Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Jeopardy's All Better

That is, when Mary is awake for it.

Monday, August 22, 2011

Why Jeopardy Ain't Worth It Now

Just realized I missed Jeopardy tonight, but then realized there's little joy in it without playing with Mary (and, I admit, beating her by a honking big margin.)

Sunday, August 21, 2011


Closet Bones

Before forcing you to read much further, let me warn you, after the next paragraph, or maybe two or three, there isn't going to be anything about Mizusho, or the other stories I'm writing or have written, or a humorous essay like the one I put up here about B-70 Valkyries and Passenger Pigeons (both of them being extinct birds of North America.)

I'm writing a sort of modern Arabian Nights story which is going to turn out to be either pretty good or, as a couple of characters in that story say, “a big old pile of horse turds.” It's centered around a stranded man in the US military finding a genie in a bottle. But from there on, it is not going to have much resemblance to the old I Dream of Jeannie TV series which, by the way, I watched when it first came out, and now watch occasionally on Hulu. I thought Barbara Eden was Hot Stuff back in 1965 when I was fourteen—and I think she's Hot Stuff now. Yes, I would cheat with her in a New York minute if I ever got the chance.

I really think I should at least tie up my Oh My Goddess fanfic with Mara, Skuld, and Mormons—though I think I've been at least as careful to not say they are Mormons as Big Love's people have to claim that their polygamous church isn't meant to represent the Mormons, or, to use the really proper form, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, or LDS, for short. I grew up among the Mormons of southeastern Idaho until I went to live with my mother and her second husband in California and attend a Catholic high school, all-male, though Salesian High of Richmond (or maybe San Pablo) CA is coed now. I rather hoped my niece would go there, but she pumped out three kids instead. Anyway, I'm quite familiar with real Mormons; I spent my summers back in Idaho, and my mother's place in California was half a block from another Mormon church. It's easy to find the Mormon church in any small town in southern Idaho: Just look for the biggest building that ain't a grain elevator or a potato cellar. I sincerely want to finish that story before I die, which might come sooner than I'd like to think since I'm sixty years old, around a hundred pounds overweight, and probably have blood pressure so high the next person to check it will probably cuss in amazement that I actually could walk into his or her joint.

Anyway, this entry really is about skeletons in my families closet. I'm not sure I'll include any of my own, but I'm not sure I won't. Most of these are speculation, but I will try to separate out the confirmed facts from the possible B.S.

I will begin with the most impressive person in my family related to certainly by marriage and perhaps more: The man I got two-thirds of my name from. His name was Thomas Carlyle Young, born in Kansas City, Missouri or some town close to the city. He was literally a giant of a man, much taller than the actual John Wayne, the only actor who could have credibly portrayed T.C. In a movie. He had enormous hands; even when I had my full growth, two-and a half of his fingers would have enough width to cover all four of my fingers. Those were strong hands, too. Two of his fingers were bent and locked from old baseball injuries—or at least that's the story I got from him.

He was a cousin of President Harry Truman's. They shared a great-grandfather. He was also related close enough to another Missouri Young by the name of Brigham to frustrate the local Mormons because unlike Brigham, he stubbornly remained a Methodist. This is not to say I every witnessed Uncle Tom inside any church except to attend a function I was part of, mostly Cub Scouts. The only religious feelings I can confirm is that he really liked to sing at least one the chorus of “When the Roll is Called Up Yonder.” But then again, he also sang a little ditty that went, “More rain, more rest, more niggers in the West” nearly as often, and just once when he was teaching me to drive when I was thirteen (his 1949 GMC pickup was a year older than me) he pointed to a bull in a field and sang:

Oh, Johnny, come milk the bull,

There's only one tit to pull,

There's only one diddle,

It hangs in the middle,

Oh, Johnny, come milk the Bull!

He moved out to Butte County, Idaho following his friend and brother-in-law Sam Paisley. Sam was married to one of Uncle Tom's many sisters. I never met any of them, but his brother Wade lived long enough for me to remember him. Unlike Uncle Tom, Uncle Wade stayed skinny after he passed sixty. A good thing, right? Well, Uncle Wade died at least ten years before Uncle Tom, probably more since I'm so vague on when he did pass on. Uncle Tom didn't depart this world until a little way into 1974, and he didn't really fail in any significant way until the last two years of his life. He lived three or maybe four months after his 90th birthday.

