Fire and Family

In 1962 my brother Rich joined the Marines out of high school, and my mom and I lived alone in the small two-bedroom house she had purchased with the insurance settlement after my father died. The house was rickety, the roof leaked, the plumbing was shot, it was deathly cold in the winter, and at times overrun with vermin.

But I finally had my own bedroom.

The house on Thompson Lane was a humble home, my sanctuary, a place where my quiet mother and I could retreat from the world and enjoy our solitude. Both of us loved to read. Reading occupied our evenings in the absence of television once our old Zenith died. My mother sat in her reading chair in the living room and I retired to my bedroom, stretching out on the big bed I had once shared with my brother.

Before the television broke down we watched Gunsmoke together. But when the Lawrence Welk show came on my mother watched it by herself, while I found something else to occupy my time, usually music and radio programs.

I had a stereo and a few Rolling Stones and Beatles records and a mirror that I could stand in front of while singing along with John and Mick. I had a transistor radio. I could hear the Giants broadcast all the way from San Francisco.

I listened to the first Clay-Liston fight.

I had the solitude I craved.

If my mother went shopping in the afternoons or on the weekend, I even had a place to masturbate without fear of being caught in the act.

Some crazy shit happened when we were living on Thompson Lane, just the two of us. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas and we watched the reports of that together, hardly speaking. A staunch Democrat, my mother took Kennedy's death hard, for she believed he was the second coming of FDR.

I knew that Lincoln and McKinley had been assassinated, but that was history. How could anybody kill Kennedy? I felt great fear. Death was too easy, I realized.

I felt even more profound fear just weeks later when a fire two houses down from ours burned a home to the ground, killing seven of my neighbors.

I didn't sleep for a solid year after that. The home’s burnt timbers reeked for months before anyone bothered to begin a cleanup, and I dreamed fire and death the whole time.

I felt certain that if I did go to sleep fire would kill me like it had killed my friends.

I went to school everyday and slept in class.

Years later I realized I probably needed trauma counseling at the time, but schools didn't do things that way when I was a youngster. My teacher knew why I slept most of the day, and she allowed me the opportunity without objection.

I was having a rough time of it when things turned really bad.

My brother Lyle, the oldest sibling in our family and the one I barely knew, had fathered three boys, raising them in Reedsport on the Oregon coast, where he worked as a logging truck driver. I didn’t know my brother or his sons well at all, for they seldom came inland from the coast to visit.

The boys were all clustered around my age. They were 12, 13 and 14 when their parents' marriage collapsed and the family fell apart. I was never clear about what happened at the coast between Lyle and my nephews' mother, but it was clearly ruinous.

The boys ended up in my mother's lap. Grandma's house.

After a promising start, my hellish teen years had begun with a devastating fire that scared me senseless. Things grew even more hellish with the arrival of Leroy, Carmen, and Steve.

The first major problem I confronted with this sudden rearrangement in my life was the boys’ outrageous and at times uncontrollable anger. Looking back years later, I realized the divorce had devastated them and contributed to their meanness, but in 1964 I was too young to understand the psychology behind that.

My own father had died when I was an infant, and I had no conception of what a father meant to a child, or even really what family life entailed.

The oldest boy, Leroy, was sullen and tougher than anybody I knew. He loved to fight. He would fight at the slightest provocation, and he would fight until his enemy begged forgiveness. He once knocked a neighborhood kid cold with one punch. The kid had challenged Leroy and my nephew didn't hesitate. A quick right-cross caught Freddy on the jaw and down Freddy went from his heels, dropping straight back. Freddy hit his head on a dog bone when he struck the ground.

I panicked when I saw that punch and its effects. I thought Leroy had killed Freddy.

Leroy was a good baseball player and had a great sense of humor when he wasn't angry, which wasn't often. Of the three brothers, he was the nicest. But he was also the guy you simply did not want to agitate. He was smart and quick to let you know it. He hated idle talk. If you started a conversation with him, you'd best know what you were trying to say. If you stumbled, he'd walk away and call you a name, leaving you to wonder what you'd done to offend him.

He tortured his brothers with this quirky aspect of his personality.

The second nephew's name was Carmen, but he preferred to go by his middle name, Leon. I despised this kid. He was a vain, self-centered greaser, and effeminate in a way that made him compensate by trying to be a tough guy. He was dumb, and had a dumb kid's look of incomprehension in his gaze. Like his older brother, Carmen loved to fight, but he wasn't as adept at it as Leroy. He worshipped Leroy, and they fought like a couple of alley cats. But for Leroy, Carmen was a pushover. A couple of solid punches and Carmen would quit. He'd go out and try someone else, someone he knew he could handle just to make himself feel better. The word wasn’t much in use those days, but Carmen was a punk.

Carmen and I never got into it physically, but when we spoke to each other a constant tension ate the room and threatened to erupt into violence. Carmen had a greaser friend named Todd. The two greasers would try to terrorize others. They picked fights with chumps. Occasionally they picked the wrong chump and got the crap kicked out of them, which I always appreciated.

Steve was the youngest, a crybaby, and the most loving towards my mother—where any love at all was exhibited. He dropped out of high school and joined the Marines in 1969. Later, he came back to our small town and told everyone he'd been wounded in Vietnam. Then he went over to my grandmother's house--his great-grandmother--and stole the cash she kept under her mattress. He’d seen her take the money out at various times to give little cash gift to her many grandkids.

Steve disappeared with the money and a Marine rep showed up in town right after that looking for him. Steve had never been to Vietnam. He was AWOL, a runaway.

The three crowded into my bedroom, with predictable results. They regularly fought among themselves, but if you said anything at all to offend one of them the other two would quickly turn into backups. They were blood-thick, and quick to pound each other, but you did not mess with one without incurring the wrath of the other two.

They used my mother like a leech uses blood. They verbally abused her and neglected the few laws she put down. She felt sorry for them and gave them money they didn’t deserve, money she didn’t have. They did nothing to help make the household run smoothly. They were uncontrollable, unless Leroy got into the mix and suddenly, unexpectedly, took her side in a matter of discipline.

And I sat in the middle of it, unable to handle all three at once, which is what it always boiled down to—the three of them against me.

I grew bitter. I lost my teen years to the assholes.

During my final year of high school their dad turned up and took over the couch in the living room. He was driving a dump truck and earning money, so I couldn’t understand why he was there. He was my brother, but I didn’t know him at all. I knew his kids too well by then, and now I had to contend with the four of them in that tiny house. They had taken it over like settlers on the plains.

I graduated from high school and took a summer job in a veneer plant before preparing to leave for Ashland, Oregon, and my first year of college.

I went down to Ashland a little early, just to escape the madness in my house. The day I left I told my brother Lyle how pissed off the whole deal had made me. I told him that I thought he was a fucking bum.

He said, “I changed your diaper when you were a baby.”

I said, “I don’t remember that, asshole.”

I told him he was a piece of shit. I lit into him with five years of frustration and bitterness and I told him I’d see him dead.

And that is what happened. I never saw him again after I left Thompson Lane, until the day my mother buried him. I stood with her at his open casket. He had died in Ketchikan, Alaska, of alcoholism. He died at 51, the same age my father died. The oldest of my siblings, he was the first one to go.

My mother cried for him, looking down at his body in that casket, because she loved him. She loved those grandkids as well, but I could never understand why. They were worthless. They didn’t bother to come to their dad’s funeral.

At this time I have no idea where they are, or if they’re dead or alive. I don’t care to know either.


TS