Excerpts - Memoir
Reaching for a Touchable Past
FOREWORD
STEP RIGHT UP!
THIS WAY IN TO
THE HOUSE OF MISERIES.
THE END OF THE LINE.
Time telescopes as I grow old.
Time shrinks as my body shrinks.
The past comes clearer and closer.
The future fades from focus.
My child – my only child – is childless.
My “stepsons,”
as their father bids me remember,
are not mine,
are not “blood.”
So, now,
no more blood
to run through time,
to inform the future of the past,
my past, my family’s past.
One might ask, why bother memorializing our meager existence when we know that our sun will
burn out and the universe will collapse and turn to cinders all monuments, headstones, fragile
recorded eulogies, photographs, and memories. Some of us, like Henry Miller, flatter and delude
ourselves that while we are living, we are the center of the universe; that we, the artists among
us, are our own gods. This delusion is what feeds and sustains our grandiose egos and motivates
us now to write memorials and to honor those who made us what we are, for better or worse.
In the past, whenever I thought about my place in the world, I became overwhelmed and
intimidated.
I used to suffer from terminal uniqueness syndrome – according to my ex-wife. No
longer. I’ve discovered that the only way I can deal with the enormity of my search for “my
place in the world” is to focus on the immediate and the personal. I now care less about the world and more about my world. Having reconciled myself to the fact that I am not the center
of the universe, I have embraced as a personal “fact” that I am the center of my universe at least. No grand progeny, no blood line, no descendants, no future, no perpetuation of ego. It all begins and ends with me. Either I am the center of my universe, or I am nothing. So let me declare: I remember, therefore I am.
To paraphrase Henry Miller at the opening of Tropic of Cancer: This then is a chronicle,
an odyssey, an explanation, a journey, an apology, many apologies, a funeral, a eulogy, a
grieving, a vitriolic purging, the product of my long delayed but increasingly urgent need to
“rage against the dying of the light” (Dylan Thomas), a desperate quest to end my restless and
rootless wandering, to become and remain a part of something – family? community? and not to wither to a desiccated husk of a man and die alone, unknown, and unappreciated -- like my
father.
I am now in the withering season of my own life, but before the stem dies and snaps, I feel
compelled to reveal, to share, some of the blooms and weeds from the garden of my life. As I
grow older, I am more interested in the past than the future, quite simply because I have more
“past” than future. As William Faulkner reminds us, “The past is never dead; it isn’t even past.”
But for many folks the past no longer exists or is important, neither tangibly nor as an idea,
merely a quest for immediate gratification from myriad shiny things readily available in a world
of crass materialism.
I feel, therefore I believe, and therefore I think, in that order, that my origins are unique.
Exceptionality is not unusual in my family. It is an attribute, an attitude that has been imprinted
on the characters of successive generations and to me from hearing and learning about it,
especially from my mother, but also, and in more subtle ways, from my father.
Beginnings, middles, and endings are illusive and faulty. Fragments of lives do not lend
themselves to an orderly narrative, and in memoir it is fragments that remain, some more potent
than others. Rootless lives, wandering without purpose (in early childhood I dreamed of being a
saddle tramp after reading a book of that title), an unsettled non-pattern which was characteristic of each of my parent’s early lives, and which continued to characterize the life of my family. I acknowledge that I was not the only kid who grew up poor and in despair. My wife grew up in a slum in Brooklyn where danger was ever-present: Puerto Rican kids running the streets with shotguns, murdered kids showing up on the steps of her high school. The redeeming grace of her childhood was that her parents endowed her with the gift of the value of learning and education.
But my childhood was my childhood, and that, in part, is what I write about. Two voices spoke to me during my childhood and formed my character and values. One voice, my mother’s, taught me Southern: manners, civility, and that history matters. The other voice,
my father’s, was that of a genteel third generation northern Californian in temperament and
values. As a result, this is a story between bookends, from my father’s last illness, death, and
burial, to my mother’s death. This memoir is structured as a series of vignettes, not as a book.
Word count, appx. 124,000.
Chapter 1: Pop's Final Journey, Death And Burial (Partial)
Mom said, “Terry, your father told me that if anything happened to him not to take him to a
hospital; to just let him die at home. Your father wanted to die happy at home.”
“At least he got back to Lake County where he got a room in Lakeport for a while,” I
replied.
Yes,” Mom said, “your father often spoke of going back to his boyhood home in
Kelseyville where he could be happy with his memories and feel independent while he was still
able. He wanted to die in Kelseyville. I’m sure he was thinking about his mother. He was very
close to her and was heartbroken when she died. That was before you were born, Lonnie.”