Now, the connection that put the “Uncle” in “Uncle Tom” is that he was married to my great-grandmother's sister. My great grandmother was one Effie Eugenia Thomas, and from the few pictures I remember of her, I can't confirm that she ever wore any other expression than a scowl. After her one and only husband deserted her but before she gave birth to Grandma Helen, she moved from brother-to-brother, living with each until his wife laid down the law and said something like “Either she goes or I do!” She ran out of brothers eventually and went to live with her sister Oakie Lee, who is always smiling in her photographs. Oakie Lee was married to Uncle Tom; maybe that's why Oakie Lee was always smiling. While I still had those old photographs, whenever I looked at Oakie Lee, I thought I just about remembered her, but it couldn't be true. She died early in the year I was born (I'm a Scorpio, BTW.) She died on the same day as her paripatetic, perpetually pissed-off sister, although they were in different hospitals. It was the headline in the relevant edition of The Arco Advertiser, and I used to have two copies of it at my house, when I still had a house. Somehow Oakie Lee managed to give her face to my mother and then to myself, and to the only sister I know about (My dad was a bigamist, by the way, even without being a Mormon.)

Oakie Lee only had one child, T.C. Young, Jr., a sad little tombstone between hers and Uncle Tom's at the cemetery in Arco, Idaho, the Butte County seat. His birth date and death date are either the same, or not very far apart.

If you've read those parts of The Milk of Demon Kindness I actually wrote and put up at FanFiction.net, Basalt County is a very thinly disguised Butte County, and Arcola is Arco.

Since it's been awhile since I left off the story of Sam Paisley, you can get a book about his life if you ever visit the Craters of the Moon National Monument west of Arco. It's a fascinating collection of varied volcanic formations. Two of the oldest buildings in Arco, the city auditorium and one of the church's that isn't Mormon are built of blocks of black basalt quarried from the region before there was a law against it. Sam pestered the Federal Government into creating the Craters as a National Monument. A visit will remove all doubt that while not every resident of Butte County believes in Heaven, all of them believe in Hell. They've seen Hell with the fire out.

The Butte that gives the county its name is a big and hopefully extinct volcano rising from the fairly flat desert that fills in most of the fish-hook-shape of the Snake River. It's a very large stretch of gawdawful, godforsaken scrub and sagebrush with gramma grass tufts in the very best places and water humans can drink in none. It's a splendid place to stick, say, maybe the largest collection of nuclear waste on the planet, otherwise known as the Idaho National Laboratory, if they haven't changed the name of Idaho's dirty little secret again.

Crossing that sixty or seventy miles, I have often thought that if there was water over the desert—well, it wouldn't be a desert any more, but nevertheless, if what is desert now was the floor of a huge lake or a shallow sea, the Big Butte and the Twin Buttes would have been islands in it. And, big surprise, that's exactly what they were at various times after the glaciers melted but before all the water drained. You can feel it especially strongly crossing the gap in winter; snow all the way, usually.

The last year Uncle was alive, and I was still living with him and my grandmother Helen on the last of his properties, not once but twice we had visitors drop in that might as well have come from Mars or points beyond. Now I don't remember who came first, but that's not important. The first one I'm going to tell you about was a man pretending to be a historian but actually a treasure hunter, who tried to pump Uncle Tom for information on the mystery of the Robbers' Basalt, a particular lava flow near the Big Butte. The mystery is this: in the 1880s, I think, silver from the mine at Mackey in Custer County, the next one north from Butte, was shipped to the rail line running along the Snake River over a wagon road running near the Big Butte. The silver was cast into eighty-pound spheres for shipment, too big and awkward to fit into saddlebags. There were absolutely no roads branching off between Root Hog (which became Arco) and I believe Idaho Falls, seventy miles. Hello, lava fields, a lot of them with lots of volcanic glass that would chop up a horse's hooves even if it was shod. Yet somehow, one shipment was held up. The posse caught one man who promised to lead them to the rest of his gang in return for not decorating the first tree the posse could find (there were and are a few small timbered patches on the Big Butte, and on one of the Twin Buttes.) But just as the light was failing, the robber double-crossing his partners double-crossed them by escaping, and the fate of horse, man, silver, and the wagon the silver was last seen loaded aboard remains unknown.

