Keeping Me Alive

Greenville – December, 1963

When I was in my late 20s, I almost went to Europe on a business trip.  The company had all the reservations and I had my plane ticket in hand.  However, the day before the flight they said, “never mind . . .” Yeah, I was disappointed.

In preparation for that trip, I needed a U.S. Passport.  One of the requirements is a certified copy of your birth certificate.  I always had the pretty one from the hospital, but never had a certified copy.  South Carolina was pretty efficient and for the right fee had a copy to me overnight. 

I read the certificate in detail and found one detail that was a small surprise.

Question:

     “16. PREVIOUS DELIVERIES TO MOTHER

          c. How many fetal deaths (fetuses born dead at ANY time after conception)?”

Answer:

     “2.”

This was a only small surprise because I knew that Mom had two stillbirths after I was born, but I didn’t know of any stillbirths or miscarriages before I was born. 

I asked Dad about it.  He answered, “I finally had to make her get her tubes tied.  I got tired of burying babies. Before you came along, I came home from work and found her and your brother and sister gone.  She told me later that she was headed to visit her family in Baltimore.  She was pregnant and had a miscarriage along the way. She stopped and put D and D in a motel with enough food for a couple of days and went to the hospital.” 

Mom left my brother and sister alone in a motel and went to the hospital for a miscarriage.  D and D were  two years apart in age and were under the age of six.  Mom didn’t tell Dad she was even leaving for this road trip and didn’t call him for help.  She told him about the miscarriage after she got home. 

I have vague memories about the two stillbirths that occurred after I was born. I remember Mom going off to the hospital for several days a couple of times. During the day I stayed at a nearby daycare, probably in someone’s home.  I remember her being gone for days(?) and I remember all the neat toys to play with at that daycare.  I also remember visiting the graves of my brother and sister, Devin and Denine Green. 

 

My mother kept having miscarriages and stillbirths because of Rh sensitization.  This causes a condition called hemolytic anemia where the mother’s Rh negative blood creates antibodies that destroy the fetus’ positive red blood cells faster than they can be replaced. 

My blood type is O+ and hemolytic anemia almost killed me. 

I was born on Friday the 13^th, December 1963. I was 5 lbs. 13 oz. at birth, anemic and yellow with jaundice.  To save my life I needed blood transfusions.  Dad told me that I had an IV in my head and an IV in my foot, one taking blood out and the other putting fresh blood in. 

I remember him telling me that the doctor told him “don’t  get attached to this baby – he won’t make it past six months.”  I guess he got a little attached because he didn’t give up.  He said that he would feed me coke and crackers, that was the only thing I could keep down.  This was the 60s and so I don’t know whether they even tried to breast-feed me.

Knowing that blood transfusions are what saved my life when I was born, I am a regular blood donor.  I started when I was 17 years old and still donate three or four times a year.  

Oddly enough, Dad never understood donating blood. He sneered at the thought and said, “if they want my blood, they’ll have to pay me.”

The Note

Houston – June, 2016

Two days after Dad’s death, while cleaning out his mobile home, I found the note.  It wasn’t placed in a prominent place and it might have been overlooked but for me reading any scrap of paper with Dad’s hand writing. 

The note was on a small notepad. The artwork on the page had a cartoon family of owls at the top, staring directly at you and the logo for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital at the bottom.  The notepad was in with the clutter on the table next to his living room recliner. 

I spoke to him twice in the week before he died.  On the Friday before, I brought him some bar-b-que (pork not beef; he was raised in Memphis, not Texas) and invited him over for Father’s Day. Then on Father’s Day when he was late, I called to see what was up. He said he was not feeling well and apologized for not calling me to cancel. 

I imagine it was several days between the time he wrote the note and committed the act.  I imagine he was trying the idea out first – that he wrote the note to make the idea real. He may have even written it on Father’s Day.

“Goodbuy  Cruel World:  I’ve Been hurting 3 T 5 years That’s enuff” 

The note told me what I needed to know – that he didn’t blame me.