“But he did come back to us to die, Mom.”
The Charnel House, July 1963.
Pop stepped off the Greyhound bus in downtown Los Angeles, opposite Union Station, feeble
legs barely holding him steady. “Watch those steps there, grandpa,” said the impatient and
annoyed driver, who had been tolerating Pop since he relieved the previous driver for the final
run to LA.
I hadn’t seen Pop since Mom drove him to Lakeport, where he lived alone in a single
room for several months. Pop almost fell as he stepped off the bus. I caught him as he reached
the bottom step. Pop was in a stuporous fatigue. Grey janitor’s pants drooping from weight loss
and added weight from being soaked with urine. He was wearing a faded flannel shirt. A
pathetic sight. The end was moving closer. He had come home to die.
In July 1963, we were living in a shabby house in a racially mixed neighborhood in west
Pasadena. Pop’s first stroke came within a few days after he returned to us. For a few days one
side of his body was paralyzed. He tried to speak. Mostly, he mumbled. A lot of what he tried to
say was unintelligible.
As Pop sat on the toilet in our tiny bathroom, I shaved him with an electric razor, a recent
Christmas gift, trimmed his sparse hair, and lifted him into the tub. I walked him back to the cot
where he lay most of the day, sipping cheap red wine which he no longer felt compelled to hide
from us, and which Mom charitably overlooked. It didn’t matter anymore. Pop’s drinking wasn’t
keeping him from doing his part to support the family. He hadn’t done that for years. He was
beyond that now. It was all up to Mom and had been for a long time, working seven days a week
and overnight taking care of other peoples’ kids, holding the family together and keeping us fed.
Then the second stroke. Pop’s sounds were garbled and pathetic. He couldn’t move, though he
tried to. He pissed his pants, soaked the cot. I was facing mortality. I was not ready for this. Too
late now for all that remains undone, unsaid, unlearned, unappreciated.
Mom knew this was the beginning of the end. She had been here before with her parents and
with patients she cared for as a practical nurse. I hadn’t experienced death and dying with a
family member. In 1963, even the charity wards in the Los Angeles County Hospital required
authorization from a physician to gain admission. You couldn’t just drive up and dump. Mom
worked for a psychiatrist caring for his alcoholic wife and their three children. She called him; he
signed a letter and offered to provide an ambulance. We declined the ambulance. Too expensive.
We were broke. You couldn’t get into the county hospital unless you were broke. The county
hospital was a teaching hospital for the University of Southern California medical school. Pop
must have understood that he would have to go to the county hospital — to a ward for the
terminally ill.
We staggered out to the car with Pop. I drove all of us to the hospital. Pop was admitted. I
hoped that Pop would at least receive palliative care to ease his suffering. I even hoped that he
might receive care to ameliorate the effects of his stroke so that he could hear me when I spoke
to him or hear me when I said, “goodbye.” Neither happened.
Pop was there about two weeks before he died. His death was inevitable; the way he died
was not. His death was accelerated by neglect. Whenever I pass or even see a picture of the
immense edifice of the Los Angeles County Hospital, I see a giant tombstone.
I visited, but only three times, glad that Mom was working, and that my brother Jimmy was in
school and unable to visit the charnel house. Visits were painful and exhausting. I made excuses
for not visiting more. I had to work. There was nothing I could do for him. I didn’t think he
could hear me. He’s going to die soon, and all this will be over. He didn’t die soon. He lingered.
On my visits, I had to wind my way to his bed, moving sideways through the narrow aisles,
between beds that stuffed the ward from wall to wall, each bed with a silent, semi-conscious
elderly white male patient. A storage room for mummies.
Pop lay “awake,” dehydrated, and not conscious of my presence. I wanted him to know I
was there. I stood beside him wetting his lips, parched and cracked from unattended thirst. He
responded to the moisture, to the small sips of water that I managed to get into his mouth with a
straw without choking him. I spoke to him. “I’m here, Pop. Move your eyes or hand or nod your
head if you can hear me or feel me.” No response. I wanted to believe that he knew I was there.
Nothing. Just like all the other near cadavers in the room. This was a death ward, where old men
were put and minimally managed until they “expired.”
