Dear Father, Dear Son

by Larry Elder

  “Now my dad is not much for small talk,” I warned Donna.

  Bill and Dad talked for two hours, told jokes, and drank vodka. When Carol stuck her head in to check on him, Bill shooed her away.

  “I’m fine.” Dad and Bill kept talking.

  Bill called me later. “Meeting your Dad and hearing about his life is one of the greatest experiences I’ve ever had. Maybe your parents might want to drive to Scottsdale and stay with us. We have plenty of room.”

  “You want them to drive to Scottsdale and stay with you?” Mom and Dad, visiting new people, enclosed in the same car for hours, and then staying in a guest’s home—in the same bed? Good luck with that.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll ask.”

  They went.

  Joyce, a family friend, drove. They stayed with Bill and Carol a week.

  Bill used a “family pass” to take them to the Grand Canyon. The woman at the entrance looked at his pass, then looked at the posse of blacks and whites standing next to Bill.

  “Sir, this pass is for your family.”

  “Right.” Bill smiled, and wrapped his arms around Mom, Dad, Joyce, and Carole. “Here they are!”

  “Ah, okay, sir. Have a good time.”

  Bill and Dad stayed in touch.

  “Randolph,” Mom would hand Dad the phone. “It’s Bill again.”

  27

  DAD AND DENNIS

  My prediction that Dennis would kill or be killed turned out to not be entirely accurate.

  Dennis tried to kill himself. He ingested rat poison.

  Mom got a call in the middle of the night from a San Francisco hospital.

  “Are you the mother of Dennis Elder?”

  Someone found Dennis in a coma, passed out on a residential street. Through identification in his wallet, they traced him back to Mom and Dad.

  When he regained consciousness, he said he wasn’t really trying to kill himself. The woman he was living with threatened to put him out of her apartment. To stop her, he put rat poison in his food. He thought it would only make his stomach hurt. Then he’d go to the hospital and get his stomach pumped while she cried and held his hand. She’d see how much he loved her and would let him stay.

  But the poison didn’t work—at least not right away. He assumed it was old and no longer potent. Two days later, he was walking to the store and collapsed. His body started convulsing. After that, he remembered nothing.

  He recovered to a degree, but the poison ravaged his insides. His kidneys, heart, and even brain had been affected. The poison caused him to contract adult-onset diabetes, and it got progressively worse.

  Dennis moved back to L.A., and bounced around while staying with this or that friend. He always managed to find a “friend” with a place for him to stay.

  “Jesus, his life is less stressful than mine,” I told Mom. “He finds more places to live than John Lesley.” Even she laughed.

  “Mom, I’m over at a friend’s apartment on Slauson, would you bring me a carton of cigarettes?” he’d say.

  And off she’d go in the car to a store in the middle of the night, to fetch smokes for her grown son. I was livid.

  “You don’t have compassion,” she said.

  Eventually, I stopped arguing with her about Dennis. What’s more potent than a mother’s love for her child? I remembered the hen at Grandma’s farm that almost blinded me in defense of her little chick.

  Dennis met his future wife. Shortly after their marriage, they moved to Arizona, her home state. “Great,” I thought, “the further away from Mom the better. No more late-night phone calls.”

  After his suicide attempt, the doctors told us that Dennis, then childless, would be impotent. “A blessing in disguise,” I thought. “He’s too irresponsible to bring kids into this world.” He proceeded to have three, plus two stepchildren he inherited when he married.

  Then he and his wife separated, but stayed in touch. When Dennis moved backed to L.A., his children visited constantly, usually staying at Mom and Dad’s.

  Dennis, for years, was in and out of hospitals. Even when I came to see him, we argued. I went to visit at him at General, the same hospital where he was born. Another 9-1-1 by some friend, and another stay at a hospital where Mom would pace the halls and wait for the doctor to tell her he would be all right.

  I asked a floor nurse for directions to his room.

