I found you, dusty desiccated in the Arizona desert, buried on a golf mesa near Lake Havasu. You found a hideout far from any family, a world away from Alabama and then the war. Four corners away from my mother your wife in Denver. Last I saw you on an official form in second grade at my Catholic school, you two were divorced, you were living in Colorado Springs. You found another girlfriend, a new wife, and lived happily without children, retiring to Arizona. Did you know you couldn’t survive as a father? I give you credit for that, but I don’t know your story. I’ve only just discovered these details. Let’s talk.
After my mother died, I went searching for details at the library, where records and references were once kept. Based on a marriage certificate which I requested from the city’s archives, I traced your name back through generations to the Revolutionary War, but I wasn’t able to find what happened to you. I was told a fire in St. Louis burned the records of veterans. I found out later you weren’t a vet, too young or too old to be conscripted into either war. My baptismal book told me the names of your parents. A few clues, some ancestry digging, but no sense of destiny. I guess you wanted it that way, identity on the loose. As far as I know, you didn’t take responsibility for me or your other kids; albeit I learned that you spent twenty years with your first wife, and twenty-five with your last. You lasted five years with my mother in between, adopted her three daughters, but skedaddled after I was born. Kids too much trouble, wily or abusive temptation, playing at love was just another high? That’s what I want to know.
Growing up I told myself it didn’t matter that I had no father, that my mother was plenty good for two parents. People didn’t ask, neighbors made up their own stories about your disappearance for my sake, I didn’t care. There were good men around me, from the guys who married my older sisters to the fathers of friends in my Scout troops. You were not missed, and I’m guessing you were fine with families left behind, out of sight out of mind. Just settle down with the little lady to drink and pray and wake up the next day without more mouths to feed. So it goes.
I see you head cocked and brow furled petting Ginger, in a white t-shirt typical wear of post war men, forcing a smile looking out from under a secret glance, next to your mother-in-law, who’s holding a fresh bouquet of mountain flowers back when we didn’t know they weren’t for picking. A walking stick rests near the boulder where the two of you sit. She has a hard time smiling, too. The two of you forced to make nice. Dad and Grandma, names I never got to use.
On the same rock seated I see my mother in the plaid Pendleton she favored for mountain trips, holding Ginger, looking away, she didn’t like having her picture taken, with her mother looking at the camera from her same position in the picture with you. A family diptych on a rock carved for two. Whose dog was Ginger? Later our family included Skippy, so I guess dogs were important to my mother. Probably just more responsibility to you, so I expect it was her incentive to have a protector around for her girls. You were a traveling salesman, moved to Denver working for an engineering company that sent you and your older brother west. I expect that knowing smile fared well for you. From the same trip to the hills, Mom is seen running and laughing with her daughter Eileen with the overbite and your friend Tom, my godfather, the three of them entangled in a game of tag. Maybe she avoided the camera after she discovered your betrayal, your abandoned family, or after you left her, a strong woman deposed by a con man.
Did you con her, did you love her, was it a marriage of convenience? Questions I never asked since I took my life growing up as I found it. My mother worked so hard with me at schoolwork, and impressed upon me my potential for excellence. I must have sublimated the fact that she did this because of her failure to hold onto two husbands, although I can’t call it a failure. The luck of the draw, but what does that mean? Her mother looks forlorn in those photos, as though she’s visiting her daughter one last time — her first son-in-law has died, and you’re a player, from the look on her face she can tell. Her daughter made it for a while on her own, but now has rebounded with this tall soldier just back from the war, so I supposed for so long, who rented a room upstairs in her house. Did you let her know about your family back in Alabama? Did you see them after your stint in the service. Is that when you found out your wife had taken up with your older brother, who was too old for the military and was the sole breadwinner for his extended family? I only found out about him last year; when did my mother know the truth? Maybe it’s why my mother was so taciturn, not wanting to know more.
Why ask all these questions of a dead man, why interrogate the disappeared, why now when there’s no one around to substantiate my claims on you? I’m nearing your age at death, and I’m looking for someone to blame for my failures, inadequacies, my lazy hazy emotions, which I’ve too long associated with growing up in a family of women, with a mother who didn’t talk to me about you, who expected me to be the best at school, the handsome son, le bon fils, the boy she could be most proud of for his scholarship, sense of fashion which she nurtured in him. She wanted me to be a man, the homo vitae lent to her then lost with your departure. You were the scoundrel I never knew or needed until now. The ways in which my life turned had more to do with you than I could have imagined. It’s the negative capability of Keats that has become the issue, since I’m seeking answers without the possibility of any resolution.
My name begs some discussion. The tagline to a photo from the summer of 1951 calls me Michael alongside my sisters Norine and Marylyn and dog Skippy, our crew seated on the porch of a cabin. I was always called Michael, but later found that my first name was John, named for you. Was it intended that I be called Michael — it seems it was a common practice in the Fifties to name a son after the father but distinguish him as an individual by using his middle name? My best friend in high school was known as Michael but named for his father Louis, who divorced his family soon after I met him. He lasted longer than you, who was gone soon after my birth. Did my mother and sisters decide on Michael after your departure? What was my given name before the age of one? Michael I grew up, although I loved the young guy who looked out for me when neighborhood kids were wrestling on a real mat, the guy who nicknamed me Mickey and invited me to wrestle — I felt the loner and he included me by naming me. Otherwise, it was legal documents that forced me to go by John. Still, the boss at my first job gardening which became my occupation and profession declared that I would be John because they already had too many Mikes on the job. I wore dark glasses all the time, presumably because of the outdoor work but really because it was cool and I had worn those round plastic pink frames with green lenses all through college, indeed, a townie from Lake Forest had recognized me in a Denver bar because of those glasses, and when a fellow worker called me John I was slow to respond, so everyone thought I was a space case. At the Steinbeck Institute where I studied as an English teacher, my fellow mates called me J. Michael because that’s how I signed up. I consider my name as fluid as my career has been, thanks to you who provided little guidance in my nominal provenance.
Mother never talked about you. The Northerns the older couple who lived next door said that you died in the war — that was their story. I didn’t ask where or when or how, since I figured that my mother would let me know anything that was important. Laura Cavalieri, who lived next to them and was also single, gave me a baseball bat when I was older; she said it belonged to her husband, but I never questioned whether he was on the road playing ball, or died in the war. We lived in an Italian neighborhood with the Pergolas across 36th, the Pontarellis kitty-corner, old man Zarlengo across Bryant. Most of these folks went to Mt. Carmel church on Navajo, the center of the old Italian North Denver hood, but we went to St. Catherine’s on Federal, and that’s where my sisters and I went to grade school. My mother said we were within St. Catherine’s parish boundaries, but that impressed me as gerrymandering by my mother. It was rumored that her first husband had been a police detective in Chicago Heights, and he had been on the tail of Al Capone. Probably another story that got started to explain a father’s absence. I had heard that he died on a train returning to Chicago after scouting Denver for his respiratory rehabilitation. But if the detective bit was accurate, she may not have wanted her daughters to school with the Smaldones, the reputed Cosa Nostra Family of the North Side. There were still plenty of Italians at St. Catherine’s, but it wasn’t the old world convocation and early twentieth century connections of Mt. Carmel. Can you detect that I’m making most of this up?
On my first grade registration card that I had to return to the nuns, you were listed as “separated” from my mother; the next year, you were “divorced”. I could read at that early age. Mother probably felt relieved that she could spell out her marital status. She no doubt promised the Church priests and their proxy nuns that she did not intend to marry again, which would have been counter to the existing doctrine. I have a hard time believing that she knew you were married prior to your relationship with her. Perhaps she discovered your previous life when your parents visited at my birth — their names are listed in the record. You would have known this would be released, shared, discussed, debated, brought to bear witness during this joyous celebration of my entry into the world and christening in the one true church. No one took pictures. There is just the Baby Book. You were still around at my first birthday, so it took awhile for you to break away. Maybe it commenced during that first year when you weren’t receiving all my mother’s attention. I was. I only have a record of your marriage certificate from 1946, the Days to Remember baby book, and what I’ve researched beyond my mother and sisters’ deaths. You haven’t left me much to go on, which is a godsend, since my imagination is fully capable of filling in the blanks: I had already assumed your status as an enlisted man which was utterly false.
I just looked at your marriage license again, and it attests that both of you knew of each others past marriage, that your new wife was widowed and you were divorced. I wonder if Mother knew the details, at the least what I’ve learned, that your wife and kids took up with your older brother while you were away, and was that a lapse of judgement or preordained, did you know it would turn out that way. How could I have missed these details when I first obtained a copy of the certificate back in the 90s, when I undertook the search for my lost horizon? I spent days at the library looking for clues to your whereabouts, but I could only confirm the marriage date and follow your ancestral trail back to the Revolutionary War, to Rev. Dozier Thornton, a soldier before he became a Baptist preacher in Georgia, never forward to your life after me and my mother. The license confirmed your nuptials, but I failed to recognize that you had lived with my mother for six years before leaving her side for good — that fact impressed me finally some six months ago, and now I learn that both of you admitted your previous affairs. I expect your first marriage was not a church wedding, or my mother wouldn’t have put up with it. Then again, she contested the nuns’ advisory about putting me in a YMCA day camp for the summer — they may be Christian, but they weren’t Catholic, but she had little choice on her budget and told the Sisters as much.
She severed her connection to her first husband’s family after he died, striking out with a trio of girls, looking for a new life not ruled by his relatives. Mother was strong willed and wouldn’t put up with the domination of a sister-in-law who ruled her roost of siblings. She fled west, where her late husband sought relief from his debilitating tubercular condition. Her daughters lived up to the task of first exploring Las Vegas, New Mexico, before settling in Denver. She fell for you, who rented an upstairs apartment in the big farm house she had bought on the North Side. I suppose that you two were in love, which she told me once — that was the extent of our conversation about you. Marylyn said you were mean, more likely a coldness I have often detected in myself. My mother and the girls came from a loving home, a liberal enclave of education, political activism, the American middle class that was growing between the wars. Away from your first family, you no doubt put your foot down trying to control the women in this new alliance, made the rules that were to be obeyed while you were traveling, as a salesman who charmed your clients, only to return home to a passel of free spirits. When you saw the indulgence I was privy to during my first year of life, you left without regret, knowing your law and order attitude had little chance of succeeding with three sisters and a baby boy in tow. That’s what I imagine. You never showed up like absentee fathers do in the movies, to say you were sorry but she was at fault, too. You never showed, let alone wrote.
