And so much fun to find your way back!
Christmases at Locksley Hall were always excessive, extravagant and generally “the big day of the year”. Though my father and his relatives weren’t much in the spirit (the relatives for religious reasons and my father because he hated commercialism primarily because it cost him money) the rest of us atoned, so we had the annual tree gathering rituals NameBright - Coming Soon We never knew how many to expect- the core family was about a dozen or so, guests we invited and guests our guests invited could easily triple that, the gifts on Christmas Eve when everybody would arrive would literally fill half the room and displace most of the furniture. Various rituals included “The Drunken Jell-O Parade” (I have to say I came up with this one even before I drank: in the bylaws you had to hold either an alcoholic beverage OR a lit sparkler [in other words one way or the other you had to be lit] and you had to be loudly singing a different song from everybody else while marching in a Conga Line headed by my mother toting the bright green lime-with-fruit-for-ornaments Jell-O Xmas Tree through all the major rooms in the house while non-participants (the elderly, Lou Ida, some newcomers) looked on in something between horror and “we’ll decide it’s charming” confusion), “The Arrival of the Ancients” [this when my father was alive and his duty included bringing in his mother and aunts as we tossed evergreen leaves and did choreography that would have been in place during the Golden Calf scene of The Ten Commandments], the menu was always a dozen or so Cornish hens, pounds of steak’n’gravy, venison, every holiday and Southern delicacy or staple you could think of including dressing, fried corn (not the battered cob abomination but kernels scraped from the cob, browned in butter with a touch of sugar and continually stirred after letting it stick occasionally for texture= may not sound it but it tastes great, and the year’s first corn was frozen just for this), fried catfish, whatever dish Grandmother insisted on bringing that looked like vomit with limas and that when we put it in the dog’s dish to make it look like some had been eaten they wouldn’t go near, etc… It was a huge affair. Even my father’s non-Christmas-celebrating relatives came (accepting but not giving gifts).
The first Christmas after my father’s death was perhaps the wildest one yet. One of its highlights was my mother’s place of employment, a home for the retarded (not the one that later saved us Deus ex Machina style but the one she worked the graveyard shift at for a year) called around 1 a.m. when my mother and most of the other adults were liberally plastered and announced that due to an unexpected number of respites [and theft of generic Christmas gifts by employees] about 7 of the residents wouldn’t have a Christmas present the next day- did my [drunk] mother have a preference which they would be?
The solution was a shopping excursion through the house for seven gifts suitable for retarded adults. Anybody have any gifts they didn’t want? Here’s some paper: rewrap them in private, nobody would ever have to know, just put M or F on the paper (for male or female appropriate), it’s a Christmas amnesty even if they do find out, and there were a good dozen or so collected. My mother’s Cavalier soon ranneth over with the gifts, a dublin of drunken relations (my mother, Luna, Luna’s brother, perhaps another one or two), cigarettes flaming out every window, as my sister-in-law and I represented Sobriety and as she had the only license and legal blood level she drove this Santa’s Ancillary Sleigh and Foam-Party-Sans-Foam singing loudly and off-key (even those who could carry tunes sang off-key- it was in the impromptu by-laws) as the car drove twenty miles at 2 am to the sylvan lodge looking place where the rejected retarded residents and relevant respites resided. Christmas was saved for them all (even the Jewish kid who was there).
Along the way we passed Wallsboro School, the old turn of the century frame building where my mother once taught (where in fact, as I’ve related at some point, during Integration and with no National Guard or camera crews around she had covered the two small black children with her body when the shotgun was pumped- odd how many stories in the family involve two small black children) and we all waved at the stately old building, still in use as an elementary school even though it was wildly out of date. And the next morning’s news related how “An 85 year old landmark in Elmore County burned to the ground last night… arson is suspected” as pictures of the school in flames were shown. I’ve always wondered if perhaps the arson was an expelled cigarette that caught the wind just so from a Cavalier going 35 mph (my sister-in-law then as now isn’t a fast driver and this was at night and she wore Coke bottle glasses at the time and had the distraction of many drunks sitting in every available seat and the hatchback, and me- but I was louder than the drunks and egging them on, which wasn’t difficult). Whatever the case, the retarded people all had gifts the next day and the students at Wallsboro finally got an air conditioned building (which if you’ve never been to an un-airconditioned Alabama school in September, October [which isn’t a whole lot better than September] or anytime after late February trust me, you’d appreciate the cigarette or the arson, either one.)
The next Christmas was considerably subdued due to bad events, Luna’s marriage and the knowledge she was soon to leave for (Virginia? Kansas? Can’t remember), money problems, etc… Still pleasant but a lot quieter. In 1984 the unthinkable occurred: Christmas at Locksley Hall had 9 participants (our immediate family, siblings-in-law, Carrie, Lou Ida, my aunt), all of them mostly sober. In 1985 it was cancelled altogether; we didn’t even decorate. December was just another month and a broke one at that.
Christmas in exile that year was to be at my brother’s house 100 miles to the south. We had accepted the invitation, then cancelled due to “Carrie’s health”, “Carrie’s health” translating as “we’re too broke to buy gifts”. (It’s the thought that counts and all that, but it’s not and we all know it, at least in the yuppier branches of the family.)
The only gifts we had bought were for Jeanine’s grandkids. I’ll call them for this Christy, Donnie and Callie, all three of them with different fathers and very different appearances (Christy, the oldest, a Sephardic Semitic appearance- olive skin and jet black hair and eyes; Donnie, the boy pale with brown eyes and brown hair; Callie, the baby, blonde and fair with freckles) and though they all three shared the same baboon-in-heat’s-distended-bloody-ass-ugly mother, were all three simply angelically beautiful children, ages (about) 6,5 and 3. I didn’t then and don’t now particularly like small children, but these were somehow different. They were sweet, they were loud, they were happy- they were so unspoiled by material things (due to Rob & Jeanine’s usual poverty) that simple things just absolutely delighted them. My mother making them clove studded pomanders, Polaroid snapshots of themselves, kittens and puppies (of whom there were always some courtesy of all the strays, many of which came to us pregnant) and books- they LOVED to be read to, it didn’t matter what it was. I would read to them selections from biographies of Joseph Smith and Cornelius Vanderbilt and as long as I’d do it in goofy voices or jump out at one of them in mid-sentence they’d love it and beg for more. My favorite memories of those times (not that there are many rivals) are of playing with those kids- they were just light enough for me to pick up all three of them and twirl them around- or of laughing at some of the things they said (once while playing school the little boy, Donnie, who was the teacher: “Now take out your Bibles… turn to the book of Santa Claus, Science and The Easter Bunny!”) They were great kids, which is why my mother and I agreed that the only money we should spend on Christmas was for them. Even that wasn’t much, about $5 each, but having a wholesale license at the time [leftover from the church I pastored in Kitty & Carrie’s revamped reconsecrated cabin that time we renamed the pasture Oberammergau, Alabama and build a multimillion dollar Passion Play to save the farm and show Jesus we liked him and stuff, and that’s an episode I’ll probably never go into other than to say it’s amazing how close it came to working- it is relevant to the Lou Ida fallout but it’s too nebulous to go into so I’ve deleted those scenes altogether] helped.
