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.

The Beating

I enjoy listening to podcasts, especially on road trips.  Some of my favorite podcasts are the ones where you get to hear personal stories of all sorts of people.  Marc Maron interviews celebrities in his "WTF" podcast; a recent one was with singer/songwriter James Taylor.  It was a good interview and covered Mr. Taylor’s bout with depression and his decades-long struggle with substance abuse. One of the things that stuck with me was his description of how his family “came off the rails.”  My own family did something like that too.

Both of my parents were alcoholics. Mom got hooked on Valium a couple of times.  She suffered from depression and had body image issues. But the point when the family came off the rails seems to be centered around Brother and his troubles.

Dad’s parenting style grew out of the way that he wanted to be treated as a kid. He fought with his mother about curfew and such and never felt like he needed a lot of parental monitoring. He really wanted to just be left alone.  He says that he left us alone because that was how he wanted to be treated, but another side to that may be that didn’t know how to be a role model.

I had a pretty good head on my shoulders and a good internal moral compass and Dad's approach, while leaving me lonely and sad for a relationship with him, worked out okay for me.  My brother, however, could have used a lot more parental involvement.

Brother was seven and a half years older than me.  I don’t know all the details but by fifteen or sixteen he started doing all the wrong things.  Cutting school and doing drugs were bad enough, but he also was stealing from houses in the neighborhood.  It got so bad that he was put in Juvenile Detention.

One of the early incidents that he got in trouble for had to do with a case of 8-track tapes. When the case showed up, he said that he belonged to a friend of his.  He even wrote the friend’s name, address, and phone number in the red felt lining of the case lid.

I only remember one of the tapes in the collection, an album from the Partridge Family.  I used to love listening to that tape.  I would play it in Brother’s 8-track player/radio combo.  I would pull the antenna down to the level of my face and pretend it was a microphone as I sang along with the songs.  I would fantasize about replacing one of the young boys in the group, becoming a member of the band.

But before that could happen, Brother’s crime was found out and all hell broke loose.  To top it off, I was a factor in his being caught.  The case of 8-tracks was stolen from the garage of another teenage boy about Brother’s age.  This kid was pretty sure that Brother had stolen the tapes because Brother had been at his house right before they went missing.  One day as I was walking down the sand road in our neighborhood, the theft victim struck up a conversation with me, eventually asking me about any 8-tracks that Brother had.  I gave him good enough inventory list to confirm that the case and tapes were his missing property.  I guess he told his Dad who then asked my Dad about the 8-tracks and then the gig was up.

I don’t think there were any official criminal proceedings this time, but there was hell to pay.  That evening while Sister, Cousin, and I waited outside, the punishment came. I can remember hearing Mom crying, but above that I could hear Dad yelling at the top of his voice, “Why did you do it?  Why did you do it?” Brother was screaming his replies of, “I don’t know, I don’t know!”  The screaming was punctuated by the loud slaps of the end of a leather belt striking Brother’s bare back.

We kids outside thought Brother was going to die. Sister was crying and Cousin and I were just staring at each other and at the house.

The next day I saw the evidence of the beating on Brother’s back – the bruises and marks that I swear were the clear imprints of the end of a leather belt, even showing the stitching and prong holes from the belt.

That beating was pretty bad and to my knowledge was the worst that happened. But there were other incidents. There was at least one fight between my parents that left Mom with a broken nose. Dad almost punched out Sister when she pushed him too far.  And I was there for one knock-down drag-out fight between Mom and Sister.

Dad rarely spoke of that time period when the family went off the rails. I like to think that he was as embarrassed at how he behaved as he was saddened about the pain that he himself had suffered during those times.  I asked him once about that beating and he blamed Mom, said that she pushed him into it with her screaming and crying.  That may be what happened, but it doesn’t absolve him from responsibility.  It was his hand that delivered the blows to a fifteen-year-old boy needing guidance.

Early on, I learned that I could not trust my parents to always do the right thing, I could not trust them to truly take care of us kids. Of all the things they did to themselves, to each other, and to us kids – that lack of trust was probably the most damaging. But in learning not to trust them, I had a better chance of surviving the relationship with my mind and spirit (mostly) intact.

That beating, is something I'll never forget, but it doesn't have deep emotional connections with me.  If it did, I might have hated Dad or estranged myself from him. The beating wasn’t a direct crime between Dad and me and his trespasses against me never rose to that level. Family members usually get a little more leeway in their trespasses against us before we give up on them.

Dreams

Dad’s side-yard allowed him to create his garden, store tools and supplies, and have space to work on projects. One of those projects is a camper trailer that he dreamed of taking out on the road.  He bought it used a couple of years ago, in much need of repairs. He had gutted the inside to rebuild it, but in the end he lacked the strength to finish what he started.  Now I’ve inherited this gutted old camper trailer and the realization that I need to pursue my dreams a little harder before I get too old and tired to finish them.

One of my dreams has been to hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon (and back up). This dream started the very first time I saw the Grand Canyon.  It was on a road trip with Dad in the summer of ’78 when I was 14.

I don’t remember everything we saw on that trip, probably because as a 14-year-old nerd stuck in a car for hours on end I was pretty bored.  I managed to spend most of those hours reading some science fiction novel.  This was in the days before I developed motion sickness and could read in a moving car.

With my head buried in a book, Dad had nothing to do but look at the landscape before him and marvel at whatever feature or sign caught his eye.  He would occasionally point out something interesting, to which I would usually respond as only a 14-year-old can, “So?” Those of you who have had teenagers, or can remember being fourteen, take a moment and pull from your memory the sound of disdain that a 14-year-old can put into their voice.  Imagine the curl of the lip and slight bob of the head when that 14-year-old can only answer with one word when you point out the majestic beauty of a sandstone formation in the American West.

“So?”

Now imagine being told this over and over again for nearly a week.  Can you imagine leaving the teenager on the side of the road?  Or putting them on a bus headed back home while you finished the trip?  Or do you wait for the opportunity for revenge?

Fortunately for me, Dad chose the last option. On one of the rare occasions that pulled my nose out of my book, I saw something on the landscape that caught my eye and pointed it out to Dad.

“Sooo!?” was the response he spat back at me.  Point taken, Dad, point taken.

On the trip itself I remember seeing the Alamo – that’s it?; Carlsbad Caverns – I couldn’t have cared less, and the ketchup in the commissary deep in the cave was the cheapest, nastiest flavor of ketchup I have ever tasted; Indian cliff dwellings – boring; Pike’s Peak – so what?

But something at Grand Canyon finally caught my eye.  It wasn’t the Canyon itself, but the sliver of a trail that went down into the canyon. We had stopped at a scenic overlook and there was a trail led out to a large feature jutting into the canyon.

To give Dad credit, he sat in the car and waited while I explored this trail for about 30 minutes.  Or, in hindsight, he was happy to have a break from me.

I hiked out to the feature and found myself a hundred yards from the parking area and any other people.  Cool!  But the trail didn’t end there.  It started to wind its way down into the canyon.  I so much wanted to go further and follow that trail and explore the canyon. I promised myself then and there to do that someday.  I’ve been back to Grand Canyon a couple of times since then, but still haven’t explored those trails.  I’ve hiked quite a few other trails, but that first one in Grand Canyon has always been fondly with me.