A Man Like Everybody Else
Feb. 26th, 2004 09:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lederhosenGanked from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
unsworn. Original is here, but I wanted to keep a copy of this.
A Man Like Everybody Else
By Kevin Rennie
New York Police Department Detective Francis Coppola charges into the Algonquin Hotel late one frigid morning ready to talk after a morning in court getting warrants signed. Standing in the center of the staid lobby, Coppola examines the dimly lit room from north to south.
It's the sort of entrance a detective should make. All other stereotypes, as is Coppola's custom, will be thwarted.
At 38, Coppola's got religion. He wants to talk about topics usually best left to Sinatra or the poets: love and marriage. Add some politics to the mix, and we've got something to talk about.
Though his life has taken jagged and unexpected turns, his theme remains consistent. He's just like everyone else, and that's how he wants to be treated. Tomorrow he will testify for three minutes before the legislature's Judiciary Committee in favor of civil unions between partners of the same sex. The committee is considering three bills: a change in the statutes that would broaden the definition of marriage; a measure that would establish civil unions between same-sex couples; and a proposal by two Republicans to ban the entire enterprise.
Just when you thought you'd lost your capacity for surprise, Coppola tells his story. The youngest of 10 children from an Italian family in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, he grew up and remained a devout Roman Catholic with a hankering for law enforcement. He attended Brooklyn College, earned an MBA from New York University and, at the insistence of his family, studied to become an accountant.
To their dismay, he joined the NYPD at 23. His first marriage lasted nine years; his second was shorter. Through it all, he wrestled with an attraction to men that his faith convinced him leads to fiery damnation.
His parish priest confirmed that acting on his urges would send him on the express to hell. Engaging in the American brand of Roman Catholicism that makes the pope want to stamp on his tallest miter, Coppola consulted a more sympathetic priest, who assured the young penitent that "God doesn't make mistakes. He doesn't make garbage." He does, however, let our lives get messy. And God divides, not always by two.
Divorced, Coppola discovered his soul mate in an old friend, Eddy, a firefighter separated from his own wife. After some fits and starts, they began a life together. Not an easy life, for it included all the tidal waters of a modern relationship. Eddy insisted they conceal it from most of the rest of the world.
The strains of Eddy's prolonged and acrimonious divorce added tension. Coppola, whose proudest achievement as a police officer is delivering four babies, enjoyed babysitting for Eddy's children. They attended Little League and Mets games, washed cars, cooked, shopped and juggled schedules. Eddy, who could lead a family of four and their dogs out of a raging fire, never seemed able to get his dirty socks into the hamper or make the bed.
When their South Shore Long Island home needed a new roof, Coppola, American to the core, bought a how-to book, took a week off to replace it, and a week to let his swollen hands recover. He winces at the memory.
Coppola works narcotics in Manhattan North. He's been shot in the abdomen, had his ribs broken during an arrest and lost four teeth, knocked out by an assailant. One day, an enraged husband murdered his wife's paramour with a machete and a gun. The cuckolded husband then headed into the precinct house where the wife worked. Coppola, a fastidious sort, first noticed the blood the charging spouse got on his uniform. Then he saw the bloody machete and pointed gun. Coppola got off the first and only shot.
Coppola began Sept. 11, 2001, at a lower Manhattan courthouse where he was to testify. He heard the first plane hit and headed for the World Trade Center, five minutes away on foot. Ushering people out of the lobby, he stopped only to say an Our Father the first time he saw someone jump, a woman in a white print dress with blue and yellow flowers. The purse she had clutched landed a few feet from him.
While ushering people through the unspeakable debris, he ran to the second-floor lobby, striving with colleagues to help establish a remnant of order in the chaos and fear. An injured woman grabbed his arm and asked for help getting out. The two began to move and there was Eddy, about to make his way up the tower with his fire company. They stood together for a moment. Eddy looked at the woman clutching Coppola's arm and said, "Be careful with my boy."
During the six years they were together, Eddy had not engaged in public displays of affection or acknowledgements of their life together. When Coppola left after visiting Eddy at his firehouse, Eddy would lower his hand along his side and say "I love you" in sign language.
As Eddy headed for the stairs to begin his climb up the tower, he shouted to Coppola, "I love you." Coppola, startled, gave him the familiar sign. "Chicken," called Eddy, their final exchange as he ascended into the maelstrom.