On the afternoon before Christmas Eve my mother got a phone call from a man who had once expressed an interest in buying the farm but never could get funding. He had a sister who wanted some land to put a trailer on and she couldn’t afford much at all, but- he asked, almost apologetically, if there was anyway she would be willing to sell just two acres of her land for, again almost apologetically, $1,500. It must have hurt just a tad when she reached into the receiver and drug him through the phone wires and the tiny holes in the receiver into the room but he didn’t complain. HELL YEAH!
Admittedly in better times we’d NEVER have sold two acres of highway front property separately from the rest for that amount since it was some of our best pastureland.) The brother and sister were there within an hour of hanging up the phone and within another hour the land was picked out, a surveyor called, the contract typed by my mother and the first $500 in hand with the rest to be paid after the survey. There would be Christmas! (And this was the one land sale to go through without a hitch that we made- we got the other thousand a week later, paid the house payment up to within 30 days late, etc.).
“Haul out the holly/put up the tree before my/spirit falls again/light all the candles/we may be rushing things but/deck the halls again now/for we need a little Christmas/right this very minute/….” My mother decided to decorate after all. The huge stove sized boxes were drug from the closets and the tinsel went up and the Nazi Nativity scene was placed (it was a pre-WW2 German porcelain Nativity set that my mother’s mother had bought in the 1930s and it’s a damned commercial for Aryan Gospel interpretation- Mary, Joseph and even the Christ Child are all blonde and blue eyed and decidedly Nordic, though one of the wise men has a hooked nose- he’s the one with gold of course- and another is black, but probably originally came with a paint set to change that). I knew where there was a huge fat Christmas tree I’d seen in the pines recently that was far enough off the road no city poacher had gotten it and I quickly dispatched it and drug it up to the house. It was about 12 feet tall so required considerable amputations and prunings but we got it there, and all those decorations my mother had accumulated over the past 30-odd years were called into action and the fat lights and the skinny lights and the icicles fished out of carpets in years past all placed.
On Christmas Eve we had to leave early to do our shopping for the family enroute to the family Christmas gathering. We asked Jeanine to come stay with Carrie while we went shopping, then we’d backtrack round trip and pick up Carrie to take her with us to my brother’s house (she was agile enough to travel but not to walk through stores or to wait in a car unattended) so she did, bringing the kids with her to go ahead and pick up their presents as well (since Santa was coming the next day).
The kids had never had a Christmas tree. They were something that you saw at school or in stores to them, not that you had in your house. And when they had been at our house the day before we had not been decorated in the least. Now the Living Room had broad windows, but it was also off a very wide porch so the sun never shone directly through the windows, and the porch faced north and the sun was still mostly east anyway, so when they knocked on the door and my mother said “Just a second!” and cued me to to cut the lights the room, even at mid-morning, was dark.
As they entered she flipped the switch that controlled the Christmas lights. The three kids entered, took one look at the tree and all three audibly gasped. They approached it and until death or Alzheimer’s or Time Traveling Portuguese Templar Slave Traffickers take my memory I will always remember this five second moment for it was the happiest in the last two years at that accursed Poe worthy house.
Christy clutched her doll to her chest, more beautiful than any madonna and child at any child’s pageant anywhere that Christmas could have been. Donnie stood in total awe, his hands covering his mouth. Catie’s hands, including the one holding the teddy bear, dropped to her side. Had this been a pillar of fire singing Roy Orbison karaoke they could not have been more transfixed; not at Fatima or at Lourdes has there ever been such a blend of children and a beatific vision. They couldn’t move and the happiness and wonder on their multicolored bulb lit faces- Norman Rockwell, Currier & Ives, hell- Michelangelo working with Toulouse-Lautrec and Waterhouse and Parrish could not have brought justice to the magic of lighting and expression and just angelic countenance. This, moreso than drunks parading Jell-O, was Christmas. It’s a memory I’ve never shared in writing and it’s because I just can’t convey it’s beauty.
It was the last time there was ever anything remotely like Christmas spirit or holiday cheer. It was literally “Christmas’s Last Gasp at Locksley Hall”.
Later the court in its infinite wisdom returned them to the custody of their heroin addicted mother and her disbarred-lawyer-turned-dealer-boyfriend when she used taxpayer dollars to file her THIRD suit for custody. In her defense she had been clean and sober for damned near six weeks at the time. Among the social worker’s reasons for recommending that they be removed was “their grandmother keeps a goat in the house”. (This was very true- her name was Belle, she thought she was a dog [she even barked] and she occupied a ‘not used for anything else’ back room with missing windows and the kids loved that damned goat more than they did their mother. Better that they should be exposed to needles and smack deals than to dehorned heads and teats, evidently.
The mother and her boyfriend kept them for a few months before they were removed again and put into foster care. The last update I had came from about 1994, by which time Christy had returned to her mother but was disappearing for weekends with her delinquent boyfriend and Donnie, about 13, was running away every chance he got to his grandparents and had filed suit for emancipation so he could go return permanently (I don’t know how it turned out). Then we lost touch altogether and I’m glad. A part of me hopes that I never learn whatever became of those kids because the best case scenario is “they’re all still alive and it could be a lot worse”. I want them to always remain those bright and happy and giggling kids that my mother and I absolutely adored, and they us, angelic faces in the midst of a hottening hell. If I could I’d cast a spell and freeze them forever, mouths agape and eyes shining as they stood spiritually transfixed and eclipsing the multicolored lights of an impromptu situated evergreen as it reached to illuminate a Nazi Nativity.
One time the kids walked through the woods with me and their grandmother when I took her to see the old granite quarry behind our house with it’s WWI era dynamite blasting holes and antebellum carved names (the owner of the property in the 1840s had chiseled his name into one of the boulders) and “Nonesuch”, aka “Big Rock”, where the “chimneys” and alters my brother and sister and I made when I was a preschooler were still standing and of course the (please pardon me, this is such a frigging cliché that I promise I would NEVER NEVER NEVER insert it if it weren’t true) Indian cemetery that was also out there.
While we were on Nonesuch the kids were playing in the leaves and all got covered with fleas. By the time we got back to the house they were miserable and crying, slapping at the creatures. My mother had an enormous antique bathtub salvaged from a demolished hotel in Birmingham when that wing of the house was built, so my mother put flea shampoo (yep, the dog variety) and lots of bubble bath into it and all three kids bathed in it together. To the best of my knowledge, this was the one time the kids were ever naked in our house.
So why do I mention this? Is it cause I’m one of them big-city pre-verts or I wanna give some snarkers a thrill? Nope. It’s because, unfortunately, it’s relevant in the next and what should be the last installment of “As Lou Ida’s Long Overdue Sexually Explicit Ass-Chewing Turns”.
“Pray, proceed…” I just said to Lou Ida.
“Well, you know that she’s in Florida. Or Georgia. I don’t remember which.”
“No, I didn’t know that. And technically I still don’t.’
“Yep, she’s working in a dry cleaners. Nothing like class.”
“I’m just surprised that as much as she smoked and with all her health problems she’s still alive.”
“I’m not. Trash lasts forever. But she split up with him you know.”
“No I didn’t. Long overdue really.”
“Well, do you know where he is living these days…”
“Yes, actually, I do…”
“Oh I doubt it. I don’t know where he was living when last you heard or when the last time you were up here was…”
“I was up there a few months ago in answer to the question and I assure you I’m quite aware of where he’s living to answer the second. I didn’t see him but I saw his stuff. He was probably hiding. He’s got to be deranged by now.”
