Dinner

FICTION.DINNERby Dell Franklin

“I’m on my way,” Mel announces. “I’ll be there in half an hour.”

“Mel’s on his way, mom!” I announce, hanging up the phone, which mother has difficulty operating due to failing eyesight and arthritis.

“If he’s on his way, it means he’ll be here in two hours,” mother says from her plush rocker with a view. Mel lives 15 miles away in Long Beach. I have driven down 247 miles from a small beach town up north, where I live in a beach shack. Took me 4 ½ hours in my limping 20-year-old Toyota Tercel. It’s Saturday afternoon and my mother and I are going out to dinner with Mel, her companion, in San Pedro. He has already called four times to check on mother. Each time he’s asked if my sister, Jeannie, is coming over. I keep telling him she can’t make it because she’s busy with HER life, she being an involved citizen and college professor.

Mother has tubes in her nostrils from an oxygen tank. She’s still fragile from a near death battle with pneumonia. Jeannie and I need to organize her affairs and find a live-in caregiver. My sister has been driven nearly mad dealing with mother and Mel and is a bit miffed I have been up north and caught none of the stress. Now I am here to make myself useful. My sister lives in Palos Verdes with her retired husband who was a corporate executive. Their two boys are out of college with advanced degrees, and doing well in business. I drive a cab, am single, rent, play a lot of tennis, surf, read, drink.

“Jeannie should be here any minute,” mother comments.

“No, mom, she’ll be over tomorrow morning.”

“Oh yes. That’s right. But you’ll be here all week, won’t you, honey?”

“No, mom, I’ve got to get back to work tomorrow night.”

After a while I remove the twin tubes from her nostrils and turn off the oxygen tank. She has more color in her face. Jeannie calls and warns me not to let mother drive.

“You think I’m an idiot? She can hardly see, and she’s terrified of taking ten steps alone.”

“And don’t let her wear those red high heels.” She pauses when I don’t answer. “We’ve got to keep mother in a controlled environment.”

I hang up after telling my sister I’ll see her tomorrow. Mother is now reading the LA Times funnies. She used to read the entire paper and the New Yorker. She was a high school valedictorian and college honor student and educator who, in her eighties, took up Oriental painting and a short story class. I sit down across from her. She smiles at me. Her eyes suddenly come into focus and meet mine with the old yearning that could melt granite.

“I miss our going to the movies together,” she says. “And going to dinner afterwards and watching the people and talking about the movie, and books, and people. I miss you, honey.”

“I know. We’ll go again.”

“Jeannie doesn’t want me to. She doesn’t trust me.”

I don’t say anything. What can I say? I cease looking into her eyes. “The motha look,” my dad used to say, describing the way she looked at me—admiration, understanding, forgiveness, everything.

***

FICTION.DINNER.dancerMel shows up around 7, two hours after he said he’d be right over. His entrance, as always, is turbulent. He has a female Pomeranian that is demanding and spoiled. Mel has to make several trips from his car, toting packages for mother, toys for the dog. He needs a hip replacement and lurches along, his shoes never leaving the ground. I go out to help him with the strawberries, champagne, bananas, boiled chicken for the dog, shopping bags of food and sundries. He is in a huff about the dog darting into the street and getting run over.

Once settled in a chair beside mother, he asks how I’m doing at the bar I tended for 10 years, but which I haven’t worked in over a year, since I started hacking. I tell him business is good. He then leans toward me and whispers that mother had a stroke. The doctors say she did not have a stroke, but Mel knows everybody’s business better than they do. He once owned car dealerships and real estate, was a wheeler dealer, is well off. He’s been mother’s companion almost 25 years, and nearly cracked up when she was sick. He is a lifelong bachelor and claims my mother is the classiest lady he’s ever known. “So Jeannie’s on her way, coming to dinner, Rick?” he says. I tell him again that Jeannie can’t come and will be over tomorrow. Mother tells him I’ll be here all week. I tell them I’ve got to go back to work tomorrow while my black Lab, who is not allowed in the house for fear he’ll eat the Pomeranian, stares sadly at me through the sliding glass door on the patio.

“Your mother likes it when you come down,” Mel says. “She perks up. She’s never happier than when you come down for a visit.”

Tonight we are going to a swank establishment down on the harbor. I volunteer to drive, but Mel insists on taking his Lincoln Town Car. Mother wears a chic outfit and looks amazingly 10 years younger than her age while Mel has on a summer sports coat and silk shirt open at the throat. I wear thrift store shorts and a Hawaiian shirt. It doesn’t take mother long to get ready after their ritual champagne with strawberries, but then we must wait for Mel to break up the dog’s chicken into tiny bites and place it beside the bowl of bottled water. Then Mel dilly-dallies for what seems forever in the bathroom and mother’s room. I ask her what he’s doing and she says he dithers. There is no use saying anything to him, and when he finally emerges mom accuses him of taking half an hour, but he insists he was only five minutes. “Thirty minutes,” says mom.

Outside, I slacken my pace to a near crawl to stay abreast as we walk to Mel’s car. I help mother into the front seat and get in the back seat behind her. Mel’s head just does come up over the seat and steering wheel. The two little heads look like gourds. Mel flies down the hill just missing parked cars. But he knows the three-mile route. When he arrives at the harbor parking complex he slams into and bounces off a center divider on a turn, and just misses a pole.

“There’s no lighting down here,” he grouses after mother informs him he needs to fasten his seat belt, which he never does.

I don’t say a word. There’s no use saying anything to Mel about bouncing off center dividers and sending terrified pedestrians, dressed for Saturday night dinner in various restaurants, scurrying for cover. The Town car has amassed a few dents and smells of dog, like my heap. Mel makes a few turns around the vast lots searching for a disabled spot, finally settling for a spot that is a row of blue lines. Oh well.

I help mom out. It takes a while to corral and steer them up the walkway to the restaurant, which is comprised of two large banquet rooms between which are three adjoined sections for elegant dining with a view of the water and cargo stacks in LA harbor. Both of them have to go to the restroom, The hostess asks do I wish to wait for them up front, but no, I wish to be seated, and she leads me to a table at a window on the water. I pick up the menu, browse it, look at the water, then at the diners, and spot mother wandering into the restaurant, looking a bit catatonic. It is a good thing the hostess sat us in the front section. Mother is headed past the salad bar toward section two when I intercept and guide her to our table and sit her down across from me beside the window.

After mother is situated, Mel scuffs into the room. I get up to intercept him and lead him to our table, where he sits beside mother. They peer out at the water.

“There’s not many ships out there,” Mel says, concerned. “Last time we were here there were a million ships coming and going.”

“Maybe it’s 9/11,” mother says.

“We’ve been here since 9/11, Lilly,” Mel says.

“No we haven’t,” mother insists.

“Yes, we were here last month, Lilly.”

“No, we went to Sorrento’s. We’ve been to Madeo’s and the Four Seasons, but we haven’t been here for years, Mel.”

“Lilly, we were here last month,” he says, with patience.

They continue to joust while I gaze out the window at the placid water. It is July and still light out. A cargo ship cruises by like a mountain moving into view.

“What a lovely table,” mother says.

“There’s no traffic out there,” Mel says, tucking his napkin at his throat, studying the menu. “There’s got to be a reason for it. I’ll find out.”

The waiter alights. He is overweight, with wrinkled forehead and huge gaped teeth. He’s around 40 and his name tag reads, RAOUL.

“And how are WEEE tonight?”  He smiles at us like we are four year olds. A number of men in red coats and black pants and ties stand around or hustle about. They all have name tags. Both banquet rooms are packed with wedding parties. Salsa music filters into the crowded dining room to mix with the standard desultory Muzak. We each order a glass of wine. Meanwhile, mom and Mel go round and round trying to decide what to order. She asks me what I’m going to order and I tell her probably the prime rib. She asks Mel if the prime rib is good. Mel says they’re not “noted” for their prime rib. Everything is “okay.” This restaurant, though pricey, is known for its ambience, not the food. Mel, the ultimate authority on restaurants and food, has found ambience, but continues to complain about the lack of traffic in the harbor. There isn’t much to look at except the flat keys of stacked containers, cranes jutting above. Just glassy water and the occasional cargo ship headed in or out.

Raoul returns with our wine and mother surprises everybody by ordering the rack of lamb, but only after putting Raoul through an inquisition regarding sauces that might contribute to her cholesterol. Mel has the salmon special Raoul so tantalizingly described. I have the prime rib. I discourage them from going to the salad bar, and they order the soup de jour. Mel selects the red rose potatoes while mother and I have the baked. They begin eating bread while I go to the salad bar. When I return they are pointing to a Coast Guard ship.

