Motus Mentis

I learned with great sadness the other day that my good friend of more than thirty years, Anthony V. Bouza, died late last month in his adopted hometown of Minneapolis. He was 94.

In his long career as a policeman Tony rose from his humble origins, and the lowest rank, to the penultimate pinnacle of power (and, I think it’s safe to say, the highest pinnacle of influence) in the NYPD, and then spent nine years as the chief of police in Minneapolis. In his career as a detective, he investigated some of the city’s highest-profile cases (such as the Malcolm X assassination, and the kidnapping and murder that led ultimately to the downfall of the Dominican dictator Trujillo), and as a high-ranking officer he guided his force through the great social disturbances and embroilments of the 60s and 70s. He was never one to shy away from controversy, and he was never intimidated by anyone; indeed, were it not for his inveterate and ornery inability simply to “go along to get along” he would almost certainly have become New York City’s Police Commissioner.

Tony (who had immigrated as a a boy from El Ferrol, Spain to Park Slope, Brooklyn) and his English wife Erica had a house on Drummer Cove here in Wellfleet, and spent summers here for many years. We first got to know them around 1990, back when we used to be summer renters here, and Nina became friends with Erica in an exercise class they both attended. We spent time with them every summer after that, until Tony and Erica both grew so aged a few years ago that the long drive between Minneapolis and here became just too much for them. They moved into a senior-care center, and although we kept in touch by the occasional letter or phone call, the only time we saw them after they stopped coming to the Cape was a quick visit when we were in Minneapolis in the spring of last year.

Tony, a towering autodidact (he was 6′ 6″), was one of the most extraordinary people I’ve ever known. He was one of those men whose presence, even when silent, filled the room, and he was rarely silent for long; he was big in every way, with a deep, booming voice. He was a man of strong opinions: though occasionally wrong, he was never in doubt. He was fantastically well-read, wrote copiously and well, had an enormous vocabulary, and was a keen student of history — especially the history of the Americas, South, North, and Central. He had a bawdy and mordant sense of humor, and used it far more often to poke fun at himself than others. (He was also, like so many immigrants who remember the hardship of life elsewhere well enough not to take anything for granted, an ardent American patriot.)

Above all, Tony had the heart and mind of the best sort of philosopher — a lover of wisdom and understanding, not for its own sake, or his, but because he believed that the truth of the world, correctly understood and rightly applied, could improve human flourishing, and increase the store of happiness in the world. He was, though, no starry-eyed optimist; the darkness he had seen and lived through in his long life and in his career as a cop meant that he well understood that mankind is flawed and crooked timber, from which nothing perfect could be wrought, and so he had a well-grounded skepticism of Utopian daydreams. Here he is, for example, on the use of violence by the police:

“I am an unapologetic supporter of the use of police violence, even lethal force, but it has to be guided by the law, the standards of reasonableness, and the U.S. Constitution. I have presided over clubbings, shootings, gassings, and other assaults by the police. I see violence as a key weapon in the police arsenal and I have trained cops in the full range of possibilities available to us. My only caveat is that the use of force has to be legally justified, measured, and appropriate, and that the weapons have to be in conformance with the law.”

His bluntness and realism made a lot of people angry, such as when, in 1976, he referred to black and Hispanic teenagers who had gone on a riotous spree as “feral”, and when he suggested that Roe v. Wade had been responsible, by causing a generation of such youths never to have been born, for the sharp decline in violent crime a couple of decades later. He was careless of making enemies in high places if he thought it was his duty to do so in order better to serve the public; knowing Tony as well as I did, I have very little doubt that whenever he thought so, he was usually right.

Having said all that, though, I’ll say that Tony and I had our disagreements. He was, despite his frankness about the limits and defects of human nature, nevertheless a man of the Left. This seemed contradictory to me at first, but the way I came to understand it was that he was an unshakeable believer in the supremacy of nurture over nature. This was, as far as I can recall, the only systematic error in his worldview, but it’s a doozy, and of course as the basis of a social philosophy it is an axiom that leads to all sorts of questionable (and costly) theorems. We locked horns often about this (he and I would sequester ourselves at parties to get away from all the small talk), but he was unbudgeable; any softening of his position would be, in his mind, a buttered slide to the abomination of racism. But even when we disagreed sharply — and this is something that is almost unheard-of these days — we could always disagree in a friendly and respectful way. (How rare is that now?) I remember that at some gathering or other, after we’d spent hours off in a corner haranguing each other on this topic (and I was getting the feeling that I was at last gaining the long-sought advantage), it grew late and Tony got up to go. He rose to his full height, gave me a great, twinkling smile, and stuck out his gigantic hand.

“Malcolm,” he said cheerily in his thunderous voice, “fuck you.” I never felt closer to him.

What a life this man had! I wish I’d been his friend for more of it, but I’m happy to have got the years I did. Requiescat in pace, my dear friend. I hate to lose you, and I will miss you always.

You can read Tony’s obituary here, and his books are available here.