I was too young and inexperienced to know what to do; to go to the nurses’ station (I
don’t remember seeing one in the cavernous hallway) and to scream for help. Go to
Administration, and yell, scream and flail until Pop got some help, to help him pass with dignity
and to leave me with some peace of mind. I didn’t know that was possible, and I didn’t know
how to do it even if I had known that it was possible. I didn’t make the same mistake with my
mother during her many surgeries and hospitalizations in her later years in Paris, Texas, to the
annoyance of doctors and staff. But I gained their respect and occasionally I saved their asses and my mother’s life for a while.
Back at work at my summer job in the mail room of a bank in downtown LA, my boss put down
the phone, walked over to me. “I have bad news. Your family just called. Your father has passed
away.” I stood there, knowing I would never forget this moment. I left work. I wasn’t crying yet.
That wouldn’t come until days later. I had to take care of business. I went home. Mom was
weeping. I had no idea what to do but felt my way through by instinct and on autopilot. I went to
the County Hospital. In my state of numbness and vulnerability, the staff prevailed upon me to
consent to an autopsy, to assist the doctors in determining the precise causes of my father’s
death, and thereby to advance science. So they said. Sounded good to me. I signed the papers.
Cause of death: Encephalomalacia, old and chronic (which I interpreted as “worn out.”
Encephalomalacia, the softening or loss of brain tissue after cerebral infarction (stroke), and/or
cerebral ischemia, an inadequate blood supply to an organ or part of the body. Arteriosclerosis,
the pathologic process by which cholesterol and calcium plaque accumulate within the arterial
wall. In other words, hardening of the arteries from years of smoking cigarettes and drinking
cheap wine.
At the mortuary, I saw my father’s body, his features were distorted from removal of the brain
and probable replacement with stuffing material. No doubt the pieces of Pop’s brain had already
been tossed out with other medical waste. But I didn’t think that because I had no idea about the
particulars of an autopsy. I knew I was looking at Pop, but I deluded myself that someone had
made a mistake and that it was not my father who lay there. And this was after the mortician had done his work.
MOTHER’S ELEGY TO HER MOTHER
This is a good time, Terry, to tell you another part of my life story. Your father has been drinking again, and he’s napping in the bedroom. Part of my life I would like to live over, the good part, but not my childhood. I wouldn’t wish that on a dog. What didn’t kill me made me stronger.
I was thirteen when I lost my mother. I thought my world had ended. Mama was pregnant again with her third set of twins. Mama had already had eight children. Three died soon after birth.
Mama was only thirty-four when the twins, Mildred and Harold were born.
Mama almost died then. The doctor told her that she must never get pregnant again.
Papa knew what the doctor had told her, but he only thought about himself. There wasn’t anything a woman could try to prevent pregnancy. Only vinegar and Lysol douches.
Mama died in St. Joseph’s Hospital, Ft. Worth. Mama’s death certificate said ‘Pneumonia’ as the cause of death. Mama didn’t die of pneumonia. The doctor who signed the death certificate concealed the true cause. Mama died from massive hemorrhaging after a botched illegal abortion. She was pregnant with twins again.
Late one night Papa came home and told me our dear mother was gone. I’ll never forget that. I just cried and cried. I had to tell my four little brothers and sisters. The twins were just two years old, and Roy was just a baby. Mildred and Harold were too young to understand; they’d go around calling, ‘Mama, Mama.’
Then, Grandma West hurt me so. ‘Frances had an abortion, and abortion is murder. Your mother is burning in hell. What she did is an unforgivable sin.’ Oh, I thought about it so much.
I was still suffering raw and scalding grief from my mother’s sudden death.
I never forgave Grandma for her words. They rose up often in my head and hurt me the way Grandma meant them to. If Grandma couldn’t scold her daughter; she could hurt the closest thing resembling her daughter, and that was me. I hated Grandma West for a long time after that. She knew what Mama had been through: too many pregnancies; too many pregnancies with twins; too many miscarriages, still births, deliveries of twins with one living and one dying soon after birth, whose passing caused more pain by having stayed around long enough to become a lovable fixture. Grandma West just wasn’t as close to Mama as I was. She could surround and shelter herself with religious sanctimony, but I couldn’t.
I had to take over, had to take care of the babies by myself. We lived out on the prairie in an oil company house. Then one night a strange thing happened. I was so tired and sad I just wanted to die. I closed my eyes and then opened them. I looked out the window as a bright light rolled in from the distance and came up close to the house. Two huge golden doors opened in the middle of the light, and several women dressed in white robes and holding
lighted oil lamps walked slowly up several steps and in through the doors. Then the doors closed, and the light went out. I knew that Mama was in Heaven. I told Papa’s “housekeeper” what I had seen. She told Papa that I should be committed, that I’d lost my mind.
