For my father....

Gunsmoke

9/27/12

 

     When I was growing up, every Saturday night my family and I would gather around our one TV set and watch Gunsmoke.  And every Saturday night, Marshall Dillon, Chester, Doc, Festus, Sam, Miss Kitty and later Quint, Thad and Newly would deal with that week’s societal lesson.  These morality plays were generally acted out in the near-mythological down of Dodge City.

    To quote Los Angeles Times columnist Cecil Smith, “Gunsmoke was our own Iliad and Odyssey created from standard elements of the dime novel and the pulp western… It was the stuff of legend.”   It truly was and as a kid, I truly loved the show.

    It was on this show where I first learned (among other things) that racism existed, not all women married their sweethearts, people die, doctors cared about their patients, the good guy always wins and what an alcoholic was. 

    Marshall Dillion was an orphan.  Chester walked with a limp.  Quint was a half-breed.  Kitty was a madam.  And Doc liked his liquor.  Flawed characters to be sure, but characters that possessed such nobility they might have originated in an ancient Greek drama; Aristotle’s Poetics with its strict rules of drama notwithstanding.

   One show that sticks with me to this day was is the one when the town drunk tries to get sober and the good citizens of Dodge take him in.  They gave him a job at the General Store but the poor man had a relapse when he drank all the vanilla extract in the store.  I asked my mother why that poor, shamed man would do such a silly thing and she simply said, “Some men have to have it. Vanilla extract has alcohol in it.” I’ll never forget the look of incomprehensible demoralization on that man’s face as he lay in a drunken stupor on the floor among all those little vanilla bottles.

   And so in honor of that show which helped shape a life of social awareness, I will call this weekly blog Gunsmoke and like the writer’s of Gunsmoke, in addition to showcasing some of the writing in my books, I will attempt to deal with the relevant social issues that as a society we face on a daily basis.   I will appreciate any comments you make and please pass this on to your friends.      Don’t forget to vote and like I always tell my daughter, “Make a difference.”  

  Today’s piece was written about my father’s last days and death.  Like so many fathers of the 50’s and 60’s, my Dad was a complex man, a man who couldn’t show affection; a man who had conflicts that ran so deep, a shrink would need a scalpel to get to them.  But he did the best he could and by the time he died, we had made our peace and in his death, I discovered he was always the father I wanted and needed.   This piece is from my first book, a memoir called The Road Runner / An American Odyssey.

                                                               Thanks,

                                                                          John Stover  9/27/12

     From The Road Runner / An American Odyssey….

    So, at this point, my father is driving back from Atlantic City; he has his heart attack and is plied with drinks or resting at a restaurant, whichever one wishes to believe.  He gets back to his home in New Hampshire and is taken to a country bumpkin, out in the sticks, hospital.  That is when I got the news.

     My sisters called me from the hospital while I was at work.  “Dad’s real sick,” they began.  “His condition is bad.”  I didn’t take it too seriously.  Nothing could kill my father.

     “Put him on,” I say.  The man who took the phone was a stranger.

     “Hi, Johnny,” he whispered.  “Thanks for getting me that room at the Taj Mahal.” 

     Those were the last words he ever said to me.

 
     “You’re welcome, Dad,” my shocked reply.  “You get better, hear?  Katy needs her Grampy, so she can come and visit you this summer.”  Silence.  Mercifully, my sister picked up the phone.

     “You better come home.  It doesn’t look good.”  I made plans to leave that evening.  It was two days before Valentine’s Day.

     I went by Jodi’s house to say goodbye to Katy.  I had several hours before my flight.  While I was on the phone, talking with my little girl, I changed my travel plans.  “Katy’s coming with me,” I told Jodi.  She had no problem with that.  We packed Katy’s Barney backpack and the two of us took the red-eye to see Grampy, my father.

     My brother Jay picked us up at the airport.  He was a mess.  He really loved my father; I had never seen it before.

     “Dad’s going fast,” he said, “We’d better hurry.”  He was crying.  At that moment I realized I loved my brother.  For all the pain he inflicted, all the suffering I endured, he was still my brother.  Borne of the same parents, raised in the same house, here we were, together, going to see our father die.  We rushed to his car.

      My father had been moved to Beth Israel Hospital in Boston.  My sisters in their no nonsense manner had taken the initiative and moved him to Boston’s finest hospital where he would receive the best of care.  Had my father been conscious, he would have asked the room rate. 

     Katy was my salvation.  She stayed right beside me, giving me strength.  I was three years sober.  She was five and one-half-years old.  Wise beyond her years.  I don’t know what I would have done without her.