“See,” mother says, “9/11. There was no Coast Guard here last time we were here.”

“The Coast Guard is always here,” Mel explains. “And the Harbor Patrol. This is the biggest port in the country.”

They joust a while about which port is the biggest in the country, naming New York, Seattle, etc., until the soup comes. They dig in. I eat my salad, which mother claims “looks very good.” I have the plate so full that food falls onto the white linen cloth. Whenever mother commented on how good the food on my father’s plate looked, he automatically gave it to her. I dish some over to mother. A cruise ship crawls by. Passengers line the railings drinking from champagne glasses and waving at people along the windows of the restaurant, and diners wave back, affecting enthusiasm. The ship is immense.

“I loved taking cruises with your father,” mother says.

“Soup’s not great,” Mel remarks.

“Rick, honey, I wonder where the ship is going. The one I took with your father went to Acapulco.”

“Probably goes to Mexico,” Mel tells her.

“Or Hawaii. We went there, too. We also went to Tahiti. A wonderful time. So beautiful. Such lovely people, the islanders.”

Mother smiles at me. Usually, when I come down here, if I can, I bring my on-again-off-again girl friend, Miranda. Though mother is fond of Miranda, she feels she’s not right for me. Three other serious flames over the years were brought home, and though mother adored them, too, they also were not right for me. When the eventual break-up with these fine ladies occurred, they all made it a point to visit my mother for lunches while going out of their way to avoid me. Mother loves Miranda. Miranda, after 16 years, is done with me. Mother does not know this.

Our food comes. When Mel sees our baked potatoes and then his own tiny red rose potatoes, he grabs Raoul by the arm and says he wants the baked too—go ahead and charge extra.

“Ok-eee, do-key!” Raoul simpers. “And would you like butter and sour cream on your potato, sir?”

“Yes, thank you, Raoul.”

When he waddles off, swishing his ass, mother says, “What an ugly man.”

The waiters at the restaurant always prepare a diner’s potato for them, but Mel will have none of that. Meanwhile, mother and I dig in. She claims her lamb is “pretty good.”

“So you’re staying a few days this time?” Mel says to me, not eating. “Your mother really likes it when you stay longer.”

“Going back tomorrow, Mel. I’ll be back in two weeks.”

“How’s the bar going?”

“Okay.”

“Still making good tips?”

“Enough to live on.”

He is perking up. “Back when I owned my jazz nightclub, a beer and a shot cost fifty cents. What are they charging these days?”

“A draft and a shot’s about six bucks. The good stuff’ll run you up to ten.”

“Been in any good fights lately?”

“Nah.” I neglect to tell either of them that I quit the bar after hospitalizing a guy in a fight. “I tamed that dive.”

“I always liked the dives.”

“I like all bars, Mel.”

He smiles. “Yes, I like all bars, too.”

His baked potato comes. He has not touched his salmon. Mother and I are half finished. Mel methodically slathers his potato. When this potato is as he likes it, he prepares to stick a fork in it and somehow knocks it off the table onto the carpet. I rise to retrieve it, but Mel motions me away and flags down Raoul, who scurries over and picks up the potato and promises to bring another. Raoul is busy with a table of four well-dressed, middle-aged Latino couples two tables over. It is getting dark out. Mel watches us eat.

“So how’s the lamb?” he asks mother.

“Just a little dry, Mel, but fine.” She sips her wine.

“Everything should be perfect for what they charge,” Mel says. “So your prime rib’s pretty good, Rick?”

“Just fine, Mel.”

“I don’t eat much meat these days,” Mel admits.

“Mel’s lost weight, Rick. Doesn’t he look young for his age?”

I nod. Mel does look good—no more than 75. He has a shock of white hair and a ruddy, smooth complexion. He had been a handsome guy in his prime. Everybody who knows Mel, says mom, likes him. He is into everybody’s business, is generous, helpful; understands finances. A former Republican, he’s turned Democrat since meeting my mother, who is an Eleanor Roosevelt liberal.

His new potato comes, Mel again slathers it methodically. He has still not touched his salmon. I am done. I help mother finish her plate. Mel picks up his wine glass, discovers it’s empty, waves down Raoul, who is now a bit hurried and flustered, and asks for another glass of wine. Raoul snares the glass and huffs off. Mel finally starts to eat. A slow eater, he likes his fish and potato, but they’re “not great.” Mel eats out frequently. At his condo, he only cooks pasta with the special sauce he learned from his old country mother who lived to be 102.

He becomes restless when his wine does not come right away. “Where is that waiter?” He peers around, agitated, flags down another waiter who comes right over and listens to Mel tell him he wants another Chardonnay. The waiter flags down Raoul, who stares at our table and then has a hissy-snit, arguing with the man before heading off toward the bar in an angry gait.

Meanwhile, Mel is not going to take another bite until his wine arrives. Finally, the wine comes, but Raoul places it out of Mel’s reach. While Mel strains unsuccessfully for the glass, I move it within his reach, and he picks it up and takes a sip.

“Wine’s good,” he concedes. “Can’t ruin good wine.”

“I like a little chardonnay,” mother says, looking and sounding catatonic, and I cannot look at her. “So did your father.”

While Mel eats, my plate is taken away by a busboy. Mel asks this person, who is actually an adult named ESTEBAN, why there is so little traffic out in the harbor. Esteban, though smiling and nodding, has no idea what Mel is talking about. So he goes and finds Raoul and whispers in his ear, and Raoul comes over and asks Mel if he needs anything, but Mel does not want to be bothered at this point, is busy eating, so Raoul goes off haughtily and then suddenly changes moods to fawn over his big festive Latino table that seems to be celebrating somebody’s birthday. Now Esteban is talking to one of the managers, who comes over instantly and asks Mel if everything is okay. ARTURO. Mel asks Arturo why there is so little traffic in the harbor. Arturo, who doesn’t speak great English himself, goes and finds another manager who is also Mexican but speaks fluent English without accent, and Mel asks HIM why there is so little traffic in the harbor, but ALBERT, after pausing to seriously consider this daunting question, shrugs and admits he does not know why there is so little traffic in the harbor. As an after-though, before leaving, he suggests that there seems to be the same amount of traffic as usual.

“I told you so!” mother exclaims with righteous fervor, no longer catatonic.

Mel wipes his mouth with his linen napkin. He’s just about done. “Last time we were here there was a million ships out there,” he contends. “The Coast Guard and Harbor Patrol’ve been prowling all night long. Something’s wrong.”

“Oh baloney,” mother states, rolling her eyes at me.

Raoul materializes, girds up, half bows. “Are we all done?” he asks, oozing sweetness, for Mel is a notoriously huge tipper. “Everything okay?”

Mel nods, sits back, removes his napkin from his throat.

“And would we like a little dessert?”

“I’ll have the decaf,” mother says.

“I’ll have the same,” says Mel.

“Double Stoli on the rocks,” I tell Raoul, and he winks at me.

FICTION.DINNER4When the coffee and vodka come, Mel takes care of the bill. The dining room is clearing out and the evening has turned dark; we’ve been here for hours, it seems. I have to get them melon from the salad bar for a belated dessert. The melon, they claim, is the best part of the dinner. We finally rise to leave. Both of them scuff off to the restrooms. I wait on the sofa in the little alcove up front beside the fire place across from the hostess station. The wedding parties in both banquet rooms are becoming more boisterous, and joyful young people in beautiful gowns and tuxes mill around in the hallways. Mother finally comes out of the restroom and sits beside me. She takes my hand, smiling, looking around, drifts out of her catatonic state.

“Aren’t the Latin people handsome?” she says. “Your father and I, when he jumped the big leagues to play baseball in Mexico, and in Cuba, we loved it so. We didn’t see each other for over two years while he was in the war, and then he came home alive, and you were two years old, and he just adored you, and at night we danced in all the little cantinas and nightclubs after his games, and there was always music, and it was the happiest time of our lives.” She squeezes my hand. “The Latin people, they could not get over how blue your eyes were, and my eyes, and they wanted to reach out and touch us, and your father, he was so protective, so proud of us, he just beamed…I miss him so….”

My father put up with a lot and accomplished a lot and gave back more than his share and died a debilitating, excruciatingly painful death he did not deserve at too young an age. Mother, nursing him, remained stoic and brave, their love genuine and heroic.

Mel still has not come out of the restroom. We wait. Normally, no person takes longer in a restroom than mother, so it’s my duty to go in there and check on Mel.