If Uncle had really known anything to help that bozo, he didn't and never would have told the “historian.” Uncle Tom spent most of the life I shared with him hunting for gold, or silver, or beryllium, thorium, flourite, and, of course, treasure. Until the last decade he found time to bring back enough venison to fill an enormous freezer on our back porch. He used a 30-06, and I never remember a new 20-round box of 30-06 ammo. With no apology to Robert di Niro or to Daniel Day Lewis, T.C. Young could do anything the Deer Hunter or the Deerslayer (hero of Last of the Mohicans) with no stuntmen, no special effects, and perhaps no hunting license every time. I'll tell you for true, Bambi makes for some mighty fine eatin'.

Uncle Tom was nearly blind when this jerk showed up, but that didn't keep the “historian” from pressing the old man for hours, ruining a fine day outdoors sitting in our one and only deck chair. Our house was tiny, but it had these magnificent Northern Cottonwoods around it, five or six of them, at least sixty feet high. We called them silver maples. They were wonderful 50 weeks of the year; the other two, they made the yard look like it was full of snow. The cotton in “cottonwood” the male trees (and they were male trees) grow these sort of wormlike things that in turn burst out with white fibers saturated with male sex cells. Idaho Power and Light paid my grandmother to cut them all down within a few months of his death, ending all threat that they would fall on their power lines—and turning a magical place into one more ugly patch of rural poverty.

The other surprise visit was from my father, Bill. This was the one and only time I remember meeting Grandmother Sewell. She was one of those five-feet-tall, five-feed-around, mostly German ladies from God's country in the middle of Texas. She talked fast, struck me as a straight shooter, and looked a lot younger than her son. Dad was going around mending fences before a big heart operation which he didn't expect to survive. But every time I think he has to be dead, damned if he hasn't turned up again, alive. The only thing that was off about her was the way she rushed off; I'm not sure she stayed for a whole hour. I mean, we could have afforded to feed her and Dad a meal before they took off. But then again, who knows how many sons and daughters and wives he had left to visit before that operation?

Uncle Tom was a Fish and Game Warden in the 1920s, when he blew a hole in a private dam across the Salmon River at Sunbeam to let the salmon run get through, and when he made damned sure famed western writer Zane Grey didn't get out of Idaho with the trophy from the bighorn sheep Grey had shot without a license. It is my guess that if Grey had come to Uncle Tom himself and asked for a little favor, he would have gotten it; the Fish and Game service probably made Uncle Tom a Warden because he was the biggest poacher in Idaho. But instead Mr. Grey sent down one of “his people” to get the permit—that's exactly how Uncle Tom always told the story, one of “his people.”

Then he became the Sheriff of Butte County. He left the office just before my time, but he was the County Commissioner until about 1960, I think, and he put in quite a few of the roads. You could always tell if Uncle Tom put in a road or not because if he hadn't put the road in, there was something wrong with it. At least you'd know if you ever were on the road with Uncle Tom. I don't think the job paid squat, but sometimes Stan would come over with a road grader and either plow out the snow in our driveways in winter, or, once, smooth out the dirt and gravel. Stan became the next CC, and Uncle Tom thought he was a perfect idiot for getting the county to buy two old DUKWs (amphibious trucks) after what will probably turn out to be the only flood in the Big Lost River Valley for a hundred years. It wasn't really much of a flood; Uncle Tom drove grandma and me through maybe the deepest part of it on the main highway in a 1962 Ford Fairlane, which was not exactly a submarine. Stan had a drawl, a cigarette always hanging out of his mouth, and one eye damaged by childhood measles that looked everywhere except straight ahead. If you remember the character actor Jack Elam, you've got most of Stan; make Elam taller and pretty skinny, bullseye.

Not a lot of skeletons so far. Well, I'm not sure any of them belong to Thomas Carlyle Young. I have only two suspicions. The first is entirely based on a very slight connection: I read in his obituary that he had been a member of the Woodmen of the World. Well, maybe he was, if in the same way as he was a Methodist. The only men's lodge in Butte County was and still is the Masons; the oldest building in Arco is either that black stone church I mentioned or the Masonic Temple, right next to city hall and the Sheriff's Department. I remember quite a few gravestones with Master Mason or 32rd Degree Mason symbols. T. C. Young's gravestone doesn't have any affiliation, and it's definitely not the kind of peculiar headstone favored by the Woodmen. I'd never heard of the Woodmen at all. There are such, but...