A lot of times I wouldn’t know what to do, which way to turn or anything, and I’d be alone with the kids, no telephone, nobody around, and I’d go to my mother’s picture, and I would talk to her picture, and I’d say, ‘Oh, Mama, what will I do?’ It seemed like I always did the right thing.”
One day you asked me, ‘had I ever visited Mama’s grave?’ No, I was afraid to. Mama died in 1920. In 1922, the Trinity River flooded the whole area and killed many people. I heard that the water took huge slabs off the edge of Greenwood Cemetery, with graves falling into the river, the rushing water opened coffins, hurled rotted remains into the river, on down the river, through the town and out onto the prairie. I had no way of knowing if Mama’s grave was washed away, and I suffered nightmares of the worse imaginings, for years.
Years later I discovered that Mama’s body wasn’t thrown out into the river. Her grave was far enough back from the river’s shoreline, but I didn’t know that comforting detail at the time.
Mama’s grave was unmarked until 1985. You had a marker placed at the grave, and in broiling heat you walked with me to Mama’s grave. Frances Gilmore, nee Parsley, 1884 – 1920. I looked down at Mama’s marker and smiled.
///
SAVED BY THE KLAN
Ruby Pearl’s father was off working at an oil refinery somewhere in Oklahoma. He had left her, fourteen at the time, alone with her four younger siblings in a shabby apartment in downtown Ft. Worth.
“After a while, we ran out of food and Harold got sick and went into convulsions.I had to give Harold medicine every four hours until it ran out. Harold was Mildred’s twin, the set of twins that survived infancy. I went running to the drug store and asked the druggist to call a doctor. On my way back I fainted on the trolley tracks. A big Irish policeman pulled me off the tracks just as the trolley was coming, and he brought me to. He asked what was wrong with me. I said that my little brother was sick and needed medicine and a doctor, and that we were hungry. The policeman asked where we lived. I pointed to a narby building. He asked how many of us there were. I said five, including me. All younger than me. He asked where our parents were. I told him my Mama was dead and that Papa had gone off to a new job. The policeman took me back to the building and saw we had no food. I told the policeman that I couldn’t have any prescriptions filled ‘cause I didn’t have a dime and couldn’t afford a doctor. The policeman took the prescriptions and brought medicine back, and a doctor.
“The policeman asked if I knew where Papa was. I told him, a town in Oklahoma where he worked as a foreman in a new oil field. I told him the name of the oil company. The policeman said he would find Papa. I explained that Papa would send for us to come later by train when he found a place for us to live. This is the way it had always been when Papa went off to a new job in a new town. I hadn’t heard from him yet.
“When the policeman was gone, we found a big bag of hamburgers and fruit, and $15.00 on the dresser. How we loved that old policeman.
“The policeman came back and told us he had found Papa and gave us money for the train ride to Oklahoma where Papa was. We all got off the train in the new town, and eventually I found Papa’s house. He seemed glad to see us. I smelled that he’d been drinking whiskey. Papa hugged me and praised me for being such a big girl and doing such a fine job of getting the family back to him. He bounced the young’uns on his knees.
“I had begun to unpack the three small suitcases we travelled with when a knock on the door interrupted our reunion. Papa opened the door. Three men stood there. One of them asked Papa to step outside. I shooed the young’uns away and stood near the door to listen. The three men pressed close to Papa. One did all the talking. “Gilmore, your young’uns was hurting back in Ft. Worth after you ran away and left them to fend for themselves. They were hungry, and that little towhead boy was bad sick. That girl of yours, the oldest, went out to fetch a doc and fainted on the trolley tracks she was so weak from hunger. Lucky for you, one of our brothers found her and took care of the business you ran away from.
“I could see Papa’s face tighten when the man said ‘brothers.’ The man talking saw it too. Fear. ‘Yeah, Gilmore, you know who we are.’ Papa said, ‘Yes, sir. You’re Klan.’ ‘Right, the man said, ‘What you have done to your family is unacceptable for a white man. We’re warning you only this one time. We’ll be keeping an eye on you, now and in the future, wherever you go. If any of us find out you ain’t taking care of these children, there will be consequences.’ The talking man drew out real slow the word ‘consequences.’ Those men put the fear of God into Papa. Papa got the message, for a while. But later he would leave us alone again when he moved to a different job.