I wonder how many other loved ones of suicide victims do the same thing, read the note to see if they are blamed by the victim.  That seems like a selfish thought and is a bit of a turn on what it frequently said about suicide – that suicide is a selfish act of the victim.

Calling suicide a selfish act is a form of blame too, I guess. When we say that, we are blaming the suicide victim for causing our grief.

Since I don’t have any grief for the end of his life, I don’t have any blame for Dad either.

In that final moment outside his trailer, in the gravel of his parking space, what was he thinking? Was he sad? Was he angry? Was he depressed? Was he relieved?

I wish I could have provided a happier ending for him. Deciding that you’ve had a long enough life after 80 years of living is a decision that should be respected.  Like the movie Soylent Green, going “Home” should be a happy decision.  You should be able to die in a peaceful, clean place, listening to your favorite music, watching images of beauty and happiness, surrounded by loved ones. The end shouldn’t be standing all alone on a gravel driveway with Houston humidity bearing down on you. 

I’ll give him this – at least he didn’t die in a hospital with tubes and wires keeping him alive.  He was ready and he died on his own terms.  Mr. DIY to the end.  

Handsome Young Man

Dad graduated from Memphis Technical High School in 1954. His year book has pictures for 198 students in the Senior class. 

I remember him telling me that he took Print Shop classes.  I also remember him telling me that the kids would sometimes use the equipment to print pornographic stories to sell to their classmates and friends.

Before that he went to Fairview Junior High.  I went to Fairview Junior High myself some 26 years later for just the last month of seventh grade, in May of 1976.

I found a couple of great pictures of Dad on dates.  You can see this handsome young man with a couple of pretty young ladies.  One of the pictures has a handwritten note from the young lady, “To Sonny, for a very wonderful night and to a very sweet guy.”

Another set of gems are the telephone directories from Fairview Junior High.  The directory from his ninth grade (October 1950) has the name of a particular girl circled and with a handwritten note, “Aint she wonderful??????????”

He tells me that he never smiled with his teeth because they were rotting pretty bad. In fact the main reason he joined the Air Force was so that he could get some dental work.  They pulled what remained of his upper teeth and gave him an upper denture plate.  He also had partials on the bottom.

It is fun and strange to imagine Dad as a teenager, going on dates, and being called, “sweet” by a pretty young lady.  He probably was a pretty ordinary kid for his time and place, just trying to have a good time with his whole life ahead of him. 

Fort HPD

On Friday I went to downtown Houston to the Houston Police Department headquarters at 1200 Travis Street. I was there to get the police report on Dad’s death.  The only official information that I have so far is the medical examiner’s death certificate.

I initially thought that Dad had killed himself with a particular automatic handgun, but from the death certificate I learned that he had used a shotgun.  That pistol is missing.  Whenever I visited him at his mobile home, I would see that pistol in a holster on the countertop near the front door. I saw it on that counter about a week before he died.

For $5.00 an hour I parked in a nearby garage about a block and a half away.  It was shortly after Noon when I arrived. Google maps on my phone efficiently guided me to HPD headquarters and back to the garage.  The temperature was high, in the low 90s.

The lobby of 1200 Travis is surrounded by glass, letting in lots of natural light. From the outside looking in, I could see the typical security screening equipment that we’ve come to see in government buildings.  Friendly officers watch as you empty your pockets into dirty plastic bowls so that your possessions can be scanned with X-Rays.  Then you walk through the metal detector and hope that it doesn’t “beep,” drawing unwanted attention.

As I refilled my pockets, the officer pointed out the glass doors 20 feet away and told me to have my identification out.  To get through those glass doors, I had to wait for someone to remotely unlock them. Through those doors was a large open space office area about 50 feet by 30 feet in size.  The office area had a makeshift but permanent feel to it.

