoon I got dressed,
which by the way was also an ordeal because when the police searched our
house they took not only all of my father's belongings but because we were
more or less the same size also all of mine. So I put on the one of the few
outfits I had which was this really ratty disgusting purple sweat suit with
the Batman logo up front which I assumed the police just you know thought no
self-respecting bank robber would ever wear, and I walked out and started
walking around town literally looking for a sign. And then I saw it. It was a
sign above a theater advertising an all-male Japanese modern dance show. And
I thought for maybe five seconds and then I did something that I'm pretty
sure my father would disown me for. I bought a ticket and I went in. And I
loved it. Here on stage were these amazing elegant graceful men and guess
what, they weren't punching each other in the
face, they were not riding Harley Davidsons, they were dancing, and yet they
were so secure in their bodies and their masculinity and I thought to myself, if
that's another way of being a man what other ways are there? And thus began a
two decade long process of trial and error of trying to figure out what kind
of man I wanted to be. And look, some of the things I learned didn't surprise me
at all. I love bourbon,
and I am the kind of guy who would watch as much sports as you would let him in a
given day, but some things were really surprising, like some French poets really
moved me to tears and even though bourbon was great you know what else
tastes really good? Rosé wine. And even though I'm really really good at
changing tires if I get a flat now I'm calling AAA. I didn't share any of
these insights with my father because for one thing he's not really the kind
of guy who's into you know insights, but for another by the time he got out of
prison I was already a man in full it was too late for him to shape who I
became in any meaningful way, and he still comes to visit from time to time
in New York where I live with my family and on one of these recent visits he and
I are sitting in my living room, not talking as men do not talk, and my son
comes prancing into the room. My three year old boy. Now that boy looks exactly
like me just as I look exactly like my father, and if there's one thing in the
world that that boy loves it's his older sister. And if there's one thing in the
world that his older sister loves it's Disney Princesses. And in prances the
child dressed like Princess Anna from Frozen, and I look at my son and I look
at my father looking at my son who by the way he looked amazing in this like
green taffeta with a black velvet bodice and some lovely lacing, and I know that
my father is judging me, but you know what I don't care because at that moment
I realized strangely that by going to jail when he did he didn't just free me
up of the burden of this macho nonsense, he also freed up my son to grow up as a
happy boy who can pretend to be whoever he wants to be even or especially a
pretty pretty princess. And I can't tell you how grateful I am
that instead of going through life mindlessly as two tough guys, my son and
I are free to become real men. Thank you very much.
Liel Leibowitz