In fifth or sixth grade at St. Catherine’s, a new kid named Holiday or Holloway punched me, unprovoked, although I’m known to have a smart mouth, not wisecracking so much as showing up others. (Here we go round the prickly pear, the hollow men, the stuffed men.) Since he was new to school, he needed to prove himself, he didn’t last long; I imagine the guys in my class later let him know that I didn’t have a father and so didn’t know how to fight. It was one of the few times someone tried to tangle — I was tall and outreached most opponents. I could have used your masculine virile militaristic attitude to defend myself. By eighth grade, Danny P chose me off, and we were supposed to meet by the billboard by my bus stop on his way home. He climbed the billboard to get out of my reach, but I showed up, shaking a fist at his elevated escape.
My mom never discussed fighting with me. Her focus was scholarship and success for her fatherless child. If you were mean as my sister suggested, then you knew how to fight, an Alabaman still squirming post Civil War, ready for revenge, on your brother, your past, your marriage to a woman who stood up for her rights. Or were you a deserter? I had a close friend in high school, knew Pete back to third grade, who got mightily upset with my smart mouth when we were goofing on a Friday night. He didn’t take it out on me, but after breaking a dozen car aerials, I wondered how my talk had set him off. With drinking buddies years later, I could talk shit and they would without fail lash out at me, and so we would rumble a bit, for some loaded fun: I hit Delbert in the nose that wouldn’t stop bleeding, and he pushed me down an icy path and broke my ankle; Robert swatted my IC! Berlins off my nose, and I bashed him with his office phone. Another time, Robbie tried his feigned fighting and I took him down and kept a foot on his back, told him to stay down — I was harboring some displeasure over a drug deal he made for me. Derek laughed ahardy because no one put Robert down. So when I needed to show some force, I was capable, but it took reasoning and reflection along the way, not traits that men typically employ in an emotional outburst of rage. Words of instruction from you may have lead to more trouble for me, so thanks for your selfish delinquency — I learned for myself.
What I want to know is what would have changed with you in my life, what were my alternatives, my parallel auto fictions. If I knew more of what life was like for my sisters with you around, I could extrapolate your actions in response to my being; but your nothingness left me without a plan outside the day to day lessons my mother bestowed. I have a few photographs, the baby book, remembered words from family and neighbors, and your wedding portrait which my mother gave me along the way. (One more opportunity when I neglected to ask her about you.) I display her portrait, one of my three sisters probably posed in Chicago, a formal heirloom shot of my mother’s German family come to America, but your picture is locked in a drawer, someone I never knew who little resembled the person I saw myself to be. In the photo gallery displayed on a metal side table, a wallet sized high school graduation photograph of me looks out from the plastic case it came in, something my mother kept — it was probably the last picture that gave anyone the sense that they knew me. In college I did everything I could to disguise myself, looking for you in me since my mother dedicated herself to independence for her daughters but mostly for me. She would not restrict my movements after high school: my life, que será será. It could have been your call.
During my senior year, I started to make decisions of my own. I had contacted scores of colleges during junior year, and applied to a half dozen, deciding to attend Lake Forest College outside Chicago, because it was small but close to the Big Shoulders City which I knew from summer trips to see relatives. They gave me a full ride, decidedly decent compared to my acceptance to Brown without a scholarship. My mother had no money for college — I won acceptance because of her determination early on to make me the best, confident and assured, and I commenced to act on her hopes for me. I dropped out of college calculus because I dreaded the class and didn’t need the separate transcript. Transferred out of Latin when it was allowed, midway through senior year, and took American Diplomatic History, which led me to major in American Studies in college. Dropped running track my last year, no longer needing to prove my athletic prowess. Without a father training cheering or jeering me, organized sports held little allure. I guess had you been around, I wouldn’t have delivered papers afternoons after grade school, when other guys were playing football, basketball, and baseball. I may have been a wide receiver or outfielder. Could have spent those glory days early on, instead of working towards higher degrees and fellowships. My mother spent a year in college before marrying. I expect your graduation plans meant shipping off to war or some kind of work. You didn’t have to make decisions, more roly-poly than me, so your marriages fell apart due to wavering and exhausting responsibility. I was determined to make my own life, but still favored the generalism of multiple courses to choose from. College meant a smorgasbord of knowledge to sample, a world of possibilities that I continue to explore. Lucky for me my mother was there, the person who had experienced intellectual fervor, mild political activism, rising affluence before she was saddled with raising a tribe of children on her own, finding employment, providing a model of practical grace in a society that didn’t give women much credit. You were a deserter or non-combatant who became a salesman, the occupation so many returning vets stumbled into, as consumer society took off. I wonder what you sold; were you well liked?
Looking for work after college, undecided on careers, I went to a pep rally or what I knew from my paperboy days to be a sales meeting for prospective employees of a vacuum cleaner sales company. I couldn’t believe the hype, the men being sucked into selling these machines at a time when practically every housewife already had an Electrolux or Hoover. I expect that you got into your occupation early after the war. You might have sold just about anything, but out west your territory may have been large, forcing you to travel days and weeks on the road, between the cities of Santa Fe, Denver, and Cheyenne, and all the small towns of the intermountain region. Sales constituted a white collar opportunity to those men who didn’t have a college degree, who were willing to put in the time, and show your contacts a good time. That may not have fit with a wife, daughters, and their dependence on you. As an independent landscape designer, I was forced to sell my ideas, and I found people reticent to invest in design without a contractor on hand to install the hardscape and plants. Delivering papers on my first route in the Lower Highlands, not my neighborhood, I was forced to attend sales meetings sometimes twice a week, two evenings and door-to-door sales, to solicit more customers. Only when I got the routes in my neighborhood did my bundles of papers expand — it’s easy to sell when people know you, and your service is recommendable. Trying to sell a product by cold calling asks too much of the salesman. Your family was probably already asking too much of you. I don’t envy you the job of sales, but maybe you were a sweet talker. I’m more the silent type, possibly because you were gone, and I didn’t know what to think. Instead of considering the alternatives, maybe I should be asking myself what aspects of my character, what behaviors can be attributed to your absence. What would the psychologists pronounce to be a consequence of abandonment?
Lions under the crib scared me like the fear that plagued other babes for all times, but when I got a small bed I joined the stuffed and burrowed jungle creatures far back against the wall to escape the reach of my sister Norine who had a twin bed alongside my mother’s in the room we all shared until my older sisters moved out of the front bedroom, which had once been a parlor with a fireplace. Mom did what she had to once you left, renting out the upstairs where you had once lived, and doubling up the downstairs accommodations for the girls. Norine was never mean but she probably had to deal with my bedwetting since I slept in the same room, and our mother was no doubt busy in the morning getting everyone up and off to school. I had a nanny named Zoro for a while, the timeline unclear to me as I was so young. I can’t imagine my mother making her take care of my wet sheets. I was still wetting the bed in third grade, when it came to the attention of the nuns at my school. That may have been the kick in the pants that I needed, they’re shaming me, to stop the soiling. Did I do this because I missed having a father, who according to traditional 1950s nomenclature, would have ruled the roost the cock of the walk? What would you have done to remedy the situation? Few of us can say until we endure the predicament of a misbehaving or confounded child in person. Parents of the 1950s were also turning over the rearing of their children to teachers, as childhood became a new category of evolution; Dr. Spock was in the air. Maybe my bedwetting was strictly physical, the house and bed too cold, which I declined to mention, since I wasn’t required to talk much with three sisters who catered to my menu of wants.
Perhaps my lack of voice was due to your absence, and the bedwetting was just another symptom. Was your departure the reason for me becoming an introvert; is such an inward looking status a choice or a product of environment, nurture or nature? I’ve spent a lifetime refraining from speaking out until it was necessary, to say something that hasn’t been said, to defend my actions, to explain myself in therapy. I practiced for job interviews and presentations, organized the syllabi for English classes at the start of the year, leaving little room for personal interaction with my students that did not evolve specifically from the academic instruction for the day. The first time that someone told me that I should say more was an associate professor in graduate school, who said that my questions were always provocative and that I would do well to ask more. I was in my mid 30s and still silent about my thoughts, reflecting little on what that appearance of intellectual superiority suggested. I could arch my brows, roll my eyes, smirk, and people would get the point. In reality, I didn’t harbor many points to make, because someone else had made them.
Although I stopped wetting the bed in third grade, I’m not beyond wetting my pants since my recent prostate surgery. The last professor who spoke during my three week fellowship in English literature at Oxford emphasized anatomical functions becoming a focus of recent fiction, and although I found his ideas only fringe worthy at the time, I have noticed more attention paid in literary books to the body and its parts since then. Is it because the Boomers are facing the depravities of old age and insist on talking about them? Whenever I’m asked about the medical history in my family, I leave you out, which leaves a major hole in my own physical well being regarding my prostate. I didn’t talk to my wife about this much, except at the start of my cancer scare five years ago, and the recent increase in its development. Stage 2 is not exciting, but my doctor said it was the right time to act. My prostate has been removed — the second largest my urologist has cut out in his career — and so has my sex drive. Even my best male friend didn’t care to be weighted with the details of my leakage, but it’s happening less and less, although I’m still unclear as to what causes it: coffee, beer, wine, whiskey; cold weather, dinner alfresco; loose underwear? I typically wear two pair these days, refusing to buy Depends or pads. So, did you die from prostate cancer, in 1980, at the age of 74? I don’t have details, except that a body interred at Lake Havasu Memorial Gardens is etched with your name.
The St. Catherine’s School Sisters of St. Joseph would stand at the door of the boy’s restroom, a large open room with standing urinals on the far east side, stalls with the doors removed to the south, and a row of sinks on the west, closest to the door. A nun would watch to make sure that boys were not finagling or abusing themselves — that’s why the removal of the stall doors. (St. Joseph faced his own emasculation.) I believe it was near the door when I was leaving the bathroom one day that my teacher mentioned the bedwetting to me. I doubt that I used those stalls very often during my eight years of elementary school, but even there I would have squatted over the toilet seat so as not to touch it with my bum, as my mother had instructed me. Maybe the third grade sister thought that a peculiar practice as well. That was my mother’s insistence for the use of public toilets, but I did the same at home, always in practice. Sometime later, better public facilities started providing those tissue seat mats; then they switched to timed inspections and cleanings, with the signatures of attendants posted on the outside door. With COVID-19 aerosoling the air, public facilities are sprayed and sterilized between each use, with most people deigning to use them.
