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King of Them All
Boisseau May 2008
Author’s note: Aware of the shortcomings of my memory, especially my earliest memories, I have supported this material with my own research. Anything between quotation marks comes from an interview, my own notes or a written document. No names have been changed.
Roommates Again
The last time I see Pat conscious is at our sister Michelle’s house in Kansas City.
As I drift in the darkness I am aware of my brother’s presence – he’s all I can think about in fact. It’s his snore, for one thing. Sometimes he sounds like a cartoon character, his deep melodious breathing an animated and almost comical sound of deep slumber. Other times, he is a jalopy, sputtering, broken down, backfiring, with a short silence between breaths, then the gasping, wheezing, sleepy, snorting, sketchy series starts again.
After nearly forty years, we are sharing a bedroom again. Pat is lying on one bed, me another. It’s the night of the first leg of Pat’s trip, the first time he has traveled to visit a family member in about a decade or more.
The little excursion has been exhausting so far. Pat has been toying with Michelle’s no-smoking-in-the-house rule. He has the habit of putting a cigarette in his mouth while sitting in the living room watching TV. You think he is going to light up. He fumbles with his matches, when he can find them. Then Michelle admonishes him, telling him again and again he can’t smoke in the house. Anna, her teenage daughter, is allergic to the smoke, she says. He complains. It’s point, counterpoint. He can’t win, but there’s a danger lurking. You don’t know if he will try it. Then what would Michelle do? Will she shriek? Will she call the police? He gives in and moves out to the back patio where he sits or paces and smokes.
Pat is the oldest of us nine kids. He is fifty-two now -- we just celebrated his birthday. He looks every bit his age: a man tattered by living on streets, in mental institutions and dim pay-by-the-week motel rooms. He no longer is the handsome guy with the shiny dark hair, the gentle big brother with the playful smile and the quick mind. He has no teeth. The teeth that haven’t rotted away had been kicked or punched out when he was jumped in prison or mental institutions. His beard is unkempt and whiskers droop, covering his lips and mouth, like overgrown vegetation in front of a dark cave. His nose is bent to one side, a result of an accident he had running from taunting motorists who had made fun of him while he was walking on the street. His hands are burned from cigarettes and stained yellow from nicotine. He has gained weight over the years, adding surprising girth to his otherwise small frame. His eyes, still piercing, a bold hazel, are more anxious than last year when I drove up to Albuquerque, New Mexico, with my mother to visit him.
He hasn’t been able to settle down since he arrived. He paces. Pat always paces. With everyone talking around the kitchen table or sitting in the living room, Pat is restless. He gets up and wanders around. I am conscious of where he is, as if a neighbor’s child is visiting a house that is not childproof.
The day before, Pat had flown in from Albuquerque. I flew up from Texas. Pat’s case manager had encouraged the visit, saying Pat wanted to travel and it would do him good. Weeks earlier, when I had spoken with Michelle on the phone about Pat’s adventure, I had been optimistic. Pat’s life seemed to be improving. He had his own apartment now, even a telephone, and he seemed to be taking his medications regularly, according to reports we’ve heard. Our plan was to stay a few days with Michelle, and then I would accompany him on the next part of the journey – to fly to my home in Austin where he would stay with me and visit our mother and two of our other sisters before we sent him back. By having me along as unofficial chaperone, Pat would be able to visit some family members he hadn’t seen in many years. We had been in the habit of visiting him, he didn’t visit us. It was understood that we wanted to avoid the kinds of drama we had experienced many times years ago, disturbances and scenes involving the police and hospitals. It is sometimes quite a hassle having a brother like Pat.
Almost immediately after my arrival my optimism had faded as I sensed how hyper Pat was and, just as much, Michelle’s weariness. Was it the tension in her voice or an intolerant look in her eyes? Instinctively, I noticed the fear, as if some impending tragedy would spoil everything. Without speaking, I knew we had to be on guard. I understood that Pat needed a tight rein. I needed to help manage the situation, and I felt responsible for keeping Pat out of trouble. Is he wanting another pack of cigarettes? What about his medicine? Is it time to take another pill?
Before he had fallen asleep, Pat and I had briefly talked in the dark, with the lights off, like we were kids. Then I heard his snore.
In the morning, I wake before dawn and Pat is gone. I look for him in the backyard. I go out the front door and look up and down the street. No Pat. What now? Nobody else is awake. I decide to wait until others rise to call out a search party. No need to bother them yet. I go back inside and upstairs to the guest bedroom and lay down. I fall back to sleep. Soon, I hear sounds downstairs -- Michelle and Pat in the kitchen. He came back. Thank goodness.
Where’d he go? I ask, knowing the suburb offered no street life, just middle-class homes and a strip of shops. He had wandered, unable to sleep, looking for something to do, he says. He had gotten lost. He had to go to the bathroom. All the businesses were closed. So he took a crap in some bushes in somebody’s front yard.