He’s not in the restroom. I walk outside to see nobody in the Town Car. I enter one of the wedding parties; packed, hot, noisy salsa music, Latinos, living it up. I spot Mel talking to two middle-aged men in tuxes at a table. He’s drinking champagne. I walk over and stand beside Mel. The men smile at me; offer champagne, ask if I am his son. I tell them I am not. Evidently, one of these men bought a Jaguar at one of Mel’s dealerships twenty years ago. I see a bottle of Stoli and fill a used plastic cup to the brim and drink half of it, listen briefly to their conversation, then go outside to check on my mother. She is gone.

I enter the other wedding party and look around; packed, hot, noisy salsa music. Mother is dancing with a young Latino man. She, like dad was, is a great dancer. I finish my drink, find the bar, take out a wad of bills, point to my cup and tell a pretty girl bartender wearing a Tux shirt and tie to hit it with Stoli, and offer her a twenty. She tells me it’s an open bar so I ask her to keep pouring and stuff the bill in her snifter and turn to watch my mother dance. She’s become the life of the party, the Latinos clapping their hands and saluting her as she whirls in the red high heels dad bought her in Italy. §

Dell Franklin writes from his home in Cayucos, Calif., and publishes his observations on sports, politics, and culture on his website, dellfranklin.com, where this article first appeared.

The man who would be my father

“I don’t want people digging through my trash or my recycle,” he’d say, sitting back down into his chair to read the morning newspaper. “I pay money for the city to come pick those up. If they want to dig through the trash, let them go to the dump.”

“I don’t want people digging through my trash or my recycle,” he’d say, sitting back down into his chair after chasing them away to read the morning newspaper. “I pay money for the city to come pick those up. If they want to dig through the trash, let them go to the dump.”

by Stacey Warde

I learned the best example of manhood from a guy who was—I thought as a kid growing up—not very manly.

My stepfather, who died in 2008 from kidney cancer, didn’t have the physique of a man who would easily intimidate. He looked more like a New Jersey Italian teddy bear, a Mediterranean Buddha with belly to match, who loved to pass out cigars and pour a good stiff bourbon when the occasion called for it; he worked hard and celebrated life with gusto.

He had a lot of fight in him, fearless in his way, and he was pretty good about knowing when to use it, without resorting to fisticuffs. You always knew where you stood with him. He never minced words.

He took us on, some 50 years ago—mom, my brother and me— as if we were his own. He quickly laid down the law, setting boundaries and establishing family as the beginning and end of all things. He had been raised in the old ways of a New Jersey Italian where family and loyalty to one’s clan are as sacrosanct as the natural order of the universe.

***

My brother and I, abandoned by our biological father, were hurt, angry little boys when mom remarried and we weren’t quite ready for another man to claim us as his own.

Sure, we liked him—as a friend—but when mom told us she was going to marry him and that he was going to be our dad, we rebelled. We tested him. When the cops came knocking on our door only a few months after the wedding, he stood by my brother and me as we bold-faced lied.

“Did you throw rocks at the old lady’s window?” he asked us, responding to a complaint from the neighbor woman—a cranky old bag who hated kids—as the cops waited patiently on our doorstep for an answer.

“No, we didn’t do it,” we protested.

“If my boys say they didn’t do it, they didn’t do it,” he said firmly, closing the door on the cops and sending them away.

Mom came home later that day and got straight to the point with my brother: “Why’d you do it, Nathan?”

“They made me do it,” he wailed, pointing his finger at me.

We both got whooped pretty hard for making our new dad look like a fool in front of the cops. He made clear that his authority was to be respected, or we’d pay the consequences. That was our first taste of fatherly love, Italian style.

“You don’t have to love me, but you will respect me,” was the message, and as time passed I learned to both respect and love my new father.

***

Dad put a lot of stock into “playing the game right.”

One summer years later, after he’d gotten his licks in as a father, he put together a traveling baseball team, hand-picked the players and helped organize the league. It was forward-thinking at the time for teens our age who wanted to continue playing through the summer, an idea that came long before the now super-hyped, expensive and prestigious traveling leagues we see today with their fancy uniforms and fussy parents and spoiled players telling the coaches what to do.

It was a big treat for us kids, too, getting to play past the usual short season of organized youth baseball; it was a rougher and scrappier kind of game, more in the dirt, and with other talented kids from communities beyond our own whom we’d never met before, and who also loved to play hard and get dirty. It was just the boys and their dads, who helped with the officiating and coaching, steeped in the passion of playing the game.

My dad instilled in me that summer a love for the game that went well beyond just playing good baseball. It had everything to do with how I played, and the way I carried myself on and off the field—do it with class, he’d say.

“If you can’t play the game right, don’t play at all!” he barked at me once when I’d tried a cleats-to-the-face slide into third base. He didn’t like foul play or cheats; he wanted me to know and play the game well enough to take advantage of my opportunities without resorting to cheating or foul play. “It makes you a better player, and others will respect you more when you play the game right,” he said. “You don’t have to cheat to win.”

And he benched me to drive home his point.

During another game, while pitching, I got increasingly frustrated because I was missing the corners, and throwing more balls, and wearing myself down. I still managed to hold off most batters, but was working too hard at it. My frustration got worse and I let anger take over and started throwing harder, straight down the pipe, but still missing, and digging myself into a hole.

My dad saved me from myself and pulled me from the game. But I was angry and didn’t want to leave and, in a fit, threw my glove into the dugout as I came off the field and he glanced up at me over his scorebook and said, “Do you want to sit out the next game, too?”

That’s all he needed to say, and I stewed quietly until the game was over. On the way home, he said, “I pulled you because you were playing blind. You don’t play blind. You’ll end up hurting yourself, or worse, someone else.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant. “I didn’t hit anybody,” I said.

“I didn’t say you were wild. I said you were playing blind. You got too emotional. You let your emotions get in the way of your abilities.” I knew he was right and thought about it for the rest of the summer and still think about it whenever I start feeling like breaking down and “playing blind.”

“You play smart, son. That’s how you win.”

***

My brother and I, abandoned by our biological father, were hurt, angry little boys when mom remarried and we weren’t quite ready for another man to claim us as his own. From left: Grandma Virginia Thurston Santmyer, Aunt Gretchen Newlon, mom and dad, Uncle MIck, Aunt 'Net at the Presbyterian Church in Laguna Beach.

We were hurt, angry little boys when mom remarried and we weren’t quite ready for another man to claim us as his own.
From left: Grandma Virginia Thurston Santmyer, Aunt Gretchen Newlon, mom and dad, Uncle Mick Radice and his wife, Aunt ‘Net, at the Presbyterian Church in Laguna Beach on their wedding day.

As mom says, we were lucky he took us under his wing, flawed as he might have been, and through him I learned the measure of a man, enough so that I grew fond of him, loved him, and eventually, as a boy of 8, started calling him “dad.”

His most manly asset, though, was his fierce devotion to mom, which counts for a lot in my book. That made him as big a man as any I’ve seen in my life. He took on the role of husband and father where most men might have fled in the other direction.

As an Old School Italian, he was intolerant of disrespect. Once, at the dinner table, my brother mouthed off to mom and dad reached over with his spoon and rapped him on the head. “You don’t talk to your mother that way, ever!” he scolded. While today that correction might be seen as abusive, we got the message loud and clear and never mouthed off to mom again.

He defended and protected her in ways that are only now becoming clear to me as I watch her adjust to widowed life after nearly 45 years of marriage. She seemed to have fewer cares then, he wouldn’t allow her to become anxious or worked up and made sure all her needs were well met. He doted on her.

I seldom heard dad argue with mom; their arguments, he’d say, weren’t anyone’s business but their own. That’s why, when they needed to discuss something that might get heated, they took their personal business behind closed doors. They never raised their voices with each other, at least not around my brother and me.

He assumed the full weight and responsibility of father for children who, at least in the beginning, were not his own, including major expenses such as making sure our teeth were properly straightened.

“There’s my new pickup truck,” he teased when friends came over, and he’d point at me, asking me to smile so they could see my new braces. “Show them my new truck.”

He’d have to wait a few more years before he finally got the truck he’d always wanted but in the meantime he took care of pressing family matters, sacrificing his personal wants, making sure we all had what we needed first.

***

My biological father, meanwhile, deserted us when I was four; he didn’t put any time or effort into getting to know me, or my brother. He paid us no attention. He was a ghost in my life, a non-person, essentially, whose only historical significance to me was that of sperm donor. As a young boy, I’d ask mom what happened to him.

“You’re better off without him,” she’d say. At first, I’d get mad at her for saying such things; I didn’t believe her. How could I be better off without the man who was supposed to be my father? A boy doesn’t understand these things. He assumes that by rights the man who made birth a possibility would also take an interest in his own children.