A recurring dream finds me constantly looking for a bathroom stall that is not occupied, or a toilet that is not overflowing with piss or shit. I don’t always recognize the circumstances or the building, but am relieved to find that stall that is private attached to an office that I have access to. Maybe it’s a school and I search many times for a toilet that students are not lined up for. I dream this grimy dream often, and I expect it has something to do with my early years attending Catholic school, the humiliation proffered by the nun, and my later profession as a teacher, where I was disinclined to reveal much about my private life to students. Did you finally bail on both your wives because the kids spent too much time in the bathroom? My mom had three daughters before you came along, and although the bathroom was large with two sinks across from each other, and there was another toilet, sink, and tub upstairs, I expect they still spent time cleaning and primping, especially since they were tweens when I was born. As a youngster, I encountered the name of the Denver rotor-rooter service that I still use, when my mother had the line cleaned yearly because of tree roots invading the clay sewer lines — lots of use of those bathrooms. Do my dreams represent your transference of your parental obligation? How would I know, or even suspect this psychologically? So many questions as we near the end of life.
Did suspending my butt over the toilet seat improve the strength of my calves and thighs, make me a better cyclist? Did my jobs riding a bicycle, as a paperboy and delivering telegraphs, besides using my bike to commute to a golf caddy job at the Denver Country Club, delay my need to get a driver’s license, and lead to my insistence to never own a car? You probably drove everywhere, like my sisters did, but your job required it. I only say that because your first move out of our household was to Colorado Springs, and from my research you hooked up with your future wife Mittie there, so I’m guessing she was in your sales territory. Maybe you sold vacuum cleaners. Did my bicycling my whole life lead to my prostate cancer, did it retard its development, or was it hereditary? More gaps in my reality processing.
People might consider me a loner, but I’ve never thought of myself that way. Yet when I recall the scenes in my life that mean the most to me, they illustrate my need for solitude even when socializing. Back when I smoked Luckies, in the midst of a party I would excuse myself to go outside and have one, to affect a courteous regard for my friends’ health and to escape the tiresome conversations I thought parties demanded. I didn’t know what to say to folks that didn’t seem protracted to me, or constituted small talk, and my wife still blames me for this, saying she can’t live up to my intellectual standards of dialogue. I tend to listen and not say much of myself, unless teased to do so. Acquaintances don’t get it, and often find me haughty, which I deny, saying I’m shy and an introvert. That’s the easy way out of contributing to discourse. I’ve worked around this by hosting parties, making sure that I’m too busy to get deep. But with social distancing and fewer friends to spend time with, I have had to carry on, and to my chagrin it feels good. Too bad I grew up after the age of ten with only a mother, my sisters having married and moved out. We lived in that rambling house on 36th and Bryant until I was 16, and I spent a lot of time alone there. If you were driving everyday, to visit clients, did you live in your head, too?
No wonder I’m an introvert — the closest I got to a team sport was bouncing a rubber ball against the stucco wall of our house for hours a day, catching it in my baseball glove, no team to join. When I got tired of that, I would lie down under a big maple tree in our side yard, daydreaming in the soft fescue that grew over an old leech field. The rest of the turf around the manse was regulation bluegrass that Denverites took pains to water to maintain the lush dreams of their youth in climates less arid. One time a father of some kids I scarcely knew took a gang of us down to the fields at Mt. Carmel High School and tried to teach us the national pastime, but after two sessions he must have thought it not worth his time. Most fathers in those days were too busy hustling work, having served in the armed forces, now strapped for financial solvency in the bustling 50s. Other guys in grade school got involved in leagues, but my mother was not a housewife, rather a working woman. I was in daycare before school, where Mom dutifully dropped me each morning and retrieved me each evening, from a gray stone house on Tennyson. We took naps on thin vinyl mats which resisted my wetting, which I seldom suffered during nap time. I had one friend who I never saw again after the nursery. In the early grades, I was walked home by older girls from St.Catherine’s who would watch me for a bit of money till Mom arrived home. Eventually I would take the bus to where my mother worked, and do homework or sweep her Chrysler — she would plant change to keep me cleaning the car every week or two — or explore the neighborhood until she got off. Harry the custodian who mopped and cleaned starting in the late afternoon and who always asked me about school had a son who was studying to become a doctor like the men my mother worked for. She would have liked to see me do the same, but she was too smart to think she could delineate a path for me. Little socializing, no team sports, but lots of street time led me to take on city living without the latchkey. My legs and mind wandered the avenues and alleys of North Denver, always walking home from grade and high school, when I wasn’t delivering papers by bike, or exploring east Capitol Hill where Mom worked.
The black mammy of my infancy may have harked back to your early days in Alabama, but my mother, your deposed wife, your second annulment, needed to work to survive, and had to have help with a youngster. I wasn’t a military brat who moved around the world never knowing his roots, but instead a child reared in a booming Western town, given up to caretakers who substituted for his mother in the early years. I suppose it taught me independence, knowing I was out and about on a daily basis, before enjoying the comforts of home with a loving parent come evening. My urban roots run along surface streets, making connections between different species and communities, not growing deep looking for an aquifer of meaning on the plains, but channeling the streams of people and buildings that lined Denver’s gutters.
When did your wandering habit commence? Was it during the draft of 1940 when you registered? What camp named after a Confederate trained you in the wiles of war, the losses it leases to its veterans? Maybe your days of sales covering the countryside started with your second or third child, a way to make a buck, before the army conveniently inducted you? What do I know, but your subsequent life reiterates the lie of settling down with a family? Of course, maybe you fostered more kids after my birth, but I expect you found a woman who wanted none of that, so you two could carry on as a swinging couple through the sixties and seventies. I disdained my own marriage during the eighties and nineties, thinking I had been trapped into having a son, but I knew that wasn’t true — I just wanted to carouse with my buddies when I should have been parenting the child. We’re no doubt a lot alike, but somehow I managed to stay in a long marriage, though I’ve always struggled with my desire to walk about, to experience and possess the temptations of drink and drugs and friends not my wife. Luckily I skirted the irresponsibilities of addiction and made sure I kept a job and a relationship intact. Maybe I’m you in a different time, different place, different mind. We always look for our grainy shadows.
You gave me the Captain’s hat, I’m sure of it, as much as I’m sure of you serving in the Navy. No, maybe Navy not, but my future brothers-in-law served in the Navy and Air Force. But when I walked up the street in that Captain’s hat, none of you were real relations. You had left and the handsome boys my sisters engaged hadn’t quite arrived. I was three of all ages, and walked a block sporting that white cap with the black patent bill and gold braid stripes surrounding the crown, and some kid said I’ll give you a kitten for that cap. Of course, to possess another life, a pet, a friend, is more important than some silly cap, so I agreed, although I didn’t talk much as a toddler, and carried the kit caboodle home. My sister Norine couldn’t believe I had not only walked a block, but had traded the cap, so she shoved me up the block to return the cat and recapture the cap. I probably lost the cap or outgrew it or wore it thin till your memory faded. Maybe my rich Aunt Norine, my mother’s sister-in-law, graced me with the Captain’s hat. Later on, she outfitted me in the Lone Ranger’s costume, my first mask. My mother didn’t care much for cats: her mother owned a grocery store and the only use for a cat was as a mouser. My wife doesn’t care much for caps or hats: from her early days puffing that bouffant in high school, hats smashed it, they weren’t considered smashing. And sister Norine only owned Siberian huskies: her first one ate all of Mother’s rose bushes, practically the only greenery left in the small back yard after she sold the land behind our house to a developer — that’s how she survived the shipwreck of your vows.
A few years later I would walk to Bob’s barbershop three blocks away. First time, one of those sister’s boys wanted my hair cut, ‘cause the sisters had let it grow long, I looked like a girl the young lad of Irish descent moaned, like I was wearing skirts back on the isle, disguised from the elves and leprechauns. That was fine, but I remember once losing a $5 bill for a $2 cut, but Bob forgave it — maybe Mom repaid it. Going to Bob’s was a landmark of my upbringing, like many immigrants religiously get their cut every week or two. That’s what I was brought up to do, expect, appreciate, but gave it up as I got older, when I started breaking rules, questioning authority. Still, the walk to the shop was most important, waltzing by the Jones and the Browns, the Pontarellis and Zarlengos, the Vosses, old Tatum, and the old Maids, going for a haircut, proper styling. Once in fourth or fifth grade, sporting a flat top, I told Bob to cut so little that my mother wanted a refund; it was for picture day and I was liking the length of my hair sticking up like punks would later sculpt into Mohawks, their sides shaved, mine neatly trimmed.
For my recent significant birthday, a good friend gave me Walkabout, both the book about kids who survive a plane crash in the Australian outback shepherded to safety by a young bush boy, but also the more violent movie adaptation by Nicholas Roeg. The gift represented my penchant for taking a walkabout a few times a year with friends, what others might call a pub crawl, but I always liked the idea of strolling neighborhoods and visiting restaurants and bars, to joy in close company on the run. For many years, I invited boy friends by for a Guy Party, where we listened to music, danced, drank heavily, and safely partied around the house and yard, usually held when my wife was at a convention. But the walkabout has supplanted that ritual with fewer members, and more moving about. Once I became used to settled in, I wanted to get out as a roustabout, and feel the cool fresh air in my hair. Maybe you felt the same making the rounds selling air registers for heating systems, that’s what I’ve learned you did, from census records and new family contacts.
Mom always wanted me looking good, on my travels, and so I started paying attention to the clothes I wore when I was still young. Dressed up for Easter one year in a plaid coat and watch cap set the standard for my explorations in fashion. Mom would find great sports coats, sky blue linen for instance, that would attract attention. When I was getting a tuxedo for Junior prom, the lady measuring me remarked on the wool black and white houndstooth car coat I was wearing — I realized then how distinguished my mother’s taste was. Like most high schoolers, I wanted to copy the crowd, and my sophomore year invested in Levi jeans, pastel yellow or blue button down Oxford shirts, and penny loafers, but that pricey preppy look didn’t last long for me. When Regis finally allowed students to wear jeans my junior year, everyone made the switch but me; I preferred khaki slacks and desert boots, and plaid sport coats — I wanted to look like Bo Diddly before he became Bo Diddly, or the beats who were a decade older and hanging out at the Green Spider on 17th.