During the day Pat wants to go places, too. He gets bored easily and likes to be entertained. We go to a matinee at a mall movie theater. We take a walk around the neighborhood. I recall that we visit a scenic overlook and gaze down on the Missouri River at the site Lewis and Clark traveled west on their historic trip some 200 years earlier.
As we drive around, Pat notices a Church’s Fried Chicken restaurant and mentions how our mother invented the fast food chain’s chicken recipe; the company ripped her off. Other times during the weekend Pat mentions that family ancestors helped Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison with inventions but they never received the credit nor the ensuing riches they deserved.
My brother-in-law, Tom, and I usually play golf when I visit. Not this time, at least not on a real golf course. Unspoken, we knew it wouldn’t be fair to leave Pat with Michelle and Anna. I’m disappointed but keep Pat company while he smokes on the patio and sits on a lawn chair. Tom and I pitch plastic golf balls around the backyard. We devise a golf “hole” that requires hitting a ball at a pot near a fence. It is a tricky shot over Pat as he slumps in a chair, in the line of fire. One of my shots accidentally hits Pat. He bolts upright. We laugh. We decide it is more fun to try to land the ball on Pat’s lap. He is a good sport about it, smokes with one hand, and throws the ball back with the other.
One evening we order pizza for dinner. As we all sit around the table munching, Tom jokes that his grandfather invented pizza. We all burst into laughter. I look at Pat and nearly choke; he has joined in, a sly smile from the corner of his mouth.
After dinner, I challenge Pat to a game of ping-pong in the basement. Pat’s reactions are slow. I mostly take it easy on him, lob the ball. But occasionally I can’t resist a slam and I hit the ball as hard as I can.
It’s near dark. He is antsy. He wants to go out just as everyone else is settling in. It’s boring just sitting around the house, he says. I’m tense myself and, with everyone so touchy, I volunteer to walk with him up the street to a bar and grill. It would get him out of the house, and Michelle needs a break from hawkish duty and issuing a stream of admonishments to try control Pat.
It is dark by the time we enter the establishment, a mile or two away. There is a small crowd inside. What will the waitress think about this unkempt, wild-eyed man? Would he pull a stunt or embarrass me? I’m somewhat used to this, act normal, step up and play conciliator, smile, and tell the waitress we are only here for some drinks. Pat orders a Coke. Pat always drinks Cokes, but there’s never enough to slake his thirst. I order a cup of decaffeinated coffee.
A few well-dressed women and men sit on stools in the dark paneled bar. There is quite a bit of laughter. I watch a muted ballgame on a TV. He slurps and looks around the room. Pat gulps, wants a refill and can’t wait for our waitress to come back to check on us. I start to cringe when he lunges and stands to block the path of a passing waitress.
“Miss, Miss,” can I have a refill, Pat asks, nearly causing her to topple a tray of food. Not our waitress. We have to pay for refill, she says, shifting and looking past him for help.
I want to leave, after my coffee, but Pat wants to stay or go somewhere else. He threatens to stay out without me. I can’t tell him what to do, he says sharply. I am not the boss of him. If I don’t stay out with him, there is a good chance we would have a mess to solve later. He might run off, get arrested, and be hospitalized again. Michelle would never forgive me if he was institutionalized in her town, making Pat her problem. He argues his way out of leaving and I’m stuck so we stay. I can’t remember what we talk about, but Pat is ever opinionated, and I sometimes challenge his statements, which seem impractical. I change the subject. I am bored and feel worn out. I’m getting tired, I say. Aren’t you? You didn’t much sleep the night before. It’s getting late. I convince him it is time to go. His drink is empty again, and he can’t smoke in the restaurant. Finally, we gives in and we head back. I sense he is still keyed up, so I encourage some wandering, and we walk the lighted residential streets. With the tall trees and two-story homes with dormer windows, this could have been the neighborhood where we grew up. We look in the windows of a few storefronts, a hardware store, a bagel shop. I am relieved that all the shops are closed.
Pat slows to an irritating crawl, hanging back. If I keep a steady pace he will follow, I think. He falls further behind, walking even more slowly, trying to light a cigarette. He stops to sit on a curb. It is cat and mouse now. I am about a half block ahead of him and, looking back over my shoulder, I stop when he stops. I am not about to let him get too far behind. I take a wrong turn somewhere and we end up walking the streets for about forty minutes. Finally, I spot a familiar intersection. An older couple passes walking a dog, and so I stop and pet, looking and waiting for Pat to catch up. What a pretty doggie. We finally return to Michelle’s. The others are asleep. Pat wants to watch TV. I stay up with him awhile, page through one of the books that fill my sister’s bookcases, unwilling to take the chance to leave him alone. He might disappear again. Sometime around midnight, I convince Pat to turn off the TV and come up to bed. We have to fly out early in the morning, I remind him. I brush my teeth and change into pajama bottoms. Working off his shirt with grunts, Pat drops into bed with his pants on.
