I FEEL damn sorry for Robert Chambers – the fa ther, not the son.
Around 10 yesterday morning, Robert Sr., 68, got a telephone call.
“It was from my son, he was in the holding cell and he said, ‘I don’t know why I’m here,’ ” Robert Sr. told me.
But the older Chambers knew exactly why his troubled and sometimes brutal son was there.
“He is sick. He has a disease, an addiction.”
The father admits full well to knowing about addiction. He’s been sober for 26 years.
“Yes, it breaks my heart. When he called I didn’t know what to tell him . . . It sounded like me saying to him, look, you’re on your own. What I’m saying really is, what can I do?
“Of course, I know he could have been a movie star.”
And anyone who knew those dark days when Chambers senselessly took the life of a beautiful flower called Jennifer Levin, you would agree.
Enraged, people would see Chambers giving arrogance a new name.
“Oh yes, he looked arrogant, that’s true. But when you’re into addiction, you have low self-esteem and you are scared, and you cover it by looking arrogant,” said Chambers Sr.
The father is still devastated by the fact that the Levin family doesn’t have a daughter.
When Robert Chambers got out of jail in 2003, he told of “remorse.”
He sounded legit but I saw him later. A man whose eye sockets were near the back of his head. The movie-star looks were long forgotten.
His mother, Phyllis Chambers, an immaculate lady, was always in denial. Mothers are that way, you know.
Chambers Sr. is a little bit more realistic: “Between his mother and I, we have spent well over six figures to straighten young Robert out. He is sick and he is diseased with an addiction.”