Women & Blacks & Hank!, oh my...

Every once in awhile I wonder how Hank! is doing without my stepfather around to pull his nuts out of the fire. Has he learned to take responsibility for himself? Or has he found someone else to protect him from the consequences of his actions?

Back in the late '70s, Hank! was busted for shoplifting. He was caught with socks in his back pocket.

Socks. He stole socks?!

Well, I'm one to mock...I got busted stealing a freaking dollar penlight. Without batteries.

The store manager called the cops and the Old Man, who went to the store and did a little song and dance--not the first, not the last--to get his boy off the hook. Can't have him going to jail or having a record or having to pay for his crime.

Maybe somewhere there's a list. Just for the sake of blogging, I wish I'd made up a scorecard, but I stayed away from Hank! as much as possible. Guy's a dick. He went from being a shoplifting dick to a drinking dick to a drunk-driving dick to a paranoid psychotic drunk-driving dick who walked along the right-of-way in front of his mother's house holding either a shotgun or a rifle. Screamed at passers-by to get off his street. People out for a walk would cross the street before passing that house.

The neighborhood adored him.

Then--early '90s--he became a drunk-driving dick who had a car wreck that landed him in jail. There were injuries. He was facing 30 days in jail. Actual consequences loomed in his future!

...and step-pops pulled some Fred Astaire magic, that old song and dance, and Hank! ended up with 6 months' house arrest instead. In our house.

If I didn't like Hank!, my mother loathed and feared him, especially after he pushed her into a wall because she was in his way. The Old Man took Hank!'s shotgun and rifle away, so Hank! wandered around the yard with a sledgehammer instead. I hid it, so he toted a jack handle instead.

The neighborhood--different neighborhood--adored him, especially with his racist screaming at the black family next door and his more mundane screaming at the white folks.

His own mother stopped letting him stay with her, so he bounced from our house to his siter's to his son's and back, never actually welcome, only endured.

I learned something the day the old man danced to get Hank! house arrest instead of jail.

I learned that "women and n*ggers" were responsible for Hank!'s plight.

The Old Man came home from the court hearing ranting that "one day I'm going to make it my business to get even with all the women and n*ggers!"

Amazing!

The past few weeks, I've amused myself wondering what the mechanism for this vast conspiracy against poor, much-maligned Hank! might be, and which group, for example, bears responsibility for which problems in Hank!'s life.

Was it the women, the blacks, or both who forced Hank! to drink?

Which group made him drive? Was it women who engineered the traffic "accident" that brought down this mighty Titan? Black people who conspired to get him arrested yet again?

Thunderstorm kills the TV? WOMEN!

Sportsball team loses the game? BLACKS! GAWDAMMIT!



I don't really have an ending for this post, other than to say I'm glad I don't share blood with him. I can't get too smug about that, though, since I did a little digging into my birth family and found one habitual offender who could well be the Hank! of that family. Felony battery, burglary, criminal mischief, larceny, prison time, five different mug shots since 2003. Makes Hank! look like an amateur.

Nicknames and Tone

I wish I had more stories for some of the nicknames I've come up with. I've tried to make the nickname fit the person, just the right amount of snark or contempt or whatever to give the reader an idea of what that person was like--I'm too lazy to flesh things out all the time and I like the mental picture that pops up with the proper nickname.

I came up with some really good ones--like Sergeant Allstate, the insurance salesman by day, sergeant for 1 weekend a month, the cheap and kind of slimy salesman--or Farmboy-san for one of the blackbelts back in my karate days; he really did have a farm, and the whole country-boy thing, but without being your Larry the Cable Guy redneck. But those are pretty much one-story guys. I didn't spend a lot of time around either of them. It's a shame--those nicknames took a while to work out (Farmboy-san only occurred to me this morning!).