My single foray into fashion design included turning an old cotton fleece lined red sweatshirt inside out, cutting off the crew collar, and slitting the throat, then twining a shoelace through holes on each side to lace it up. I was thirteen and some girl laughed at me wearing my creation when I was collecting for my paper route. That was it for design, outside of assembling an ensemble’s parts. In the pictures from the hills, it looks like you wore that requisite outfit of the forties and fifties: Oxford shoes, slacks, a white tee shirt, and long sleeved plain shirt. In one formal picture with Mom, you’re wearing pleated pants, a white shirt with cufflinks, and a wide silk tie. If you weren’t smiling, you could be any slick in a film noir. Mom always wanted to dress me to the nines, and her taste was exquisite. Too bad you satisfied her on that fashion level but gave up your grubstake on her heart. I wonder how much the transient I would have been had I known you better, followed your lead.
You were born in the South, married on the edge of the High Plains, and died in the Southwest. Many Americans during the 20th century followed this pattern of finding genus loci — get out of the rural hamlets, head for the city of dream jobs, retire in the sun. The children of that early generation, who lived through two world wars, wanted more to settle than move up in the world, and when they found that place that pleased them, they stayed. Denver was one of those places that pleased lots of folks, and plenty of military people passed through the bases along the Front Range before serving in the armed forces, only to return to this land of opportunity after their stint, hunting and fishing in the hills while working in the city. Maybe you were stationed at Lowry, or trained with the 10th Mountain Division, and woke up to the grand scenery and climate that is Colorado. You left my mother to live in the Springs, closer to more military personnel. So what should I say, congrats, you lived the dream without the worries, you found your Mittie and lived a life that early on might have been tough to negotiate. Ask my mother what it was like to have one husband die, another leave her, and raise four children. See how she handled her troubles. Luckily Denver was welcoming. She managed and lived long enough to enjoy a baker’s dozen of grandchildren, eleven years longer than you. Maybe raising children contributes to longevity. I wonder if you ever knew your offspring. They were jumping jacks and pogo stickin’ it while you were still bouncing around the West, a free bird.
Like my wife who checked out a tip on the ride board at Columbia, right after graduating, zooming for Berkeley but dropped in Boulder, I would spend my younger days hitching rides around the country, visiting friends, charting my course through the American landfill, the backstreets, wherever the wind blew me, even riding the rails like I imagined Woody did during the Depression. Most of my trips meant getting back and forth between Denver and Chicago, where I went to college. I met some railroad buffs at school, and they counseled me on how to hop a freight between Chi-town and my home town, grabbing a ride on the Shotgun express out of Galesburg, the Midwest’s switchyard. I had hitched out to California during Winter Break my freshman year, to see a girlfriend from high school and explore the coast, but that freight hopping was my hardtack adventure. Difficult to say where I got my attraction to trains, unless it was my immediate liking of “King of the Road” by Roger Miller, acting out the words as a sixth grader, making myself out to be the real hobo of my early Halloween costumes.
Then again, I remember during a summer spent in the care of my sister Marylyn, under the occasional direction of her black babysitter, going up the block to Smith Road near Holly and climbing over boxcars siding up to warehouses that looked more abandoned than operational, feeling the steel couplers and wooden floors and steel panels of the boxes, before I ran back to the apartment for a lunch of creamed corn and hotdogs, vegetables not being one of my favorite choices, much less creamed, but I ate it because I did what I was supposed to do, and in this case it was to behave and listen to my caretaker, for the sake of my sister who already had three kids and was living in a small courtyard apartment on her husband’s salary attempting to pick up a few extra bucks working for the accounting firm where she was originally employed right after high school. Maybe Marylyn was lucky enough to get in one year of college before becoming the burdened housewife. But having railroad lines so close to her place signaled its low rent. I had to ride my bike from the farmhouse on the North Side all the way to Adams County east of Federal near Clear Creek to encounter more rail lines. We would swim in the gravel pits and throw rocks at new cars chained to flatbeds being transported into the city. I don’t think I ever Catholic confessed doing that, because I couldn’t figure out who to compensate for the damage. Otherwise, the railroad was downtown at Union Station, but that meant legitimate travel with my mother, to see relatives in Chicago or Tucson.
I wonder how your parents traveled to my christening, all the way from Alabama. Railroads carried the majority of travelers in 1950, but ridership declined through the next decade as interstates provided new cross country access for automobiles. You probably had your fill of trains in the service, whether you were trained in the states or assigned to the European front. I rode the train to Chicago when I was young, but all my sisters, Mother and me traveled by car as well in her brown 1949 Chrysler. When I was ten or eleven, Mom and I took the train to Tucson, to visit Aunt Helen and Uncle Paul. We were supposed to fly standby on Continental since Jack, Marylyn’s husband, worked for Bob Six, but that promised flight fell through and we grabbed the train, via El Paso. The last luxury trains in America, standard with silver finger bowls, fine meals, and shipshape porters. Mom had to order me two breakfasts, since I gobbled the first, growing up to be the good son you never knew. Tucson was hotter than any place I’d ever been. They had lawns of clover in the back, colored rocks out front, and roadrunners in the fields across the walls of this new development. Mother and I shared a big queen size bed, and one morning I woke up early and saw my mother’s floppy tit hanging out of her nightgown. It was one of my most memorable trips, spent at an impressionable age, and probably sealed my love of trains and tits.
Photographs of my mother and her cousin Charlotte in swimsuits reveal her to be a real Flapper in the early 30s. One piece suits, some with skirts, star graphics accentuating breasts, the two of them posing seductively, like the cutout photo of my wife and her girlfriend that Pat gave me one summer day, the two of them saluting the sky in their bikinis. I never thought of my mother as sensual until I saw these old photos before her death, one of which I collaged into an altar of memories which I posted in her room after her stroke. Looking for pictures of you, I found other portraits of my mother that exalted her to be quite the catch when she first married. I’m sorry we never talked about her life before my birth — it was selfish of me to think that I was all that mattered to her. The one time she mentioned you to me, she said that she had loved you. You could have been the one who felt selfish for keeping her to yourself.
After college, I bummed around a bit, picking up whatever jobs I could, between living in Chicago, traveling the country, hanging in Denver — I even worked for the Colorado and Southern Railroad as a gandy dancer for a while, repairing track during the day and clearing snow off switches at night. If hopping a freight was hardtack, this job was Beat all day. The railroads were finding it tough to find reliable workers, and they sure didn’t enforce any safety regulations. Imagine Neal Cassady holding down one of his best jobs. Chain gang in the city, with the crew shouting back to the baritone mariachi singer barking “Is there any hope?”, “No hope,” with the hammers hitting the spikes. I wore cut off khakis and black engineer boots to work, striding through downtown in the early hours, dark glasses, a head of brown curls with sun bleached blonde streaks, to work all day in the hot sun. The older Mexicans would drink a beer and a shot with their lunch at noon, while the younger crew of black, hispanic, and white loners would smoke weed and talk shit for break. What a great job, I was the only one of my friends who had money. I’d walk across town to my Capitol Hill apartment, and Derek and Danny would have let themselves in, and I’d buy steaks and Tanqueray Gin, and we’d blast the night away. I was in my twenties, carefree not calculating, looking for love in all the wrong places, and found it some five years later, after I quit railroading, took up bartending after a gig programming computers, returned to Denver and started gardening, to find my wife who showed me what sensual and sexual was all about. You were 45 and my mother was 40 when I was born — what were y’all thinking, or maybe you didn’t consider the possibilities, just loving each other and you had adopted the girls? One more kid shouldn’t have run you out. What did, Mittie in ColoSprgs (so the highway signs used to spell it)?
My efforts to find you have been negligible at best, and infrequent. I tried the Denver Public Library back in the 90s, and found your ancestral line back to the 1700s, but nothing about what happened to you after you left my mother. Seems that a fire in St. Louis burned military records that may have offered a clue. I sent a sample swab to Ancestry two years ago, and found a few cousins. One fellow contacted me who had gotten proficient at tracing his family tree, and told me that once he looked at the lineage I had posted, he understood that your brother apparently took on your wife and kids, when you moved to Denver after the war. That confusion over which of your children call you father and which call your brother dad surfaced in two obituaries I discovered yesterday. Mittie called your two daughters and son — Challie, MLady, and Johnny — her stepchildren, but Challie called her father Robert. What happened during the war to mix things up this way? Sounds like some of your kids may have been as mystified as I have been over your absence.
I had two older sisters from another father who married twin Irish boys, both blonde and brutally handsome fellas who turned out to be womanizers and drunks, although one always pushed for promotion while his brother worked in garages and drank the rent money away. My sisters had five and three kids before divorcing the lads — they went on through several marriages each and lived longer than I ever expected them to. In their family, the women always took care of the men, and I think that my sisters understood more about the marriage dynamic having lost their father before seeing you abandon the flock after adopting them. Unfortunately, all three of my sisters died in their sixties, from a variety of cancers, but I attribute their deaths to the stress of being fatherless two times over. Maybe my mother was too demanding of you, especially after my conception, since no one alive knows whether it was expected or not. She was Catholic and you were a Southerner, so big families may have been the rule, but hoping her age or the rhythm method might prevent my birth was a gamble. Sounds like you gambled with life and destiny on a regular roll. I guess I’ll give the ancestral dice a toss of my own….
January 27, 2021
JTT
___________ Drive
___________ Texas
J,
Your name is also the name of my father, who I believe died in 1980 in Lake Havasu. I never knew him, and never asked my mother, Evelyne _________, about him. She died in 1996.
I have tried a few times to find more information about JTT, but have only recently put together a few scraps. I have a copy of my parents’ marriage certificate from 1946, have a few photographs of him, and a baby book that says his parents visited after I was born, in 1951. I have a formal portrait of them, too.
Recently I found that he married Mittie, and just saw her obituary, which mentions her stepchildren — Challie, Johnny, and MLady. In turn, I found obituaries for Challie and Adelaide, and an address for you.
Would you be interested in talking to me about your early life with your father, or about his life after he married Mittie?