“Well… let me just say that and I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, your Mama’s troubles all started the day she hooked lives with those people…”
“Mama’s troubles started a long long time before that. But I’d say specifically it was when Daddy dropped the mortgage insurance to save $17 per month the summer before he died and when he died he was broke and…”
“Well he left a lot of life insurance.”
“He left absolutely no life insurance. He left what was in his state retirement account which if you’re interested was $22,000, and after his funeral and Kitty’s funeral and the bills that were due or past due and the notes that had to be paid off there was $10,000 left which Mama put into a CD that she held onto for as long as she could but had to cash it out a year and a half later and it was gone within months.”
“Well, a lot of things she spent it on weren’t necessary at all.”
“We took a vacation to Charlottesville, Asheville, Gatlinburg and then St. Augustine, I’ll grant you that, it wasn’t necessary, but I’m glad we did. That was less than a thousand dollars and the money would have gone with it or without it and at least we got some good memories from it.”
“Just like Blanche kiting off to the Holy Land with…”
“With her own damned money that she inherited with her father that she used fifteen hundred dollars of to buy one week that she remembered happily the rest of her life before turning every penny of the rest of it which was about six thousand dollars over to my father so he could use it to keep up that goddamned farm nobody else on Earth wanted but him and send my brother and my sister to college in high style so that they could graduate and not help us when times were absolutely horrible and sit on their ever richening asses making fun of me for not having a degree when I was going to college in shoes that were held together by rubber bands and Mama was wiping retarded people’s asses for next to nothing. YES! Mama ‘frivoulously wasted’ her own goddamned money for a vacation and THANK YOU GOD THAT SHE DID! Because if she hadn’t the money would have been GONE and she’d have had nothing, not even the memory of a mystical experience on Masada or of being rowed through Traitor’s Gate pretending she was the Princess Elizabeth, and those were some of her best memories and I wish she’d lived long enough and kept her health long enough for me to go back there with her but I couldn’t so c’est la vie what were you saying?
“I was talking about… well, anyway, the point is that sorry woman is in Florida or Georgia- the swampy part of course- and living with her trashy son.”
“Well I’m glad that she reunited with her son. Last I heard from her she’d only just gotten a letter from one and hadn’t talked to him since he was a little boy. Maybe they have a business selling pygmy gators.”
“No, she’s working in a dry cleaners. A dry cleaners. Probably sweeping up or something equally classy…”
“I worked in a dry cleaners once. One of my duties was sweeping up. It’s honest work.”
“Well she’s sure not above dishonest work is she?”
“She did what she had to when she had to I suppose. We’ve all done things we wouldn’t usually do and hope we never have to do again. I’m sure when you left Denver…”
“When I left Denver I wasn’t trying to frame you for child pornography and make you into a child molester!”
“And I’ve always meant to thank you for that. Of course I wasn’t born at the time so you’d have had your work cut out for you.”
“Well you were born when Jeanine decided to get you sent away for raping her granddaughter!”
[silent rage moment]
“Alright- you’re my father’s cousin and you’re old so I’m giving you a little bit of leeway but be real careful here… what are you accusing me of?”
“I’M not accusing you of nothing. [sic] But that piece of trash would have accused you of raping that piece of trash granddaughter her piece of trash daughter had…”
“Her daughter was a piece of trash. I’ll give you that. But if you are trying to insinuate that I ever… EVER FUCKING EVER did anything that was even remotely inappropriate with any of those kids… who were not trash… so help me God I’ll slap you with a slander suit so fast that…”
“Jon! I’ve known you since you were born! I always said to Garland, ‘Jon is the sweetest child you have, I just love him to pieces!’ and you were, you were the sweetest child I ever knew, you loved all the old ladies which was good and your only bad qualities was that you loved your Mama so much that you took her side in…”
“My mother, as you know, is dead. But do not think for a split-second that I am even remotely even slightly even AT FUCKING ALL mixed in my loyalties or neutral where she’s concerned…”
“Oh I’m sure, and you watch your language! I see trash taught you well in how to speak!”
“I’m a good listener. Go on. About the child.”
“Well I just want you to know… and I understand that this is enough to make anybody mad, I really do, and it’s very obvious this is the first you’ve heard about so I accept that you’re not cussing at me but at the situation and the… I honestly believe… completely erroneous allegation.”
“Thank you, my dear aunt. Now, what’s this about my trying to rape a child?”
“Well I don’t think you did for a second, I want that clearly on the table, I don’t think you had it in you to do something so vile, but Jeanine, oh Jeanine and Rob, they sure did…”
“Let me tell you something about Jeanine and Rob. When I came back to get some stuff from that house after we took the first carload to Montgomery and they saw I was there, and this was just before the sheriff through everything out and I have it on best authority that you helped yourself to quite a bit of it…”
“I only took what I…”
“WATER UNDER THE BRIDGE! I DON’T CARE! But… when Jeanine and Rob saw me up there they brought the kids to see me, they hugged my neck, both of them, the kids hugged my neck, the kids asked me about Mama they wanted to go with me to see her and Jeanine and Rob practically begged me to take them to Montgomery to see her and bring them back, and I would have but she happened to be at work that day because she worked about 80 hours a week back then. Do you think for one second that if Jeanine, even if she is an alligator whore or whatever as you call her, do you think for one second that if she thought I had inappropriate attentions for any of those kids she’d have let me anywhere near them? She’d have come at me with a gun or a knife or anything she’d have gotten her hands on.”
“Oh I’m not saying she believed it. I don’t think she believed it any more than I do.”
“Ah… she just wanted to have somebody that she said was the son she never had and the son of the woman she said she thought was the greatest person ever born to get sent away on a false charge of child rape because… she couldn’t afford a birthday present and wanted me to have state dental care in prison? What? What’s the motive here, I’m afraid I’m not quite getting it.”
“That house. They wanted Aunt Sibyl’s house.”
“Ah. And me raping their granddaughter was a down payment?”
“No you’re just being daft. Their plans were to come to that house one day while you were asleep in bed, have that oldest girl they wanted to promote… what was her name? Missie…”
“Christy!”
“…have her strip down naked, get on top of the bed with you and make sexual motions while they took pictures, and then use those pictures for blackmail so your mama would give them the deed to that house. And if she hadn’t they’d have accused you of raping a six year old child!”
[a pause while I absorb and it’s not easy to absorb through that much fury]
“Okay, so the plot as I understand it. Come into the house. Go into the room where I’m sleeping. I, a grown man who was 19 years old or so and who they knew slept with a loaded and cocked .38 caliber Coast Guard Issue revolver at arm’s length under the bed, but get past that… get their granddaughter to strip naked and get on top of me, without waking me up mind you, so that they could use a camera they didn’t have which I know because whenever they needed a picture made they had to come up and borrow ours…ooh, so I guess first off, ask Mama to borrow the camera, then come up and do the nekkid on top of a sleeping guy stuff… am I naked too?”
“I have no idea.”