The connection that might be is that the two clowns who founded the second Ku Klux Klan after D.W Griffith's Birth of a Nation stirred up the nigger-bashing pot were selling phony memberships to the Woodmen of the World before hitting on this scheme to sell bedsheets at a 2000% markup.

I'd kind of like the second suspicion to turn out to be true, but I have a way to go before it will fall into its logical place.

The other significant Uncle in my life was Uncle Thurmond Johnson. With his wife Vera helping, he owned and operated a restaurant named Uncle Tom's Cabin in Richmond, California. It was at or near the corner of San Pablo and MacDonald Avenues; it might have been the same building that was the Honolulu Cafe for many years and is now a restaurant under new management and a new name. It's one of those long but narrow places. Since I was in high school (late 1960s) there's been a big “Mexican” restaruant next to it called the Hacienda, a pretty ugly building with pretty good food, always a pretty cocktail waitress, and sometimes a piano bar. It's a lot easier to spot the Hacienda than the little restaurant hidden next to it.

Uncle Thurmond was the first person I remember dying on me. I thought a lot of him. Even at three or four I think I felt there was something a little skewed about little old Uncle Thurmond; I sure seemed to wind up in bars with him a lot, even though I don't think he ever got drunk around me. He died when I was either three or four, and I cried for him.

Later, I wish I hadn't.

Aunt Vera was Thurmond Johnson's connection to me: She was my Grandfather Watkins' sister, Grandma's sister-in-law. And to be frank, she was a lot bigger than Uncle Thurmond and seriously beat upon with the ugly stick. But she was immensely kind-hearted, and could she cook. Maybe she was the very beginning of the weight problem I've always had. Howso? Well, I can only remember about six months of living with my father, my mother, and my little sister together, and it wasn't six months in a row. The rest of the time, I was either living up in Idaho with Grandma Watkins and Uncle Tom, or living with Aunt Vera. Funny thing, it was just me who went to stay with Grandma or Aunt Vera; my sister never went, too, never even visited as I remember.

Anyway, I guess I wound up with Grandma and Uncle Tom on a permanent basis because Aunt Vera married a younger man named Frank, or maybe Frank married Aunt Vera's inheritance. Never found Vera's will. I guess Frank was in drinking money for quite awhile.

As you may have guessed, my parents split up. Technically they never divorced because legally they were never married—the “bigamist” thing was not a joke. This turned out to be a good thing for my mom later because it allowed her eventually to marry her second husband in the Catholic Church. He was a very serious Catholic. And this came about from a connection through Aunt Vera: After she sold her wonderful house in Walnut Creek, she moved into a fourplex in Richmond, and across the hall lived one of my stepfather's many sisters. He'd just got seriously and very cruelly dumped, and Aggie and Vera contrived to set him up with my mom. All in all, this was a good thing for me, eventually.

I didn't know my mom had remarried until I was thirteen. She showed up with her far from new husband in a hideously ugly 1958 Impala painted in not one but two tones of puke. Poor Al, my stepdad. Uncle Tom was still going full-steam in 1964. The next day, a little day-trip of, oh, 300 miles or so, with Uncle Tom driving, pointing out the sights as he did—driving along the Salmon river with rock faces inches from the edge of the pavement on one side and twenty, thirty, forty foot drops into the river inches from the payment on the other side. Uncle Tom taught me all the right things about driving; he just didn't do them himself most of the time, such as favoring one side of the road over the other, or paying that much attention to the speed limits. I'm sure the scariest man Al had met until that day was his own father, a man so mean he'd been kicked out of the army. The German army. But Uncle Tom didn't even notice Al was there most of the time, I think. Maybe Jimmy Lee was more of a man to Uncle Tom. After all, Jimmy Lee could hunt and fish and shoot (I can just shoot.) The only manly man thing I ever saw Al do was drink, and he really didn't do enough of it to qualify as a professional or even an amateur drunk.

Long after he was dead, and after my mother was dead, I discovered in a desk a poem Al wrote in high school about Lindbergh flying the Atlantic. It had to have been an assignment, but he'd kept it, and it wasn't awful. It was the one and only time I saw around that armor of responsibility Al had built around himself, and it was too late to do him any good.

