The day after Thanksgiving, the entire clan adjourned to #4 son’s house, outside of Auburn.*

There we played several rounds of mah-jong.  Not, it should be noted, with the Milton-Bradley set made of boxwood and “ivorine” on which my grandmother whiled away World War II in Denver with her mother, sister, and maiden aunt.  But rather the set made of bamboo and ox-bone that da partner bought me so that we wouldn’t “wear out the tiles” on the family heirloom (or somesuch). 

While we played, the stories continued. 

Before I relay this next bit, let me give a little background.  My father’s family has its own stock of stories that get trotted out at various family gatherings.  Often over cards.  In many respects the paterhistorias are more substantially gothic than my mother’s.   For instance, one of the congeries of clanly fables involves my great-great-grandfather (not my namesake, but his father).  This sub-section of the family lectionary has many lessons, of course.  But just to give you a flavor of the narrative arc, they often begin with my ancestor standing sentry one night during The War (you know the one, just do the math on how many generations back that was).  The lesson then generally moves to a middle point that involves thick description of 19th century antisepsis techniques (trust me, you don’t want to know**), before concluding with the bit where the hero takes away the toy guns his grandchildren are playing cowboys-and-indians with and replaces them with toy trains.  This set of stories was dusted off any time I evinced even the hint of an interest in firearms, to explain just why it is that in our family we do not, will not, tolerate guns in the home.

This was in my mind as my father, moved by the spirit (and the wine, and surely the mah-jong), began to tell a story about his early married life with my mother. 

When they first got together, my parents lived in Redding, in a rented house hard by the Sacramento River.   In that house, they entertained all kinds of guests.  This included family: my mom’s brothers came to visit a time or two.  It also included the flotsam and jetsom of my father’s various efforts at uncredentialed social work: men with names like “Pottawattamie Mike” — not to be confused with “Bootlegger Mike” — whom he’d met through various organizing efforts.  It even included an old high school friend of my mother’s first husband by the name of “Crazy Pete.”

Bootlegger Mike was a fellow my dad knew through his brother.  He’d been a psych patient of my uncle’s, and my father convinced him that he didn’t need the lithium to heal from the trauma of Vietnam, what he needed was the good fresh air and freedom of Northern California.  So Bootlegger Mike moved to Redding.  There, given the combination of his Troy Donahue looks and his wounded-warrior vulnerability, he cut quite a swath through the female population; apparently he could go down to the pizza parlor and women would simply follow him home. 

Unfortunately, the wounded-warrior look was for real; Bootlegger Mike had taken so much LSD in the war that it was hard for him to keep some of his shit straight.  He tended to call my mother “mother,” for instance — not out of a sense of Southern familiar deference, but out of real confusion.   But he did have some real skill as a painter.  Some of you may remember a rather large picture hung on the wall of my old room, growing up.   A painting that featured huge flowers, a faceless fairy in a hoopdress, featureless mountain peaks in the background, and a de Chiricoesque arcade hung with trios of golden pawnshop-balls.  Bootlegger Mike painted that. 

Crazy Pete, on the other hand, was more obviously crazy (thus the name).  When everyone else was out of the house, Pete would carefully remove the magnetic bits from the handsets of phones.  This so that the voices couldn’t speak to him and tell him to do bad things.

Is it any wonder that the day Son #1 came to visit his sister and her husband, after greeting him at the door my mother announced to everyone present, “Has everyone met my brother the FBI  agent?  He’s just back from Vietnam.”

The first bit, strictly speaking, was a lie.  The second bit may have been true, though it was nevertheless somewhat beside the point.  In any case, the combination was enough to clear the house (temporarily) of ne’er-do-wells.

I believe it was sometime around this point that my father rented an apartment across the street for the excess houseguests to stay in.

Where was I?  Oh yes.  So one day, this fellow Pottawattamie Mike shows up on my parents’ doorstep.  Evidently he’d heard that there were some cousins raisin’ hell against the federals up in Shasta County.  Which was true: the Pit River Band were engaged at that time in some take-back actions.  So he’d hitched his way across county to help out.  And further, he’d heard that maybe my father knew who to contact (this was also true, sorta); but in any case, could he maybe have a place to hang his hat for a couple nights?  Just outside, perhaps, since he’d gotten used to sleeping underneath the stars on his way there from Michigan (or Oklahoma, wherever). 

Along about 2 that morning, he was awoken by the sound of a bullhorn.  He pokes his head up out of his sleeping bag to see the house surrounded by Redding’s finest.  As in, like, a gun pointed at every window.   Potawattamie Mike does what anyone in their right mind would do: he put his head down and crawled back into his bag.