“Well it would work better if I was don’t you think? Okay, somehow undress a 19 year old 200 pound guy… WITHOUT WAKING HIM UP AND IGNORING THE FACT HE HAS THE ABILITY TO END THEIR LIVES LITERALLY AT HIS FINGERTIPS… oh, and this with the Pekingese and the Siamese cat who always slept on my bed in those years and neither of whom liked kids and would have raised holy hell… get past all that… strip me naked somehow without waking me up and put a naked child on top of me so that they could make pictures with my mother’s camera, take them to Harco or TG&Y or wherever and get them developed… all so that my mother would give them the deed to a house that they already lived in rent free and that had a mortgage on it?”
“Aunt Sibyl’s house didn’t have a mortgage on it. This was…”
“The hell it didn’t. Grandmother’s house was included in the same mortgage as our house. The reason was that Daddy figured with all her income”
[Quick aside: My grandmother’s various pensions were more than my father’s salary]
“…the only way that she would ever help us pay the mortgage if anything happened to him was if her house was on it because dispossession was the only thing she was afraid of, and incidentally it didn’t work- she still refused…”
“Well Rob and Jeanine didn’t know that…”
“Yes they did. We told them the first day they looked at the house that there was a mortgage on it. They had asked if there was anyway they could buy it with us financing and we told them the truth, no there wasn’t, it was tied up in my grandmother’s lifetime estate and in a mortgage, it wasn’t ours to give if we had wanted to. Frankly if we had sold the house on the hill it would have been a bitch to release but, I guess luckily, nobody ever wanted to buy it… anyway, getting back to the Crime of the Century, two experienced grifters… and I’ll tell you that now, yes, they were… I could tell you things about those two that you don’t know that would surprise you considerably…”
“Like what?” (This very eagerly.)
“Irrelevant. But you’re saying that once they have me naked and take pictures with our camera and get them developed their plot is to say give us this house, which you can’t because it’s tied up hopelessly with a still living senile stroke victim’s lifetime interest and on a 13% mortgage… or we’ll go to the sheriff and…”
“Well I don’t even know if they’d thought it out that…”
“No, let’s continue this out, please. I love true crime. They wanted to say ‘if you don’t do as we say we will go to the sheriff, a man who was so enamored of your daddy that…and Jeanine and Rob knew this… he didn’t press charges when daddy’s widow held a gun on him! Do you know about Sheriff Loggins’s son and Daddy?”
“I’ve heard rumors…”
“And probably spread more. I won’t go into the whole of it, but let’s just say that Sheriff Loggins’ own son would have been in prison his damned self if my father hadn’t perjured himself on the stand in 1975 to get those charges against him dropped… did you know that? It’s been 30 years and Daddy’s dead so I don’t think he’ll be tried for perjury… but Jeanine and Rob, two people who both had criminal records, as I’m sure you knew…”
“Yes I sure did!”
“…and those criminal records both including vice and bunko from years before in New Orleans… oh yes, I’m quite aware of their pasts, moreso than you, but I’ll tell you flatly neither of them ever exploited a child or anything even near that, they did penny ante tourist fleecing in the Quarter… but two…”
“I…”
“Shut up, I’m going to finish this… two people who could not have stood up to a background check are going to go to a sheriff who they knew worshipped my father and say ‘look, here’s some pictures we took of a sleeping nekkid guy with our nekkid granddaughter’, thinking that never one time would it occur to the sheriff to ask ‘why were you taking pictures of this rather than stopping it’ and ‘isn’t it odd that nobody in this family has ever been in trouble with the law and yet both of you have and you only have custody of these kids by a thread’ and all so that they can get the deed to a house that is falling down that they’re already living in rent free and that they know for a fact my mother could not give them if there was a gun pointed to her head because it’s tied up in estates and mortgages… is this what you’re trying to say?”
Lou Ida [who has tried to interrupt several times but been talked over loudly each time]: Approximately. I didn’t say it was a smart plan.
[after a long silence]
Me: I don’t believe it ever happened. But… out of curiosity… how do you know about this? Did they feel that as a cousin and somebody who hated them you’d be a good person to confide it to?
Lou Ida: No of course not. But I got it from a perfect source, somebody who never told a lie in her life…
Me: The Virgin Mary?
Lou Ida: As close as you’re gonna get, she was a virgin and she didn’t lie… Aunt Carrie.
OH.
MY.
GOD.
Let’s just cursorily examine the first few things that are wrong with just the abstract of this. In the first place I honestly don’t think that Carrie was even capable of coming up with a plan that sordid or complicated, I seriously doubt she knew there was such a thing as pedophilia and I doubt she would have understood the whole “let me borrow a camera so I can strip your well armed son naked and get my 6 year old granddaughter to assume a compromising position on top of him without waking him and blackmail you for this house, please” Rube Goldberg Meets The Thenardiers At Neverland Ranch bullshit concocted plan if you’d explained it to her with hand puppets and a laser pointer and a short video narrated by the late Marlin Perkins. In the second or fifth place, why the hell would Jeanine and Rob, who I know weren’t exactly The Sting in caliber of criminality or intellect but also weren’t stumblingly retarded, have told Carrie or even discussed it around her? Life’s not an operetta- you really don’t have to “once more recite our cunning little scheme” in meter and simple words before enacting it, you would just do it. In the sixth place, IF Carrie did make such an allegation (which she didn’t, but dismissing all of the ‘each one in and of itself enough to call this a bunch of bullshit’ problems with it) it’s hardly written in stone Gospel- CARRIE’S FAVORITE CONVERSATIONAL PARTNERS WERE HER DEAD SISTER, MY DEAD FATHER, SHE ONCE CLAIMED SHE SAW SANDY DUNCAN IN HER BATHROOM AND GARY COLEMAN LOOKING THROUGH THE WINDOW, THOUGHT VANNA WHITE AND TOM BROKAW WERE TALKING TO HER EACH NIGHT AND INVITED THEM TO DINNER, ONCE SPENT FIVE MINUTES CALLING OUR DOG FROM OUTSIDE WITHOUT REALIZING THAT THING SHE WAS STICKING HER HEAD IN WASN’T THE FRONT PORCH BUT OUR LIVING ROOM CLOSET, HEARD THE VOICE OF GOD TALKING TO HER IN A KITCHEN, ANSWERED THE TELEPHONE BY SAYING ‘I DON’T KNOW HOW THESE THINGS WORK’ INTO THE RECEIVER, ONCE WONDERED HOW SO MANY APES GOT ONTO THE PATIO AND CALLED ME BY MY BROTHER OR MY FATHER OR MY GRANDFATHER’S NAME MORE OFTEN THAN BY MY OWN AND FOR 92 YEARS REFUSED TO USE A TOILET BECAUSE SHE THOUGHT IT WAS NON-HYGIENIC WHEN COMPARED TO A CRISCO BUCKET YOU COULD TAKE OUTSIDE THE HOUSE ONCE YOU WERE DONE! She was in a triumvirate with Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton as folks who were not unimpeachable.
“Lou Ida you are straining like Elvis after a cheese orgy. This did not happen.”
“Well it’s easy for you to say now, you’ve been away from those people for a long time, but let me tell you what I heard… Rob started raping those girls himself as soon as they were old enough to walk. I heard he got the oldest one pregnant, and she was already his to begin with cause he uncovered the nakedness of his own stepdaughter when…”
“You are more certifiable and that is a goddamned lie. I know for a fact that Rob couldn’t possibly be the father of those children and that he couldn’t rape anybody if he wanted to.”