MY MOTHER’S NURSING SCHOOL ADVENTURE
June 5, 1966, my mother and I were driving in northern Mississippi, travelling to Monroe, Louisiana to visit her cousin Lola. The radio music was suddenly interrupted to announce that a White man had shot James Merdith from ambush as Merdith lead a “March Against Fear" (for registering as a Black voter) from Memphis to Jackson, and warning against travel in the area, where we were. I told Mom that four years earlier Meredith was the first Black student to enroll at the University of Mississippi amid intervention of federal troops and chaos and killing on campus.
“Oh, that poor man,” Mom said (referring to Meredith). People down here are still mean as cotton mouth snakes. I’ve heard enough. Turn off the radio. Turn around. Go thorough Arkansas.”
How do I change the subject? I thought. Then …
“Mom, you never told me about nursing school,” I said,
“Terry, I was too embarrassed to tell you when you were young, but now you’re grown up so I’ll tell you.
“I was just eighteen and the only thing I ever wanted to be was a nurse. When a girlfriend across the street said she was going to Mangum, Oklahoma for nursing school, I wanted to go but felt like I was too dumb. My stepmother wrote a letter and told them about me, and the hospital let me in. You didn’t have to have too much education to get in. It was hard work. We got free room and board and $12.00 a month pay. We all worked twelve-hour duty, with a few hours off to rest, and I mean we worked hard: slingin’ bed pans and washing them out and cleaning rooms, even the operating room. Sometimes I would faint at things I saw in there. We’d give hypodermics. The first time I gave a hypodermic I nearly broke the needle off in the man’s arm I was so nervous. And every time someone died, I had to tell the relatives. I’d end up crying just like they would. And the doctors all kidded me. They’d come by when I was in the service room, and I was washin’ bedpans and I threw up and they’d stick their heads in the door and laugh at me.
“There was one nurse there and she was a clown. When we’d go down to eat, we’d say ‘what’s on the menu today?” And if they’d had lots of appendixes to take out, she’d say, ‘Appendix on toast or ovaries on something.’ After she said that, I just couldn’t eat. Later that nurse got kicked out because she was comin’ in drunk at night after going out with one of the doctors.
“One day the supervising nurse, Miss Marner, told us that they’re taking pictures for a new catalogue for the school. She tells us that they want a picture of a student giving a patient an enema and another one of a student nurse giving a patient a douche. I nearly died. One of the student nurses, Mabel, who was real religious, said she wasn’t going to do that. I said I wasn’t gonna either, I’ll quit first. We soon found out that we didn’t have to take those pictures; the supervisor was just joking.
One time Miss Marner fixed me up with a date with a doctor. He wanted me to go to Medicine Springs with him for the weekend. He was a young married doctor. I said, ‘Oh no, I don’t do that.’ Besides I didn’t have any clothes to go anywhere. He said, “I’ll buy you some clothes and give you $500 if you spend the weekend with me.’ And then I wouldn’t kiss him. He said, “I’ll give you $20 for just a kiss.” I told him I didn’t need the money that bad, and God knows I did; we were paid only $12 a month. And we had to have our hair marcelled with a hot iron, and that was fifty cents. And then it would rain and it’d all come undone.
Miss Marner told me she’d sleep with all the doctors and go anywhere with them for $500.
Dr. Border was the head of the hospital. He was a great big fat guy and wore a black wig. He would get drunk. And when I was on night duty, we’d hear him down in the big ward riding around in a wheelchair. Dr. Border’s mother, Grandma Border, was always coming to the hospital. She thought of him as a little boy. One of many times Grandma Border called the hospital, Miss Marner answered the phone. Grandma Border asked if Dr. Border was there. Miss Marner said, ‘Yes, Grandma, he’s in my bed right now.’
One time, Dr. Border got drunk and operated on a woman. The next day he went in to see the woman and asked her what she was in for. The woman said, ‘Well, you oughta’ know, you operated on me.’ He didn’t remember.
Another time, I will never forget. I was giving bed baths, to men too. I gave one a cloth and told him to finish his bath. He said, ‘You finish it,’ and pulled back the bed covers. Oh my God, I nearly died. I went running up to the superintendent’s office, my face was burning. The superintendent hated men. She’d never been married. She went into that room and told him, ‘You finish your bath and don’t ever insult these nurses again. They’re not prostitutes – they’re nurses!’
“Wow, Mom! That’s some story,” I exclaimed.
“Yes. I didn’t stay. I left to get married; to my first husband, Hobart.
That was a disaster and a story for another time.”
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