We can email or write letters, or call. As I’ve gotten older, having retired from teaching, I’ve started writing, and one theme that I’ve tried to untangle is why I never knew or heard anything about my father. Anything that you could tell me would be appreciated.
I hope you’re healthy, and thank you.
JMT
So Johnny the name he’s always known would be my older half-brother, who reunited with you after you married Mittie, after your brother Robert moved the family to Texas. Perhaps she insisted on making amends with your older brother — maybe there was no falling out — meeting your children from your first marriage. But why was there no contact with my family; was my mother responsible for kicking you out over Mittie? Is she the one that forced your hand at dissolving the marriage? Or did Mittie consider herself a home wrecker and avoided contact. I know that Marylyn said you were mean — were the girls’ disapproval of you tantamount to your womanizing? I guess I’ll never know, unless Johnny can supply a trove of new information about your character, your being, which slowly inflates your long held nothingness to me. My mother knew of your first marriage according to the license you both signed, but you weren’t married in the Church the first time, so she could take vows as a Catholic; once the two of you were divorced, she could never marry again, focusing her attention instead on the love child, me. At least I floated a raft of father figures along the way, which might have preserved me better than a father’s going down with the ship.
Marylyn’s husband Jack assumed the role of male guardian at the father-son breakfasts in Cub Scouts, and he also became the Webelos leader for the den that my mother had lead. Jack was working for Continental Airlines, the expanding upstart headed by Robert Six, who was married to Ethel Merman. With the election of John Kennedy as president, Cuba became a focus of international drama, and Jack was party to that, as a steward or supervisor on a plane that was hijacked by a father and son team who wanted to fly to Cuba. Kennedy tokened Jack a silver cigarette box for his part in thwarting the hijacking of the plane. Jack gained a moment of fame, before he moved into union organizing and too much time away from home.
Bearing five kids in not many more years, Marylyn had it, and divorced him before taking up with a man she had known in her early years of accounting. I remember Jack calling me on my attitude once in Webelos, because I was acting snotty towards my mates and made a smart remark to him, thinking I could get away with it since he was my brother-in-law. He acted like a father should, and I learned. He went through a few marriages after his divorce from Marylyn.
You can tolerate only so much before you snap, to assert your authority, which I discovered as a father holding my son up by his neck after some transgression, when I realized this is not how it’s done, and walked away from corporal punishment. My wife would suggest that there has been a long history of psychological abuse, mostly towards her but my son as well. Did you walk away when you got afraid of what you might do? Or did my mother call you out for your abuse or sins? Did your older brother who assumed your family duties call you out on your irresponsibility, or did he break the covenant between your first wife and you? Moving to Colorado may have represented the clean break you needed, but it didn’t alter your wanderlust. Mine was spent subconsciously looking for the father I never knew. I engendered a line of substitutes through my youth and beyond.
My sisters’ boyfriends would take me along when they all went bowling, and sometime’s at the brothers’ house, we would all sing, or play Yahtzee. They did what they had to as far as putting up with the girls’ kid brother. When I was older, Jack taught me how to shave, how to always pull the razor in one direction so my beard would grow in full. It always has except for the time I contracted alopecia after swimming off a house boat in Lake Mead. At least that’s where I think the bare patches in my beard came from, although I had shingles around the same time, so maybe it was an immune system problem. You ever experience hair loss like that? Your hairline was already receding in the portrait I have from your wedding, you were 45; my hair has started to reveal more of a forehead at age 70.
Jack’s twin brother Jim drank more from the start, and I know this because as a child of five the girls were dressing to go out, all having taken baths on a Saturday night before my weekly soak, Mom boiling pans of water on the stove because the water heater couldn’t handle the demand, Marylyn likely going out with Jack, Norine with Jim even though she was younger, Eileen may have been dating Mike another brother, the guys picking up the gals, and whether Jim was adding hot water to the bath or just leaning on the tub, he fell in, which suggests to me that he was lit. These guys did play the father role, though, and one time Jim drove me on a double date, meaning me and my girl and another couple to a dance at a gym in Lakewood, and turning onto Sheridan from 44th, he drove down the wrong side of the median for a block; I knew then he was lit, as we all snickered in the back seat. I’m not sure whether letting Jim drive was better than having my mother take us for a ride.
Jim and Norine married and moved into the apartment upstairs in our house, the apartment you lived in when you met my mother the landlady. I remember times visiting Norine with her firstborn daughter when she didn’t seem so happy, when Jim was missing nights, when I would look out the west windows of the house to see what cars were parked there. He and Jack owned and worked a gas station for a while, and Jim would repair cars and drink till long after dark. He had been stationed at Thule Air Base in Greenland for years before marrying, so the long nights of drinking in the dark started there. That may be one of the vices I inherited via osmosis from him, staying away drinking nights with friends when my son was young.
I have often wondered what level of drinker were you. Considering it was the 1950s, and unless you were Black or a Beat smoking weed, you were drinking Highballs and smoking Luckies. That was the smoke and style that I sucked up to for many years. Just like the music I heard from my sisters, listening to lounge music and standards from the Rat Pack more than the Animals, Beach Boys, or Chiffons as I was growing up. In college I drank more than smoke dope, had a few unfortunate episodes of puking on the green and on the Northwestern train, but that was what I knew, even though I became friends with the biggest weed dealer on campus; I think we liked each other for not fitting within people’s expectations. Anyways, nothing happened in high school, I was the prince my mother wanted. After college, another story, as I became a gardener after getting a degree in American Studies — the grounding I needed on the way to design. But you were in Havasu by that time, living in a manufactured community around a lake with a bridge imported from London. How fake is that? I was working all the tribes at a small liberal arts college, and you were retreating to a retirement that included you and your wife.
My life hasn’t been planned. I fell into occupations and relations, and discovered father figures along the way. Bill ran the station when I became a paperboy for the Post. He treated his charges like future business leaders; indeed, his head boy when I began was involved in Junior Achievement. This was a kid whose father had killed his mother and siblings, the last guy executed in Colorado, and Bill saw him through the crisis. We had sales meetings and dinner nights for the top sellers each month, at a smorgasbord in Westminster, where young guys could eat all they wanted. When I was robbed one night collecting for the paper, in an old apartment house just a block north of where I lived, Bill told me to up my estimated loss for the insurance claim. That way I was able to pay for my bike wheel that the punks had kicked in so I couldn’t follow them. My mom insisted I get a dog after that to accompany me when I was collecting at night and delivering papers early Sunday mornings when it was still dark. That German Shepherd named Ginger, after another of my mother’s dogs, followed me everywhere I rode. Bill taught me how to sell papers and handle money, and Ginger rode shotgun for me.
JTT hasn’t responded to my inquiry; I found a different address for him and might send a copy of the letter there. I suppose he has become my latest father surrogate as I try in my naïveté to outline and outlive your shadow. Since I have always cynically embraced the optimism of the Protestant ethic, the shade has scarcely darkened my attitude through life. If I worked hard, acted on my curiosity, and broadened my knowledge, I would find success and happiness, but now that I’ve retired and face my mortality in a frequency of operations, body part replacements and removals, your signals from the past catch my ear more than present or future alarums. I’m facing hip and cataract surgeries, more planks to walk before I get to swim again at full stroke.
At least my wife and son and his wife and daughters are healthy and eager to soak in our spa and swim in the pool in summer. That’s my family since my mother and sisters died in the late nineties and early aughts. I don’t see my nieces and nephews as much as I did when we hosted summer parties every year, when they had young kids who could enjoy the pool. But those relations are in their late fifties now, and they all live in the suburbs, so I see them less and less, as they too have become grandparents. I suppose this dwindling of mi familia has led me to search for ancestors who might enhance that sanguine heritage, even those whose lifeblood doesn’t flow.
Fathers are notorious for moving out, shirking the guard, selfishly searching for space, lest they enter into nuptial and parental lockdown, required in a family structure where the woman kept the house and kids, and the man worked long hours to provide. You changed that, even though a lot of men had left their families before; after you women started finding ways to support themselves and their kids, because they could no longer rely on a village of relatives to sustain them. My mother had survived the death of her first husband with the help of her aunt, who found the Denver house I grew up in, where she met you. You irretrievably changed marriage and life for her, because you left her to depend solely on her own resources. Like a rum runner or frat boy who loses purchase with the ground, you motored down the road, sliding along those slick pavements without a care except getaway. Your obituary is one line, that you died in May of 1980. No story, no history, no relatives mentioned. I guess that’s how you liked it, no trace, no regrets, moving on, crossing Styx, who did you pay?
Plenty of good dads inhabit this earth. Friendly men, tortured men, put-upon men, men who take their fatherliness seriously, famously, lovingly. I don’t know what kind of father I am; I’ve talked to my son about it, saying I didn’t have an example to follow, but I had many mentors, who guided me, befriended me, saw me through the days and night. I never complained, so for someone to take me up, they had to see an air about me that needed to exhale, express itself. You never did that for me.
A good friend these days, ten years younger than me, acts as an intellectual soulmate, a person who guides, counsels, deflects, and heralds me. We camp, hike, play gravel road bocce, and bicycle, all the while talking, cooking, comrading it. I played these same games as a youngster, in Boy Scouts, without a father, although there was my Cubmaster and Scoutmaster, the father of a classmate, who instructed all of us in the skills of the world, in capitalist competition of an ethical sort. HOP was a good man, to whom I wrote a letter after reading Bellow’s Herzog in college, thanking him for the direction he leant me. Like Bill my boss at the Post, he thought it important to teach the children well. They had an indeterminate impact on my eventually becoming a teacher.
Lucky for me that I didn’t come under the influence of men who abused the trust allotted them as priests. There lurked one of them in my parish, who as a novitiate and as a priest preyed on boys my age. I expect my mother kept an eye on him when I served as the ring bearer for my sister’s wedding that he officiated. The church knew of his abuse before he became a priest, but parishioners did not. I didn’t have much contact with him, although classmates have recently told me he drove others around in his convertible. When I was twelve, I got a paper route and an older cohort befriended me. Turns out he was gay, ostracized only because he was overly friendly; he managed to keep his orientation quiet. He would go to Mass with us because my mother realized that it was better to keep him close at hand than to let me spend alone time with him. I didn’t have a clue, although I suspected she was trying to convert him. I avoided the priest by circumstance but entertained a friend who wanted me for himself. That’s the openness that my mother fostered in me.