After a while, though, I figured she was right, that he probably didn’t care, and that indeed I was better off without him, so I forgot about him, except for the one random visit he made to our home when I was about 10 to discuss visitation arrangements with mom and my new dad.

That was the last time I ever saw him. I heard from him once more when I was in high school and he sent copies of the New World Translation of the Bible favored by Jehovah’s Witnesses to me and my brother.

I took my brother outside with our copies of the “bible,” and showed him how we would appreciate the gifts by placing them in the gutter, pouring on gasoline and setting them on fire. As we watched the thin pages of the bibles crinkle into twisted ash, my grandmother pulled up beside the curb to park her car. She sat staring over the steering wheel, horrified.

“What are you doing?” she demanded as she got out of the car.

“Oh, hi grandma, don’t worry; it’s nothing, just burning those fake bibles Jim sent us.”

I’d gotten to calling him Jim because that’s what mom had always called him, never “your father,” whenever she talked about him, which was rare.

The strange thing was I hadn’t thought twice about burning those books, and didn’t realize the real horror of it until I saw grandma’s face when she drove up. No one in the family valued books more than she did, coming from a family of educators; her mother, Marie Harding Thurston, and aunt, Ruth Harding, both had schools named after them.

For me, it was a kind of purgation.

I wanted to be rid of those books, and the false religion, and the show of some kind of weak Christian love from a man who didn’t want to be a father to his children.

Not long after I was married, I thought of seeking him out, to ask him personally why he hadn’t taken an interest in his two sons, but it was too late. He died when I was 23. He was 45, and had started at least two more families besides the one he started with us.

At that point, it didn’t matter much whether we “hit it off” or got on well. I was more interested in finding out what sort of man he was, whether there were patterns and habits of mind that I might have inherited and whether there was anything about which I should be concerned.

But any such opportunity was crushed when mom spoke up casually one afternoon as she and my wife relaxed at the dining table drinking tea and coffee. I was cutting an apple by the sink. “Oh, by the way, Jim died.”

I didn’t expect it to hit me the way it did. I didn’t shed any tears, but it troubled me and left me feeling vacant. My wife graciously walked over and put her arm around me. I must have felt like a sack of potatoes.

***

I might not have picked my stepfather as the “ideal” model of a man for a young kid looking for a strong father figure, which is what I wanted as a terrified little boy. I would have picked someone like my biological father, whose pictures mom kept showed a man with a powerful, muscular build. My one earliest memory of him, in fact, is of him putting his fist through the bathroom wall.

I learned quickly, however, that my stepfather cared with the kind of devotion that shows real backbone. He made a lot of sacrifices, and paid us a lot of attention. He was our protector, even without the intimidating manly presence a young boy might want in a father.

I’d seen him fearlessly go after people who wronged him or who showed the slightest disrespect, people, for example, who parked their cars in the handicap zone he’d had the city paint on the curb nearest the front door so that grandma could get to her car without trouble.

He’d run out, no matter who it was, and he’d confront the offenders, directing them away from the painted curb. Even the scary looking guys complied.

CULTURE.me-and-dad“Dad, you gotta be careful these days,” I said once during a visit to the old neighborhood, “there are a lot of gang bangers passing through the area now.”

“I don’t care,” he said, “they don’t belong there.”

I seldom heard whatever he said to people as they rummaged through his trash on trash days; but he’d shoosh them away and off they’d go.

“I don’t want people digging through my trash or my recycle,” he’d say, sitting back down into his chair to read the morning newspaper. “I pay money for the city to come pick those up. If they want to dig through the trash, let them go to the dump.”

As a father myself, I determined as much as possible not to be like my biological father, who it seemed to me, quit when the family he created put demands on him that he wasn’t ready to meet. He became a flyboy. He fled, spawning more families along the way, leaving more abandoned, fatherless children in his path.

I swore that I would never do that to my child; that I would never flee from my responsibilities, that I would break the cycle, as much as possible, and try to be a meaningful manly presence in my daughter’s life. I failed on many levels to give her what she needed but she knows that I love her and will not abandon her. She’s the apple of my eye.

Without my stepfather’s example, though, I might never have known what it means to be a father. Over the years, I’ve tried to emulate his commitment and respect and love for family. Mom was right. We were lucky to have found him. §

Stacey Warde is publisher of The Rogue Voice.

 

Life in Hell: An American Bad Dream

CULTURE.HELL

 

by Stacey Warde

My life, as the lives of so many others, has been playing itself out like a bad dream.

I’ve entered the dreaded dark wood of Dante’s Divine Comedy, which begins with the Inferno, where gods and holy personages, the people we thought had our best interests at heart, are seen for what they really are: Evil, gluttonous, corrupt, and villainous. I’ve met my share of them, mostly, like Dante, in the church.

It’s almost 3:30 a.m. and the neighbor’s dog complains through the window next door to be let inside. Her owner sleeps soundly through the plaintive barks.

The moon will be full in less than an hour.

A distant great horned owl hoots, echoing into the crystal blue moonlit shroud covering the surrounding valley. A cop prowls with his lights off, driving slowly, like a drunkard, down the wrong side of the road.

Another car passes every few minutes, the whir of its tires against the cold, blue asphalt sounds like the sudden splash of surf rushing up black sand on a winter night.

Who the hell would be out driving at 3:30 in the morning? And where could they possibly be going? Or, coming from? What occupies their hearts and minds?

It doesn’t make sense to me, the quiet slinking under cover of darkness. Few things do in the underbelly of night, and even more so in the broad light of day when the slinking of ill-intent is less obvious.

This journey of the dark night leaves me with many questions. But one, more than any other, stands out: Where do I belong?

Like Dante, I’ve “wandered off from the straight path,” disoriented, astray. Virgil has not yet arrived to guide me through hell to my Beatrice.

The flat, two-dimensional view of life in popular American culture — good and evil, rich and poor, black and white, gay and straight — no longer serves as an adequate guidepost for what is real.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

And worse, the church, that paragon of all that is good and virtuous in American life, and which claims to know the “Way,” stumbles blindly, reeking of its own hypocrisy, meanness and wrongdoing, unable even to guide itself.

Without a Virgil, I’m lost. We’re all lost. The gods are silent but stirring.

I’ve given up on church and religion. Its answers about God — “The God” — sound like crystal shattering in my ear. They feel trite, contrived and false; wishful thinking and adolescent fantasies. A moment of silence and prayer for the lost? How about weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth?

The New Age solution to think positively makes me want to puke. It’s whistling in the dark.

CULTURE.JOBI think of Job in the Hebrew scriptures, the most modern book ever written. There are no easy answers. Not even the wisest, most orthodox or even hip person can answer Job’s complaint. His sufferings, as the worlds’, are an anomaly.

And God — “El Shaddai,” the Hebrew word for Almighty — what is God in that story? A cruel and arrogant brute not unlike the Greek gods of antiquity who sadistically toy with their helpless supplicants.

El Shaddai, or rather his consort, Satan with El Shaddai’s consent, murders Job’s 10 children, destroys his household and property, mercilessly assaults Job’s body with disease until he is covered in boils, lamenting his woes, alone in an ash heap. Job, longsuffering and faithful to the bitter end, is the only one who remains virtuous. Even God fails to answer Job’s complaint.

Like Job, I demand an audience with the Almighty to lodge my complaint, and claim my innocence, to protest the senseless suffering of so many. There’s no plausible reason for these sufferings, for the bad dream I’ve been living in concert with others.

“You create your own reality,” one of Job’s New Age friends tells him.

“You’re full of it,” he answers back. “If I create my own reality, what do I need God for? What do I need you for?”

Unlike Job, however, I’ve given up on God, at least the one I have known until now, the one who is All-Everything except dark, contrary, mysterious and evil.

I should consider myself lucky, a friend told me recently, that the Inquisitor isn’t shoveling hot coals onto my disemboweled intestines. He’s right. Five-hundred years ago, my body would have been splayed open and savagely torn apart for spreading heresy against the church.

But I know the real reason for such holy violence. I know, as do Dante and Virgil, the dark secrets and lies that bishops and priests keep safely tucked under their pious collars, how vicious and mean and cowardly they are, how much they deserve their painful, eternal sufferings.

I don’t believe in the devil, another Christian contrivance conceived as the bugaboo of all that is horrible, painful and unexplainable. The devil, the dark god, if you will, is, I believe, just another face of God, if God is the Ultimate Reality.