One of the long sides of the office space faced the doors that I had just come through.  Behind the desks, there were a couple of officers sitting with PC monitors, keyboards and mice and some other office equipment that I did not recognize. I handed my drivers license to the officer who greeted me.

“How may I help you?” he asked.

“I’m headed to records on the 21st floor,” I replied.

“Well, that’s changed.  They’re gonna take care of you right over there.” He pointed to the office area directly behind him.  “Hang on a minute while I get you signed in.”

He then started to make small talk. “You have the right kind of hat for today.”

I was wearing a very large brimmed hiking hat that gives my fair skin lots of coverage from the sun. “Yeah,” I replied as I took off the hat showing my white and ever enlarging forehead. “My fair Irish skin needs all the protection it can get.”

“Have you tried that Banana Boat . . .” he started.

“Somedays I don’t have it handy.  And when I sweat, the chemicals make my eyes burn. The hat does what I need for short walks.”

He changed the topic. “You look like a doctor. Are you a doctor?” Now it felt like I was being probed for information.  I’m about 80% sure that he was making small talk.  I do it myself all the time.  I’m an introvert by and large, but in one-on-one situations I like to chat with people.  But police offices are probably trained to ask questions when dealing with the public, to gather information to confirm whatever story they are being told.  The officer might be making conversation deliberately to get information, or out of habit, or just because he was bored sitting at that desk all day.

“I work in I.T.” I told him.

“Now there’s a good job to have,” he said.  “Some of those I.T. guys make a sweet six-figure salary.”

“My job is not much different than your’s,” I told him.  “I sit at a desk all day staring at a computer screen.”  I almost mentioned that he and I had matching waste lines to go with our desk jobs, but kept that comment to myself. “Except that you get to talk to people and I rarely talk to people during my work day.”

“So you’ve got them afraid to bother you,” he smiled.

“No, I have one of those administrative jobs that don’t require a lot of contact with people.”

While we were chatting he was going about his job.  He put my drivers license into a card scanner that quickly grabbed the image. He handed the license back and manipulated the PC until a label printer on the desk printed a temporary ID badge.  He peeled the label from the backing and handed it to me.  With his other hand he indicated to put the label on my shirt high on my chest.

Again, he pointed to the other side of the office space. “Go over there and fill out the blue form and they will take care of you.”

The blue form was for requesting a public police incident report.  It was mostly geared towards getting reports from traffic accidents.  Where it asked about what kind of crime, I wrote “suicide.” There was a blank on the form to enter the incident number.  I had already gotten the incident number by phone the previous week.

When I handed the form to the clerk, she asked me if I wanted the public report or if I wanted the full report.  I told her I wanted the full report but would start with the public report.  She keyboarded and moused very briefly until the large laser printer/copier behind her spit out two pages. She directed me to the other clerk sitting with here who would take my payment of 20 cents.  That was a pleasant surprise.  I expected to pay ten or fifteen dollars, but instead I paid only by the page.

The public report was useless to me.  It didn’t have any information that I didn’t already know. However, the last section of the report was called the Property Section.  All the text in this section was redacted.  The Property Section had seven subsections that apparently described seven different pieces of personal property that I assume where confiscated or taken as evidence.

To get the full report, the records clerk told me to go around to the other side of the office space, right where I started and to tell them that I needed Open Records. Now it felt like I was dealing with a city service. I had gotten to Point B and they couldn’t help me and so I had to go back to Point A.  Whereas if the officer at Point A had asked me if I wanted the public report or the full report, I would have told him “full report” and then I would have gotten to go to Open Records to begin with.

I have pretty good patience most of the time, but mercifully there were only a couple of other people there asking for reports.

Back at the front desk, I told the officer that I needed Open Records.  Instead of directing me to the 21st floor as I expected, he pointed me to a row of chairs against a wall and said that he would call them and someone would come down.

I sat and waited for just a few minutes before a nice middle-aged man came from the elevator bank and sat down next to me. I showed him the redacted public report and told him that I wanted the full report.