Then there are Pocahontas/Piglet (first ex), Number Two (second ex), Scumbag (haven't written much about him, aside from the "Saving Whitney" post a few years ago), Hank (the insane stepbrother) and the Old Man (stepfather), some of whom are regular topics.

Lots of snark. It seems at first glance that I don't have a lot of happy stories. But I intend them to be at least partly funny, rather than just a collection of angry rants.

Shotgun Hank!

I know I've never written about "Hank," my crazy stepbrother. He's the natural-born son of my stepfather and he is, as I mentioned, batshit crazy.
Hank's always been an aggressive ass and a bully. The apple didn't fall far from the tree, there, but since he spent most of his time at his mother's house instead of ours my life was a lot simpler.

I'm not sure when he started getting crazy, but I know he did it to himself by boozing heavily, driving drunk, and demolishing cars. He took a few head injuries in the late '80s and early '90s. As I understand it, the head trauma triggered some changes in his brain that led to him being diagnosed as paranoid psychotic.
One of the drunken car wrecks led to him being placed on 6 months' house arrest. In our house. Thanks, Dad (step-pops talked the judge into that instead of 30 days in jail--he never seemed to let the bastard face the consequences of his actions, but he'd whip the shit out of me for relatively minor stuff).
Hank took to muttering to himself--"goddamnmotherfuckindrinkinproblem" was a favorite--and pacing around the yard like Jason Voorhees working as a mall-cop. He carried a sledge hammer around for a few weeks, always leaving it at the back door when he came back inside. I decided that it needed to disappear so he wouldn't hurt anyone, and I'm still pretty smug about how I did it.
As I was heading into the house from a coffee run, I grabbed the thing, hoping to sneak it into my room before he came outside--and damned if he didn't pick that moment to open the back door. I'm holding the sledge in my left hand by the end of the handle (he always leaned it head-down against the house by the door) and quickly moved it so it was hidden along my left leg. He came out to my right, never even seeing the hammer, and I moved it around to the front of my leg, walked into the house, and closed the door. Scared the crap out of me. I don't know if he ever figured it out, or whether he blamed the neighbors.

He started carrying a jack handle, instead. Oh, well.

When his house-arrest was finally over, he went back to live with his mother. Instead of the jack handle, he started toting a 12-gauge shotgun or a rifle, pacing along the property line and shouting at passers-by to get off his street. Yes, they were loaded. Step-pops finally got some backbone (it always took him a while to man up and deal with Hank) and took the guns away from him. The rifle went to Hank's son. The shotgun came to our house, where the Old Man kept it in his closet. Yes, it was loaded.

In the next 10 years or so, Hank would cycle between living at his mother's house, living at ours, and staying with his son or sister out in Mississippi. By the late '90s, his mother was so terrified of him that he ended up with us when he was in town. In 2006, when the Old Man had the stroke that brought his Alzheimer's into full play, Hank had to go.

I was picked to clear the guns out of our house, since no one really knew what the Old Man would be like when the Alzheimer's took over. It was a good idea, as it happens, since he freaked out over mirrors and photos of people and was convinced that my mother was an impostor.

I found the shotgun in his closet. Yes, it was loaded. Safety fucking OFF. That's scary enough, but the ammo it had in it was a couple of triple-ought buckshot shells and two one-ounce deer slugs. That's what Hank had been toting around.

It's a wonder no one ever got killed.

The End.

We got The Call around 7:45 this morning.

Service and burial are set for Tuesday. He'll be in a plot close to my grandmother's (his mother-in-law) just outside Castleberry, AL.

"Not expected to live through the night."

The Old Man is in a coma. His breathing was labored earlier, but I don't know what amount of consciousness there was.

I hope that if there was suffering, and awareness of same, that the end comes soon. It is an evil thing for a mind to endure--and it's the one thing I'm really afraid of.

Down, Down, Down

The Old Man's been in Hospice care for several weeks; at the time, the docs gave him 3 to 6 months.