     We reached the hospital in minutes.  There he lay, unconscious, peaceful, his massive chest rising and falling, aided by a respirator.

     “Dad, it’s me, Johnny.  Johnny and Katy, Dad.  Dad?  We’re here Dad.  We came to see you get better.  Dad?  Dad?”

     If anything could wake him up, this would...  “You better wake up Dad, this room is costing you a lot of money.”  Nothing.  There was no gurgle, no spit, just the hissing of the respirator.  He looked like he would wake up any minute and ask me if I had to pay extra for the sudden departure.  But instead he just lay there.  The whole family was assembled.  We stood around him like a real family, as six individuals who really loved and cared about each other.  We had come together.  We would hold, remain strong, for my father. 

     “He would have wanted it that way,” we all agreed.  Eventually, knowing we could do little, we all left to get some rest.  The hospital would call if there were any change.  The prognosis wasn’t good.

     I went back to my sister Jewel’s.  She was a nurse at Beth Israel and assured us we would be called if there were any changes.  The phone rang at 5:00AM, the same hour we were notified of my mother’s death.  The news was not good.  We’d better get there fast.  

     We all met in the doctor’s lounge.  The specialist gave us our options...  “The heart is badly damaged.  He has little chance of survival.  If we take him off the respirator, he’ll probably go in an hour.”

     “What if we take him off the medication?”  I inquired.  “Will he wake up?”

     “Yes, but he’ll be disoriented, agitated,” the surgeon told me.

     “I don’t want that,” this from his wife, the alleged killer.  “I don’t want him to suffer,” she repeated.

     One by one, my four sisters agreed to remove the life support.  My brother, still crying, also agreed.  I was the sole holdout.  “But, if we take him off the medication and he stays on the respirator, will he come to?”

     “Yes!” her simple reply.  It hit me like a hammer. 

     “Well, lets talk about this a minute.”  I said.  “I’m not ready to just let him go like that.”  All at once, they ganged up on me.

     “You just want him to wake up so he can see you and Katy,” this from Jade.

     “So!” 

     “You didn’t see him before, John, he was so upset,” this from Jess. 

     “Upset?  Dead?  What’s worse?”  I wanted to know.

     “John, he was so agitated, so scared!”  His wife. 

     “But he will wake up?”  I asked again. 

     “Yes, he will,” again the surgeon. 

     “I’m not ready to pull the plug,” I intoned.  Their decision to pull his plug was reached so quickly, I thought there must be a power shortage.  At this point, they were all against me.  Six to one.  Two if you count my daughter. 

    “I want Grampy to wake up. I miss my Grampy.”  Katy clung hard to me; her little blue eyes still red from no sleep in almost two days.

     “I need to open a dialogue here.”  I said.

      I remember it like it was yesterday.  And on and on.  I would not give in.  If I was going to make a decision to end my father’s life, I wanted to take more than five minutes to do it, so I held out. 

     Eventually the doctor persuaded me.  “It would be the best decision,” she told me.  It was not one I took lightly.  I had stood against my entire family.  Mine was the voice of compassion.  Their voices were those of reason, of common sense, of fiscal prudence. 

   “He would have wanted it this way, he wouldn’t have wanted to be a burden,” my brother’s logic.  The room cost $2,000/day.  That was a burden.  None of us wanted him to die, but it seemed like it was easier to let him go than to watch him fight.  By 6:30 that morning, the decision had been made.  I had outlasted everyone by an extra twenty-five minutes.  It was the hardest decision I ever had to make, but finally, I agreed. 

     “Do it!” I said.

Our Father Who Ought To Be In Heaven

  We walked into his room, the massive chest rising and falling.  Eyes closed.  The hissing keeping time for his damaged heart.  We watched the doctors disassemble our father’s life.  He breathed on his own for a minute or two.  Then slower.  He showed no distress.  Finally, the monitor told us what we already knew.  He was dead.  My father was dead.  I had wished for this since I was five years old and now here it was.  My sister Jess grabbed my hand and began a prayer to a God we never believe existed, “Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name!”  We all held hands.  All six kids.  We stood over my father and prayed for him and for us.  It was truly a beautifully shared moment.  It would be the last we would ever have as a family.

     We buried my father, almost as quickly as we ended his life.  The wake was held the following day, February 14th, Valentine’s Day.  The funeral the day after.  He was in the ground before the newspaper heralding his demise was on the streets.  We had six powerful and diverse personalities to contend with.  Add to this my father’s widow and her six children—and you had a recipe for a stew of meat and potatoes dissension.  Already the details of his will were being whispered amongst the heirs.  Hushed expectations, for no one knew what to expect.  How much did he leave?  How much would I get?  Our sadness would only be allayed by the details of that much-discussed document, his will.  