My father had no such option available.  So he goes to the door and opens it.  Wearing, evidently, de rien.  The nice lieutenant showed his badge, and asked if Mike de Blank (or Arthur X; or Wael Ul-Haq Waleed; evidently he had several aliases) was in the house. 

My father replied, somewhat truthfully, that no, he was not.

Here, a little back story might be necessary.  See, Mike de Blank/Arthur X etc. was one of the ne’er-do-wells against whom my mother had put her foot down.  Earlier that evening — maybe around the same time that Pottawattamie Mike had been unrolling his sleeping bag under the fig tree in the back yard — Mr. de Blank had run into his ex-wife and her sister at the local mini-mart.  Words were exchanged.  Apparently a gun was displayed.  Mr. de Blank “convinced” his ex-wife to take him back.  The sister asked the mini-mart clerk to report a kidnapping.  Oh, and did I mention that Mr. de Blank was a felon out on parole?  If you want to embroider the point, he hadn’t seen his wife since before he went into the clink.

This was how Redding’s finest came to surround my parents’ house, guns a-blazin’, at 2 a.m. in the morning, on the hunt for an armed-and-dangerous ex-felon purportedly in process of committing an abduction.

Now, to be fair, my father did not lie at that precise moment.  Mr. de Blank was _not_ in the house, it was true.

He was across the street, getting re-acquainted with his ex-wife in the most biblical of ways.  Evidently after the initial gunplay, things got much more voluntary — or at least that’s the story as it’s been handed down.

In any case, the cops did not quite believe the naked hippie when he said that Mr. de Blank was not in residence.   So they requested to search the place.

My parents, being law-abiding citizens, consented.  And so the cops searched.  And what did they find?

An army-surplus duffle bag full of pistols and shotguns, stuffed underneath Crazy Pete’s bed. 

When they took Crazy Pete downtown, they discovered (to their consternation) that every gun was properly registered.  Pete may have been crazy, but he was no fool.

How does this story end?  What is the lesson on this day for the good people of this blog?

a.) All the ne’er-do-wells declared the next morning that they would have no part living in such a crazy household.  And so they de-camped for parts unknown.

b.) Once the cops relased Crazy Pete on his own recognizance, my parents called my mother’s ex-husband to ask him to collect him.  He took Pete down to the Army recruiting office.  Where they rather quickly determined that he was too crazy, even in 1973, to send off to fight for America’s freedom.

c.) Old Lady McCracker, onto whose property my parents’ backyard abutted, berated my mother later that week with some version of “who do you think you are with your dirty kids and your dogs, you river trash?”

d.) My father, when he had finished regaling us with this tale, up there in Auburn, over beer and mah-jong, to cap the story off declared to all of my mother’s relatives a hearty “my gawd, can you imagine keeping a sackful of guns?  Stuffed under the bed?”

Which is where the meta-story ends: With my aunt, Son #4’s wife, saying “well, yes, actually, I can imagine that.  Where else are you supposed to keep your guns?”

It was at this point, as I recall, that da partner and decided to head down the hill and hit the Fox and Goose.

Oh, and for the record?  Grandma hadn’t played mah-jong for literally sixty years, and yet still she schooled our sorry asses three games to four.

*As completely tangential window dressing, I would note here that #4 son and his wife used to live in L.A.  In Carson, to be precise.  Wondering where Carson is?  It’s the white man’s Compton — or at least was when they lived there, in the 80s.  When the peace dividend hit, he (along with most of the skilled working class of the greater LA area) lost their jobs making bombs for the greater glory of Pax Americana.  Son #4’s specialty was riveting the magnesium armor onto the Bradley Fighting vehicles that won us the First Gulf War.  Anywho, when the defense industry imploded, what they noticed most especially, of course, was the frontier of urban disorder marching ever closer, month by month.  So they sold their modest two-bedroom and bought 3 acres in the foothills, far from “gangs” and “drugs” and other such (ahem) bugbears.

**Oh, so you do, do you?  Basically, it goes like this: Cavalryman Thompson was shot while standing sentry.  The bullet took off his finger and passed clean through his chest, missing all the major organs.  In order to clean out the dead flesh, they inserted in between his ribs a silver pencil wrapped with a silk handkerchief, on which were larded a dozen or so fly larvae.  Some days later, after the maggots had done their work of consuming the putrescence, the doctor grasped the end of the handkerchief and pulled it out of the officer’s back.  The wound healed, and my ancestor when on to a long and happy life, including many moments that involved teaching his grandchildren and great-grandchildren (i.e., my father) that they must never, ever, play with guns.  Thus the toy trains.

1 Reactie »

Episode #2: Oh Good and Faithful Servant; or, How #1 Son Learned to Stop Worrying and Embrace his Name.

One of the fascinating things about family narratives — and of course I mean “fascinating” in the “mildly interesting if you’re supremely bored” sense of the term — is how different they appear in different tellings.