A sense of wonder at those brief and eternal remarks made in the lobby of hell inflects the police veteran's voice as he turns his gaze to the hotel ceiling. Coppola took the injured woman out of the building to an ambulance. Outside, he saw the South Tower had collapsed. Two attempts to return to the building were thwarted by a police chief. "Son, the building is going to collapse, we have to run." The two picked up a struggling man on the street as impenetrable smoke enveloped them. Coppola, leading, followed the whistling sound of firefighters' oxygen tanks into an alley that sheltered them from the collapsing North Tower. Eddy, somewhere in the tower, found no safe haven.
Coppola spent 247 days at the site removing the debris. Hoping each day he would find Eddy's remains. He found and removed the bodies of several friends, but he did not find Eddy's.
When he speaks of those endless days, he moves back from the table and bites his lip as the tears form. "He was my sun and my moon. He was the one who rocked my world." Not one to beatify others, Coppola says with a wide smile and snappy tone, "He was also a clumsy big-mouth. He was a human being."
He bristles at the injury by malevolent ignorance inflicted on the little innocence he still possessed. At Eddy's memorial service, Coppola was asked to stay in the back of the church and not speak to family or friends. He was mistakenly told that Eddy's remains had been recovered in October 2001. He called Eddy's mother, who refused to explain. He searched Long Island cemeteries. And then he discovered that the issuance of a death certificate had prompted someone at the morgue to list Eddy's body as recovered, a mystery of the bureaucracy.
On Sept. 11, Coppola lost, in addition to Eddy, 19 friends. He and Eddy were not "flag-wavers." They led a quiet life. Gay and lesbian friends, including a group of cops and firefighters and FDNY chaplain Father Mychal Judge (one of the first fatalities on the ground that day), spent a lot of time at their Long Island house. As attention focused on gay and lesbian heroes and survivors, Coppola stepped forward. He had spent his life "always prepared for the worst." It kept arriving. Closeted friends distanced themselves as he became active among police and firefighters, telling his story in training classes and bereavement groups.
Remember when we thought Sept. 11 would make us all a little kinder? Frank contacted a sister a month later to ask if his estranged family wondered how he was. "No," the harridan replied, "I'd rather you were dead than a fag."
"How can I convince them I am the same person?" he says, repeating his chorus, "I am just like everyone else."
He knew nine gay firefighters who were killed; six of them were couples. He's known surviving partners of gay and lesbian victims who have committed suicide. He wrestled often with those dark thoughts himself. "I am lost a lot." He insists he must have been spared for a purpose. Randomness of life is no explanation.
Coppola is the traditionalist who will be mistaken for a revolutionary. He wants to be treated like others. Like the people he protects as a cop. Like the aging neighbors he keeps an eye on and provides help for when they need it. Like the people he sits next to at Mass. He sees no difference between himself and them. If he could have married Eddy, his partner's divorce would have been settled years before. He is, like every mother hopes her son will be, a marrying kind of guy: "I want to be able to marry the person I love."
He tells the same thing to recent graduates of the police academy and veterans whenever they ask him to speak, relishing the sweet danger of debate. His message does not vary: "It's about love."
He declares one more time that he is just like everybody else. You may argue with him. The legislators who hear and meet Frank Coppola tomorrow might wish that everybody else were more like him.
unsworn. Original is here, but I wanted to keep a copy of this.A Man Like Everybody Else
By Kevin Rennie
New York Police Department Detective Francis Coppola charges into the Algonquin Hotel late one frigid morning ready to talk after a morning in court getting warrants signed. Standing in the center of the staid lobby, Coppola examines the dimly lit room from north to south.
It's the sort of entrance a detective should make. All other stereotypes, as is Coppola's custom, will be thwarted.
At 38, Coppola's got religion. He wants to talk about topics usually best left to Sinatra or the poets: love and marriage. Add some politics to the mix, and we've got something to talk about.
Though his life has taken jagged and unexpected turns, his theme remains consistent. He's just like everyone else, and that's how he wants to be treated. Tomorrow he will testify for three minutes before the legislature's Judiciary Committee in favor of civil unions between partners of the same sex. The committee is considering three bills: a change in the statutes that would broaden the definition of marriage; a measure that would establish civil unions between same-sex couples; and a proposal by two Republicans to ban the entire enterprise.