     I had an ace-in-the-hole.  My best friend Luke had drawn up the will.  Luke gave my father a break on his fees and, as you know, my father loved a bargain.  Poor Luke had no idea that he was about to walk into a hornet’s nest.  He was between six rocks and a hard ex-wife.  Poor Luke.  Luke Murdock, Attorney-at-War.

     The wake was a simple affair.  Because of the immediacy of the situation and the fact I was leaving the following afternoon, we held his viewing the very next day.  All those who could have or would have come would not be notified in time.  Would Bertha, his ex-girlfriend, attend the affair?  How about the guys from the Hotel?  Would they get on their Sunday suits and shuffle over to nearby Conley’s Funeral Home, if notified in time?  We’ll never know.  In total, perhaps forty people attended his wake.  Mostly friends of us kids.

     I wrote a simple eulogy in the car on the way to Conley’s Funeral Home.  If asked, I had planned on saying a few words for my father.  To pay my respects.  There was just not enough time to prepare and memorize a formal piece.  I would have to wing it.

     My father’s funeral was much different than my mother’s.  It was less of a shock.  We had a little time to prepare and he was not fifty-one years old like our mother had been.  We had been anticipating this day from childhood.  “When I’m gone this.  After I’ve died that.”  It was his litany.  Before bed say three Hail Herbies and ten Our Fathers’ Will.  We had been weaned on the will.  Raised on the “after I’m gones.”  It was almost anticlimactic.

 
     I walked over to my father’s dead body.  There he lay.  A giant crucifix at the foot of his coffin.  A rosary wrapped around his lifeless fingers.  Who had done that?  He certainly hadn’t requested it.  He hated organized religion.  It was just another instrument of his rage.  He would not wear anything formal.  At my oldest sister’s wedding, the proceedings were almost halted until it was agreed he could wear his white wool socks with his black tux.  No hose for this man, God damn it.  He hated ties in life, so we wouldn’t bury him in one.  He wore his mock turtle sweater, accompanied by his navy blazer.  He looked like he was heading to the track.  The make-up artist had done a good job.  He looked almost happy.  A peaceful repose. 

     I looked down at my father’s converted hands and got mad.  He looked like he was dressed up for a revival meeting.  He didn’t love Jesus and Jesus didn’t love him.  His religion was one of fear.  His was not a punishing God, he did the punishing and here he lay, with a rosary around his embalmed fingers. 

     Something had to be done.

Into The Storm

 

I turned around and walked out of the hall. It was February; the middle of a severe winter.  I had on a mock turtle and my navy blazer, nothing more.  I walked into the snow.  I stood in the cold, my thin California blood oblivious to the tempest.  I knew what my father wanted.  What he hated more then death itself was “a phony.”  He hated people who represented something other than what they really were.  If we wanted to bury my father with something he revered, then goddamn it, I would do just that.  I began walking into the storm.

     I arrived sometime later at a liquor store.  The same liquor store where the condemned men from the Hotel, would buy their cheap wine and whisky.  I had walked several blocks and I was just down the street from the Hotel, my father’s hotel. 

     I kept on walking.

    The Hotel had not changed in the years since my father’s reign.  It still had the same green aluminum siding, the same neon sign, blinking...

 The New East Oak Hotel

Completely Modernized

Some Rooms With Bath

Brockton’s Largest and Finest

Free Parking in Rear

 

     That sign was forty years old.  It was no longer the largest.  I doubt if it ever was the finest.  Today, two and one-half years later, it has been torn down, a casualty of urban renewal.

      But on this February day, Valentine’s Day, the Hotel still stood.  I had not been inside in over twenty years.  I walked up the front steps, through the double storm doors, into the warmth of the checkerboard lobby.  Nothing had changed.

      The lobby was filled with strangers.  I didn’t know a lost soul.  I walked over to the green Formica desk, still insulated with its plate glass windows. 

      “Anybody here remember Herb Stone?”  I inquired.

      “Over there,” the less than helpful desk clerk.

       I walked over to the same red vinyl couches, smelled the same stale cigarettes and then I saw Larry.  Larry O ‘Reilly.  The Santa Gauze man.  He no longer looked like a redheaded Curly.  These days he looked like crimson Santa Gauze.  He must have gained two hundred pounds.  He was huge.  Red and huge.

      The years had not been kind to Larry.  He was still over medicated.  He did not seem to remember me, but he did recall my father.  “Do you want to tell some of the other boys?”  I asked him. 

      “Mmnnahhh,” he had his own problems.  I left him to his cigarette.