He paused and stared at the report for a moment and from his body language I half expected him to say that he couldn’t help me.  But he let is breath out and handed me a clipboard with another form.  He told me what blanks to fill out. This form wanted a little more detailed information about Dad.  There was even a check box to indicate that I already had the public form. There are apparently some rules about victim privacy, but I guess as his son I was able to submit the request for the full report.

The records clerk told me that I would get the full report in seven to ten days. He said that there would be an invoice along with the report as well as a payment envelope and that I could use to mail the payment back to them or that I could come downtown and pay it to them directly.

My business was done, but there was something else to do on my way out.  The corner of the lobby has a small Houston Police Department Museum. The number of exhibits is small and somewhat haphazard. The highlight of the museum is the Wall of Honor memorial for fallen Houston police officers.

I finished my tour of the museum and exited back out through the security screening area.  The officer there made a point of retrieving from me the stick-on visitor badge.

Faceplant

I reflect back on my childhood and on balance it was mostly an unhappy one. Two factors standout: 1.) alcoholic and emotionally distant parents and 2.) starting school at too young an age.

When I was two or three living in Greenville, I would see Brother and Sister go off to school.  I really wanted to go with them so Mom took it upon herself to teach me to read.  Apparently I’m a quick learner (at some things) and by the time I was four I was reading 3rd grade level books.

Our society likes to start kindergartners at age five and since I am a December baby the public school wouldn’t let me start at age four.  Mom and Dad decided that I should be in school and so they enrolled me in private school.  I went to a Catholic all-girls school where only the kindergarten was co-ed.  Just about the only thing I remember about going to that school was being an altar boy for one of the services.  I had to put out a candle and I remember being very nervous about it. I wore the robes and completed my task without incident.

That early start in school left me physically and emotionally behind my class mates for the rest of my life.  I was smarter than most of them, but smaller than most of them. Combined with my buck teeth, curly hair and overall naiveté, I was setup for a lifetime of bullying and abuse.

One of my successes in childhood was roller skating.  Mom and Dad used to drop us off at the skating rink every Friday and Saturday night.  I know now this was their way to get rid of the kids every weekend so that they could hang out at the bar.  But I learned how to skate pretty good.

Sister was a fast and bold skater.  She could roll around that rink backwards seemingly endlessly with incredible speed and power. Brother learned how to dance skate and would perform wonderful routines with a beautiful young woman.  I remember these incredible spins he could do, pulling his arms in to his body to increase the speed of the spin.

One of the skating sessions was a Racing session.  Boys and girls raced separately.  All the racers would gather into the center of the rink, then the rink referees would pick the racers for each race. They tried to group the racers for each race at similar age and skill levels.  The winners of each race got a wooden nickel good for a free coke.

I was a fast skater and I won my share of races, but there was this one kid that was a bit of a punk and I just could not beat him in a race.  I so much wanted to beat him. One night he and another kid were ahead of me in the race, dueling it out for first place.  Frequently in races, skaters would collide with each other and fall.  In this race the two lead racers’ skates touched and the both went down leaving me, the third place racer the easy win.  When my nemesis fell, he landed stretched out across the lane between me and the finish line.  I was going to win, and in my joy I decided to jump over my nemesis.

I didn’t jump high enough.  The face plant I made on that wooden floor was spectacular.  There were no broken teeth and there was no blood, but there was a lot of pain.  I came up bawling my eyes out.  The referee took sympathy and gave me a wooden nickel.

Dad was a roller skater as a young man in Memphis in the 50s. I’ve got a couple of great photos of him on skates and I have his profile from his 1954 high school yearbook. He apparently loved skating so much that his ambition was “to own a string of skating rinks.”

Thinking Like a Prick

Dad and I didn’t see eye-to-eye on much including, of course, politics.

Not that I ever knew the man to actually walk into a voting booth. His first go-to answer for not voting was that they were all crooks. His second go-to answer was that he didn’t want to register to vote because he didn’t want jury duty.  Heaven forbid that he should make a sacrifice of his precious time.