Would a father have shunned the paperboy friend for the sake of protecting my manhood? Other guys from the neighborhood had their doubts about his carefree nature, but I tended to think he was a nice sort who wasn’t into macho habits like motorcycles and mean dogs. He had a Cushman and gave me rides, which was suspect in others eyes, but I was enjoying the attention — still have the scar from a burn on my calf from riding the scooter in shorts. Years later he took me up in the hills to shoot a gun, the only time I have, so this is what being groomed was about. I grew bigger than him, but kept in touch until one time he tied me up in his apartment, and I forcibly walked out and struggled down the stairs from his second floor room, still cuffed, when he decided I was not standing his entrapment. After I was married and had a young son, the three of us were walking 16th Street downtown, when he came up and introduced himself. Our conversation was brief. My wife was duly informed of my history with this fellow, and I decided not to renew the contact. As a father, I put him out of our lives, since he had gotten crazier flaunting his pedophilia. My son’s godfather, gay himself, said to steer clear of Butch, whom he had met and heard tales of, like my boyhood friends who questioned his sexuality and sincerity. You might have provided some instruction earlier, but I doubt that I would have understood your meaning or intention. My wife’s father cautioned his daughter about overly friendly roommates when she was about to enter an all girl’s college. She didn’t have a clue. My mother compassionately watched my development without saying anything discriminatory.
The molester priest was protected by the nuns, fellow priests, principal, I expect even the Pastor Monsignor. The accusing boys were called liars and threatened by the enabling authorities. No one was reported to the police, and the priest was reassigned time and time again. Just like you moving from one family to another, leaving a trail of children who didn’t talk about you. In the last two decades children who were abused by priests have come forward to tell their stories. I still haven’t heard yours, so I assume the worst, although I’ve given you the benefit of the doubt in these pages. I’m not sure what that phrase entails, but I usually take people at face value, think the best of them, but the more I question your choices, the ones I’m aware of, the more I probe your motives, what I can imagine, the less you impress me as bona fide.
Asking myself what became of Butch, I discovered his obituary; he died of COVID-19 just weeks ago. He had been living in a Catholic assisted living residence for several years, was involved with the Knights of Columbus and veterans groups. I remember him being discharged from the Navy for his paranoid schizophrenia. With the money saved from his service, he bought a Jaguar but blew the engine outside of Vegas — he said he hadn’t checked the oil. Another stab at seduction. Somehow my mother’s insistence on his going to church made a miracle happen, since the online remembrances only mention the friendly and social aspects of his nature. The church became a refuge for reformed pedophiles as well as monster priests. He led me down the road to rape but must have confessed, made light of it as a venial sin, received absolution. Just another con, or craziness incarnate, he was not to be held responsible.
How did these encounters change my attitude, my sense of purpose, my inclination, my evolution through college into marriage, becoming a parent, a life of public service? Did my life amount to the stuff of greatness that Mother envisioned, or inoculation? I would like to ask Butch about his temptations towards me — too bad he’s gone — but I would never get a straight answer from him, I never knew his sister, but I dream about the neighborhood where he lived, next by 32nd and Tejon. In my dreams the houses below 32nd fall like cliffs, and the ballfields across Tejon display waves of weeds, blocks of small houses crowded close at acute angles, a poor brown neighborhood unfriendly towards a gangly white kid like me. My first paper route served the mostly Italian neighborhood just north of the community where Butch delivered papers, where he lived, this ominous place of my dreams. Why do I envision the Lower Highlands as falling away to the river, stifling and precarious in its channels, peering from atop the cliff where I stumble from vertigo?
Since he died of AIDS in the 1990s, I’ve spent years constructing an alternative world around my son’s godfather, my best friend. In my dreams, we spend many evenings enjoying dinner in a gray Queen Anne’s house he never inhabited. I see the oval dining table behind the sheer draped picture window which I don’t know from his or my life. I recognize the painted brick residences behind this house, because the route I take to reach it cuts through several intersecting alleys that surround interior spaces on a block where people stabled horses, then cars in North Denver. I wrote a paper about these carriage lots for a graduate class, but mostly remember the one off 38th and Clay, southwest, where we would play, wander the weeds, hang with Gene and Joel; and there was one by Marty’s house southeast of 37th and Alcott, where weed wars, throwing rich clumps of wheat grass at each other, and fireworks would occur. Wandering these alleys made growing up mysterious and mundane at the same time, since they led nowhere but encompassed a new field of dreams, a playground not fenced.
My best friend grew up near Athmar, brick ranch houses in a 1950s development. No alleys there, but he came from Alamosa. Cities were thorny, goat heads in late summer that punctured bike tires. That’s why he liked me: Thornton and Espinosa, two scrubs that sought prickly attention. But the dreams I have of him include refined dinners, a nice house, sophisticated company. It’s a world of difference from Butch, who died two weeks ago, whereas I’ve not lived Mikee except in my dreams for 25 years. Why one not the other; did one apologize to the OG, the great authority, while the other understood he took his pleasure, not denying it? Yet it was Mikee who said keep our son away from George. Mikee had been abused by a relative he told me. He wasn’t about to let that happen to his godson. How the world turns is a surprise and can be an undaunting release. What release shall I garner knowing more of your life?
Maybe Butch was manic, depressive, paranoid, schizo, only remembered his paperboy days like his obituary attests. Maybe I didn’t see his craziness as anything more than that, not a disease but fun loving descents down mountain switchbacks on his bike, outracing motorbikes while the rest of us marveled at his adventurous biking skills. Maybe Butch stopped living beyond his attacks on young men. Maybe he was caught, disciplined, institutionalized, treated, and his life as a carefree gadabout was aborted. Maybe the rest of his life was spent working with the veterans and within the church he so contemptuously declined in his youth. Maybe riding his bike was the only joyful memory he had. It’s one of mine.
Priests in my life also served as mentors, and father figures. I served as an altar boy at Fr. Ken Leone’s ordination mass, when I was in eighth grade. During high school I became involved in the Search, a Catholic retreat for students which sought to involve them in their faith, at a time when consciousness raising groups began to proliferate, a new spiritualism taking hold. Search woke students up to the fact that many people cared for them, even strangers loved them, via a series of letters delivered to each participant on the final day. The shock value delivered the faithful blow, and people were asked not to disclose this finale to students who had yet to attend the workshop, which made it a badge of social status. And so, Search became a Catholic fraternity that I became involved in at the organizational level, and other retreats copied its success. It was exactly the kind of deliverance that Ken Leone ached to maintain among his parishioners. He made me believe that he had witnessed miracles from prayer, and I always thought he was a genuinely good person, a director of faith. He would occasionally call me after college, to see if I wanted to talk or be blessed, and he always said that I was in his daily prayers. I thought his faith was too sacrosanct for me to imbibe further. Maybe if I had followed his example and words, I wouldn’t be conducting my own search now for you, looking for that letter from a father saying how much he cared for me. My mother’s letter on the last day of Search made the point. She expressed her love and pride of me in a voice I hadn’t heard before.
Willy Becker became the priest most like a father to me as rebellion coursed through my teens and twenties. Albeit, rebellion for me was mild-mannered, yet Becker, who was a Jesuit novitiate when I first met him, later a brother and then a priest, scolded me a few times alongside teaching me what it meant to grow up. He also taught me German, History, and Handball. He saw two naïve young guys in Mark and me deciding to attend college out of state as summer help for his dad at his warehouse in Kansas City. We grew up more working as young hands at a transfer site in the bottoms of KC than probably either did attending college. At a time when my peers were falling away from the Church, Father Becker did everything he could to keep them connected, marrying them and baptizing their babies. In preparation for our forced nuptials, our parents insisting that we marry and not have a baby already conceived out of wedlock, my wife thinking they would be overjoyed at becoming grandparents, Donna asked Fr. Becker if he could keep god out of the ceremony, and he had no compunction. Last time I saw Willie Becker was at a celebration of my 33rd birthday, at our house and hosted in conjunction with my intellectual soulmate Mike who was born a day after me. Most of my mates were married by then and had kids, so this was one of those times when we held a family gathering and acted like adults, for Becker to witness. He was a surprise guest invited by my wife and when he showed his face at the door, I howled, “My Willie, my Willie, why have you forsaken me?” The Jesuit educated class of guys hailed the reference. Willie died a few years later of a brain tumor, and I couldn’t bring myself to attend the service. I didn’t want to acknowledge his sacrifice. I would have to find other father figures to serve. It would be another ten years before I undertook the search for you.
A body might think that I would have learned something about girls growing up with a mother and three sisters, but they were older, my mother close lipped, and so I learned little about dating or wooing women outside of observing my sisters’ leaving the house on dates. I kissed a girl from Wyoming visiting her Zarlengo grandpa who lived across the street when I was five, but didn’t have much other interaction with the opposite sex until I was fourteen, when a girl from California was visiting her relatives who lived across the street from a friend of mine — he seemed to be the front runner in her escapades, but we were all aghast at how mature she appeared, looking older than twelve because she had breasts, and the Beach Boys were ringing through our heads that summer, from Barbara Ann to California Girls. Two years later I was kissing Leeann in the stairwell of her house, a bunch of guys sitting downstairs listening to the Cream debut. These were my singular flirtations before dating in high school, and I had to learn how to dance from an old friend in the neighborhood who I didn’t see much because we went to different schools. In eighth grade I fell for a new girl because she was the standard brunette with long hair, more attractive according to type than the big blonde I had been close to for years. I didn’t know what to do with either girl, but followed the social tips that classmates blurted in boasts of mirth and masculinity.
One time after a social at Elitch’s riding in the new Twister coaster next to Carol the smart blonde, I remarked to friends back at school the next week that the seats were comfortable with a padded arm rest separating the two people in each car especially with the twisting motion of the ride, when Skip said “GTA” to the other guys, meaning “get the ass” for suggesting that rubbing up against a girl was not what I was looking to do. That was as unnerving to me as when some older guy at the Y asked to borrow my towel showering after swim lessons, and I wiped my bum and handed it to him, and he refused saying he didn’t want it now after I’d rubbed my privates. Naïve anatomy lessons among guys that I was never warned about. I wish that you could have listed lessons about life and growing up a boy, even a raucous honest informational like Jamaica Kincaid’s Girl, but I got some help from my friends in high school, where I trialed and erred my way through.