So, for instance, my mother’s version of her childhood generally begins about the time she stood on the lawn of the tuberculosis sanitorium, waving her recently-divorced mother goodbye before being shipped off with her youngest brother (an 18-month old) to live with an aunt.  #1 son, in the meanwhile, got sent to live with the exceedingly humorless Episcopalian grandmother.  She who is legendary for taking her grandchildren to midnight Eucharist despite having falling on the way and broken her wrist so badly the bone was practically poking out (but would she go to the hospital?  Noooooo…. what is a little pain when we have the birth of our risen Lord to celebrate?  And besides, pain is for the unchurched, the low-churched, and the Romans).  This being the same grandmother whose only (adopted) child had just walked out on his consumptive wife, 5 year-old daughter, 3 year-old namesake, and infant youngest son.  

My mother’s narrative does not improve until the point (approximately 12 years later) when she received a scholarship to attend college out-of-state — a circumstance that entirely befuddled her Pentecostal step-father, who simply did not believe in education for girls (and I mean that literally.  I think the man simply did not believe it existed, much less was worthwhile).

Seen from the perspective of the next eldest child — #1 son, the namesake, whose nickname growing up was the acronym for “juvenile delinquent” but was pronounced like the state mineral — the narrative appears quite different.  And it was at this Thanksgiving that I learned a number of new family stories.  To wit:

Somewhat late in my grandmother’s tenure as a single mom, she managed to acquire the lease on a “nice” apartment.  This required some persuasion, evidently, as renting to a single (white) mother with three children under the age of 10 was simply not done in Pasadena in 1954.  And yet she managed to secure the apartment, complete with separate garage, a nice big yard for her three children, and even (awww) a turtle by the name of Speedy, who lived in the incinerator.*

This arrangement lasted for a few months.  Until such time as my uncle — playing Tom Sawyer sachem to the neighborhood braves, apparently — taught several boys in the neighborhood the fine art of lighting arrows on fire and then shooting them at fixed objects.  Such as, well, just to pick an example out of the air here, an attached garage.

Man, no wonder my mother wouldn’t let me play with lawn darts.

In case you were wondering, Speedy was saved from the inferno.  However, they lost the lease.

Now shift forward a few years: grandmother has married a Pentecostal butcher, and together they have two more sons to whom #1 son can teach delinquent tricks. 

Such as the fine art of slamming your brother’s fingers in the jamb of a door. 

This occured, evidently, when my mother was baby-sitting.  The sight of blood laid her out cold,** so it was #1 son who had to call the bowling alley — where mom and the butcher had gone for a night out — to ask them what to do about the fact that their youngest’s pinkie was (ahem) literally hanging by a thread. 

This (naturally) led to further tales of adventure.  Such as the time that #1 son was of age (16, I think — as his elder sister was away at college) and so he had his license.  As he had some errand the details of which are tangential to the thrust of this story, he took his two youngest brothers on a drive.  These two scamps still being quite young, they (of course) tussled with each other, as boys do.  To the extent that one of them fell down into the wheel well.  Whereupon #1 son, being the dutiful older brother, reached down to try and haul the young pup up by the scruff of the neck.

During the time that he was wrassling with the giggling six-year-old writhing on the floor of the Volvo, the car drifted into the right lane, across the two lanes of oncoming traffic, over the curb, athwart the sidewalk, and up a lawn, before coming to rest against a suburban stucco wall.  At some point in this little rally he managed to clip a housewife.  Seriously enough to break her leg. 

Evidently when this call came to the bowling alley my grandmother and the Pentecostal butcher hadn’t even begun their game. 

In further developments, the aggrieved housewife and her justifiably-pissed hubby decided to sue.  So they went to the fanciest law firm in town — where one of the junior lawyers positively jumped at the opportunity to make a public example of this slatternly no-count bad mother. 

My grandmother was promptly served with papers.  And so she did what anyone would do in her situation.  She went to her boss and asked what should she do?  After all, she’d never been in this sort of situation before.

Her boss read the papers.  And then he called in the junior attorney and read him the riot act.  The junior attorney did not actually have to apologize to the firm’s senior secretary — whose name had changed recently enough that he simply hadn’t noticed the difference — but the suit was, in fact, quietly settled out of court.

If there’s a lesson in all of this, I have yet to figure it out.

*It’s the details, really, that make the story, no?  I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.

**UPDATE.  My mother has informed me that I’ve conflated two stories here.  She was not, in fact, babysitting when this event happened (she was off at college).  #1 son was babysitting, and he had to call the bowling alley to ask if he should pack his baby brother’s finger in ice.  The “laid out cold at the sight of blood” occured elsewhere, and it was my grandmother who fainted: at the sight of #1 son with a stick jammed into his soft palate.