“You don’t know any such thing…”
“Yes, I do.” (This is true, I know he couldn’t, but I digress.)
“Well from what I heard from…”
“Lou Ida I don’t care what you’ve heard. It’s been 20 years since I lived up there. It’s been a dozen years since I saw Rob or Jeanine. I don’t care. In fact you know what, IF it happened and it didn’t, but assuming that all logic be killed and gutted and cast by the wayside and it really happened, then I am going to take a lesson from the Bible. You know what? If it happened, I forgive her. I forgive both of them. I’m sure they were desperate and it didn’t work and it didn’t do any harm and wherever Christy is now she’s well over 20 and if she wanted to crawl on top of me nekkid while somebody made pictures the only thing she’s gonna get out of it is disafuckingpointed, so I forgive them. May they go in peace, I turn the other cheek, whatever. Was there any other reason you called?”
“Well I was also going to tell you that Alabama Rural Electric has some money that belongs to your mama.”
“That’s good to know, I’ll look into it. Anything else?”
“Well… I can see that you take after Blanche a whole lot more than you do Garland…”
“Thank you. I try. Anything else?”
“I hate that such a sweet boy turned into… into something like your mother…”
“This is your final warning shot old woman. In case you’re under the delusion that I am neutral or even objective in the matter of my mother let me correct it. If you were in a burning building and also in that building was a PHOTOGRAPH of my mother, a bad photograph with blurred face that I didn’t even like and that I had duplicates of, and I only had time to save one thing from the building, let’s just say I’d need a frame because I care more for a photograph of my dead and rotting mother than I do for your living flesh, do you understand me?”
“Your father once said I was like his twin sister and that his kids…”
“Did he now? I never heard him call you anything but his crazy-ass sex whitetrash cousin Lou.”
“Well you probably weren’t listening because you were your mother’s child more…”
“At least my mother was never locked up at Bryce Hospital like yours. Oh sorry… did I say that? But I do remember one thing he said about you. Oh hell, I remember lots of things he said about you… you wanna hear it in his voice? Here I go!”
Since my father wasn’t a public figure you just have to take my word for it that I do a perfect imitation of him. Like him I have a very deep, very resonant voice and though I don’t have a southern accent myself I can mimic his Piedmont-with-overtones-of-Shakespearean-scenery-chewing style perfectly, so perhaps she was impressed when I said in his voice
“I tell ya one good thing ‘bout Lou. If I ever need a forest cleared I can do it for ten dollars. All I gotta do is git a guy with a ten inched dick, pay him one dollar an inch to stick it up her one time, then chase him into the woods and up a tree and give that crazy old maid an ax. She’d chop you forty cords of hardwood to get him back down there.”
Long Silence but I do hear her fuming before she says
“Your father could be a very crude man so he may have told something like that as a joke, but I’ll be like you said. I forgive him. I’ve been made sport of for my beliefs and my morality before. But he never would have…”
“Well actually he told me another thing about you that I don’t think he was joking about. He said that when you were both teenagers he came to your father’s house one day and found you, oh I suppose this would be about 1941 or so? If it’s not you can correct me. He said he found you in your father’s cow barn with [CLOSE RELATIVE WHO I WON’T IDENTIFY] and you were [CONSENTUAL NON-PENETRATIVE SEXUAL ACT I WON’T NAME] and you were hoopin’ and a hollerin’ and saying [SOMETHING SOMEONE WOULD CRY OUT WHILE BEING NON PENETRATED BY AN UNNAMED RELATIVE] and that when you saw him there you told him you’d call him a liar and tell your brothers he tried to rape you. Do you remember that?”
“THAT…YOU ARE…HE DIDN’T…”
“Lou Ida I want you to swear right now before God and all that you hold Holy that it never happened, that nothing like it ever happened, and swear that if you are lying may you die in long agony and burn forever in hell. Swear that and I will apologize very humbly.”
“I don’t swear anything before God! It’s against my religion! And we don’t even believe in hell!”
“What a pity. You’d have been a shoe in for a desk job there.”
“Well I think your mother was more than friends with Jeanine. What do you think of that?”
“I think on her worst day she could have done a hell of a lot better than a woman who smelled like goats…”
“And Carrie told me about the men who were in your mother’s bedroom some mornings…”
“I slept in her room almost every night for the last few years on the old sofa along the south wall and I think I’d have noticed, but if she was the whore of Babylon or getting it on with Jeanine or even Jeanine’s goat and it brought her some pleasure then I for one am glad because she needed it…”
“I think it is just a terrible tragedy that you used to be my favorite nephew and…”
“I think it is a terrible tragedy that you are going to die soon- maybe today, maybe next year, maybe in ten years but you are going to die and when you do your body is going to stay in that house and rot for days or weeks before anybody finds it and when they do the cats and rats and snakes will have eaten most of it and when they find out unless you made arrangements and prepayments you are going to be dumped in a potter’s field that nobody will ever visit and when the news of your death goes around there is not one single person on this or any other planet who is going to give one good goddamn and it’s not because you outlived them it’s because you are a selfish petty stupid worthless bitch who never made anybody’s life any different for your having lived unless it was for the worth and that is the single worst thing you can say about any person after that it is only a matter of degree and in case I haven’t mentioned it I think you’re ugly fat and crazy as well goodbye!”
“I think…”
CLICK
I slammed down the phone, though unfortunately not with enough force to displace any pictures, and to borrow a line from my mother, ‘Damn that felt good’.
She hasn’t called back since. I hope we can salvage the total silence we had for many years but if not, well… well actually her kidneys would be too old to use anyway, so to hell with it.
And that’s why I’m going to hell for calling an 80 year old woman mean and nasty names and accusing her of something I heard from my father 25 years ago that he claimed happened 65 years ago and that I couldn’t help but notice she didn’t deny. And how not to get a house through black mail.
And if you’re wondering where Rob lives these days, he moved back to Grandmother’s house at some point and he’s squatting in there. It’s not so bad except for the fact that a tornado blew the roof off of half the house a number of years ago, the floors in the front rooms collapses and the only way to get into the rooms where he makes is lair is by walking over a series of boards into a back bedroom where he’s pitched a tent over the bed. Calls have been made to get him out of there but the sheriff never found him at home.
So if you’re ever interested in a nice little summer cottage that needs a little fixing up (new roof, new floor, new walls, wiring) and already has a caretaker, let me know and I’ll hook you up with the person my sister sold that property too recently. And don’t worry about the rumors you may hear about the old man who lives in a lair in the back of the ruined place being a child rapist or anything.
In the first place he’s not a bad sort, he’s pretty harmless. Besides, he’s in his late 70s by now as he was a good bit older than Jeanine, and he’s got to be a bit deranged to live in that place (though it’s where he was happiest I suppose). And his main vice is just that he always way overestimated his intelligence and had a tendency to shoot his mouth off a lot more than he should have and think he was a lot tougher than he was/is. In fact, that’s actually the reason why to this day Rob
doesn’t have a penis. It was cut off by an… I think it’s safe to say, “enemy”, in a Louisiana prison before he ever met Jeanine. Lucky in a way though- had he not been in prison he’d probably have bled to death before they got him to the hospital, but since it was just a short walk they saved his life.