Al was an indefatigable worker, pressing on regardless. Unfortunately that just doesn't count in the way our culture rates the manliness of men. Uncle Tom was a consistent failure over the course of his life; Al built ships that were a big part of winning for the right side of the most important war the whole world has ever fought and, Please God, ever will fight. People still talk about Uncle Tom in Butte and Custer, and his name is still up at the head of the road he lived, where it turns off from US 93, thirty-seven years after T.C. Young died. Al is forgotten; the last of his sisters have passed on, and as per my mother's wishes, I scattered her ashes in Butte County, instead of having her buried with Al. I did visit Al's grave a few years ago. I doubt if anyone else ever will. Uncle Tom never went to war anywhere, and yet he still has a better reputation than another resident of Moore, population less than 200, a retiring man, whose name I do not remember and who I do not remember ever speaking with Uncle Tom. But that forgotten man did win the Medal of Honor.

Jimmy Lee was really Virginia Lee Watkins, my mother. I got the impression that Uncle Tom had raised her more like a son than a daughter before Grandma Helen Watkins moved to California with her, living with Uncle Thermond and Aunt Vera. Grandma did have a job, some kind of store, not the restaurant, but she lived with her former or perhaps still legally attached sister-in-law—BTW, neither my Grandmother Watkins nor Aunt Vera Johnson ever said one word to me about me about Grandfather Watkins until the 1970s. Grandma Watkins was the only one speaking by then, Aunt Vera being dead for over ten years. I don't even know his given name; he went by “Ty.”

Maybe I'm stalling here. What happened to change Jimmy Lee the tomboy into the damaged soul I knew was this: Nice little old Uncle Thurmond raped her when she was thirteen, or maybe I should say, started raping her. What's a man to do when he doesn't want to fool with a pregnant woman? Not Aunt Vera; she was barren, or perhaps untouched. I mean my sweet little Grandma Helen Watkins; Thurmond knocked her up while she was living in his house. The “tumor” probably got too big for an abortion; somewhere out there, probably I have or had an aunt or uncle I'm never going to meet and who didn't or won't ever find out I exist.

Maybe Bill Sewell wasn't my dad after all.

I do know Uncle Thurmond didn't do any time, but my mother was in the Juvenile system long enough to marry Bill just to get out of it, according to her own words. My mom hated sex, even other people having it. One day she screamed for me to stop when I was staying over with my girlfriend and we were being loud in our bedroom. I'm still with that girlfriend, BTW; I'm sixty and Mary's sixty-eight now, and this was about twenty years ago. Sorry to spoil any nubile fantasies you might have been starting.

My mother was eighteen when I was born, in 1950. She had my sister in 1955. She didn't tell me my sister had been adopted out until 1970, and my sister had no idea I existed at all. We've never been very close since.

The suspicion I'd kind of like to be true is that Uncle Tom was really my mother's father, not “Ty.” The first time I heard the truth, I had great difficulty accepting it. Grandma? Even after I walked in on her when she was 58 in 1963 and caught her with her hair down out of those tight, twisted braids she always war, and, because she was washing her hair, nothing but a slip on—a memorable day, also, because it was the day of JFK's funeral—I just didn't think of her as sexual in any way. After seeing what she really looked like, and re-evaluating what Helen Dorothy's boobs had looked like, I have to say when she wasn't trying to look like a 120-year-old Chinese three-times grandmother, she wasn't bad at all for her age or for a woman quite a lot younger. But that one is very much wishful thinking, unless I missed out on every single one of Uncle Tom's genes for tallness, large hands, roman nose, really outrageously large ears, complete lack of athletic ability. I'm taller than Uncle Thermond, even shrunken down to 5'5” but once a towering 5'7”, just one inch shorter than the actual Napoleon. But you can put that up to my mother, a little on the tall side for a woman, and better nutrition. All the time around Mountain View, Palo Alto, and around the Bay, I see pairs of Asian women walking together, and I realize the one a head taller is the daughter. I guess there's a faint hope that the smallness of Thurmond Johnson canceled out the expansiveness of Thomas Carlyle Young. But wishful thinking can make you believe almost anything. How else can you explain George W. Bush getting a second term?