We got a call this morning: they've put him on oxygen; his heart keeps trying to stop; the pneumonia he's been beset with for more than a year isn't getting any better--and the Hospice folks aren't taking him to the hospital.

I've long since accepted that he's going to die; Alzheimer's just does it agonizingly slowly.

I wish his daughter--my step-sister [let's call her "Screech"]--wasn't having such a hard time with it. Her coping mechanism has been denial and shrill accusation: he doesn't have Alzheimer's. He's not going to die. He didn't have a stroke. You've gotten him locked up like that so you could take all his money. You've got him in that place to kill him. At first, she was venting at the top of her lungs over the phone, screaming at my mother, who has Power of Attorney and has been managing all this shit the best she can.

Mom hung up on her ass. Screech called back--"Did you just hang up on me?!?!!!11!1!!?"
Mom said, "Yes." And hung up on her ass again.

So now Screech is doing her screeching by proxy, I think through an aunt.

Funeral's going to be interesting. I've been assigned the task of keeping Screech away from Mom. Not really sure how I'm supposed to do that. Do I loom with amiable menace like a bouncer? Stand hip-shot like a gunslinger, one hand on my trusty Peacemaker? Show off my mad bo-staff skillz like Napoleon Dynamite?

Shit. I don't want to go to the funeral. I don't want to deal with Screech's childish rantings or the other asinine family politics--the cousins who pretend I don't exist at the yearly reunions; I don't want to see my insane step-brother (yeah, I've got some stories about him...the entire neighborhood does).

[ETA: The funeral went quietly, nobody misbehaved.]

Bullies...and the Old Man

Still thinking about the Old Man, and my own troubles.

I was afraid of him for most of my childhood...disliked or hated him for that into my 20's...angry with myself into my 30's for not standing up to him, all because of those whippings that seemed all out of proportion to whatever I'd done, the threats of taking an ax handle to me...I wasn't a great kid, no, but I wasn't that bad or all that different from any other kid my age. Maybe it was his own upbringing; for the few years I was around his father (he died in the late '70s), most of the memories I have of Grafton were of a stern stranger. I don't remember him as a loving grandfather figure or much of anything else. And I don't know whether he whipped the tar out of his own kids.

I see other people, their closeness to family, and I wonder what it feels like. In my forties, the old fear is gone, the anger still there: I never stood up to him, or to anybody else. The closest I ever came to fighting back against bullies amounted to peeing on one. Would have been more satifying to knock him down and beat him unconscious, to make sure that was the last time he bullied anyone.

There was a teacher who was worse than that, in some ways. I was in her marketing class. One day, on the way across campus to her "portable" classroom, I found a pair of aluminum push-pins in the dirt. I like shiny things and metal, so of course I grabbed them. I had them on my desk during class (no book bag? Can't remember--but I had enough sense to not sit down with those things in a pocket).

One of the bullies got assigned to pick up trash in the room: the teacher's notion of punishment for talking. He walked up and down the rows, smirking, collecting paper or whatever and putting it in the trash can he was toting. When he got to my desk, he swept my pins into the can. I told him to put them back--and the teacher got involved.

She looked at the pins and told me I'd stolen them from her bulletin board. Wouldn't listen to my side of things. Go sit down.

As I walked away, I muttered, "you f*cking bitch."

This got me sent to the dean's office, got my mother called in for a conference with the three of them...and got me suspended for a few days. No one bothered to ask me my side. All they cared about was the disruption, not right or wrong. To this day, I stand by what I did--but I wish I'd been better at it, my own defense attorney, able to use words as weapons, with the conviction of being in the right--the pins weren't stolen, and she was a farking bitch.

Funny thing is that she was supposed to be psychic. It was years later that I thought that I could have used that--"You're psychic, right? Why don't you use your mystical powers to find the truth?"