  “Are you Mr. Dennis’s brother?” asked the shy Filipina nurse. “Hey, everybody, this is Mr. Dennis’s brother.”

  She lowered her voice and looked around as if she might get into trouble.

  “Could you get him to stop cursing? We try to do our best for Mr. Dennis. But he just, you know, screams and yells.”

  Three other women nodded.

  “I’ll talk to him.”

  He was sitting up watching television, flipping through channels with the remote.

  “Nothing on television. No cable. Some hospital.”

  “I’ll talk to the CEO about upgrading your accommodations.” Stop it, I told myself.

  “You don’t have to be sarcastic.”

  “You don’t have to act like this is the Four Seasons.”

  “This guy is sick,” I thought. “He can’t help acting this way, but you can. So calm down.”

  We talked a bit about Mom and Dad and how worried they were about him.

  “You know, Dennis,” I said at what I felt was a good time. “I don’t know how long you’re going to be here, but the nurse wants you to stop screaming—”

  “Those bitches. They won’t tell you anything! I asked what time I was gonna eat, and they wouldn’t tell me! Why am I taking this shot? Won’t tell me. How long am I going to be here? Wouldn’t tell me. I’m not an animal. I deserve to know what’s going on! At least tell me when I’m going to eat, Goddammit!”

  “That’s right, Dennis. These nurses get up in the morning and say, ‘What can I do to make Dennis Elder’s life miserable?’”

  “I just want them to answer my questions! Is that too much to ask?”

  “If you treated the nurses better, maybe they’d tell you what you want to know.”

  “If they told me what I wanted to know, maybe I’d treat them better.”

  “So you’re admitting you treat them like crap?”

  “I’m not admitting anything.”

  “You just did.”

  “No I didn’t.”

  “Why did I even bother coming?”

  “Good question.”

  “Would you rather I leave?”

  “Suit yourself.”

  “Give me strength,” I thought. “He’s lying in the hospital, getting weaker and weaker, and still we argue. What’s wrong with him? What’s wrong with me?”

  The nurse stuck her head in the door. Her expression said, “Well?”

  “I talked to him.”

  “Oh, thank you. And, Mr. Dennis, we’ll be feeding you at 5 o’clock.”

  I turned to Dennis. “See?”

  “See, nothing. She should have said that in the first place.”

  Four months later, he died.

  Mom insisted on holding the funeral at a large church.

  “We need a place big enough for all his friends,” she said.

  A large church? Honestly? Dennis’s “friends” seemed to pop up when he had money, and disappear when he was out. They are the kind who change addresses all the time, unstable, always moving, living-on-the-edge-of-life folks you can’t exactly locate and notify by phone.

  “The number you have dialed is no longer in service.” I called five phone numbers I’d scrounged up and I got five of those recordings.

  We managed to track down and tell a few people about the services, and told a few neighbors and a couple of other people who knew him, and that was that. We didn’t put a notice in the paper—and if we had, who among his acquaintances would have read it? Even if they had, so what? It’s not like they were going to drop everything and come to his funeral.

  �
��No,” said Mom, rejecting the suggestion of a much smaller church for the funeral. “Dennis has lots of friends. They’ll be there.”

  Neither Dad nor I wanted to speak at Dennis’s funeral—Dad because he just doesn’t speak in public, and me because I wasn’t going to say some insincere things about what a great guy he was. Mom couldn’t speak because she wouldn’t have been able to control herself.

  Dad lost weight and looked fifteen pounds lighter than only a few days earlier. Mom said he just stopped eating. At the funeral, he stared straight ahead, occasionally shaking someone’s hand.

  So Kirk spoke for the family.

  Kirk told funny stories about Dennis, pranks they pulled on each other, the time they spent in Arizona.

  “And he absolutely loved his children,” Kirk said. “And we’re going to miss him.”

  Kirk sat down and he whispered, “Can you believe all these people?”