The primitives knew this long before the church fathers turned the One God into two — black and white, body and spirit, good and evil, God and Satan. Our ancestors understood there was no difference, only shades of grey, turning from light to dark to light again.

They had names, both male and female, for these different shadow-like faces of the One Spirit: Wotan, Loki, Freya, Odin, Kali, Astarte, each emerging from the primordial soup as another aspect of the energy activating the cosmos.

These existed long before there was a church, eons before there was a devil. The devil is a scapegoat. Even Flip Wilson — “The devil made me do it” — knew that.

The dark god inhabits the Underworld, where sooner or later everyone visits — in dreams, mythology, Dante’s Inferno, in life and death. There’s no escape. And when we arrive at the Underworld, we don’t necessarily encounter a devil, only shades of ourselves, our enemies, all that has been rejected from our consciousness.

We have met the enemy and enemy is us. “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” What then? What remains of this dark night? What am I to do? There’s no turning back.

The dark god dwells in the loam of our own repressions and denials, appearing in the night with horns, cloven hooves, and the pungent vitality and fecundity of earth.

He inhabits the shadowy wooded places where men and women have danced naked together for ages, drunk in their own eroticism, muscled, virile and potent, drawing sustenance from one another and from their Dionysian longings to release their own vibrant power.

It’s no wonder that the Western world, driven by the Christian ethic to subdue the earth and deny the body, has nearly decimated the world’s forests. So why not give up on God, at least on the one-dimensional Western monotheistic Monolith we’ve come to know? The one who drinks our blood and eats our flesh, and asks us to sacrifice our loved ones on the altar of faith?

We need the dark god, not a being separate from but the other face of God, to awaken from our nightmares and make sense of the parts of our lives and ourselves we fail to understand, to finally discover where we really belong, to know there is no really true safe harbor for this passage.

The cobalt color of the full moon’s light slowly, reluctantly gives way to the silver sheen of dawn’s arrival and the world emerges from the shadows of night but remains as dark as ever, cloaked in ignorance and religious bigotry.

I wait for my Virgil to show me the way through this dark passage, to guide me through the stench and horror of the Underworld, where perhaps I may gain some insight, an advantage from sufferings, and emerge finally to find a home. §

Stacey Warde is publisher of The Rogue Voice.

G’ma loves Cassius Clay

But here was Clay on our TV, blustering, making horrible threatening faces, shaking his fists at the camera, calling Liston a “big ugly bear” and predicting his demise at his own hands in unparalleled bombast. AP Photo/John Rooney

But here was Clay on our TV, blustering, making horrible threatening faces, shaking his fists at the camera, calling Liston a “big ugly bear” and predicting his demise at his own hands in unparalleled bombast. AP Photo/John Rooney

by Dell Franklin

It was January of 1964, shortly before I was inducted into the U.S. Army as a 20-year-old, and then-Cassius Clay and soon-to-be Muhammad Ali was going to fight terrifying heavyweight champion Sonny Liston, an ex-con whose scowl in the ring was so menacing several opponents melted before the first punch and folded like accordions.

But here was Clay on our TV, blustering, making horrible threatening faces, shaking his fists at the camera, calling Liston a “big ugly bear” and predicting his demise at his own hands in unparalleled bombast.

Dad, an ex-amateur champion boxer out of Chicago who could have turned pro but instead chose baseball and reached the Big Leagues, said, very sourly, “He hasn’t fought anybody, except Archie Moore, and he’s fifty years old for Chrissake! Moore would’ve made a fool out of him ten years ago. This guy’s all talk, a showboat blowing his own horn, Liston’ll knock him out and shut his mouth.”

Mother, an Eleanor Roosevelt Democrat, said to me, very quietly, but matter-of-factly, “A black man has to blow his own horn in our society, or he’ll never be heard.”

We all watched film of Clay training. He danced and glided around the ring, occasionally going into a frenetic shuffle and throwing punches so rapidly he reminded you of a lightweight, and it was hard to believe anybody could lay a hand on him, much less beat him. He was undefeated and had embarrassed every opponent, and only Doug Jones, who lost in a decision, had come close to beating him. As we continued to watch Clay spout and threaten and predict, making those faces, Gramma, about 4-feet-10, Russian born, who raised seven kids (including my mother) without much help during the Depression piped up, “Oh, that man, look at his eyes, they’re so kind and gentle. He’s a beautiful young man, he’s just putting on an act.”

That was it for me. Gramma had the wisdom, the X-ray insight. Mother nodded. I was all in on Mr. Clay.

***

A month later, I was in my third week of basic training at Ft. Ord, California, and our company DI announced, to our disappointment, and his sadistic gratification, that we were to clean our barracks and no radios were allowed for us to catch the Clay/Liston fight. Luckily, our platoon DI, a three-striper named Jeffries, a towering scary black man, informed us if anybody found a transistor radio, we could listen to the fight, because he wasn’t going to be around, he would be watching it on closed circuit and didn’t give a goddamn what we were doing as long as the barracks was tip-top in the morning.

So, around 40 of us surrounded a small transistor radio. Almost everybody favored Liston. My dad, with whom I’d gone to fights and watched the Gillette and Pabst Blue Ribbon bouts on TV and listened to his predictions of when and with what punch would end most of these fights, and was almost always right, picked Liston.

I picked Clay as bets were made.

We were glued to the radio, yelling, whooping, and when the fight was called and Clay won, all those who picked Liston yelled “Fix!” The few blacks who had picked Clay were shuffling, throwing punches, gloating, boasting just like Clay. I called dad a couple nights later and the first thing he said was “Fix. Goddamn fix.”

Yeah, sure. Later, when I saw the film during my 15-day leave, and Cassius Clay was now Muhammad Ali, I told dad, “Look at the size of Ali, dad. He’s BIGGER than Liston. Nobody’s gonna beat him. Let’s face it—he is the greatest!”

Dad didn’t want to hear it. “Bullshit,” he muttered. “Joe Louis takes him out in five.”

***

September of 1966 I had about three months left in the Army, was stationed in Northern Italy, and my first sergeant, a black man who’d been in the Army since 1940, Pastell Gardner, wanted to borrow my car to drive to Frankfurt, Germany, to watch his man, Muhammad Ali, dismantle the German contender, Karl Mildenberger.

At the time, I was a Spec 4, a medic, and owned a VW Beetle I’d managed to buy with black market dealings with Italians, for no GI could afford to buy a car clearing $118 a month. Our company was primarily black, but for some reason Sergeant Gardner, the slickest person I’ve ever known, a bulky Sugar Ray Robinson look-alike with a walk and an attitude right out of a New York Jazz joint (he was originally from South Carolina) took a liking to me, and I have to say I admired him as one of those special characters who come along and show you how life should be lived to the fullest—and with uncommon style.

I asked couldn’t he just take a train? But no, the sergeant wanted some independence, promised to be good to my heap, and so I said yes, and he took off toting his finest silk suit and wide-brimmed hat, and when most of the post gathered in the EM club to watch the fight on TV, if you looked closely, there was Gardner, ringside, a blonde German woman beside him (he was thrice divorced) as he puffed on the biggest cigar he could find.

As most of the white GIs rooted for Mildenberger, representative of a country we’d defeated in a war just 20 years earlier, every black rooted for Ali, who sliced Mildenberger up like beefsteak, and once again every black GI in the room slapped hands, danced and shuffled and threw punches to the wind, while white guys shuffled off in defeat.

No fix here. When Gardner returned, my car in tact with a full tank of gas, he couldn’t stop smiling. “Greatest time of my life,” he said, as I visited him at his desk in the orderly room, a framed, autographed photo of Ali on the wall near the one of President Johnson. “Ali, my God, you got to see the man up close to believe it. Ain’t nobody like him, never has been, never will be. Man is magic.”

He handed me one of his cigars. How he got them from Cuba I’ll never know.

***

One of my customers, who knew I was a fanatical fight fan and liked Ali and supported him all during his exile from the boxing world, gave me a poster by Leroy Neiman of the coming fight.

One of my customers, who knew I was a fanatical fight fan and liked Ali and supported him all during his exile from the boxing world, gave me a poster by Leroy Neiman of the coming fight.

Before the Frazier/Ali match in March of 1971, as I tended bar in a hotspot in Manhattan Beach, California, one of my customers, who knew I was a fanatical fight fan and liked Ali and supported him all during his exile from the boxing world, gave me a poster by Leroy Neiman of the coming fight, and then framed it for me—brown and tan wash depicting sleek Ali, rough charcoal portraying gnarly Frazier, so different from Neiman’s other colorfully gaudy fight posters. I quickly hung it up in my studio apartment—my only (to me) museum piece. Forty-five years later, it’s still the centerpiece among my collected art.