Nah. I never had the backbone to stand up to any of them, the Old Man, his son, the bullies at school, the teachers who didn't care anymore about teaching and just wanted to get through another day of dealing with us teenaged terrorists. Then there were various management types, both in civilian and military employ, where pushing back would bring worse than schoolboy suspension...well, a boss can only fire you. Military people can throw your ass in jail whether they're wrong or not.

So many authoritarians and incompetents. Teachers fail upward and become administrators. Sergeants collect more rockers on their sleeves. Crappy team leaders become managers become district managers. Brown belts become black belts--and there's always someone who thinks his new rank should be used as a bludgeon. The new administrator wants to clean up the school, get rid of things he found offensive and could do nothing about. The new sergeant tries to shape up his platoon by becoming a shouting drill instructor. The new district manager has to be consulted for every decision, demanding that payroll be kept unrealistically low--but those sales have to go up, whether there are enough people to do the job or not. The new blackbelt looks upon simple mistakes as infractions to be punished.

They're all the same. But the stepfather, the stepbrother...where do they fit into this? An administrator or manager can be shuffled sideways, a sergeant reassigned, a black belt put through a "guantlet" where he must face the other high-ranks, to be shown how little he knows.

What the hell do you do with family?

What the hell do you do three decades later, when you're not that scared little kid--just an adult looking at new things to be afraid of--your own failing health and that of your surviving parent, looking for a new job.

What the hell do you do when that giant with a belt is just an old man?

The Old Man goes into Hospice care.

Feb. 14 marks two years since my stepfather was put into an Alzheimer's "home", if that's what it's called.

A few days ago, he stopped responding to medication, stopped talking, and is refusing to eat. He's been placed in Hospice care, given 3 to 6 months to live--or what passes for living, considering the Alzheimer's.

It goes back to January of 2006; one morning he just didn't get out of the easy chair he slept in. My mother went in to check on him and found him in the chair, glassy-eyed, barely breathing. He'd had what the docs later called a "mini-stroke." He got hospitalized quickly enough that there didn't seem to be any massive harm from the stroke...but it was enough to cause "Capgras' Delusion". It had him convinced that my mother was an imposter, that there were THREE of her, but she wasn't the right one--she was her own sister.

From there, things got worse. We had to take down photos and mirrors because those people in there were coming out after him. He was convinced that neighborhood kids and adults alike were having sex in our cars. My mother was in bed with every man in the neighborhood, and her "sister" was covering for her. He woke me up one night (scared the shit out of me!) wanting me to come and chase the people out of his bedroom.

For a few months, he worked as a security guard at (I think) a strip mall...but he couldn't really tell time anymore and couldn't even fill in his time sheets or reports.

He would freak out, have siezures, get combative, and wander around the house. It got to a point where we had to have him "Baker Acted" (involuntarily committed) on Valentine's Day 2008--ironically, the same thing he dragged his own feet on when his own son was terrorizing the household and neighborhood with his psychotic paranoid episodes.

He tried charming and sweet-talking his way out of it--the same thing he would do to get his son out of trouble, and the same thing his son would do to get himself un-committed after a few days--but (fortunately) freaked out when a doctor was present. That was enough to get him placed in the home.

I don't envy anyone their life in that place. It's in an older 4-story brick building a few blocks from the Pensacola Public Library. The Alzheimer's ward is on the top floor. It's a frightening place to be, surrounded by what I can only call "broken people."

I scribbled this during Thanksgiving lunch in 2008:

Strange croaks, raspy whispers, breathy mumbles
A syllable repeated like a sentence
They struggle with their wheelchairs
Not sure why they cannot move

One fights the table-top attached to his seat
Trying to reach the latches, hoping for escape
Another snaps at an unseen assailant,
Imperious old woman sitting alone

One walks in circles, his mental rudder locked, no one at the bridge.
A "Rat Pack" poster, photo of James Dean and his car
Elvis, Marilyn, Audrey Hepburn
All watching over the broken ones

The TV babbles, for once more sensible than its audience,
Who don't know their own families
Who see friends from long ago

One wonders what their worlds are like
Trapped in minds growing ever smaller
Or trapped in one that no longer works

He looks old. Insubstantial. He thinks this is a restaurant,
That I flew in from Tallahassee, my sister from Georgia
He accuses my mother of affairs, worries about the waitress

That's about as finished as that's going to get.

