A SERPENT IN THE NEST
One defining
memory I have of my childhood is when my father would get his slide projector out at family gatherings and narrate the slides - which were projected on a white
bed sheet tacked to a wall in the living room. The pictures were of family
vacations, relatives and his time spent in Vietnam. I was enthralled by how he
told the story of his life, punctuated by the *CLICK* of the slide carrier and
the brilliance of light that illuminated his past and transported me so vividly
to a time and a place. It was almost as if he created a mythology out of the
mundane, and occasionally even I was a character. The humor that was usually
missing during the actual events, was elaborated upon (and fictionalized) to
get a reaction from the family. For instance, one time we traveled to the
Mogollon Rim in a camper. It was me, my father and stepmother, and my great
grandmother Naomi. While we were away from camp, my dog - Buddy, got into the
cooler and ate the food. To hear it at the family slideshow, one would think it
was a hilarious moment lifted out of National Lampoon's Vacation - with me as
Russ and my father as Clark W. Griswold.
My recollection of the real event was
something else entirely. I had trouble reconciling the fictional family that
was presented at the slideshows with the real family that I experienced. But,
even I had to admit, the stories were entertaining. The stories were so much
better than the reality. It was my first introduction to the transformative
power of fiction.
So, it is in the
format of those family slideshows that I present the complicated story of the
relationship I have with my father. I'm afraid I don't quite have my father's ability
to paint rainbows where there are none. If it is true that everyone creates the
story of their own life out of their unique perspective, then perhaps it is
time that I present my take. It may seem a bit disjointed at times, but rarely
do our memories unfold in linear ways, and even if they did, the truth does not
always follow suit. So without further ado...
hang the sheet - dim the lights - pass the popcorn (everyone set?)
* CLICK *
This is a picture of my father taken at
the Grand Canyon. His father (my
grandfather) had died a month or so before this picture was taken. Wife/gina and
I had come from Sarasota to pick up my grandfather's Nissan truck, which he had
wanted me to have upon his passing and to help organize my grandfather's
copious record collection - which we never actually got to.
My father was in the hospital room when his father died.
* CLICK *
This is my mother and father on their
wedding day. The photograph is time-stamped June 1973. I was born on October
21, 1973 - four months later.
My mother died on January 12, 2015. She was 57 years old.
My mother died on January 12, 2015. She was 57 years old.
* CLICK *
Three generations of Little's. This was
the last time we were all together. My father moved back to Arizona to be with
the family, and more specifically to be with my grandfather whose heart was
beginning to fail. I stayed behind in Sarasota by myself.
*CLICK*
This is a newspaper clipping of my father
- presumably submitted by my grandparents. Dates are important here. He
graduated 1966 - two years later he was drafted. I was born seven years after
this picture was taken.
*CLICK*
This is a picture of my father with
his two sisters taken in 1988. I never understood the perm. He looked to me
like a mustachioed Mike Brady.
*CLICK*
Mike Brady from The Brady Bunch was a
men's hairstyle trendsetter. Who knew?
This is the father from my novel "The
People's Republic of Retail". When I think of the word "Dad"
this is what comes to mind - men with perms, stuck in the 70's.
*CLICK*
My father freshly returned from Vietnam.
*CLICK*
Here's my father a few years later
surrounded by relatives. It was obvious to me that two tours in Vietnam had not
turned my father into a soldier. It's hard to say what direction his life would
have taken had he not been drafted. My mother told me that he had tremendous
nightmares about the war.
*CLICK*
This is what I refer to as my father's
"angry years". You may not be able to see it, but I can. At this time
the differences between father and son had become irreconcilable. This picture
was taken right before a camping trip. My father always idealized these
vacations, but to me they always felt more like this…
*CLICK*
The mood is right, but not the logistics.
My father and stepmother rode in the truck, and I was in the camper being towed
behind. My father began to complain that I spent too much time reading, instead
of looking out at the scenery. These roles - my father as "man of nature
and experience" and me as "milquetoast bookworm" would divide us
for decades.
*CLICK*
Probably the closest we ever were as father
and son. I have no memory of this moment. Wish I did.
*CLICK*
October 21, 1973. The day I came into this
world.