But the last part is a little secret we’ll keep between us since unlike Lou Ida you don’t know his real name or where he lives and it’s obviously not something he likes to talk about. The only reason I know is… well, that’s another story. It involves a court case more than 20 years ago and a judge who moved for a dismissal on a charge by Rob’s step-daughter.
And that’s what I like about the South.
In other news I saw the new James Bond movie. Really good.
PS- I guess given his living situation (especially since the destroyed house was once occupied by a grotesque lobotomy victim) the spoiler box would be the ultimate Southern Gothic “short story” (and if you’re wondering
1- no, his stepdaughter and the grandkids didn’t know
2- yes, he had to sometimes go to the doctors for “plumbing assistance”
3- no, not a catheter, just a tube
And here’s The House of Weokahatchee (the name “Sampiro” of course being not quite accurate and a few others changed as well):
My father’s line:
James W. “Da Jim” Sampiro (1856-1917) married (1881)
Louisiana Talitha Cumira Cotton (1863-1963)
Their children:
John Arlington (1881-1981)
Gene (1883-1971) who begat Burl (1912-Nov. 2006), Lou Ida (1926-) & others
2 other sons & 1 daughter before 1888
Kitty (1889-1982)
Carrie (1889-1988)
S. Garland (1892-1957)
Anna (1901-1903)
S. Garland Sampiro (1892-1957) married (1926) Sybil M. Murdock (1899-1989), daughter of Dr. Samuel Murdock (1864-1946) and his wife, whose many other children included Pythia Lucile “Lucy” Murdock (1908-1989), who lived with her sister Sybil after her release following 35 years at the state mental hospital (7 of her siblings, my grandmother not being one of them, were also hospitalized)
The only child of Garland and Sybil M. Sampiro was
S. Garland “Gahlun Junior” Sampiro (1926-1982)
and he married Blanche Levana Gilmer
Maternal Line:
Ennis “Mustang” Gilmer (1893-1979) [4th of 16 children; he was born the same day as Hermann Göring, incidentally, though to almost certainly different mothers]
married 1920 Sophronia “Sisso” Traywick (1902-1975), sister of Reediana “Aunt Reed” Traywick (ca. 1905- 1985) [Reed was married many times]
their children were
- Carl “That Sorry Sumbitch” Gilmer (1921-2001)
- Earl (born and died 1922)
- Joanna “Joey” (1925- ), wife of Joseph “Joey” Bows, with whom she had Luna (married many times, mother to Nigel, Shea and sometimes “Deaf Chris”) and Jimmy (married many times, no children)
- Blanche Levana Gilmer (1935-2006)
The children of Blanche Gilmer and Garland Sampiro, Jr. are
-Rebecca “Becki” (1959-), married to J.H., no children
-D. S. Sampiro (1961-), married to L.L., 2 children (Amanda [unless I’ve called her something else] and Garland, now ages 18 and 16)
-I, CLAVDIVS… I mean, Jon (December 1966- alive as of this typing)
Goddam, Sampiro, your stories don’t disappoint. 
Sampiro, my friend, there may indeed be many egregious sins for which you may surely be hellbound. However, the cussin’ out of Lou Ida is not and will not be among the reasons you may end up in eternal hellfire. That woman deserved, nay, begged, for that to happen. Just so you know.
Is it your mother’s sister “Joanna” the “Joanna” she threw in your father’s face and he turned cold?
I had to yell at my husband to quit talking to me because I was reading The Sampiro Thread. He looked at me a bit funny…
I absolutely adore you.
My mother is dead. That’s a strange sentence to say, think or to know it’s true, but it is. It’s been completely distributed throughout my mind and worldview with alarming, disrespectful even, speed. She died three months ago today and I wish I could say that I cannot believe it is true and that I am lost and mourning but it is true and I’m not either of those things. I feel I should be.
I held her freezing foot between my hands trying in vain to give it warmth and talked to her when I knew she couldn’t hear me and I made a cutting sarcastic comment to ICU staff too dense to get it when they stood in the door and bitched about their schedules as I tried to have a last moment with her. All happened, I can replay any of them dispassionately in my mind. I had a meltdown of sorts while alone at her bedside in which I told her to die. That I don’t regret. When she was conscious and trying to talk, trying to yank out a tube that I think confused her I told her to stop, “it’s alright Mama… you need the tube to breathe… get better and they can take it out and then you can talk.” That I regret; I so wish I’d not just told her not to fight it but that I’d helped her take the thing out so that I could have heard the words she wanted so desperately to say, even though I’m well aware that those words in all probability were “Get this goddamned tube out of my throat.”*
For almost forty years Ptolemy and Copernicus both were wrong in my opinion; my mother was the center of the universe. And now she’s not there, and just as when geocentric gave way to heliocentric centuries ago the sun still “rose” in the east, and it still set in the west and the price of wool didn’t rise and bacon and cabbage tasted exactly the same as they did before.
I’ll occasionally forget for just a second, because she always was and still remains everywhere. Walking through Ikea, a store she probably never heard of and definitely never entered in a city (Atlanta) she despised she was everywhere nonetheless. “Mama will love these meatballs and this ligonberry jam… I’ll get her some of the frozen… oh, yeah, I can’t do that…”
But when it happens it’s not as profound or as “Damn! Damn! Damn!” as I almost wish it were. “I’ll call Mama to see if she has th… oh wait, Mama’s dead” and “I’ll go yard sale-ing this Saturday morning and see if I can fi… oh wait, I have to work this Saturday morning” carry about the same weight.
It’s certainly not that I don’t miss her. I do, very much. Terribly. But it’s just that it is, in a word, different from what I thought it would be. There’s been no catharsis and if the past is any indication there won’t be. Cathartic breakthroughs are the stock in trade of Meredith Baxter movies on Lifetime, not of real life. It hits me instead in waves, the Ikea experience and the like.
I live in The Mamaleum, a shrine where I can’t get rid of things because they remind my siblings of Mama but that they don’t want in their houses just yet because they remind my siblings of Mama. But these things, while I won’t them gone for both personal and aesthetic reasons (we had very different taste), are never among the things that “set me off’. It’s a smell or a person’s tie or a news story or something that seemingly has no connection to her but when you live with a person for decades and go through some super quelle mondo shit with that person for much of it there’s nothing that has no connection to her. I’ll go someplace I’ve never gone and do something I’ve never done and somehow she’s there, for either I want to share it with her and I can’t or the woman at the next table or counter or skidoo will remind me of someone we knew or whatever. Such is death.
I hope this doesn’t sound incredibly self pitying for I don’t mean it to be. It’s just an odd transition, in part because it’s not a transition. Mama was living and now she’s dead and all the pieces are rearranged with, again, disrespectful ease. I remind myself sometimes of Macon Leary from Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist; if you haven’t read it Macon has a disturbing moment when his son is killed (not a spoiler, he’s dead by the start of the book) because a few months before his son had been in an accident and while not knowing if he would live or die Macon had completely totally rewritten his life to not include his son, even though his son was the person he loved the most. Friends who called to make sure I’m not rubbing shit in my hair (for “what will this do to Jon” seemed to be the foremost thought on everybody’s mind) come away relieved and probably a little disappointed.