Just when you thought you'd lost your capacity for surprise, Coppola tells his story. The youngest of 10 children from an Italian family in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, he grew up and remained a devout Roman Catholic with a hankering for law enforcement. He attended Brooklyn College, earned an MBA from New York University and, at the insistence of his family, studied to become an accountant.
To their dismay, he joined the NYPD at 23. His first marriage lasted nine years; his second was shorter. Through it all, he wrestled with an attraction to men that his faith convinced him leads to fiery damnation.
His parish priest confirmed that acting on his urges would send him on the express to hell. Engaging in the American brand of Roman Catholicism that makes the pope want to stamp on his tallest miter, Coppola consulted a more sympathetic priest, who assured the young penitent that "God doesn't make mistakes. He doesn't make garbage." He does, however, let our lives get messy. And God divides, not always by two.
Divorced, Coppola discovered his soul mate in an old friend, Eddy, a firefighter separated from his own wife. After some fits and starts, they began a life together. Not an easy life, for it included all the tidal waters of a modern relationship. Eddy insisted they conceal it from most of the rest of the world.
The strains of Eddy's prolonged and acrimonious divorce added tension. Coppola, whose proudest achievement as a police officer is delivering four babies, enjoyed babysitting for Eddy's children. They attended Little League and Mets games, washed cars, cooked, shopped and juggled schedules. Eddy, who could lead a family of four and their dogs out of a raging fire, never seemed able to get his dirty socks into the hamper or make the bed.
When their South Shore Long Island home needed a new roof, Coppola, American to the core, bought a how-to book, took a week off to replace it, and a week to let his swollen hands recover. He winces at the memory.
Coppola works narcotics in Manhattan North. He's been shot in the abdomen, had his ribs broken during an arrest and lost four teeth, knocked out by an assailant. One day, an enraged husband murdered his wife's paramour with a machete and a gun. The cuckolded husband then headed into the precinct house where the wife worked. Coppola, a fastidious sort, first noticed the blood the charging spouse got on his uniform. Then he saw the bloody machete and pointed gun. Coppola got off the first and only shot.
Coppola began Sept. 11, 2001, at a lower Manhattan courthouse where he was to testify. He heard the first plane hit and headed for the World Trade Center, five minutes away on foot. Ushering people out of the lobby, he stopped only to say an Our Father the first time he saw someone jump, a woman in a white print dress with blue and yellow flowers. The purse she had clutched landed a few feet from him.
While ushering people through the unspeakable debris, he ran to the second-floor lobby, striving with colleagues to help establish a remnant of order in the chaos and fear. An injured woman grabbed his arm and asked for help getting out. The two began to move and there was Eddy, about to make his way up the tower with his fire company. They stood together for a moment. Eddy looked at the woman clutching Coppola's arm and said, "Be careful with my boy."
During the six years they were together, Eddy had not engaged in public displays of affection or acknowledgements of their life together. When Coppola left after visiting Eddy at his firehouse, Eddy would lower his hand along his side and say "I love you" in sign language.
As Eddy headed for the stairs to begin his climb up the tower, he shouted to Coppola, "I love you." Coppola, startled, gave him the familiar sign. "Chicken," called Eddy, their final exchange as he ascended into the maelstrom.
A sense of wonder at those brief and eternal remarks made in the lobby of hell inflects the police veteran's voice as he turns his gaze to the hotel ceiling. Coppola took the injured woman out of the building to an ambulance. Outside, he saw the South Tower had collapsed. Two attempts to return to the building were thwarted by a police chief. "Son, the building is going to collapse, we have to run." The two picked up a struggling man on the street as impenetrable smoke enveloped them. Coppola, leading, followed the whistling sound of firefighters' oxygen tanks into an alley that sheltered them from the collapsing North Tower. Eddy, somewhere in the tower, found no safe haven.
Coppola spent 247 days at the site removing the debris. Hoping each day he would find Eddy's remains. He found and removed the bodies of several friends, but he did not find Eddy's.
When he speaks of those endless days, he moves back from the table and bites his lip as the tears form. "He was my sun and my moon. He was the one who rocked my world." Not one to beatify others, Coppola says with a wide smile and snappy tone, "He was also a clumsy big-mouth. He was a human being."