*CLICK*
Happy Thanksgiving from the 1st Air
Cavalry.
*CLICK*
Here's the menu. My father told me that
due to budgetary cuts, meals were served on paper plates. I didn't understand
at first. Then my father told me how little food can fit on a single paper
plate. These were hungry young guys. Many depended on care packages from home.
In my father's diaries, food is a predominant theme.
*CLICK*
This is an entry from one of two diaries
my father kept while in Vietnam.
*CLICK*
And here is another.
*CLICK*
Christmas break during my junior year of high school. I rode a Greyhound Bus from Southern Illinois (where I was living
with my mother) to Arizona and back again. A friend from High School didn't
think I would come back. I knew I could never stay.
*CLICK*
October of '93 or '94. I was living in
Jacksonville, Florida with my fiancé M-----. My father and stepmother were
living in Sarasota at the time. It was almost a year before he came to see me. There
are no pictures of M-----. They were thrown off The Bridge of Lions into the
Matanzas River in St. Augustine after the relationship imploded. A commonality,
both of our first major relationships failed miserably. The only difference - he
had a son as a constant reminder.
*CLICK*
My mother and grandmother in June of 1973.
My grandmother never approved of my mother, and from what I know of her,
probably with good reason. My father had a dominant mother, two sisters, and a
father who was an OTR truck driver - meaning he was gone a great deal of the
time. His mother was the matriarch who held the family together for years and
her disapproval must have stung - even more so as my mother's mental health
began to show early signs of instability.
*CLICK*
This was the framework of a stone house
near Hound Dog Acres where I grew up. It is still standing today. The house I
grew up in did not survive the two floods. Neither did my parents' marriage.
*CLICK*
This is a water flume, also near where I
grew up. My father liked to float through the tube as recreation. One time he
took me with him and somehow I got separated from him and almost drowned. I was
terrified of water and enclosed spaces for a long time after that. It got so
bad that, after a screaming fit, my father could take no more and took me
outside with a bar of soap and we showered outside using the hose.
*CLICK*
I knew Dave Amburgey as" the
zookeeper". He was one of about 6 groups of people that lived in Hound Dog
Acres. I remember staring with wonderment through the cages at his animals. At
night, I could hear the lions roar across the desert. My father's high
school/Vietnam buddy Danny also lived not far from us. I remember waking to a
fire burning brightly across the starless night. Danny had met someone,
brought her home - they had both passed out. We were too far out for the fire
department to be of much use. My father
told me later, about the same time he told me about the zookeeper's animals
being shot, that the girl was so badly burned that her skin stuck to the seat of
the car. She died soon after.
*CLICK*
The most dangerous thing in the desert is
not the heat or dangerous animals, it's water. The photo above is from a recent
Arizona flash flood. I survived two of them, but they both radically altered my
future. This is some information I found about the deluges of my childhood:
Between
October 1977 and February 1980, seven regional floods occur and Phoenix is
declared a disaster area three times. There are 18 fatalities and approximately
$310 million in property damage.
November
1978: Floodwaters virtually destroy the community of Allenville near Buckeye
and cause heavy damage in Holly Acres on the Gila River and Hound Dog Acres on
the Agua Fria River. The Salt River has a peak flow of 140,000 cubic feet per
second. Damage estimated at $51.8 million.
The 1978 flood is the one that is burned in
my memory. I was five years old. I remember my father shouting. I got out of
bed and stepped into water. We piled into the car. My father and mother were
visibly afraid. We went over a rise and right into rushing floodwaters. My
father jumped out. My mother passed me to him and then he pulled her out. It
was November. It was freezing. We were soaked. We huddled on the high bank for
I don't know how long. My next memory is of us at the Red Cross shelter. There
was news footage of me walking around the cots in my father's cowboy boots.
Nothing was the same after that. Most
everybody moved away. The silence of the lions was deafening. My parents split
up. Then we went to live with relatives in a townhouse, plagued by traffic
noise, far from the desert and the life that we had known. My cousin's treatment
at the hand of his cruel stepfather shattered my idealism. My father spent most
of the time away. One day he came back and told me he had met someone.
*CLICK*
One of the happiest memories of childhood.