My blue rough cotton loose leaf binder wore the names of several dames I dreamed and dated, but one in particular, a sweet girl from Mount Carmel held the top spot. I went out with her and we made out, new for me, in a hallway of a hotel where a party was happening, and another time in a park. After the second time I told a friend trying to act cool that she was a slut, when what I meant was she was loose enough to let me kiss her. I didn’t know the language guys used towards girls, and got in trouble with a friend of hers who now attended my all boys school, who told me she wasn’t a slut and don’t say such a thing. I apologized but knew I had hurt her. When I was younger, I had once returned from hanging and talking trash with the guys and mentioned “broads” to my mother, who was aghast that I would use such vulgar language — I thought it was synonymous with girls, not understanding the nuance of the word. I became aware of the richness of English vocabulary which led to my teaching literature, because I was so bereft of sophistication in slang as a youngster, and wanted to know doubles lingo and Cockney slang.
Not progressing much beyond kissing Karen in the park, I was stuck for dates for dances as a sophomore, and JC hooked me up with one of the girls he had made, so I got a backseat car full of kissing one night, but I didn’t get as far as John I’m sure. He was smart, a baseball sensation, liked my matching colored Oxford shirts and socks, but dropped out of the academic and athletic track when he started smoking dope and reading Kerouac. By the time he graduated it was rumored that he had gotten a girl pregnant. JC was becoming our local Beat poet bohemian, and later would boast about his philandering in hotels in downtown Denver. We remained friends after I went to college. He said he heard I was listening to Billy Holiday, who he thought was a trip. I felt complimented since I always looked to John for guidance in ways to be hip, but was surprised since Lady Day was just one of the musical legends I had checked out in college. I guess he was losing his grip on me, and I sealed that deal when disgusted with two timing his wife, I secretly took up with her for a few months. Call it white knuckle sex that put me in a bad way with my friends and messed with my head so much that I exiled myself to Chicago — I had become the two timer with women and men friends who were all making their adventurous and rebellious ways in life. I took it on the chin as far as my ambitions — I had been working for the railroad as a gandy dancer after graduating from college — but I punched back, left for the City of Big Shoulders, where I worked as a computer programmer before reverting to the cagey life style of a bartender. Talk about girl trouble; I needed a father’s advice.
There was a prelude to the affair when I turned the layabout tables on John, an innocent game of steady with “my girl” early in high school, when Patti rejected me after a prolonged period of Donovan-glazed dancing and talking on the phone, where I persisted in winning her back only to drop her later as was my want. We’ve seen each other a few times over the years and are still friendly, both of us knowing what went down. It was the adolescent version of loving John’s wife preempting his dissolute wind down. He confronted me in my apartment when he found out about us, no blows, and I backed off. Years later he came to my house to excuse himself for his alcoholic addiction, making amends, and I drank the entire time he labored to apologize. Why was I so envious, so spiteful, so miserable towards John? It amounts to the same attitude I take towards confronting you, Father — you usurped my power and I want to cuckold you for it. UnFather.
Years later after I was married and had a son, my wife and I were visiting Edge Gallery when it was on upper Larimer, the early incarnation of an artist stronghold before it would be branded RiNo decades later, when we walked into a little bookstore owned and run by JC — we were civil, and I admired the fact that he had founded a store based on his literary ambitions. It didn’t last long, and although I’ve heard that he published a book of poetry, I don’t think he made much more of himself, but that wouldn’t have phased him. He told me once when we bumped into each other on Capitol Hill that he had a sick dog and had been spending time with him curled up in his cage at the vet. Absurdist John, always displaying his best Beat self. After leaving my mother the year I was born, how did you manage to stick to one lady till death did you part? I expect you kept playing around but didn’t have as big a family to support, so kept her happy so she kept you. I never knew how to play around, too Catholic I guess from my mother’s example, who never dated or married again albeit there were suitors. My wife says I never inhabited your player lifestyle — she still suspects I’m gay or bi or asexual 40 years into marriage. I still don’t understand a woman’s psyche. I can’t perceive how you could have abandoned two wives who were seen as saints by their sons. I heard back from JTT, and he and I agreed on your moral dissolution.
Johnny didn’t know ye, though he spent the first nine years of his life living in your household, but from what he reports, you were gone a lot of the time. After getting my letter, he left me a phone message to say he was “delighted” to receive it. When I called him back the same day, he repeated that he was delighted to hear from a Thornton he had heard a rumor about living in Denver, but nothing was delivered before my letter reached him. His wife had a few small strokes, so he’s blessedly abiding her, missing his two sisters who died over the last years, so to find a new sibling, a relative not his seed, was a catalyst, a jumper cable for a weak memory, and he has invited my wife and I down to visit him in San Antonio, where he has lived since his step father, my father’s older half brother, moved the family there when he was young.
In our conversation on the phone, when I asked about why you, our father, had divorced your first wife Adelaide, the mother of three, Johnny said you had an eye for the women. Johnny said this cautiously, I’m assuming to protect any illusions I might have had about you. By the end of our 45 minute conversation, he submitted that you were “morally corrupt,” not something a person would like to hear about their legacy. He followed that statement with an episode from the age of eight, when you took him on a sales call to Birmingham, stopped by a lady’s house, and proceeded to tell him to take her daughter outside and play for 45 minutes — Johnny locked himself in the car to shield himself from your paternal abuse. I’m lucky you left when you did. I’m afraid my oldest sister Marylyn may have been privy to your abuse — all she ever had to say about you was that you were mean. You probably thought that she would go along with your entreaties and orders. She saved herself for her first husband, who turned out to be a cad of a different sort — they had five kids before Marylyn threw him out for his womanizing, but at least he took the kids once he remarried. Just like Mom, she fell for a good looking man who sweet talked her until he was over her, moving on to fresh fruit hanging from the tree. I believe my mother must have been embarrassed by your departure, after adopting the girls and conceiving me. Her first husband was a bread winner and father to the girls. You were a gadabout hamstrung by morals you only cared to observe when they served your libido. Your third wife made contact with your first family but never with mine. You must have been horrible towards my sisters and mother. Why do I want to know more of your illicit ignominious behavior? To rack you, ride you on a rail out of my life, to excuse my own deficiencies by blaming you, the father who abandoned me? Very well; I’ll see to it.
When I consider the women who have meant the world to me, my mother rules for her perseverance, abiding love, her example of intelligence and style, and letting people be themselves. Sister Marylyn ranks for her beauty, ambition, and sense of duty to her children, after raising them as youngsters before turning their daily deliverance over to her husband so that she could live her own life. Then there’s Donna, my wife, who has abided my friends from the start, while they averted my gaze from her through vice laden nights when I should have been watching my baby boy grow by her side. She is the ever young girl who just wants to have fun, always provocative yet thoughtful, ignorant of wanton motives yet accused of being egotistical by girlfriends who can’t keep up with her. I’ve had a hard time keeping up myself, not evolving as the handsome lover she first knew, but becoming the intellectual builder of place and space, moving outside of people to engender their homecoming. In a funny turn, Denver became my father, offering its guidance through a network of paths that summoned memories for me and laid out the happy trails to my future. Donna was there riding bikes and walking the streets with me, as I moved through jobs that focused on the urban fabric of a quality life, spent hearing music at the Rainbow and dancing at clubs, going to the first galleries in the city, sharing museum life and neighborhood activism. She moved from Boulder because I knew Denver and its burgeoning culture scene, a love growing out of my time on the streets. That wild ecstatic time of falling together with her was bookended by my early life until I was 16 living in a single house, and the house we have dwelled in for over 40 years. That permanence was something I needed since you were no where to be found. My mother and wife provided home and stability. Denver gave me direction. So much for your fathering.
What happens when a place replaces and repairs a parent? Is it renovation or restoration, preservation or innovation? What’s the proper pronoun for a place that substitutes for a father? Denver has long been known as the Queen City of the Plains, but does that imply a gay orientation, like the King Soopers on Capitol Hill lovingly called “Queen Soopers”? Denver has nurtured me in practical manners, like a father might. I say might because that is only speculation on my part, a turn to the subjunctive. These questions languish in my mind because I’m meeting up with my brother Johnny in a few weeks, for the first time, and although I want to connect and converse and hug this sibling older than me by 18 years, I want more to dig for information on you, you who are morally corrupt by Johnny’s account in our first call. Maybe Denver in the 1940 and ‘50s was corrupt as well, busting out all over post war, military men looking for lovers and g-sauce. That’s when you married my mother, bedded her, adopted my sisters as a matter of course, and fled upon my arrival. Too many men for you I figure, since you left the fold of an earlier family after a son grew into the age of reason. You may have lived with Johnny longer, but it doesn’t mean you liked him, and you knew enough to get out right after I became the competition in Denver. Laius knew enough to send the babe Oedipus up orphanage hill, but not enough to give a stranger the right of way on the King’s road. You weren’t that proud, more intent on moving on, without the tangle of a wife’s apron strings or daughters’ love. Learning more about you has only meant more disappointment, and more gratitude for a mother who kept her son to herself.
Growing up in Denver, I’ve enjoyed, been granted the right of way. Born in the boomer years, the city expanded as I learned to walk the blocks of the Highlands, and bicycled the circumference of North Denver, from the Platte and Valley Hiway south and east to the northern ridge and boundary at 52nd Avenue, and the horizon line of Sheridan. My friends and schools and close classmates mostly lived within these confines. Because I grew up walking and biking, I paid close attention to the sidewalks, gardens, houses, local stores, people of the places I frequented. My inveterate rambling led to drunken and drugged tours of the city for the stag parties of friends about to wed; to scouting downtown dives when we were in our twenties, knowing enough to leave Collins where they served 50cent pitchers when one of the usual blokes sweetheart took a shine to me, he came stomping over to our table; to Thanksgiving Eve walkabouts where friends of me and my son have taken to visiting streets of bars, Colfax, Broadway, Larimer, Santa Fe, time and time again, to catch a start on the holidays, let them rest in peace after our glugging sojourns. My bicycling for jobs and on commutes led me to discover the richer enclaves of Circle Drive, the Polo Club, Bonnie Brae Boulevard, only to find my born again stomping grounds of Capitol Hill and Baker to be more arresting, soul stirring, with their Victorian haunts and punk palaces of renters. I scarcely leave the beltway bounded by the Valley Hiway, Colorado Boulevard, and the I-70 mousetrap, caring instead to scoot my way through the inner city on my Vespa or Schwinn Searcher, commuter hacks that keep me attuned to traffic and changes in the hood. I walk the flagstone walks of old communities, recalling my history as I traverse the pavements raised by tree roots, interrupted by new concrete construction. Where was I when the corner grocery and laundromat on 1st and Cherokee disappeared; boarded up it transformed into a coffee klatch and brewpub? Citizens, gatekeepers of the urban core, deride the gentrification that has occurred, but I’ve watched the changes all my life and know that Leevers Locavore surpasses the Miller’s Super of my youth. The one change I can’t imagine is what my life would have been like with a father — so I love this city.
