by Larry Elder
“What about the tapes?”
“What about them?”
“They prove he was in on the cover-up.”
“Tell you what they should do. John Dean and Ehrlichman and what’s the other one—Haldeman? Anyway, before they send them to jail, they should get together and make some new tapes and just replace the old ones. Then go on about their business.”
“Are you serious?” Mom said.
“Damn right, I’m serious. What did Nixon do that hurt the country? And he’s losin’ his job over this. I bet a whole lot of presidents did worse. He just got caught. Should’ve burned the damn tapes. Now, it’s too late to burn ’em. So, if I was Nixon, I’d make some new tapes.”
“For God’s sake, Randolph!” She walked out of the room.
They never discussed politics again.
“Yes,” Dad repeated as he toyed with his coffee cup. “Your mother isn’t easy.”
We didn’t say anything for a while.
“You never attended any of my graduations,” I finally said. “Not junior high, not high school, not college, not law school.”
“What?”
I repeated it.
“Had to work. What, you don’t think I was proud?”
I shrugged.
“I damn sure was.”
He said that when I went away so far—the East Coast for college, the Midwest for law school—it became a matter of cost. He was right. How could I deliberately choose schools far away from home—to get away from him—and then get upset because of the cost to close up the café, lose money, and pay a for coast-to-coast flight to come visit?
I reminded him how he promised to try to make it to my junior high school graduation, but didn’t. Mom came with Aunt Dorothy.
“When I got home I cried. I didn’t think you gave a shit.”
After high school, I never went to another graduation ceremony, just had the schools mail the diplomas.
“You went to just one Little League game.”
“I remember, the one where you tore Kirk up.”
It was so strange to see him in the stands that day. I heard him yelling all game long.
“Way to dig right in there!” he shouted. I used to be afraid of the ball, and it took me almost a half a season to overcome the fear of getting struck by a pitch.
“I also went to one of your practice games,” he said.
He did?
“And you stood this far off the plate.” He stretched his arm out. “You used to be afraid of the ball. By the time you were up against your brother, you were diggin’ right in there.”
He went to a practice game?
“And who sponsored the team one year? Elder’s Snack Bar. Café helped pay for your uniforms.”
I remembered. But I thought that was Mom’s doing. But the café was Dad’s place, for Chrissakes.
“Would I have sponsored the team if I didn’t give a shit?”
Another man walked up to the glass and tapped on it.
“That’s Rodriguez,” Dad said.
The guy pointed to his watch as if to say, “Isn’t it time for you to go home?” Dad smiled and waved him off.
“Do you love Mom?”
The question caught him in mid-swallow. I expected him to say, “No,” or “At one time I did.”
“Yes, I do.”
I said nothing.
“You don’t believe it?” he asked.
“No, I don’t.”
“Suit yourself.” His way of saying, “You’re entitled to your own opinion.”
“You have a helluva way of showing it.”
“Your mom isn’t easy.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Have you ever asked her if she loves me?”
“No,” I said.
‘Why not?”
“I guess I didn’t want to hear the answer. How do you think she feels?”
“I’m just not goin’ to get into that. I made my bed, and I’m goin’ to lie in it. That’s all I’ll say. When you have kids, you have to be there for them. And I wasn’t about to get divorced again.”
“Again?”
“You didn’t know I was married before?”
“What?”
“Matter of fact, I was married twice before.”
“What?!”
“You didn’t know that?”
Was he kidding? No, I didn’t friggin’ know he’d been married before. Twice!
He first married when he was nineteen. He married a nineteen-year-old girl who didn’t tell her parents.
“Soon as her parents found out, they made her go to court and have the marriage—what do you call it?”
“Annulled?”
“That’s it. She was young, and they wanted her to marry someone ‘better.’”
“Did you love her?”
“I did. Her family moved away right after the, what do you call—”
“Annulment?”
“Right. The second time, I married a woman who cheated on me.”
“I assume this didn’t last long either?”
“Seven years.”
“Seven years!”
All this before he married Mom?
“Besides,” he said, “I wanted kids and she couldn’t have any. So it worked out. Least I think it did.”
I needed to use the restroom. Given all the coffee he had drunk, I thought he was probably fighting it, too.
“You know, I left you guys for awhile one time.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean your Mom and I—I just decided to leave you all. We decided to get divorced.”
My bladder could wait.
“When? I don’t remember that. I would have remembered that.”
“Well, I did. I decided that I’d had enough and that you guys would be better off without me around.”
He found an apartment, put down first and last month’s rent, packed, and left.
“How long were you gone?”
“Three days. Couldn’t sleep. Couldn’t eat. I just wasn’t goin’ to do to you what they did to me—make you grow up without a father. It’s just not the same when your daddy ain’t around. So I came back home. And nothin’ more was said about it.”
Well, I’ll say.
It was 4:05.
12
HIS LIFE AND TIMES
“Why did you go into the Marines?” I asked.