  His children and his ex-wife were at the funeral. And they cried when Mom’s pastor spoke about him.

  So many others came, too. People from our elementary school. People he met in junior high school. People from Crenshaw High, and not just from Dennis’s class.

  Former neighbors, some I last saw twenty or thirty years ago, came up to Mom and Dad. Many cried, telling Mom and Dad them how much they loved Dennis. Even the “low-lifes and thugs” came, several driving in from Arizona.

  I saw faces I barely remembered, others I had completely forgotten about. Men and women—who I knew as little boys and girls—told my mother how much they liked him, how funny he was, and then told of his many acts of friendship and kindness. Several referred to him as “Chico,” a nickname somebody gave him in high school for who knows why.

  “Are you Chico’s brother?” one said. “He talked about you all the time.”

  He did?

  “Someone said you are Chico’s older brother?”

  “I’m one of them,” I said.

  “The one on the radio? He never missed your show. Used to point to the radio and say, ‘You know who that is?’”

  He did?

  “Used to say, ‘He could be president someday, but I think he’s too smart to do that.’ And I laughed and Chico said, ‘I’m serious as a heart attack.’”

  “Would anyone now like to come up and say a few words about this man who touched so many lives?” the pastor asked.

  A line formed. As one speaker sat down, another took his place in line. Some dressed in suits, others in dress pants and shirts, many wore jeans, and some looked as if they borrowed something, anything, to try and look appropriate.

  “I don’t know how he did it,” one said, “but Chico put up the money to bail me out.”

  “Me and Chico used to go out of town together to visit my Mom in Henderson,” another said.

  “We used to sit up all night and play cards, and I’ll tell you what, he could tell jokes.”

  “If Chico had money, he’d say, ‘Let’s go and get a brew,’ and never asked for pay back.”

  “He lived next door to me in Phoenix, and would give me advice on what to do about that crazy husband I used to have. Whenever he went to the store, he asked me if I needed anything. And ….” The woman broke down. Another mourner retrieved her and helped her back to her seat.

  “He used to give me advice,” said a man in his early twenties, one of dozens of people I had never seen and knew nothing about.

  One told stories of a stray cat he found and cared for.

  All but one of his children briefly spoke, the youngest too distraught to say anything. Mom was right. People came.

  After Dennis’s funeral, for whatever reason, Dad never again said, “I wish I had known. Maybe I could’ve done somethin’.”

  28

  DAD NEVER LEARNED TO HATE

  A few years after I started on radio in L.A., “60 Minutes” interviewed me. They wanted to know about how my parents shaped my thinking, so they came out to their house. The crew set up lights, sound, cameras, and had professionals put on make-up. Mom was interviewed first. She talked about my career, about how she felt about those who attacked me and whether it affected her emotionally. Dad sat in a chair in the corner the whole time they were setting up and during Mom’s interview. Then it was his turn.

  Morley Safer sat across from him. Safer talked to Dad about his hard life in the country, during the Depression and Jim Crow.

  Mr. Elder, said Safer, your son says if you work hard, keep your nose clean, you can make it in life. Is that how you feel?

  “Worked for me,” Dad said. “Worked for me.”

  When the piece aired, the only part of Dad’s interview they used was, “Worked for me, worked for me.”

  Dear Larry,

  I’ve listened to you for years, but only recently found out that you are the son of the man who ran Elder’s Snack Bar on Valencia Street.

  Tell your father that the food was amazing, especially the biscuits and pancakes.

  I used to work at Jeffries Banknotes, not far from the restaurant. Everybody who worked there ate at your Dad’s place.

  Please say hello to him for me. (Tell him I’m the one he used to tease for wearing the San Francisco Giants baseball cap.)

  Sergio

  I’ve received dozens of letters like this one. Dad’s response is always the same.

  “I just did my best.”

  I brought my parents to hear one of my speeches. I talked about my appreciation for my mother and of how her influence made me believe in myself.