I awaited the fight with dread, having watched Ali against Quarry and realizing he was not the same, he was heavier, slower; rusty from a 3 ½-year layoff. At this point, dad sort of admired Ali, but still insisted Liston took a dive, and I told him I thought Liston probably quit both fights because Ali had him psyched out and terrified of looking embarrassed in the ring in front of millions of boxing fans who once admired him.

Dad picked Frazier over Ali. I insisted Ali would have easily beaten Frazier had he fought him in his prime. As it was, in defeat, Ali stood up from a devastating left hook in the 14th round that would have retired most boxers, showed his courage as he fought gamely on, and humility in this first defeat, and came back to beat Frazier and all the contenders while being half the fighter he had been before they took his championship away. He was also easy to hit, bigger, slower, with only sporadic dancing and electric footwork, but he still had that jab and those hands—and the will of two teams of oxen.

Much later, when he became a human punching bag for Larry Holmes, I refused to watch. Every fighter comes to this point in his career, but Ali? Yeh, Ali. He was mortal, and damaged beyond recovery, and as time passed and he lapsed into the most severe symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, became largely mute and unrecognizable in his puffiness, there was still that twinkle in his eyes, like he was still putting you on, what my gramma described as “kind and gentle, a beautiful young man.” §

Dell Franklin writes from his home in Cayucos, Calif., and publishes his observations on sports, politics, and culture on his website, dellfranklin.com, where this article first appeared.

Pacific Coast League Reunion

Oldest living New York Yankee recalls early Southland pro baseball

by Dell Franklin

CULTURE.REUNION.NOREN CARD

Irv Noren threw and hit gracefully left-handed, led the league in just about every offensive category, and went up to the big leagues in 1950 and had an accomplished career until 1960, including three World Series victories with the Yankees.

While attending the Pacific Coast League reunion down at the Huntington Beach Library, and browsing through old photos and scrapbooks guarded by fanatics who followed and felt the PCL of the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s was indeed the golden age of baseball, somebody told me Irv Noren was in the house.

I had been talking to aged diehard PCL fans and pointing out pictures of my dad engaged in the biggest, bloodiest brawl in the history of baseball between the Hollywood Stars and LA Angels in 1953, and when I spotted Irv across the room I instantly became a dog frantically wagging his tail and made a beeline toward him.

Irv was on a cane and as he conversed with several old geezers (that’s all there was at this gathering) I waited patiently beside him until he turned to me and I said, “My father, Murray Franklin, played with you on that 1949 championship team.” Then I showed him the ring awarded those champions that I had inherited from my father, and he shook my hand.

“Remember Murray very well,” he said. “Great guy.” And it was apparent right off that Irv, though in his nineties, was spry, mentally acute, and still inspired. I told him that in all the years my dad played pro ball (from 1937 until 1953) the Hollywood Star team of that era was his favorite. Of course, on that 1949 team, Irv could have been the inspiration for Robert Redford in “The Natural.” He threw and hit gracefully left-handed, led the league in just about every offensive category, and went up to the big leagues in 1950 and had an accomplished career until 1960, including three World Series victories with the Yankees, who got him in a trade with the Washington Senators after he had two solid years.

As soon as we were alone, I said, “You must be 92.”

“I’m 91. Going on 92.”

“You hit .319 in 1954. I had your card.”

“That was a pretty good year,” he conceded.

He said he roomed with the great hall of fame pitcher Whitey Ford from 1952 until 1956. They were still tight. He said Yogi Berra never got credit for being a great athlete, because of his squatty build. “I don’t think Yogi had three passed balls a year. He was as good as they come behind the plate.” A few enthusiasts began hanging around, for, with most of the old PCL players now deceased, Irv, along with Paul Petit and Dick Adams, were the only celebrities left. Before I moved on so others could pose for pictures with Irv, an admirer asked, “What about today’s players, Irv?”

“Bigger, faster and dumber,” he said, a twinkle in his eye. “I think Jerry Coleman told me that.” Coleman was his team mate with the Yankees and later a San Diego Padre broadcaster.

Another man who was part of the crew running the reunion came up with baseball card-sized black-and-white photos of Irv standing beside a famous singer as part of the local lore of the entertainment and film culture that surrounded the Hollywood Stars. Bob Hope, Milton Berle, Kim Novak and Anne Bancroft, among others, regularly attended their games. I instantly recognized the photo as one I kept among my dad’s archives.

CULTURE.Franklin, Murray - Detroit 1941

The author’s father, Murray Franklin, played with Irv Noren on the Pacific Coast League’s 1949 championship team.

“My dad’s in the picture,” I said. “And so is Sandlock, Frank Kelleher and Maltzburger.”

“We cut your dad out,” the man confessed.

“You know what my dad was like,” I said. “He’ll rise from his grave and kick your ass.”

“We know that. We’re sorry.”

***

One had to be around to appreciate what the old Pacific Coast league meant to kids my age, which most of these people running and attending the reunion were when the league was all we had out here, the games were televised, the rivalries were rabid and tribal. I was at the game during The Brawl between the Angels and Stars, and since my father was in the thick of it, I told these geezers how I was out beyond the ropes in the outfield for the crowd over-flow, fought with Star knot-hole kids, and ran across the field and through the stadium and into the clubhouse, where, after the half hour brawl that took 50 LAPD to stop, the clubhouse looked like a field hospital in a combat zone.

One man in a wheel chair told me, “Those were the days. I loved the San Francisco Seals. That’s where I’m from. I’m still pissed off the Giants and Dodgers came out here. What they call the PCL now is a crock of shit.”

The big leagues were what we got on Saturday’s televised “Game of The Week.” The PCL was a quality league full of veterans who’d played in the big leagues and those moving up (Joe DiMaggio, Bill Mazeroski, Ir Noren, Gus Zernial, etc). Games were televised at night Tuesday through Friday with a day game on Saturday and a doubleheader on Sunday. The ball players on all the teams along the coast—from Seattle down to San Diego—were heroes to us kids, and since I was the son of one of these men, to come to this reunion was a nostalgic journey and a thrill unparalleled.

Wherever I went, with my three friends who came with me, I told stories. Dick Adams, 96, former Hollywood Star, player-manager, high school teacher-coach, professional musician, sat at a table with his baseball cards, a few teeth missing, bright and jovial, telling stories. I told him of the time a pitcher named Bear Tracks Greer with Houston of the Texas league dusted my dad, who played for Beaumont, four times. Dad was ready to charge this scary backwoods monster, when the catcher warned, “Bear’s crazy. He’s not like other people, he’ll drill you with that ball from five feet, right between the eyes, dehorn you. He can’t get you out, so he figures if he’s gonna walk you he might as well knock you down four times—nothing personal.”

“Knowing your dad,” Dick said, “I’m surprised he didn’t charge him.”

“He was backwoods, Dick. Crazier than Bobo Newsome. Only reason Bear Tracks Greer wasn’t in the big leagues was because he was too crazy, tearing up bars at night—uncivilized. He met dad in the clubhouse at the Texas League All Star game, drunk as a skunk, put his arm around him and said he loved him and offered him a slug of the jug he was holding. He was supposed to start the game but passed out on the training table.”

“Yeh, if he’s crazier than Bobo, I can see it.”

Dick then told me and my friends about a woman in an elevator who informed Joe DiMaggio, who was with two pals, she could make him happier than his wife of the time—Marilyn Monroe. When Joe refused, his buddies asked if she’d mind taking them on instead. She told them to get lost.

Dick left us with this one: “I never drank much and I’m still kicking at 96, but I only got one year in the big leagues. My brother Bobby drank like hell and got in 14 years!”

***

Later, a good Samaritan found the glossy of the original photo that had left my dad out. My pals and I wandered over and met with Noren. He was still standing, cane discarded, asked one of my pals, Dave, if he could get him a glass of water. Dave took off. When he returned, Irv thanked him, drank, and we got him to talk. The man was a star athlete at Pasadena High and Pasadena City College, actually played professional basketball for Chicago in the NBA during the 1946-47 season.

He talked of his baseball teammates, guys like Hank Bauer and manager Ralph Houk, who served in WWII. “Seems like all of us served, and a lot of those guys saw heavy action, but they never talked about it. Mickey Grasso, a catcher, my teammate with the Senators, was a tank commander, in charge of a bunch of those cracker-box tanks we had, and they were no match for those damn Panzer tanks, and they were out-numbered. It was toward the end of the war, so Mickey had his guys jump out of their tanks and give the heil Hitler salute. You were better off captured by the Germans, because they weren’t like the Japanese.”