What were the transitions and altered maturities that a father, you so maligned in these pages, would guide his son through that I substituted daily sustenance from my city? Getting my first haircut was left to my future brother-in-law cajoling my feminine family to cut my locks at Bob’s at 38th and Clay, the route becoming one of my favorites since it was on my way to and from Church and School. I walked the blocks on my own from the age of reason, seven in Catholic years. Rather than cut diagonally through the parking lot of Miller’s and walk the long block down Bryant to 36th, I would walk Clay, maybe cut through the weed lot next to the back docks of the grocery store, and jump down the high wall, check out the dumpsters, before I walked to Bryant. Once a friend found some nudie magazines in the trash, but I refused to look at them, knowing it was a sin. No doubt my sisters and mother shielded me from any exposure to female bodies, especially as I took on the role of the male in the house after your surrender to desire and due departure.
Sometimes I would walk down Clay to 37th, and walk past the Browns’ white brick Queen Anne with the big dormer, and espy old man Tatum’s place down the corner. The Browns were a big family, and the house was a bit distressed, and the big yard not kept up to the standards of most of their Italian neighbors. One time Tatum, who lived in the sub apartment below the big staircase to the front door of what is now called the Lumber Baron Inn, answered the door in a night gown and cap, a weird premonition of a Dickensian bugger. I was collecting for his paper delivery — I didn’t know what to think about this old man with a full grey beard answering the door in a dress. I didn’t know enough to ask my mom or sisters, either. Across from it was the Whitaker house where I would be robbed when I was a paperboy. After that, Mother got me a German Shepherd pup to accompany me on my route.
I suppose the route to getting my mane trimmed for the first time, and the streets that constituted my first job as a paperboy should have been the father/son ley lines in my life, but I never thought about it at the time. My mother and sister delivered my papers for two weeks when I was hospitalized with mononucleosis, so they learned the streets like I did. Why was I so satisfied with the love and saturation of focus of a single parent? Is that it, the knowledge that I was special in her eyes? She gave me a sweatshirt that I wore proudly, naïve I may have been, that spouted in headlines “It’s hard to be humble when You’re the greatest.” Sounds like something Muhammed Ali would have shaded a broadcaster with. But I was a kid, twelve years old wearing that red shirt — kids wear the darnedest things their parents bestow on them. And the children live by the attached subliminal messages. She was throwing shade on you.
As a paperboy learns the desires of his customers, where they want their paper thrown and whether the kid can deliver the pitch with a sidearm toss or overhead hook, he changes the lay of the route, riding some blocks with the houses on the right, others on the left. He learns the route from his predecessor, but it changes as he picks up or loses customers. I started slow in the old Italian neighborhood south of Mount Carmel Church, taking over from a local kid who was moving on to high school. By the time I gained the route near my house, and the route adjacent to it, I was delivering over 200 papers a day, from 35th to 38th Avenues, Zuni to Federal Streets. So I achieved mastery over my hood, and remember the houses to this day. I don’t expect a father could have taught me as much as a mother did who trusted me to study hard and work to get ahead. So much for you as an influencer.
What I found out about you from your other legitimate son Johnny could be as much fiction as fact, since he had little contact with you after you left the family when he was nine, shortly after you brought him on a romantic rendezvous with one of your acquaintances in the sales trade. He wasn’t as old as Biff when he discovered Willy Loman’s deception, but it smacks of the same 1950 dilemma of salesmen beating the bushes of their clients while the stayathome wife cares for the progeny. Willy had gotten on in years and had reached the point of where he wasn’t so well liked, so the play leads to the Death of the Salesman. You left your first family while there were still opportunities for a cad, more likely available in the boom towns of the West. You worked with your older half-brother Robert for an engineering company in Denver. Robert had a chance to transfer to New England, and that’s where your ex-wife Adelaide hooked up with him. Your daughters and son moved to San Antonio to live with their aunts, because your father’s second wife couldn’t abide them. Eventually Robert and Adelaide moved to Texas to raise the family together, a loving bunch once you were removed. You probably settled in Denver for its easy virtue and vice, and met my mother in turn. So much of this sounds like a fictional trope of life in the 1940s, but Johnny swore by most of it, even though he had to fill in a few gaps based on the letters of his mother. He had more testimony than me, which makes me think that Mother disdained any contact with you, not solely because of your abandonment, but because of your illicit behavior. She probably realized that you had taken her for a ride, that the derisive look on her mother’s face next to you in the photo I have suggested the shadowy truth of your story.
The story of your first wife Adelaide marrying your older half-brother was revealed to me in a letter from an Ancestry hobbyist who has mapped most of this family’s tree. He noticed that what I posted in terms of my lineage didn’t correspond to what he had uncovered about your relationship with Robert — we are fourth cousins removed far too long. That was a clue that led me to research the obituaries of your children, and third wife Mittie. With that information, I was able to contact Johnny and traveled to meet him in May. He’s a real gentleman — nice to know he grew out of your influence and loved his Papa Robert. Johnny and his family welcomed Donna and me with open arms. Johnny first found you since the split in Colorado Springs, where he was stationed for training at Fort Carson. He thought that you were in the vicinity, and looked you up in the phone book. You met him that night, and he was astonished how much alike the two of you looked. Donna took a photo of Johnny and me before we left San Antonio, and it reveals similarities between half-brothers: the forehead, the earlobes, the chin. So I must have looked a bit like you, too, although I never had a chance to see it with my own eyes, and the wedding portrait I have of you never impressed me for its likeness.
I have my mother’s nose, and a cribbed taciturn quality. That’s who I saw in me. At various ages and hair styles, I’ve been compared to Lou Reed, Cat Stevens, and Elliot Gould, all fine by me. I can only say that you reminded me of a cad from a ‘50s film noir. I think that’s why my wife doesn’t ever want me to slick back my hair, since that’s the designated look for the role of a heel. Johnny only saw you a few times after that time in the service. As a good soul who has been a deacon in the Baptist church for most of his adult life, he attempted to repair the riff between you and his mother, by arranging a dinner date for you and Mittie with Robert and Adelaide. He never heard what came of it, so I expect it didn’t play fair between the couples. From what I heard, Johnny took on this service of recommitment another time, when his sister Adelaide was ready to divorce her husband of many years and several children — she had met a preacher who attended to her cerebral nature. Johnny thought that the kids needed their original parents; was that projection on his part? MLady lived a long life, to the age of 87, despite Johnny’s admonitions.
Mittie contacted your children after your death in 1980. Not me, but the other children she had met. Johnny didn’t have much to say about his other encounters with you. You died of emphysema, smoking till the end. At our first breakfast with three of Johnny’s four children, and two of their spouses, Johnny said that you didn’t say much, and I offered that my wife had the same opinion of me, but Johnny countered that I had said more that morning over breakfast burritos than he had ever heard our father speak. So maybe my taciturn speech doesn’t completely come from my mother; you must have contributed to my routine silence. Thanks. That’s probably done more to wreck my relationship with my wife, and other partners, than even my drinking.
Who am I looking for in you? Other friends from high school who found that they were adopted, searched or didn’t for their biological parents. One was satisfied with his Botero bulwarks of a mom and dad, bowling champions, strong midwestern types; another didn’t get along with his father, a business man, and wanted to pursue his dream of the Beats, to find someone beyond reach. I didn’t have a ghost to pursue, no substitute in the room, although I had plenty of men I looked up to, for spiritual, communal, fatherly advice, they wanted to advise me, for my mother’s sake, or sisters’ good will, or their own interest in spreading good cheer beyond their complicated sometimes troubled relationships. I wasn’t looking for a father, not consciously, so their efforts were welcome but in vain. My mother would never marry again, because of the Catholic Church’s ban on divorce. When the Church made it possible to negate a union after children were born, sister Norine asked me to testify regarding her marriage, years after she had wed and born three daughters, trying she was to deny the consummation, that it took place under false or drunken circumstances since her husband was an alcoholic. I refused without realizing its importance to her. I wanted nothing to do with religion since it had little comforted me after high school. My three sisters were taken in by men who were products of the ‘40s and ‘50s, men who felt they could marry one woman and bed others as was their want — only one of them managed to stay married to her original partner, and only because she could wield a frying pan with the clout of a Louisville Slugger. I didn’t need comfort, or a father, just a relationship to last. I was not promiscuous, in fact more prudish in my desires, at the height of the sexual revolution. I was liberated with a healthy skepticism of what love means, mostly due to your absence. Then a cool girl who wanted a baby entered my life. I’m not sure that I was prepared for fatherhood, but I made it up as I went along with the family affair. You were little help, although I always figured my son was better raised by his mother than me. Early in the child-rearing years, I was AWOL, and I scarcely new the right lingo to describe it.
Robert, Johnny’s son who developed and built big spaces for rich folk, but who now is set on preserving historic haunts around Boerne, like churches and gas stations, fashioning them into offices and condos, said to me at the end of our visit that he could not imagine growing up without his father. They are close, whereas the youngest son Andy was said by his dad to still be figuring out his dream — he was an actor and now a therapist. Andy told me it was nice to have an uncle, and promised to see us. Robert would love our house which we have reconstructed over decades with found objects and salvaged materials, what he uses now to render an authentic look to his newest projects. It’s nice to know these folks, my nephews of sort. As Robert asked me, is it closure on you my father who art in vain, or an opening to a new family, yours abandoned years ago? Thanks, dad, the UnFather who left me to my whims and dreams, ambitions, my desires, academia and solo bicycling, a wife who loves and stands me which you may have only found in your last take on love, a brother who I’ve found and his family, a renewed interest in my nieces and their families, my mother’s legacy in this land of Denver, most sons would not thank the likes of thee, but I’ve always been different. Thanks to Mother most, who only told me she loved you.