  Then I talked about my dad’s life:

  I have been accused of—I’ll try to put this in as nice a way as possible—“naiveté” for my feeling that this country, with all of its flaws, is the fairest, most decent country in history. And I want to tell you a little bit about why I feel that way. I want to tell you a story about two Americans—one not so famous, the other, infamous. They’re both roughly the same age, grew up in the same era, both grew up in the same area of the South.

  The first, not so famous, is a black man. He is now eighty-two years old, and grew up in Athens, Georgia. Until he was five years old, he assumed that the woman who raised him was his mother, only to later be informed it was not his mother; it was his grandmother. He never knew his father. His real mother, who later raised him, had a series of—let’s call them “friends”—one of whom used to beat her regularly. Once his mother wanted to attend her own mother’s funeral and the man didn’t want her to go. He beat her so badly she was bedridden and missed her own mother’s funeral.

  This boy grew up in this family and, when he was thirteen years old, he came home one day and was making too much noise for the mother’s “friend.” The mother’s friend got angry and the mother sided with her boyfriend. He was basically thrown out of the house at the age of thirteen. He then went down the street, hearing taunts from the mother, “You’ll be back, and if you won’t be back, you’ll be in the penitentiary soon.” He walked down the street and was taken in by a white family, where he began to cook for them. He did that for a time, and then began a series of jobs: shoeshine boy, bellhop. He decided to apply for a job as a Pullman porter—at the time Pullman was the largest private employer of blacks in the country. He got a job, traveled around the country for the first time, including California. World War II broke out; he became a private, ultimately a sergeant, stationed in Guam. And he was a cook—cooked for thousands and thousands of GIs during the Second World War.

  When the war was over, he returned to the South where he wanted to get a job as a short-order cook, and he was told that he had no references, even though he had cooked for thousands of people during the nation’s war effort against Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperialist Japan.

  He decided after he got married he would go out to California, a place where he had visited as a Pullman porter, because it seemed so fresh and sunny and open and liberal. So he came out in the ’40s, and applied to a series of places to get a job as a cook, and was told he had no referen
ces. So he went to an unemployment office and sat and sat and sat, and finally got a job as a janitor, worked at that place for a number of years, while simultaneously working at another place as a janitor, and he cooked for a private family on the weekends, and attended night school to get his G.E.D.—he had always felt inadequate and insecure because he didn’t have a high school diploma.

  Meanwhile, he and his wife have three children. He later saves enough money to start a restaurant—he is now in his early forties—and he successfully ran this restaurant for thirty years near downtown Los Angeles.

  A tougher life I have rarely come across. Yet he never hated, he was never bitter, he never condemned his circumstances, and he always said there are very few problems that cannot be solved through hard work.

  The man I speak of is my father.

  The other man, who grew up in the same era, in the same geographical area, and is the same age, is famous. He became governor of Alabama, and in an unforgettable statement, said, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” He stood in the doorway and prevented black students from attending the University of Alabama. He personified the bigoted, Jim Crow, segregationist South.

  He ran for president, and was shot—paralyzed from the waist down. For the first time, he began to understand what it was like to be helpless, began to understand what it must be like to be black. At the end of his career, he began to reflect on his past, and he showed up unannounced in 1978 at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama—you might be familiar with that church. It’s the church from which one Martin Luther King Jr. became the spiritual head of the modern civil rights movement. At the time, there were three hundred black ministers and lay leaders of Alabama churches conducting a day-long conference. Mr. Wallace was wheeled in unexpectedly and asked to speak to the gathering. They allowed him to speak and he said, and I quote, “I never had hate in my heart for any person, but I regret my support of segregation, and the pain it caused the black people of our state and our nation.”

  Amid cries of “Amen” and “Yes, Lord,” Mr. Wallace added, and I quote, “I’ve learned what pain is, and I’m sorry if I caused anybody else pain. Segregation was wrong, and I am sorry.”