      Walking back, I realized how much my life had changed.  I was the boy raised among chaos and insanity.  It was my heritage, my birthright.  It could easily have been me living there.  I had come so close several times, but I had managed to escape that trap.  I had left the Netherworld.  I lived in the sunshine.  A reborn man.  Sober, with a job and family.  Raising myself from the depths of despair, I would be on a plane in the next twenty-four hours and return to my golden life in California.  A simple phrase crept into my mind.  “If nothing changes, nothing changes.”  I had made the changes.  The necessary changes to reclaim my life.  I had admitted to a problem with drugs and alcohol.  I went to meetings.  I carried the message to others.  Those measures would not always be enough.  Today though, it was enough.  I looked up to the gray skies and spoke to a God I was never sure existed and I thanked Him.  I thanked Him for my life.  I thanked Him for my daughter.  I asked Him to watch over my father’s soul.  And there and then, in that bleak winter storm, I knew that God did indeed exist and that He had been with me my entire life.  I continued on through the snow, into the liquor store.  I would give my father something he did believe in.  I would give him something to take to a better world.  

     It was a simple decision really.  I bought a Hershey Bar with Almonds and a nip of Ron Rico Rum.  My father’s favorite.  I pocketed my change and took my provisions for a New World back to the funeral parlor, back into the storm.

      The crowd had grown slightly.  The viewing hours were coming to an end.  My brother stood in the corner, very serious, shaking hands.  My oldest sister Jane was working the crowd, inquiring if she could get anyone anything.  Jewel and Jess sat with their families.  I walked past a reluctant Uncle Willy standing in the outer hall, on through the crowd and up to the casket.  I dropped to my knees, 

      “Dad,” I began. 

      “Thanks!  Thanks for everything you did for us.  I know you did your best.” 

      Silently I whispered, “I love you, Dad!  Say hi to Mom.”  Than I slipped the candy bar into his breast pocket, the bottle beside it.  A little treat, a nosh, something to tide you over until you reach the other side.  I smiled as I placed his favorite items within his reach.  “Go lightly, Dad.  Go with God.”  A God I now knew indeed existed.

      My gifts did not go unnoticed.  My younger sister Jade walked over and immediately judged my conduct.  “It will only draw maggots,” she sneered.

     “Jade, it’s not the candy bar that is going to draw the maggots,” I retorted.

      “Hmmm,” her one word reply.  It was obvious she still hated me.

        Well, it seems most of the other mourners approved of my gifts.  They all started leaving their own offerings.  Dad’s blue blazer was bedecked with medals of St. Christopher, an AAA key ring, pictures of grandchildren.  It’s a wonder they didn’t put pennies on his eyes.  The poor man was so weighted down with cheap mementos; he looked like he had just come from the State Fair.

      Eventually, the gift giving subsided.  The rush to leave something with the corpse faded.  The last prayers and blessings were said.  The Pastor asked if anyone would like to say any last words.  I hesitated.  “Let the others go first.”  I reasoned.  I would go last.  No one could follow my act.

      My brother, much to my astonishment, declined.  He was too overcome to speak.  My sisters Jewel and Jess also remained in the background.  Then Tammy spoke.  She spoke simply and with love.  She praised my father.  She talked about his good traits, what a good and kind man he was.  I’m not sure, but I think I heard the body turning over in its casket.  A full revolution blocked by too many doo dads.  He really hated hypocrisy.

       My oldest sister Jane went next.  She spoke with the certain hysteria of one who is about to get willfully fucked.  For reasons that go too far back for me to tell, she was eliminated from the will.  She would get nothing; her children, the same.  But today, she spoke with conviction and a purpose.  She foretold of annual reunions at the family compound.  “Compound?”  What were we, the Kennedy’s?  She was getting her expunged foot into an uncertain family door.  She was his first-born.  What had happened?  She would get her 1/6th share in the family home, but that was all.

      Jane was followed by one of Tammy’s daughters, Tamara, a part time masseuse and manicurist.  Hers was more of the rambling type of speech.  “I loved Herbie,” she began.  “And he loved me and all of us kids!”  O.K., I don’t have a problem with that.  “Herbie was my father,” she continued.

      “Well, your step-father,” I thought to myself.  Still if that’s how she feels....

      “He thought of me as his own daughter.”  Now my sisters were beginning to stir.  The hair on the back of my neck began to rise.  “He loved me as his own.” 

     “What?” this from several sisters.  The mood of the hall began to change.  People forgot their mourning and began to choose sides.  My sisters were becoming openly hostile.  It was getting ugly and this would only be the beginning.  Amidst great wracking and sobbing, Tamara nearly collapsed at the podium.  Her older brother rescued her.