When Texas changed the law and started to use the Texas Driver License registrations to add to the jury duty list, he gave in and registered to vote. "Now I can cancel out your vote." He smiled and almost giggled.  What the hell?  That grated on me a bit.  Just another insult from the old man, but it also degraded the reason to vote. Vote, yes vote, but do it because you believe in something.  Not because you want to insult your son’s judgement.

As I almost always did around him I held my tongue, but I did have a retort in mind: “Okay, Dad that’s just fine -- cancel out my vote.  Here, let me write out a $2,000 check for my guy. Let’s see you cancel that out.”  I can think like a prick with the best of them -- it's quite easy, but I find it easier going in life by not acting like one.  Dad never quite learned that lesson.

I put up with his negativity and jibes at me for decades.  As I’ve been thinking about them a lot over the past few weeks I finally asked myself the other day. "Why the hell did you put up with that crap?"

Damn Good Painter

When Dad left the Friden company in early 1969, the family moved from Greenville back to Memphis.  He decided to follow his father into the house painting trade.  He probably worked with his dad and oldest brother some in the house painting trade when he was younger. Being someone who always has to do things his way, Dad never liked having a boss.  He says that he left Friden because he could see the writing on the wall for the electromechanical calculation machine, but I am also just as sure that he didn’t fit in well with the corporate world.

I can unequivocally testify that he was a damn good house painter and he was proud of it.  He always wore white dress shirts and white painter’s pants.  He had mom take his work clothes to the dry cleaner so that his shirts would have a good pressing with sharp creases and just the right amount of starch.  In his later years, when the kind of work that he did expanded to all sorts of repair/remodeling/construction, no one else on the job was allowed to do the painting.

He paid me to work as a painter helper for him part of one summer when I was thirteen. I'm going to use the word, "work" loosely and because after all I was only thirteen.  He was painting the exterior of new Perry Homes houses out in Katy off of Mason Road.  My job as a helper was setup and clean equipment, do the cut in work and scrape the excess paint off of the paint shields as he was spray painting the house.

We lived in Sharpstown near Bayland Park at the time.  We got up and left the house well before dawn.  The idea was to start work at first light.  Summers in Houston are brutal for those who work outside and you want to get work started early and be done by three or four o'clock in the afternoon.

Breakfast would consist of milk and Hostess Fruit Pies.  Dad got white milk and cherry, while I choose chocolate milk and lemon.  We would buy a couple of bags of ice for the small ice chest and just drink the water straight from the chest as it melted. Lunch would be from a food truck that Dad called the Roach Coach.

He paid me $2.00 an hour, which was probably too much.

I learned some skills that summer. I know how to clean a paint brush with just an inch of paint thinner in a bucket.  I learned how to cut in and caulk.  I climbed ladders a lot and learned to fear and respect them.  I got to walk on roofs to paint vents and around chimneys. When it rained, I learned how to walk in slippery Texas gumbo.

I also learned that I never wanted to work outside for a living, especially in Houston summers.

Painting ended up being hard to do as a full-time permanent occupation for a couple of reasons.  Unlike some trades such as plumbing, HVAC, and electrical, painting doesn’t require a license or formal training or certification to be a contractor.  Over time, the house painting trade was taken over by those willing to work for less money.  But also the fact that Dad was operating in the underground and untaxed economy meant that he couldn’t bid on any of the bigger, legitimate work that required a tax ID.

While he did all that other kind of work to survive, he considered himself first and foremost a painter.

I’ve been working on some ideas for his grave marker.  He was an atheist and not very sentimental, so all of those religious and sentimental things won’t do.  The marker will have to say something about him.  My idea right now is to add a paintbrush and bucket to the marker.  I also want to show on the marker to whom he is connected in the cemetery. Dad will be the fourth generation buried there after his father, grandfather and great-grandfather. Below is the first draft of the marker.