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took great umbrage at Gerri Javor’s article and organized a petition drive to get her fired. He asked me to translate the petition from Hungarian to English.
    The
Plain Dealer
didn’t fire Gerri Javor, but it forced her to have a meeting with my father.
    “She’s a very attractive young woman,” he told me afterward. “You should try to meet her sometime.”
    I laughed and said, “If
you
like her, Pop, I wouldn’t.”
    Two years later, when I met her at the
Plain Dealer
, the first thing Gerri Javor said to me was, “You’re that man’s son, aren’t you?”
    I liked her.
    My father had lived in Cleveland all these thirty years that I had been in California. He was ninety-two years old and needed around-the-clock nursing. He’d had a heart valve replacement when he was eighty-five and had then suffered a series of strokes.
    He couldn’t hear very well now and he was on a catheter and most of his teeth were gone … but he was happy that he was still in his own house in Cleveland Heights, thanks to my ability to foot all of his bills, and not in an old-age home.
    I loved my father but came to the awful, heartbreaking realization in 1990 that I loathed him as much as I loved him, a realization that made our relationship cruelly difficult and painful.
    István Eszterhás was a Hungarian novelist and journalist, until 1990 the greatest friend I’d ever had. He was my inspiration and support. He believed in me and cared about me. He loved me.
    I knew that without his presence in my life, I would have accomplished very little.
    But I tried to stop loving my father in 1990.
    I didn’t speak to him for a year and a half. I didn’t allow him to visit the grandchildren he loved, Steve and Suzi.
    All my life my father told me he had a recurring dream.
    I was a little boy and we were walking through a labyrinthine train station. He was holding my hand and he somehow let it go and, suddenly … he had lost me.
    He was sobbing, running up and down, yelling my name, trying to talk to people who didn’t speak his language.
    No one understood what he was trying to say … and I was gone, lost somewhere in this foreign world.
    Gerri Javor and I courted while we were both police reporters at the
Plain Dealer
. Part of our courtship was covering stories together.
    At a wedding on a Saturday afternoon on the East Side of Cleveland, the former boyfriend of the bride shot the groom and took the bride hostage at an apartment complex only a couple of blocks away from my father’s house in Cleveland Heights.
    Gerri and I were both covering the story for the
Plain Dealer
as the apartment complex turned into the scene of a media siege. Print and network reporters were there from as far away as Chicago and New York.
    As the standoff continued into the next day, I called my city editor from the scene and said, “What if we fly the shooter’s mother in here? She lives in a small town in Pennsylvania. We’d interview her, find out everything there is to know about the shooter, and then maybe she could talk her son out of there.”
    The cops went ballistic. They said if we flew the mother in, we’d be playing Russian roulette. What if the shooter didn’t like his mother? What if her presence triggered more violence?
    The
Plain Dealer
decided to fly the mother in anyway on a private plane. Gerri and I met her at the airport. She was a pleasant, white-haired old lady and Gerri immediately made friends with her. We drove her around Cleveland for a couple of hours, interviewing her, getting all the details about her son before we drove her to the scene of the standoff.
    The cops tried to tell her to go back home, but she wanted to see her son. I talked her into taking me inside the building with her. The cops seethed.
    We went inside the apartment house and up a flight of stairs. Cops with shotguns crouched all over the stairway. The old lady said one word:
“Baby?
”
    Her son shot the girl and killed himself.
    In the twenty-four years