      Tammy’s son Jordan, the rescuer, spoke next.  All Tammy’s kids really seemed to love him.  Some didn’t feel the need to stick their flag of affection into the new territory of a lost loved one.  Some, like Tamara, obviously did. 

      I never got to know Tammy’s kids.  By the time my Dad made his disputed first encounter with Tammy, I was already out of the house; an outcast, running down my roads. 

      But on this Valentine’s Day, Jordan spoke with eloquence and admiration.  He spoke of my father’s good traits as well as his bad.  Jordan was in pretty bad shape emotionally.  It was apparent he too loved my father.  This was my father’s other world.  His secret side.  His tender side.  Growing up, I never got to see it much, but in his later years he apparently mellowed.  These kids, these strangers, knew a side of my father I had rarely glimpsed.  I could see it with my daughter, but the moments he displayed this tenderness were rare indeed, reserved only for puppies, horses and newborn babies.

      Jordan gave a good speech.  It was well thought out and spoken with love and conviction.  His would be a tough act to follow.  He ended with the words of  “My Way,”

    “And now the end is near,

    And so I face the final curtain,

    I’ve lived a life that’s full,

    I’ve traveled each and every highway.

   And what’s more?

   More than this,

   I did it My Way.”

    “And Herb did it His Way!”  Go Jordan, good job. 

 

On Dad’s Behalf

 I took my piece of paper, the one I had written in the car and walked to the podium.  My father’s adorned, still body less then two feet behind me.  I began with the obvious...  “I loved my father,” that got them. 

      “My father gave me many things,” I continued.  “The love of travel, the courage to take risks, the telling of a good joke.”  They were paying attention now.  I thanked his wife Tammy, for loving him as she had.  After all, I was still the Ambassador.  Perhaps I could repair the damage started by Tamara.

      I likened my father to a racehorse, Tammy his trainer.  I went on:  “To be called hard-headed in my family, is considered a compliment.”  Laughter.  Now I had them.  “My father was proud of me, he told me so.  He said ‘Johnny, you’ve had a tremendous comeback’ I love that he used the word comeback, because comeback implies I was once great and had become great again.”  Appreciative nodding of the heads.  “He told me everything I needed to hear,” I continued.  And with the confidence of the executioner who is about to pull the trap door lever, I deadpanned...  “It is just like my father to check out at 6:00 in the morning, so he wouldn’t have to pay for the extra day!”  It was probably the biggest laugh I have ever received in my life.  People were spitting food across the room.  It was so funny because it was so true and everyone there knew it.  I ended with a little sentimentality.  All knew how Herb loved to drive.  “And when he gets to Heaven, he will say.  ‘Move over St. Peter, I’m doing the driving!’”  Like a heavyweight fighter who has just KO’d his opponent, I ran from the ring.  It was time to let him go.

  As my father lay dead forever in his casket, I thought of Ariel’s song from the Tempest…

 

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell
(Burthen Ding-dong)
Hark! now I hear them, --Ding-dong, bell.

     The day of the burial was bitter cold.  My father was buried alongside my mother, next to her his father, my grandfather.  My father’s mother also lay there, but because of all the bad blood spilled, hers was an unmarked grave.  Willy’s mother, the second Mrs. Herbert H. Stone, Sr., also resided in an adjoining unmarked plot.  One big happy family.  They had said it many times; “I’ll see her over my dead body!”  And here they all were and here they all lay.

    Katy stood next to me as the words and blessings were said.  It was below zero that cold February morning.  Her little California body had never experienced such conditions.  She stood in her ski parka and like a veteran of many wars; she bent over and placed a flower on her grampy’s casket.  “Bye, Grampy, I love you.”  For her, those words were as natural as eating ice cream in summer.  I was so proud of her.

     The day before, Katy and I had taken a drive through Brockton.  I showed her the house where I had grown up.  I showed her my elementary school.  I took her by the Hotel, but we didn’t go in.  We drove through the park where I had sledded and skated as a child.  It is a big, expansive park with many lakes and roads.  As we drove around Field’s Park, Katy couldn’t hold back her feelings.  This was not something she learned from me.  “I miss Grampy!”  Simple, direct, honest.  Then she started crying.  Her little body had finally taken its rest stop.  It had said,  ‘Enough, I need to cry here.’  And she did.  I looked over at my little girl and I too started crying.

     “I miss him, too, honey.  He loved you, that’s for sure.”  Only the last few words were lost in my tears.  We drove around those circular roads, the same roads where I had taken my dates and smoked my first joints and we cried together.  A couple of crybabies.  It felt so good.  I never loved her more than that moment.

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