“Everybody who could either got drafted or joined. I joined.”
“Why the Marines?”
“They always seemed to be where the action was. And I liked the uniforms.”
“Did you like being a Marine?”
He said at twenty-eight, he was older than most of the others in boot camp at Montford Point, a black training facility attached to Fort Lejeune.
“I was probably more disciplined than the rest of the guys. I had been out on my own so long.”
He was made a cook, then promoted to sergeant and put in charge of the mess hall. He traveled in the Pacific Theater, ending up stationed on Guam.
“I’ve been all over the world.”
On Guam, they counted down the days to what everyone thought would be the invasion of Japan. Expected deaths, both sides, were conservatively estimated at one million.
“Then the bombs fell.”
Hiroshima and Nagasaki forced Japan’s surrender and ended the war. When I read about the A-bombs in grade school, I never thought about where my Dad was when they were deployed, or how it changed the course of his life—and my life. Like most people of his generation, he never talked about his service and how America helped save the world from tyranny. He didn’t think he did anything heroic. He did his job, came home, and started up again.
“What did you think when you heard about Hiroshima?” I asked.
“I was confused. I didn’t know what it meant. Pretty soon, we figured it out. It meant we were goin’ home soon. And I could get married.”
He and Mom wrote and made plans for marriage. In a s
helf in the closet at our first home, I saw Dad’s postcards from Guam that Mom kept in a photo album. When I asked her, she didn’t want to talk about them.
“Put that old stuff away,” she’d say.
The cards are long lost or thrown away. Mom probably didn’t like thinking about how she may have felt something akin to passion for Dad—or maybe she didn’t want us to think of her in that way. She was dismissive, even angry when I would ask her questions about those old postcards. So I stopped.
“I loved runnin’ on the road,” he said.
He smiled as he talked about the pre-war years he worked as a Pullman porter.
“I got to travel, see different parts of the country. It’s why I moved to California.”
“What was it you liked about California?”
“It was always so sunny. November. January. March. Didn’t matter. Bright and shiny. And it seemed like the people were more fair. I didn’t see any ‘Blacks Only’ signs. You could sit anywhere you wanted on the bus or in the movies. Looked like anybody could catch a cab. Plenty of work, night and day. So I made a mental note that maybe I’d move here.”
Because he was single when he worked for Pullman, he agreed to “run wild.” This meant he had no regular route or regular times, and it brought more hours and more money. He had to be ready at any time and be willing to go anywhere. He’d sometimes have a layover in a city for a half a day to a full day.
“If we pulled in to a southern city, I always made sure I had tin cans of food and some crackers ’cause you never knew whether you’d be able to walk into a store and buy somethin’ to eat.”
“Growin’ up,” he said, “segregation was all I knew. Where you went, where you ate, where you sat in a movie house, even the public parks. The black parks weren’t as nice as the white ones—had more rocks and dirt.”
Yet after the war, he returned to Chattanooga.
“I went to an unemployment office. When I got to the counter, the lady pointed to a sign I’d walked under. It said ‘Whites Only.’ ‘You’ll have to go through that door,’ she said, pointin’ to another one. So I walked back out the ‘wrong’ door and through the ‘Colored Only’ door. And the same white lady—the one who just told me I had walked through the wrong door—walked down to help me.
“I went home to your mother, and I said, ‘Shi-i-i-it, I done traveled all over the world for this country, and I have to put up with this shit. I’m movin’ to California.’”
He told Mom to stay in Chattanooga, and in four days he’d find a job and send for her.
“Why were you so sure you’d have a job in four days?”
“I know me.”
When he got to L.A., he rode the streetcar and walked around for two days looking for work as a cook. Nobody would hire him. Every restaurant told him the same thing—he had no “references.” He told them he ran the mess hall as a sergeant in the Marines. They all said, “Sorry, you have no references.”
“So I changed tactics. Every restaurant I went to, I told them I’d work for a reference. They said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘I’ll work for a reference. If you like my work, you can start payin’ me. Or, if you like my work but still can’t use me, you can give me a reference.’ They said, ‘We can’t let you work for free.’ I said, ‘I’m not workin’ for free. I’m workin’ for a reference.’”
“What happened?”
“Still wouldn’t hire me. So, I changed tactics again. I didn’t know the city very well and I was just catchin’ the bus and walkin’ around to get a job. That didn’t make much sense. So, I went to an unemployment office. This time there was only one door, but the lady said she didn’t have anythin’. I said, ‘What time do you open?’ She said, ‘Eight o’clock.’ I said, ‘What time do you close?’ She said, ‘Five o’clock.’ I said, ‘I’ll just sit right here until you close, and I’ll be the first one here when you open. Just call me up here when you have somethin’.’
“I sat in the same chair for the rest of that day, and most of the next.
“Then she called me up. She said, ‘I have something, but I don’t know if you want it.’ I said, ‘What is it?’ ‘It’s with the National Biscuit Company, but it’s a job cleaning toilets.’ I said, ‘Of course I’ll take it.’”