He bristles at the injury by malevolent ignorance inflicted on the little innocence he still possessed. At Eddy's memorial service, Coppola was asked to stay in the back of the church and not speak to family or friends. He was mistakenly told that Eddy's remains had been recovered in October 2001. He called Eddy's mother, who refused to explain. He searched Long Island cemeteries. And then he discovered that the issuance of a death certificate had prompted someone at the morgue to list Eddy's body as recovered, a mystery of the bureaucracy.
On Sept. 11, Coppola lost, in addition to Eddy, 19 friends. He and Eddy were not "flag-wavers." They led a quiet life. Gay and lesbian friends, including a group of cops and firefighters and FDNY chaplain Father Mychal Judge (one of the first fatalities on the ground that day), spent a lot of time at their Long Island house. As attention focused on gay and lesbian heroes and survivors, Coppola stepped forward. He had spent his life "always prepared for the worst." It kept arriving. Closeted friends distanced themselves as he became active among police and firefighters, telling his story in training classes and bereavement groups.
Remember when we thought Sept. 11 would make us all a little kinder? Frank contacted a sister a month later to ask if his estranged family wondered how he was. "No," the harridan replied, "I'd rather you were dead than a fag."
"How can I convince them I am the same person?" he says, repeating his chorus, "I am just like everyone else."
He knew nine gay firefighters who were killed; six of them were couples. He's known surviving partners of gay and lesbian victims who have committed suicide. He wrestled often with those dark thoughts himself. "I am lost a lot." He insists he must have been spared for a purpose. Randomness of life is no explanation.
Coppola is the traditionalist who will be mistaken for a revolutionary. He wants to be treated like others. Like the people he protects as a cop. Like the aging neighbors he keeps an eye on and provides help for when they need it. Like the people he sits next to at Mass. He sees no difference between himself and them. If he could have married Eddy, his partner's divorce would have been settled years before. He is, like every mother hopes her son will be, a marrying kind of guy: "I want to be able to marry the person I love."
He tells the same thing to recent graduates of the police academy and veterans whenever they ask him to speak, relishing the sweet danger of debate. His message does not vary: "It's about love."
He declares one more time that he is just like everybody else. You may argue with him. The legislators who hear and meet Frank Coppola tomorrow might wish that everybody else were more like him.
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no subject
Date: 2004-02-25 03:47 pm (UTC)For me, particularly moving on several levels, one being that we were discussing the Korean War and Vietnam with the head teacher today and the sense of sacrifice that oft produces not understanding but malice is poignant.
Thank you for sharing.
no subject
Date: 2004-02-25 06:41 pm (UTC)It's articles like that that point out well what I think I and most folks in our mutual audiences agree is an unacceptable hypocrisy: that heterosexuality should be celebrated and homosexuality condemned in popular culture and in our society.
Unacceptable that we wink-wink-nod-nod guys reading the SI Swimsuit edition full of nearly-naked women in public but the same man reading the same edition full of nearly-naked men might get condemnation or worse. Unacceptable that you can have practically explicit male-female sex scenes on popular television and you can't have practically explicit male-male ones. Unacceptable that fraternity brothers can post nude women on their dorm room walls but not nude men. I don't think anyone here would disagree it's hypocrisy, and it's wrong.
I think it's either all good, or all bad. It's either all acceptable for public celebration, or none of it is. It's all either a natural part of life to be reveled in, or it's all a weakness we should strive to rise above. I think which side of the coin we all choose is up to each of us --and should be left to each of us to choose. But to gleefully accept heterosexuality and shun and condemn homosexuality --or, for that matter, every other form of alternate consentual sexuality-- is untenable and hypocritical, and articles like this one show why. And I think it's about time we as a society sat down and faced that fact head-on.
no subject
Date: 2004-02-26 07:26 am (UTC)I want to find his sister and bitchslap her, but other than that...
no subject
Date: 2004-02-26 10:14 am (UTC)Why can't people see that?
no subject
Date: 2004-02-26 11:06 am (UTC)"How can I convince them I am the same person?" he says, repeating his chorus, "I am just like everyone else."
Some how the average joe just wont ever really understand the difference, That Frank Coppola indeed has experienced something not like everyone else.
I still shake my head in awe and revel in the fact that there are people out there strong enough to stand up for their convictions and rally for a love.