This was my cat Tiger. She came wrapped in a box that Christmas. My father said
that I wandered all over the desert with that cat slung over my shoulders. I was told that she died giving birth to a
litter of kittens. I have no memory of her kittens.
*CLICK*
This was a horrorshow. You may not be able
to see it, but I can. This was the night of "the cookout". We were
leaving Arizona the next morning to head back to Sarasota with my grandfather's
truck. Earlier in the day my stepmother offered me $1500 for the truck. I promptly
turned her down. Later, during the cookout, (the first time I had seen the
relatives in decades) my stepmother casually remarked (during a lull in the
conversation) "Why don't you go down and clean up that horseshit."
Everyone was stunned. Everyone but me. This was an echo of something I had
heard throughout my childhood.
From her perch in the kitchen, where she
could look out over their Arabian horses, I heard this phrase repeated so many
times I began to associate myself with horseshit. My father loved horses - I
loved books. Instead of finding a way to bridge that gap, my stepmother chose
to exploit our differences. She had good reason. For one, her own son from a
previous marriage was a massive screw-up so her best option was to marginalize
me at every turn. I was born in my mother's image - a reminder of a life that
had occurred before her. From the minute we met, she was looking for a way to
edit me out of the picture. At this particular time, her son was due to be set
free on parole from a fraud charge in Sarasota and was headed "home".
She needed two things, a cheap truck for her son, and the memory of me excised
once and for all. My family's inability to stand up for me helped her achieve
the latter, but I still have the truck to this day.
*CLICK*
This is my father at the Grand Canyon. I am not in this picture. The previous night I was in a hayride accident in which (as I tried to board the trailer) my leg slid between a double tractor wheel. A spring pierced my left leg and pulled out a fist sized piece of my flesh. I was thrown to the ground by the force and the full weight of the tire (and all the passengers) ran over my ankle. My stepmother's mother was in from Atlanta visiting, and not wanting her to miss out on the Grand Canyon, she convinced my father to go on the trip anyway. This decision has made less and less sense to me as I have met and surpassed the age that he is in this picture. I had 147 stitches and a drainage tube, and I was in the hospital for 5 days. They were gone for 4 of those days - no phone call. That first night I listened to a man in an adjoining room moan and scream all night long. He was recovering from back surgery I later found out. Something broke inside of me that night that has never fully mended. My great-grandmother arrived to see me the next day - only to find a listless shell. I was 12 years old.
This is one of the most profoundly
heartbreaking photographs I have. I am surrounded by everything except love. I
am physically present, but no longer there - emotionally, mentally… Too many
summers spent locked away in the house by myself. Too many weekends spent
cleaning and re-cleaning under my stepmother's thumb, while my father retreated
to his horses - unwilling or unable to stand up for his own son. This was not
long before the break-in - my own personal Watergate.
The
following summer I was trapped inside - given detailed instructions on cleaning
the house to (but never meeting) my stepmother's obsessive standards. Ever
since the little league incident in which my father was my coach (a tragic
mistake of Shakespearean proportions) my parents had isolated me away from any
kind of extra-curricular activities. It didn't stop them from dressing me as an
avid sport's fan - something I wasn't and am still not to this day. So day
after monotonous day, whilst my folks worked excessively long hours trying to
flip houses and constructing Arabian horse tax shelters - with the grand scheme
of seeking a bit of that '80's era brass ring, I was stuck inside of a house in
which I was no longer welcome. I spent all summer cleaning and watching 3 VHS
tapes over and over and over again- Blade Runner, The Thing and Trading Places
- unable to have friends or much less spend time with them.
I called my father at work one day to ask
if my friend Jay could come over. He agreed, but swore me to secrecy. So Jay
showed up and we had a great normal kid day. It was such a remarkable event for
me that I couldn't help but write about it in my diary. A few weekends later a
break-in occurred in which a jar full of change was stolen. I was at my
grandmother's at the time. My stepmother decided to ransack my room - something
she frequently did, and found my diary. I arrived home and was told to leave. I
spent that week trying to get a hold of my unreliable mother to ask if she could
come and get me. I finally got through to her and she reluctantly agreed.