On January 12, 1982 I lived in a household that consisted of me and my parents and I attended Wetumpka High, a public high school. Three weeks later I lived in the same house but now with my mother and a 90 something aunt and attended a different school because my mother had “issues’ with the principal of Wetumpka and rearranged his office in a slight manic episode prescient of Clean Sweep twenty years later. On August 16 I had a mother who was terminally ill but doing very well and I was preparing the house for her rearrival (I had an appointment to have a chair lift installed the day she died- I was using my retirement fund from the University to do it) and two weeks later I was finishing the cleaning out of my overstuffed apartment in Tuscaloosa while designing brochures and handouts for my new job and remembering occasionally my mother was dead. Both times, lots of change in a short space. I find I do better with those than with stability or, God forbid, gradual change. I also find I’m babbling.
Anyway, I miss her terribly except for when I don’t. It’s still surreal. There were many times that I could honestly say I hated her but there was never a second when I didn’t love her; there were times I wished she was dead but never a second when I wished she would die. She left me a lot of money that I didn’t even know she had and trite as it sounds I’d honestly be willing to give every penny of it back to have one more day with her (though I’d buy an insurance policy that it wouldn’t be one of her evil days, for she could be). But on the whole, I’m disappointingly fine. Life is going on. I’m not morbidly depressed, I’m not spending hours staring at the floor, I’m not treating her clothes and her knick-knacks as if they were holy relics to be touched only with goatskin gloves and that on the one day per year her priest can utter the holy words ‘BLANCHE IRVINA’ [which is her real name- Levana is a pseudonym I use for her in writing when I give Mustang’s name as Levan instead of his real name of Irvin].
I did find that bagging her clothes was a bit beyond me but otherwise no problem. Tired of the siblings who act as if her furniture should only be moved by six priests with gold rods but who don’t want it themselves I’ve finally said “fuck it” and rented a U-Haul for tomorrow and I’m taking a ton of it to storage; I’m ripping out the carpeting downstairs and putting in maple flooring because even if the house is to be sold (which is a whole other fucking story that is going to end up making me closer to my siblings or never speaking to them again depending on the day of the week- HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE TO PROBATE A *(#@$udsjdfojED ESTATE FOR A WOMAN WHO WASN’T RICH AND HOW MANY TIMES CAN MONEY GRUBBING SIBLINGS CHANGE THEIR MINDS…. But I digress. If I redo the entire house in a pastiche of early modern Graceland repros, Louis XV and Ikea down to the last light socket cover there’s still not a corner where I won’t be reminded of her, so I’ll have here what I like.
Anyway… this is incoherent I fear, but the point is I love hummus. And I also wanted to answer a question that was asked when she died.
*(I have to admit I hope somebody laughed at that.)
Some medicational trivia that is probably a bit TMI: shortly before my mother died (though I didn’t know at the time she was about to die) two physiological things happened that “affected” my rational judgment. The first, to use a clinical word those who’ve worked in mental health (as I have) and or those who’ve had exposure to mental health pharmaceuticals (as I have) may be familiar with but others may not, was that I decompensated. This means that a mood leveler I’ve taken for almost a decade essentially suddenly stopped working- worse than, even- it reversed itself. This happens- the body builds up a resistance, aging causes changes, etc., on the subject of which is the second: I was walking around with an undiagnosed case of Type 2 diabetes and my blood sugar, part through stress, part through being overweight and not watching my diet, and part through pure genetics, had risen to dangerous levels. Twixt the twain, and add in “extenuating circumstances”, ration and anger management were a couple of things I wasn’t particularly good at this summer, but I think I hid it well
Well actually, believe it or not, I did handle it well. I had some meltdowns but I was able to limit them mostly to Internet Message Boards and keep them out of the Waking, a largely intentional redirection that allowed me to keep my cool with nurses and relatives and the like when I was essentially having ‘nutflashes’ (if that’s not a word already I hereby call it into existence) and dealing with a little worse news each day. For those who may not know what I’m talking about, and I won’t link for obvious reasons, I allowed things written on “another message board” (hey guys!) that I would usually have ignored to… ah… “get to me” a bit and worse, since Dopers and lurkers were involved, I brought it here. People who I would usually regard the same way I’d see but not see those poor pitiful defectives pushing their life in a stolen grocery cart while reeking of piss and mumbling about ‘good waiter wasn’t he liked his hand lotion gave me the crabs though yeah I eat go-carts don’t mind saying it but I never killed no nuns Gotta Quarter? God bless…fuckin’ Eggo killed Kennedy I want a space needle” for in Cyber World that’s essentially what they are, but I’m in their debt for providing a provocation in a moment when I needed a target to unleash some neurotic rage even if said rage was disproportionate.
To those who were non-participatory witnesses to this I apologize very sincerely and with enormous chagrin. My medication’s adjusted now, the stress burst like a boil, diet and exercise (OH I’VE GOT TO TELL YOU ABOUT MY PERSONAL TRAINER- HE’S A FLAWLESS REDNECK RUSSELL CROWE WHO… well, enough sordid stuff for one thread, but… damn… I think perhaps you have to be gay and Southern to understand just how hotter than the core of the sun flawless clueless rednecks can be, but another time)
Anyway, to quote John Astin’s Buddy from Night Court, “I’m much better now” and horribly embarrassed that even in a moment of medicinal weakness and high stress I granted these witless people the importance life so obviously and wisely denied them. Most of all I apologize for brining it to these shores. Today I can honestly say I don’t harbor anger or hostility at them at all, just pity for the same reason I have pity for Rob, that poor impotent embittered fool living amongst the trash of others through a combination of bad fate and a refusal to accept the mediocrity imposed by a god less merciful than I would have been. I apologize again to the innocent.
That said, when the following question appeared (and don’t worry, there are no flames coming) in the thread about my mother’s death
I received some emails basically saying “Take it in stride man, bite the bullet, don’t rise to the occasion!” and I very much appreciate the sentiment. It was a very kind thought. But to be completely honest even at the time I thought it was a fair and reasonable question others were probably too polite to ask, and it deserves a fair and reasonable response.
The short one is this: she was my mother. It’s that simple.
The longer one is that if you have read every post I’ve ever written about her and even if you had a face to put with the name, you wouldn’t really know my mother. She was poisonous, she was manipulative, mean-spirited, selfish, intolerant and many other bad things. She was responsible for many of my worst memories of childhood and adulthood, that’s all true. But warts and all she was a fascinating and wonderful human being, sometimes best admired from a distance admittedly but she was such a fighter and the most unconditionally loving person who was capable of change, who was as totally selfless with all she had as she was selfish in her emotional demands, who gave her life to the service of others- she was damned sure not an easy person, but I don’t think it’s just prejudice (or what one Doper snarkily referred to as my “she’s his fucking Jocasta”- odd I never made that connection ) when I say she was an incredible human being who warts and all enriched my life.
Not long ago my sister called me and while we talked she started sobbing.
And I understood exactly. I felt a relief when she died. And a complete devastation. And I still feel both. But… ultimately I feel the need to go on. That’s what she would have done and that’s what I’m going with.
I apologize for this mawkish crap but I promise it won’t happen again and I’m almost done.
I have heard it said that “All the bad stuff you say about her, you’ll remember that when you’re standing over her grave”. I’ve stood over my mother’s grave and they’re right- I do remember saying it. I don’t feel any guilt over it, but I do remember it.
