Father's Day

I knew my dad almost entirely from stories told to me by my family, along with some Ektachrome slides kept in a cardboard suitcase on the top shelf of our hallway closet.

Seems he was what my Grandma Sliwa called a "good time Charley." I think she was trying to imply that when money was plentiful he knew how to make everyone happy. And when money was tight he made himself scarce for months at a time. By the mid 1950's he had made himself scarce so perfectly that no-one ever saw him again. This is his photograph from Lexington Street where I was born. I'll tell you about the capuchin later. According to family lore the little guy actually smoked a pipe and kept my dad in Old Crow bourbon. They worked together downtown, usually Pershing Square. Grandma Sliwa said he smelled terrible, owing to my father's irregular habit of changing or washing his diapers. This is my favorite picture of my dad. They look like partners, which I'll venture is truer than any photos of he and my mother.

After he cleared out, and when my uncles were unsuccessful at finding him in any of his usual haunts, we moved to Van Nuys in the San Fernando Valley. We lived with my Uncle Hendrik in a tract home built to accommodate a GI family who'd returned from World War II. We were the second owners. The original buyer worked as a copy editor at a local television station. Something bad happened and they found him stuffed with sleeping pills, wedged between a neighbor's stucco wall and a boxwood hedge. The bank sold it to Uncle Hendrik at a good price. With so many ex-soldiers eligible for cheap loans it was a buyer's market.

Initially, my mom got a part-time job as a bookkeeper at an Insurance office up on Ventura Boulevard, then a few years later ended up marrying the guy who hired her-- a Farmer's agent, my step-dad, Bill Regan. Since my real dad never divorced my mom, she was supposed to wait an interval of 7 years, or until it could be proved he was legally dead, but Bill Regan had a lawyer friend who worked for the Van Nuys DA. He pulled some strings. I remember they were married in Las Vegas. My brother and I stayed home with my Grandma, but when they returned the newlyweds brought us both little bags with real silver dollars in them. They were the big ones: showing a woman's face in a crown of thorns on one side, and a rather vicious looking eagle on the other. Weighty in your hand like fun is suppose to be, but isn't.

I remember those silver dollars fondly. A month or so later, when my mom was short, she waited for me to walk home from school and asked to borrow them. There was no way I could tell her that I'd spent them on a used pellet gun from a Catholic School kid who lived on Murietta Street, so I told her I'd lost them. She usually paid careful attention not to hit us in the face or on the head, but that day she went crazy and started beating me with one of Bill Regan's belts. Put out my right eye.

The doctor joked about it when I awoke from the operation. They call it an enucleation. He said something to the effect that I'd resemble a pirate with a patch on one eye, and all the girls would swoon at how romantic I'd look. "Like Gregory Peck." He said, though I think he meant Errol Flynn. Why children's doctors always have such pathetic humor has always been a mystery to me.

Eventually, I had an ocular prostheses implant--a glass eye. Contrary to the doctor's promises, the girls didn't like my eye patch, nor my fake eyeball. At first they'd search to see which eyeball was the real one, but then it got spooky and they'd lower their gaze and appraise the ground. Around then I started thinking about my real dad again. I secretly wished he'd return with his capuchin to rescue me. I wouldn't make any noise, I'd clean up after the monkey, I'd even quit school and hawk a daily newspaper, The Examiner, for some extra cash. Nightly, I'd pray and wait. Maybe you know how that feels, the praying, the waiting? I was certain he wasn't dead. He just liked bottles of Old Crow better than my mom. Seemed to me like a fair way to deal with a thorny problem.