After some fidgeting, and listening for Pat’s snore, I fall asleep.
Early the next morning, Pat is gone -- again. I go outside looking for him. I scan neighbors’ yards. I enter the Catholic Church a couple blocks away. It is Sunday, but the early mass won’t be for more than an hour. No Pat inside. I light a candle. God, please help Pat. Grant him Your highest and best good.
Our flight departs soon. Michelle calls the police department to see if they picked him up. No Pat. We agree that if Pat doesn’t show up, I should get on my flight without him. What else can I do? Later, at the airport, I feel relief as I take my bag from Tom’s car. At least now I won’t have to manage Pat during his visit to my home, no more images of coming home from work to find my house burned down from an unattended cigarette. If Pat acted out, became delusional and ran away, would we spend days searching for him? What if we were forced to check him into a mental hospital? The worst-case scenarios couldn’t happen now -- at least on my watch – but I feel anxious about leaving the problem with Michelle. It was going to be her mess to solve. The return flight is uneventful. I nap.
A few days later, Michelle tells me over the phone that they finally found Pat. In the middle of the night he made his way across the state border to Kansas and he wandered a couple days before he was picked up by the police on suspicion of vagrancy. They agreed to let him go and drop the charges if he flew home. She immediately had his airline ticket changed, called his case manager, and sent him back to Albuquerque.
It takes a couple days of calling and leaving messages before I reach Pat on the phone. I tell him he had hurt his chances of visiting the family anytime soon. We have to trust him to obey house rules and to not run off. I am sorry, he says. We can’t spend our time searching for you all the time, I continue. Mom is eighty years old, and most of our brothers and sisters have kids at home. I’m not sure when we would be able to arrange another trip. I know, he says. He says he is sorry again. His voice, often difficult to understand over the phone, fades off in a mumble. I don’t want to hear him anymore, not in this way. I am ashamed, cornering Pat into making amends for inconveniencing us. I change the subject. I have to go, I have to go, Pat says suddenly, urgently. The phone goes dead. He hangs up without saying goodbye.
Later, I think to myself that he hung up so abruptly because he had to go to bathroom. He has been suffering from incontinence.
The King of Them All
Pat and Jon were the oldest. Good cop, bad cop. Wise king and the prince of darkness. One the power of attraction, one aversion.
Inevitably, there was a dispute, some test or a battle of wits. There was a game and someone was accused of cheating. They argued over whose turn to retrieve the baseball from the bushes. Or, Jon picked on Madeline. He had her on the carpet, her arms pinned to her sides as he tortured her. He licked her face, and she tried to push him off, shaking her head back and forth, red-faced, hair flinging. Jon’s laughter was maniacal, his tongue dangled. Sometimes he dripped thick salvia from his mouth. Just before the slime touched her face he sucked it back up into his mouth.
There was a wrestling match. Pat would win, of course. We danced around the house and burst into our made-up song of victory: “Who’s the ki-iiing of them all. Everybody knows it’s Pat, Pat, Pat!” Over and over we would sing, doing a bunny hop dance, marching in circles, our legs and arms pumping, cheerful, through the living room, the hallway, the kitchen. A regular conga line. The world was a riotous circus, and sometimes it was all right.
“Who’s the ki-iiing of them all. Everybody knows it’s Pat, Pat, Pat.”
“Who’s the ki-iiing of them all. Everybody knows it’s Pat. Pat. Pat.”
Somebody is Making a Racket
All I know is somebody is making a racket, and they are trying to climb into our house. As spooky black as it is outside, it seems impossibly bright inside at this hour. The lights burn.
This is one of my earliest memories. I am three or four years old.
I sit on the stairs. I am blinking in half sleep, looking down upon the scene, an almost mythical vision, this bird’s-eye view. I don’t remember words, but there are loud noises and there is movement in the hallway and in rooms below. Suddenly I realize that my dad has broken into the house, and he is causing a ruckus. Everybody in the house is up by now. Even my little sisters, Barbara and baby Denise, couldn’t sleep through this.
Years later, I learn my father, separated from my mother, climbed the arbor outside, crawled on the roof and stumbled into the house through a window. During a certain period of our lives, these were semi-regular incidents. The way I remember, they played out the same: Dad, drunk, gets in the house in search of my mother. Chaos ensues. It’s loud. We try to protect her. We hide her, usually in a closet or under a bed. Sometimes dad was violent. One time he threw my mother against a wall and she crumpled to the floor. One time we picked up kitchen implements, pots and pans and banged them violently, driving my father from the house, so Pat once told me. Madeline remembers standing on a step and swinging a skillet at him.