On his fourth day in L.A., he had a job. He sent for my mother.
He worked at National Biscuit for eleven years. It wasn’t long before he was put in charge of the other janitors. He took a second full-time job as a janitor with the Barbara Ann Bread company. He eventually left Barbara Ann to work as a janitor for a business closer to home. The Paul Laymon Company repaired and distributed pinball and other coin-operated machines.
It had been years since I’d thought about Dad’s job at Laymon’s. It was just two blocks away from our first house, on the corner of Pico and Valencia. One Saturday, Dad asked Dennis and me if we’d like to go to work with him for a few hours. We didn’t, of course, but what were we going to say?
Off to work with Dad we went. He opened the door to a large, dark warehouse. No one else was there. He turned on the lights. Everywhere we looked, there were pinball machines, just like the kind at Disneyland, all neatly lined up against the walls.
“These here haven’t been fixed. But those over there, they work. Do you want to play them?”
Dennis jumped up and down so high, he almost ripped his Achilles. And I was looking for the catch.
“Dad, we don’t have any change.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” he said.
He reached in his pocket and pulled out a little tool, kind of like a bottle opener. He bent down, opened the front of the machine, inserted the tool, and jiggled something until he heard a “click.” Cha-ching. The lights started blinking and the pinballs dropped, rolled down and lined up, ready for action.
“Let me know when you’re done with that one, and I’ll fire up some more.”
Dennis and I went from machine to machine and spent the fastest four hours in recorded history. Dad disappeared to the other side of the building, but would re-emerge just in time to take out the tool and make another machine come to life.
Because his second job was two blocks away, he was able to get a little more sleep. He averaged four, sometimes four-and-a-half hours of sleep, six days a week. He also worked on most Sundays when he cooked, washed cars, or did yard work for Mr. Laymon.
“Your mother and I decided that she should be home with you kids—at least until junior high. So I had no choice. Didn’t you like her bein’ there when you got home from school?”
I did. And I’d known plenty of kids who came home to an empty house or to a relative or who stashed themselves somewhere until their mothers came to get them.
“When you don’t sleep much, I guess it sort of makes you cranky. Least on Sundays—if you guys stayed quiet—I usually could get a little more.”
This explains the Sundays we went tiptoeing around the house.
“Do … not … wake … up … your … father,” Mom said.
I once had dinner with a wealthy, prominent California politician. He told me about his father who, like mine, left school and began working full-time at about fourteen years old. He got a job as a clerk in a department store. The store had a big inventory sale, and he worked thirty-six hours straight. The store manager, who found out about this enthusiastic hard worker, decided he was management material and took him under his wing. By the time he was in his twenties, he was the store manager. By his early thirties, he was put in charge of several stores and worked in senior management until his retirement.
My father, too, excelled wherever he worked. He’d propose different and better ways of doing things, which led to more responsibility. But then he’d reach a limit.
“Only so far ‘you people’ could go,” he said. “The answer is to work for yourself. And that’s what I intended to do. But I knew I needed more education.”
So along with the two six-day-a-week jobs and his Sunday work, he went to night school f
or a high school equivalency diploma. I remember him sitting at the kitchen table “doing homework.” I used to wonder—how could a grown-up have homework?
“I had a lot of catchin’ up to do,” he said. “I’d forgotten what little I knew.”
Dad told me about how intimidating it was to go back to high school at his age.
“When I signed up for adult school, they asked me what grade I left off at. I said, ‘I want to start at the bottom because I can’t remember much of anythin’. So put me as low as you think you need to, and I’ll work my way up.’” So they started him at the third grade.
Uncle Thurman, in Cleveland, talked about Dad’s pursuit of his G.E.D. I told Dad how impressive Thurman had found it.
“You know the kind of balls it takes to go back to school when you’re in your forties? I dropped out of high school,” Thurman had told me, “and I always felt insecure about it. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to work all day, do homework, drag my ass out of the house, and sit next to some teenager. Couldn’t do it. Most motherfuckers wouldn’t have the nerve. I know I didn’t. But your father did.”
“Thurman said that?” Dad said.
“He sure did.”
“Well, I’ll say. Huh. Never thought it was impressive. You just do what you have to do.”
I asked about growing up in Athens, before he moved to Chattanooga. He remembered that it was a college town. And he remembered the University of Georgia.
“Did you ever go on campus?”
“No, it wasn’t allowed.”
“Did you ever think that maybe someday you could go to college?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“It’s just not somethin’ that ever crossed my mind, that I could go to college, let alone that one.”
“Does that bother you?”
“What, that I didn’t think about college? No. I had to work. I did plan to be my own boss some day. That was my dream.”
He noticed that black workers in Chattanooga walked long distances to and from their jobs. Why weren’t their more jitneys to carry them back and forth? There were a few, but not nearly enough. He bought a used car but found out he needed a special license to operate a jitney service.