Bill Regan didn't have his own house, so after their marriage he moved in with us. He smoked Chesterfield cigarettes and gave my brother and I the coupons which came in every pack. If you saved enough, or smoked enough, you could redeem them for gifts. My brother got a paint-by-numbers kit and stayed within the lines. It was a perfect likeness of a Maine coastal lighthouse. He was duly proud and taped it to our bedroom wall. I wanted to save mine until I had enough coupons for a 26" Schwinn bicycle, but it never came to pass. I don't remember why, maybe he didn't smoke enough, maybe my mom used them on dishes or something. I only mention it to show Bill Regan as a decent enough guy. Not father material maybe, but an okay guy. When I saw James Dean's father in REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE, the guy who wore his wife's apron, I was reminded of Bill Regan. He wouldn't wear an actual apron of course, but he was a push-over with my mom. Years later I think he was the rich guy on GILLIGAN'S ISLAND, still a sucker, but a nice one.

Only having one eye has its drawbacks. For instance I couldn't hit the baseball in Little League, nor could I catch very well. Something to do with depth perception-- monocular vision impairment. Try it. Close one eye and throw something high into the air, then try to catch it. Years later I was able to pass the DMV driver's test, but barely. When I started drinking and driving with only one good eye things went bad. But, that was in High School. All in all, we people with one eye learn to compensate. Could be worse, could be blind from someone throwing acid all over my face.

In 1882 a woman named Sonora Smart Dodd was born in Sebastian County, Arkansas to a Civil War Veteran named William Jackson Smart and his wife Ellen Victoria Cheek Smart. Southerners always had those names that sounded like sissy well drinks in a swank bar. "I'd like an Ellen Victoria Cheek . . . smart." Could have creme de menthe in it, or grenadine for Christ's sake. "I'd like a Truman Capote with a paper unbrella, if you'd be so kind." He'd fought with the First Arkansas Light Artillery at the Battle of Pea Ridge in 1862. His commanding officer was Brigadier General Albert Pike, a future Grand Dragon of the Klu Klux Klan. Albert Pike is known for desertion after being accused of allowing his troops to scalp the Union dead at the Battle of Pea Ridge. In addition to charges of embezzlement of Army funds and mishandling of war materials, Pike was eventually arrested for insubordination and treason. Andrew Johnson granted him a presidential pardon in 1865. For some reason Albert Pike has a large bronze statue erected on Judiciary Square in Washington D.C., the only Confederate so honored anywhere in the capital. Kinda like fighting the Nazis and then after the war bringing them all here to run the CIA and the space program. After hiding in Canada until the War ended, Pike returned to Arkansas and was given a Presidential pardon by Andrew Johnson. Pike was elected Sovereign Commander of the Southern Jurisdiction of the Scottish Rite of Freemasonry (a 33 degree Mason), a post he held for 32 years which coincided with his stint as leader and judicial representative of the Arkansas KKK.

I know I started talking about the Smart family then got sidetracked with Albert Pike and Nazis, even President Andrew Jackson, a proud son of Tennessee who took the reins after Lincoln got snuffed. We remember him for being an apologist for the Confederacy after the war, and being impeached by the House of Representatives, though saved by a vote in the Senate. Just another well-connected slime ball dancing a drunken jig in the palace on Pennsylvania Avenue. But I do digress. Twice. Maybe more.

The Smart family (remember them?) eventually moved West to an area near Spokane, Washington. Sonora Smart Dodd was very attached to her father, and when our country began to celebrate Mother's Day, she approached the Spokane Ministerial Alliance and presented a plan to honor fatherhood. She believed that June 5th, her father's birthday should be the appointed date. The Alliance chose the third Sunday of June instead. The first Father's Day to be celebrated was June 19th, 1910 in Spokane, Washington. Eventually, in 1972 Richard Nixon established a permanent observance of Father's Day on the 3rd Sunday of each June. Hence from crackers do holidays spring.

I never saw my dad after he left the family. He never returned to succor me in my times of need, nor to receive any parental devotion which I may have proffered. Keeping a monkey on a chain and training him to take coins from tourists and then tip his little round hat in appreciation doesn't sound like a typical occupation for one's father. But when I see this photograph of him with a few days' stubble on his chin holding the capuchin like a proud father might hold an infant son. Well, takes all the spirit I can muster just to lay down. Just to want to time a train's approaching speed and lay me sweetly down.

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