I held the black-and-white glossy of Irv and dad and his teammates and the celebrity singer. They all looked so young, and especially Irv, who was 24 at the time and about to go up the following year to start his big league career. Now Irv was the last one standing, Mike Sandlock having died recently at 100. Mike used to pick me up off the ground when I was a 7-year-old in the clubhouse, rub my face against his rough beard, and say, “You a lover or a fighter, Little Meat?”

“A fighter!”

“Thatta boy.”

My friend snapped a photo of Irv and me, the photo held out front in my hand. Afterwards Irv sipped his water and asked, “Who brought me this glass of water?”

Dave said, “I did.”

“Thank you very much,” Irv said, all grace and appreciation, just like he played the game. §

Dell Franklin writes from his home in Cayucos, Calif., where he lives with his rescue dog, Wilbur. More of his sports essays can be found at his website: dellfranklin.com.

Raped in her own backyard

Don’t let this incident rob you of your self-worth. You fought for your life, and you’re here, and you won. It took a lot of guts to fight that guy off.

Don’t let this incident rob you of your self-worth. You fought for your life, and you’re here, and you won. It took a lot of guts to fight that guy off.

by Dell Franklin

I just get to work at 4 in the afternoon and I’m sent downtown to wait for a lawyer to lead somebody to my cab from the courthouse across the street from the old art deco Fremont Theater. I park in front of the Fremont. There’s activity here: lawyers in double-breasted suits carrying brief cases and talking on cell phones; secretaries in fetching outfits talking on cell phones; a flow going in and out of the coffee house beside the Fremont and the Italian eatery and rib joint on the corner—San Luis Obispo’s beehive.

I keep my eyes on the city hall building. I wait 5 minutes. I do not like to wait. I do not like lawyers. I get out and pace, malevolently eyeing the bee hive. Finally, a short fire-plug of a man, around 35, who fills out a beautiful suit like a weightlifter, scampers across Monterey Street from the courthouse and signals me. We meet on the sidewalk beside my cab.

“Sorry to keep you waiting,” he says right off, taking in my sneakers, thrift store shorts and faded Harvard Business School T-shirt. He offers a hand, introducing himself as Larry. “It’s just that I have a hysterical client. Somebody tried to rape her in Los Osos. She was at the police station. I’m her family lawyer. She’s still in the courthouse. Be patient, please. I’ll take good care of you.”

Please be kind to this lady, ey? She’s been through hell. Right now the police are trying to find the bastard who attacked her. She’s in a lot of distress. She’s very fragile.

I say okay and he hustles back across the street, obviously a one-time high school football fullback. I’ll usually run the meter when I have to wait for somebody, demanding the fare pay for my time, but I’m not going to press a rape victim. Five minutes later he leads her across the street, an attractive but ragged-looking thirty-something woman with long mussed honey-colored hair, dressed in work shorts, and a man’s baggy T-shirt.

The lawyer introduces her to me as Gail. She is still in an extreme state of agitation and perhaps shock and does not look at me as the lawyer helps her into the shotgun seat and continues counseling her. I wait for him on the sidewalk. When he is finished comforting the woman, he hands me his card.

“I don’t have any cash on me right now. Can you come to my office up the street when you get back to town?” Los Osos is 12 miles away.

“Well, we’re not supposed to go out of town without collecting first. And I don’t like coming across town when I can be at the airport. But I also don’t like conducting myself like an asshole, so I guess I have to trust you. If I can’t, maybe I can hire you to sue yourself.”

He chuckles, but he’s not quite sure of me. Still, he says, “I can go down the street to the ATM if you want.”

“Nah, I’ve decided you’re a good lawyer, a very extinct breed.”

“Thanks, pal. Please be kind to this lady, ey? She’s been through hell. Right now the police are trying to find the bastard who attacked her. She’s in a lot of distress. She’s very fragile.”

“I’ll take good care of her. That’s a promise.”

“Thanks.” We shake hands. I get back in the cab. I plow through the beginning of rush-hour traffic, headed for the highway leading to Los Osos. I decide not to initiate conversation with the sniffling figure beside me, who is curled into the side of the door, as if trying to make herself smaller. I fiddle with the radio, find NPR. Once on the highway, we ooze into a 50 mph flow of traffic. I glance at her, offer a reassuring smile, as if saying: “I know it’s tough, but you’ll live through it.”

“Thanks for taking me home,” she says in a wee voice. “I don’t know what I would’ve done without my lawyer. He’s such a great guy.”

“I liked him right off.” She sits up a trifle. “So, you live in Los Osos…you like it?”

“Well, I do…I mean, I’ve lived there a while. I guess I like it, but after today, I don’t know.”

“You look familiar. I used to tend bar at Happy Jack’s in Morro Bay. You ever in there?”

“Uh-huh. I used to go there to dance before I met my husband. I don’t go to bars anymore. My husband doesn’t like them.”

“That’s probably where I saw you.”

She sits up a little and replaces her handkerchief in her purse. “Somebody tried to rape me,” she says. “I was out in the back yard tending to my gardens. I have a really nice yard and garden. I grow tomatoes and peppers and we have an avocado tree and a lemon tree. I love working in the yard. My husband really likes the way I keep things so beautiful and tidy. I was watering my plants, and out of nowhere this guy jumped the fence and threw me down and put his hand over my mouth and tried to rape me! He slapped me and punched me and said he’d kill me if I screamed. Oh God…”

“What did you do?”

Her voice cracks with a slight sob. “I fought him. I fought for my life. I kicked him. I bit him. I scratched his face. I fought and fought. He ripped my clothes off. I punched and scratched at him and I screamed…I didn’t care if he killed me. There was nobody around, everybody at work. I was crying so hard, and fighting so hard, and screaming so loud, he just took off.”

I glance at the scratches and bruises on her face and the discoloring from bruises on her arms and legs. She starts to cry again, quietly, holding her face.

“Go ahead and cry,” I tell her. “It’s good for you. You need to cry it out.”

We are cutting through the bucolic serenity of green farm and ranch land with shadowed foothills on either side, homes and barns nestled into crevices under trees.

“I’m so worried about my husband.” She sobs louder, looking out the window away from me.

“Why?”

“What if he doesn’t believe me?” She’s looking at me, near hysterical.

“What do you mean—doesn’t believe you? There’s a police report, right? You went to the hospital. Look at your bruises and scratches.”

“I know, but maybe he’ll think, well, that I…invited it.”

“Why would he think that?”

“I don’t know. He might, though, think I ASKED for it.”

“No way. What kind of man is he?”

“He’s real macho. He’s a contractor. I’m just so ashamed, so worried he won’t believe me.”

“Look, what you do is you don’t try and convince him of anything. You direct him straight to your lawyer and the police.”

“He’s already talked to my lawyer by phone.”

“Have you talked to your husband?”

She nods, sniffles. “On the phone. I don’t think he believes me. I don’t know what to do.”

I was watering my plants, and out of nowhere this guy jumped the fence and threw me down and put his hand over my mouth.

We approach Los Osos, a swale adjoining Morro Bay Estuary. Big generic shopping center on our right. No main drag. A notoriously scrumptious bakery emitting hellacious aromas every morning to counter the miasma of a thousand septic tanks and sumps. At one time Los Osos was a low-rent encampment of biker types and plenty of meth, but since real estate went crazy in the ‘90s it’s become somewhat gentrified, with a scattering of holdouts intimidating Cal Poly professors and suburban retirees tooling its rutted curb-less side-streets and driving to San Luis Obispo for trendy shops, Trader Joe’s and Costco.

“What you need is a drink,” I say.

“Yes, I think so. I’m not much of a drinker these days.”

“Just get a half pint, enough to take off the edge, and relax you a little. What do you usually drink when you do drink?”

“Bourbon, I guess.”

“What do you like to mix with it?”

“Seven-Up, or Coke.”

“Okay, we’ll find a liquor store. You get a half pint of bourbon and a Seven-Up. Go into your living room, lock up the house, turn on the TV, and have a quiet drink or two, and wait for your husband.”

“If he doesn’t believe me I don’t know what I’ll do,” she wails.

“If he doesn’t believe you, leave him,” I say. “I know it’s none of my business, but how the hell can you have a relationship if your husband doesn’t trust you and he’s not even here after what you’ve been through?”

“I’m so screwed up,” she admits, as we pull into a liquor store parking lot. She sniffles. “I just wanna die.”