That next Saturday I remember my
stepmother was conspicuously absent. So my father was left with this last
little bit of unpleasantness. There were choices to be made. He made his. It
wasn't easy. I could see him wrestling with it. He knew there was no coming
back from this one. In the end he chose his second wife over his own son. I was
set out on the curb like a bag of garbage. My mother showed up 10 hours later.
My father has tried to justify this move
over the years, but there was only he and I, and though he could live with the
lie - I couldn't. Nothing would ever be the same again after this.
*CLICK*
This is my father and his new girlfriend
Lisa. My grandmother could not stand music in the house. It gave her
migraines. My grandfather was (as it turned out) an avid (almost obsessive) music listener. When she died of liver failure my grandfather spent the last few years of his life free to indulge his passion. By the time he died he had thousands upon thousands of records. When his own father died, my father seemed finally set free to seek his own happiness. Lisa is a great person. Probably the person he should have been with
all along.
Around the millennium, I left the excess
of Jacksonville behind and came to stay with my father and stepmother for a
time. It was not a need to - but a desire to. I had a job and paid my own way.
I wanted to try to rebuild a new relationship on the spot where the old temples
had fallen. During this time I became obsessed with capturing random images of
my father in black and white.
*CLICK*
My
father seemed always fascinated by storms. I took the photo in the middle of
this image and my father remarked "That is strange world weather." I
told him that I was going to use that as the title of my book of poems.
*CLICK*
This was my bedroom and writing desk at
Camelot East where my father and stepmother lived. Camelot East is an over 55 gated
community. It had a nice library with many Hemingway volumes. My stepmother
constantly replaced the horse statuette on the desk in a kind of tug of war. It
was the act of a snake whose venom is no longer potent. This is where I
interviewed my father about his Vietnam experiences.
*CLICK*
I took my father to the Dali Museum in St.
Petersburg. He was amazed when the docent pointed out the images hidden within
this particular painting. I watched him closely and at the moment of
realization I whispered, "Dad, that's what I'm trying to do with
writing." I think he understood. After all there is a precedent. My father
filled two diaries while in Vietnam, but he also had a journal.
*CLICK*
This is an illustration from my father's
Vietnam journal. It is filled with newspaper clippings, drawings, and detailed
descriptions of drug trips and random thoughts. In contrast to his two diaries,
this one is dripping with creativity and personality. The book I'm working on,
"The People's Republic of Retail" owes a lot to this journal. It's
filled with cartoon-y illustrations, video clips and pictures of historical
figures and events. I read my father's journal many times as a child. In terms
of style, you could say he influenced me as a writer. We had more in common
organically than what was ever allowed to take root.
*CLICK*
Another random pic from the Camelot days.
Where the baker rack stands there used to be a birdcage. My father always had a
thing for birds. In Arizona he keeps pigeons. When I was a child he had a coop
filled with all kinds of birds. One day a snake slithered onto this lanai
(fancy Florida word for porch) got into the birdcage and swallowed both
songbirds. When my father saw the snake coiled in the birdcage he immediately
grabbed a pistol. I stopped him and told him it wasn't a good idea to fire a
gun in a residential area. He knocked the cage over and beheaded the snake with
a hoe. He then proceeded to take a knife and slit the snakes belly open and saw
his songbirds. It was too late they were both dead.
In the end, the grand experiment failed.
My father moved back to Arizona to be with family and I stayed in Sarasota
alone. In a way, I lost him twice, but this time I was okay with it. We both
went away with a deeper understanding of each other. I had pushed myself to the
edge and I could live with that. Our current relationship is… strained. As years go on I find myself repeating his
pigeon philosophies. I have reached the age that he was when I was a kid.
Experiences - great and terrible, shape us, but in the end it comes down to
choices. We are ultimately judged and adjudicated by what choices we made. It
is important to understand why, but you can't spend too much time dwelling on
questions at the expense of living your life. Maybe that is the nature of a
father to a son. Good, bad or indifferent, they are with you always.
In the months after he left, I was
involved in a terrible auto accident, but I also met a girl…
*CLICK*
A few years later I took her to a Chinese
restaurant and asked her to marry me.
*CLICK*
She said "Yes" by the way.
*CLICK*
Although we don't have children, in the end I win…
*CLICK*
…because I got all the kids.
This is heartbreaking and wonderful. I love you both.
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