1 Reactie »

At one point this past Thanksgiving Saturday — at an absolutely delightful evening at AllGuin and fam’s house — Mizz TLCNYC made reference to a number of amuse-oreilles that da partner and I told her on the previous Friday evening.  While my memory of certain aspects of that night are (ahem) muddled, I did think it worthwhile to put those stories into some kind of order.  Such as it is, I mean. 

So, in a backwards attempt to explain just why it was that I got so astonishingly drunk on Friday, I here present you with four short stories regarding this year’s family Thanksgiving.  But first, it might do to list the dramatis personae:

Grandma, a native of the Midwest but resident in California for 65 of her 84 years.

Grandma’s children, including: the narrator’s Mom, #1 Son (a public servant in San Diego), #3 son (a motorcycle mechanic in Carson City), and #4 son (a skilled machinist in Auburn).

Immediate in-laws, including: the narrator’s Dad, #3 son’s on-again/off-again/on-again girlfriend (a DMV technician), #4 son’s wife (a stay-at-home mom)

Various grand-children, including: The narrator and his partner; the narrator’s older brother, his wife, and their three children; three of #2 son’s four (adopted) daughters; #3 son’s OA/OA/OA GF’s grand-daughter/adopted daughter (more on which later), and #4 son’s two (natural) daughters.

In absentia, but appearing in the stories nonetheless: Grandma’s three ex-husbands (two of whom are deceased); Son #1’s wife, her father, and his (second) wife; Son #2 (deceased); Son #2’s widow and her second husband; and Son #1’s second daughter, her husband, and their 2-year old son; plus Grandma’s third husband’s three sons.  Oh, and the narrator’s mother’s first husband.

Got that?  ‘Cause there will be a quiz later.

Episode 1: Pig Odalisque

On the Wednesday before Thanksgiving I received a call at work from my mother, to the effect that her step-father — my grandmother’s third husband, the one that if they were ever to divorce all of her children had agreed that they wanted to keep him – had passed away.  This was, to a large degree, not unexpected.  He had moved into a nursing home earlier this summer, and most folks in the family had, at one time or another, made their pilgrimage down to Monrovia to say their farewells.  So… while death is never precisely a happy event, certainly his was as gentle as can be imagined for someone who had lived his full four score and ten.

My grandmother, ever the practical Midwesterner, concluded that her most sensible course was to spend her mourning time with her kin.  So she called her husband’s sons, gave them the news, and then promptly packed herself, her baggage (including her personal-size martini kit), her eldest son, and his eldest daughter into the Escalade and got on the road, bound for Sacramento. 

The next morning the entire family descended upon chez nous.   Seventeen people showed up on our doorstep, and proceeded to play catch-up with a vengeance — not least because everyone there knew that we all had to to all but sing and dance to keep Grandma cheerful in her time of loss. 

This included meeting the new demi-cousin, a perfectly charming 6-year old girl named for a season, but I won’t say which.  She’s the newest adoptee into the extended clan, taken in by her grandmother when her father and mother — to use the phrase which my mother improvised when questioned on the matter by one of the younger grandkids — “went bad.”*

It might have been about this point in the proceedings that my grandmother began to distribute whatever it is that WASPs call tschotschkes.  To myself and da partner she gave a large bin of lunch-sized baggies of bat-shaped pretzels and pretzel-goldfish.  She also gave us a medium-sized bin of chocolate truffles.

Do not try to look for meaning in these gifts, by the way. 

To my father she gave a deck of Christmas-themed playing cards.  These promptly went into the drawer in the china cabinet where all such packs of cards live (it’s the middle drawer on the top row, in case you’re curious).  She then proceeded to break out three pairs of her deceased husband’s shoes, along with several of his shirts, which she bestowed upon my father.  All of these items fit rather well. 

And yet I repeat, do not try to look for meaning in these gifts.

To my mother she gave a matched set of three small ceramic pigs.  All of them arranged in…well, rather sumptuous poses. 

I will say it a third time: do not try to look for meaning in these gifts**

The pigs now live on a table in the living room with all the other tschotchkes.

The gifts disbursed (there were others, to her various sons), we adjourned to Marie Callender’s for our Thanksgiving meal. 

*This feint did not deter my cousin — who is 10, mind you — from pressing my mother with “what does that mean?”  At which my point my mother had to be honest: drugs. 

**That’s a big old lie.  There is a rather amusing story behind the pigs, which I’ll save for another time.  It involves my mother, her first husband, his dead father’s (i.e., “the judge”) Volvo (upholstered in white leather, natch), a pig, and, yes, you guessed it, hizzoner the mayor San Francisco, George Moscone.

Geen reactie’s, je kan de eerste zijn »