“Listen,” I say. “You’ve just been through a traumatic ordeal and you’re not thinking clearly. You’ve been violated and humiliated and made to feel dirty…by some animal, a criminal. It is NOT your fault. Don’t let this incident rob you of your self-worth. You fought for your life, and you’re here, and you won. It took a lot of guts to fight that guy off. You’re a victim. Your husband will understand. Now go in there and get yourself a bottle to calm your nerves and don’t worry about your husband. Everything’ll be okay. I’m positive.”

Still shaky, she enters the liquor store. A few minutes later she returns with a package. I drive through neighborhoods to her modest house. The front yard is tidy with rows of flowers in full bloom and hedges edged sharp as razors.

“I wish I had money to tip you,” she says.

”You owe me nothing. Go on in there and relax. You didn’t invite this. You’re a nice gal. Have faith in yourself. It’s been a bad, nasty day, and things’ll be rough for a week or two, but then you’ll be thankful to be alive and have good days. Hang in there. Good luck. Now go in there, and make your first drink the biggest one.”

She starts to leave. “Look at my yard…isn’t it beautiful?”

“Very much so.”

She looks at me, her red-rimmed eyes well up and register utter despair, almost terror. “I won’t be able to go out there anymore! My back yard, it’s my favorite place in all the world…and I’m afraid to go out there now!”

“Listen, that was a one-shot deal. He’ll never come back. All this will pass.”

She faces me, trembling, leans toward me, ever so slightly, and I take both her hands in mine, give them a little squeeze. Her shapely knees are grass-stained and scratched raw. “Hang tough, kid—sometimes that’s all we can do. It’s not the end of the world. That’s what my mother always tells me, and it’s true.”

I let go of her hands. She gets out of the cab and opens the gate of the short, white picket fence and walks past a cat and up to the porch and front door, opens it, shivers, turns and waves at me, then disappears into the house, the cat right behind her. The door slams shut.

When I get back into town I pull up to her lawyer’s office and get out of my cab. I hear somebody shout, turn to look out onto Marsh Street and see the lawyer, who is encased in a white baggy outfit of the kind of plastic material a vermin exterminator or astronaut might wear. He is heading toward me on a skateboard, sneakers having replaced his Oxfords, his knotted tie the only trace of his former attire. He pulls up to me in a sideway skid and grins. He hands me three twenties for a $36 fare and tells me to keep the change.

“This is therapy, man,” he explains. “How’d it go?”

“I got her to do some talking. She’s still in a panicky state.”

He nods. “Thanks for your trouble. I appreciate it.”

“Well, I hope she’ll be okay.”

He shrugs, rolling his eyes in a helpless manner. “We do the best we can, man.” Then he smiles and we shake hands and he zooms off on his skateboard, expertly gauging traffic on the street, like a teenager. §

Dell Franklin writes from his home in Cayucos, Calif., where he lives with his rescue dog, Wilbur, a very needy chocolate lab. He writes of his years as a cabbie, bartender and athelte on his website, dellfranklin.com.

The Great Mother

She nurtures and devours

CULTURE.devouring mother

A pantheon of mythological devouring mothers from Durga to Kali to Isis reaches across cultures and down through history. There’s even a tiger goddess who both nurtures and devours.

by Stacey Warde

A soft gentle voice, much like my mother’s, calls to me, a young boy of 4, while I sleep, “Stacey, Stacey, Stacey….”

I awaken in the dream and look about the room from my top bunk; in the bunk below, my younger brother sleeps soundly.

I notice the squarish light fixture on the ceiling in the darkness, and turn my gaze to the bedroom door.

At the side of my upper bunk, towering menacingly above me, nearly touching the ceiling with her enormous head, a saber-toothed tiger, blood dripping from her fangs, walking on her hind legs, slowly approaches me. My heart begins to pound wildly with fear.

As she nears, I can see my mother’s sweatshirt on the saber-toothed monster. I start screaming until my real mother appears.

I had the worst recurring nightmares as a child; ghouls, monsters and wild animals filled my early childhood dreams.

These dreadful nightmares occurred with alarming regularity. I sensed concern from my young parents, and from relatives at whose homes I often slept, where I could awaken an entire household with blood-curdling screams in the middle of the night.

“What’s wrong with him?” I remember an older cousin, whose room I once shared, asking my aunt. I was staying with them, and attending school in Laguna Beach, where mom grew up, while she recovered from a life-threatening illness.

“Nothing’s wrong with him,” my aunt said, “he’s just having a bad dream.”

“Yeah, but does he have to do it in here?”

Finally, Jiminy Cricket appeared in a dream, probably stirred by a Disney episode I might have seen in which he asks Pinocchio, the wooden puppet, if he’d like to become a real boy, and in the first of a series of lessons sings “Always let your conscience be your guide.”

“When you get into trouble and you don’t know right from wrong, all you gotta do is give a little whistle.”

I could give a little whistle and feel safe again. I’m not sure I even had a conscience then but I wanted to be a real boy and needed the security offered by this peculiar animated bug friend.

I have no idea what triggered my rescue from these night time horrors of a devouring mother by this bumbling Disney character, but the nightmares ceased.

I worked on becoming a real boy.

I wavered between two questions that sprung from this recurring nightmare, adding to the horror and confusion it brought: What did this monster do with my mother? When did my mother become a monster?

I’ve since learned through psychology that a devouring mother image suggests an overbearing and anxious woman attempting to compensate for her deficiencies and insecurities. She’s controlling and critical. She can be harsh and judgmental.

The sons of these mothers often grow up to be puers, little boys who need their mommies, who never venture out beyond the safety of mom’s apron strings and become independent men, or the authors and heroes of their own lives. They remain dependent and seek dependencies in relationships that mimic their mother complex.

They are commitment phobes, never quite able to break the primitive bond with mother. The challenge is to break away, to pursue a life free from maternal dependencies or attachments, to become a person of independent means and bearing and character.

This is no easy feat for boys whose mothers were themselves still children when they gave birth.

In a way, mother and I grew up together.

She was 17 when she gave birth to me. I suspect she felt a lot of insecurities, as any teenage mother would, and she mustn’t have felt any more secure when, at the age of 20, she was left alone with two young boys, after my father walked out on us and never returned.

I suspect she did her best to protect me and my brother, to give us a safe haven from the rigors and perils of life. I never felt unsafe, except when monsters pursued me in the night.

***

Western tradition’s finest example of a puer who bolts from under his mother’s wings and grows into a man of formidable power and influence is Perceval.

Through trial and error, he moves beyond the clutches of his overbearing and protective mother, who does not want him to become a warrior like his deceased (read “absent”) father, killed in battle when Perceval was too young to remember.

Eventually, by following his bliss, and through numerous mishaps and the counsel of more worldly, perhaps wiser, souls, he grows to become one of the great knights of the Roundtable.

***

Once, I remember flying over the front seat from where I stood on the back seat in one of those clunky ‘50s chevys, long before seat belts were mandatory, when mom had to suddenly apply the brakes. I wound up on the floor boards under the glove box.

“Are you OK?” she asked in a panic. I was fine.

She was pugnacious and caring, if not overwhelmed and frightened in those early years. She found her way, remarried, built a home and family; and I never had another nightmare of a devouring, blood-dripping, saber-toothed tiger wearing my mother’s sweatshirt.

A pantheon of mythological devouring mothers from Durga to Kali to Isis reaches across cultures and down through history. There’s even a tiger goddess who both nurtures and devours. Ultimately, as these powerful figures remind us, we shall all be devoured by the Great Mother Earth.

But that’s not all.

The First Mother also nurtures and sustains.

On the more personal level, of course, the same holds true for our mothers who birthed us. They can also nurture and sustain and devour.

It seems the only way out, the only way to free one’s self from the harm of this devourer is to create a life of one’s own, grounded in but not held captive by mother’s nurturing and protective instincts.

Eventually, a man must break away from his mother and become his own person. Cultures recognize this in which boys are taken at a certain age from their mothers and joined to the men, from whom they learn the skills necessary to survive.

In the U.S., this does not always happen. Many men grow up without a father, their upbringing charged mostly to their mother, who attempts to be all things to her children. Sometimes, boys will grow up, as I did, with dependencies which can be extremely difficult to overcome.

I’ve lived the greater part of my life under the shadow of this primal monster of my early childhood nightmares, afraid to disappoint or to stray too far. But I’ve also learned to venture out, believing that behind my biggest dragons are my deepest treasures.

Mom, meanwhile, would like nothing more than for me to uncover these treasures, my birthright, to live in good conscience and when troubled with fears of being devoured to give a little whistle.§

Stacey Warde is publisher of The Rogue Voice. He can be reached at roguewarde@gmail.com.