I can honestly say I don’t have a whit of guilt over any of the stories I’ve shared about her, telling about her “suicide chicken” or any of that. In part it’s because I earned the right- I was there with her when she needed me, I didn’t even think of leaving til I knew she could handle it, but there’s another far more important reason.
To me, and I know I’m weird and gayish and all and I don’t pretend to speak for all, but to me telling stories that I hope are funny and outlandish and over-the-top about a mother who was funny and outlandish and over-the-top is not disrespect. Disrespect would be not sharing her. I let others laugh at her because I thought and still think that she was hysterically funny at times, but I don’t consider her a laughing stock and I never did and I don’t think most people who’ve read about her will. I WANT people to know about her, and it’s not revenge but, frankly, love. Admiration. A n
Well, I can explain better by telling another story about a dead mule that will be the last story for this thread.
Actually that’s a lie.
It’s a story about four thousand dead mules.
And it really is true, and it really does contain four thousand dead mules, and while it involves my family I can actually totally verify the factuality of this one with a link to a site about the poor beasties and their deaths. And it’s in these four thousand dead mules and their effect on a relative who I saw daily but who never spoke to me (even though I literally once thought was a god and brought buttons to his deaf mute wife), how they made him cry when he broke bread and affected my family for so many years, that I think I’ve decided on my next move. And I’d love to hear your opinions on my decision.
Unfortunately it’ll have to wait after I take the Mama Sampiro Touring Relicry to storage. And please accept my apologies for the even more rambling and incoherent than usual nature of this one- it’s late and I’m tired but I wanted to finish before Uhaulin’ ass.
I have a feeling, on a totally unrelated note, that my siblings aren’t going to take this U-Haul and storage thing easy. But then again, to quote my grandmother Sybil, * “As a sinner who had a much cruder mouth than I do once said, ‘Fuck ‘em.’”*
Sampiro
The stories I read today did not make me laugh. They make me incredibly sad that there is any element of truth to them. ( I don’t want this to sound like I think you routinely make stuff up, but on the other hand, can you blame me for taking certain portions with a large grain of salt?) I’m not entirely sorry that I read them, if only because it’s (nice isn’t adequate but I don’t know what is and it’s time for me to leave for church) to fill in some of the gaps in what you have told elsewhere in this thread.
On a sort of unrelated note, I’m not exactly glad to hear that you were decompensating earlier this year, but sort of glad to hear it. I have been braced ever since you reappeared for another explosive meltdown. I don’t like them–no matter who is involved–and I’ve been a little afraid you’d meltdown without giving closure to your stories of your mother’s death and what happened thereafter. So I’m glad to hear that at least for the moment you are straightened out on that front.
Best wishes for your future.
Sampiro, you called your mother “the most unconditionally loving person who was capable of change” and I realized that was one of the things I loved the most about my mother, that she was capable of change, and that distinguished her from other women I knew, who were clearly NOT capable of change, and made her more…more fun to know, among other things. So, thank you for helping me to think of my mother in another way. One of the things I learned since losing my mother eight years ago (and another thing is that it can’t possibly have been that long!) is that I keep seeing her in new ways as I talk to someone else who knew her or read something she wrote or something someone wrote to her, which is good since it keeps her alive, and, yes, changing in my mind. I hope you have this experience too, and I am sure you will.
Thanks for writing.
First off, Sampiro, don’t worry about your Cyber Breakdown. Your friends and admirers knew where it was coming from, and as for the rest, well, your Grandma Sybil said it best.
Second, I can tell you the hole in your heart that is the shape of your mother will heal in time, but she will always be a part of your life.
WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TRYING TO SAY YOU LITTLE SORRY…
Oh, sorry… just trying to keep in shape.
On this note, I most definitely admit to giving stories spin- making them funnier than they were by eliminating certain elements and emphasizing others- but I think people would be far more surprised to learn that they’re all- ALL- based very closely on truth, from Rob’s missing member to the Lou Ida hand controlled car and her “adjustment” to Luna’s history and eulogy, etc… A friend who attended the funeral and knows the speakers well and who read this made the comment "It’s such a shame you can’t imitate Gary as it would add dimensions, nobody would believe this guy- especially the constipated eyes closed and podium gripping ‘I’m gonna let you all in on the great secret of existence’ look before uttering something so stupid you’d think he served an apprenticeship with Corky, for if anything the description of him and his eulogy is understated. On the subject of Luna his critique was “Yours was more profound- you quoted her as saying what she tried to say more than what she really said” and that’s probably true (except for the cat killing part, which is verbatim). And that also is true.
So while I don’t appreciate the implication that I’m lying (believe me, there’s no meltdown coming) I’ll admit to tailoring some elements for narrative. Whenever I describe anything I’ve seen or anyone I’ve known or recent events all are portrayed with substantive accuracy; it’s only the details and mood that I play with. (In other words objective truth supplies the black dress and perhaps the necklace and gloves, but I’ll supply the handbag and the pumps.) I’ve never changed a major element or even a major detail of the things I’ve experienced myself other than the obvious “names and identifying details” of living people.
And uh… I’m glad you’re not “sorry” for having read them.
Sampiro–you crack me up!
Thanks so much for taking the time to write all this.
Sampiro, I’m glad to see you back.
I enjoy your stories immensely, and figured out long ago that you sort of exaggerate to make the stories more enjoyable, sad, funny, etc.
I was shocked when I read the meltdown thread. I figured something was going on besides stress, so I’m glad you’ve got all that under control now.
All that being said, welcome back. I look forward to more of your stories. As crappy as some of your life has been, it seems like you’ve done a lot of living.
Sampiro is southern. What he does is tell stories that are the God’s truth, just embellished to add a little color, that’s all. A good southern story teller knows how to embellish and Sampiro is a master of the southern story. This I say with all due respect and awe.
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To me, and I know I’m weird and gayish and all and I don’t pretend to speak for all, but to me telling stories that I hope are funny and outlandish and over-the-top about a mother who was funny and outlandish and over-the-top is not disrespect. Disrespect would be not sharing her. I let others laugh at her because I thought and still think that she was hysterically funny at times, but I don’t consider her a laughing stock and I never did and I don’t think most people who’ve read about her will. I WANT people to know about her, and it’s not revenge but, frankly, love. Admiration.
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Well, I’m a Southern transplant, albeit a teen-rooted sapling, and then, edumacated abit to Southern culture. Um, I got a right Twang of mind that seems to hold and Pass.
Sampiro, I see your descriptions of your Mom as being extraordinary in the depth of truth told, and Truth Told is such a tricky thing in the South. Perhaps because the Truth of the South has so many layers, at least what I’ve learned being here.
There’s what you tell today, which might be saving grace toward tomorrow, as far as your immediate folks are concerned. Hmmm, don’t be a Gossip…be a good citizen.Southerners are good with that.
There’s what you could tell today, but, instead, learn about the folks you live with, and come to understand, for all their foibles, well, you get what they’re about, odd and all… Don’t be a Gossip, but maybe you can be a Politician.Southerners are good with that.
Then there’s what you learn about the folks you live with, come to understand their foibles, see that, hate it, love it, both for why Chrissakes, stay up all night figuring it the Fuck Out, hacking it out on paper for mostly the Love part, taking it into your innermost being and coming out with what might pass as at most a frustrated pass at adequate. Shit, Southern writers are Really Good at that.
And mine is a Sad Pass at explainining that.