The whole scenario has only deteriorated relations between my mother's side of things and the Old Man's own kids. We've never really been close, but who wants to be around screeching a-holes who keep demonizing my mother? "She's only interested in his money!" "He doesn't really have Alzheimer's--she's keeping him locked up!" "He said we could have that car."

Me, I've seen the woman who'se been married to him since the mid-70's starting to look OLD because of the strain on her these last four years. I've seen her crying. I've seen her health slipping and forgetfulness setting in, anxiety, panic, sleeplessness, loss of appetite.

Some mastermind.

TOOLS!! Perfect for FATHER'S DAY!!

Eh, not so much. In the run-up to this sales-driven "holiday" every car parts joint is raving over how their selection of tools is Just What Dad Needs, BUY IT NOW!!

Ignoring the fact that the Old Man is in an Alzheimer's hospice, he's never been a guy you'd buy tools for. It was best not to encourage him--he meant well, but the poor man couldn't be trusted to do more than basic--VERY basic--repairs.

Three little scenes, for explanation:

1) My mother swears that she had to teach him how to change a light bulbin the early 1970s. He was ready to throw the lamp away. Apparently he'd never encountered such a thing on the family farm in the 1930s and '40s. He went Air Force during Korea (no idea whether he traveled out of the States), then college and university (law school). I can't imagine how anyone could go through 40 years of life and NOT know about light bulbs, but I'll give her the benefit of the doubt because...

2) Mom had to call an electrician to come and un-do one of his "projects" in the 1980s. He decided to install a new light fixture in the kitchen and ended up knocking out the lights for the front half of the house. Amazing. Then there's...

3) The day he decided to rotate the tires on his '81 Fairmont. He jacked up the passenger-side front corner of the car and removed the tire correctly...okay so far...then he put a cinder block under that corner of the car. An upright cinder block--long-wise. The weakest part of the block was now holding up the car. He goes around to the driver's-side rear (remember, front tires to diagonal rear, rear tires straight to the front--I can still see the decal in the trunk). He starts...to...jack...up...the--*BOOM!!*. Note to self: don't use a cinder block lengthwise to hold up a car. It'll break.

Like I said, very basic stuff: he got really good at changing spark plugs on the mower. It was always an amusing thing--but also sad, because I wonder how much of it was the early effects of Alzheimer's. But I won't focus on that, since I intended the story to be amusing.

The Old Man thinks he's John Wayne!

"The Old Man" is my stepfather, who's been in an Alzheimer's hospice since February of 2008. As his mind deteriorates, he's gotten more and more prone to violent outbursts (threatening my mother is what got him put in the Hospice).

This past Friday evening, he got into a brawl with one of the other patients, and I have to wonder if either of them even knew what the fighting was about. I wonder how much of "him" is even still in there. The last time I visited, on Thanksgiving, he was lucid enough to recognize me, my mother, and my sister, but he was convinced that we were all in some restaurant in Tallahassee, and that I'd driven in from somewhere.

We were all fabulously wealthy. Did you know my stepfather owns Florida State University? Talk to me--I'll hook you up.

--

I've thought of him as "The Old Man" for quite some time--more than a decade, maybe two. He adopted me when I was about 5. It only took him a few years and some pretty brutal beltings to alienate me.

He wasn't the sort of man who simply administers a few swats to let you know you've messed up. Nope. His approach was more like a frenzied lashing with that wide, black leather belt. He got so unhinged once that the buckle slipped out of his hand and cut me just above the waistband of my shorts. I was 6. I don't even remember what I did, but I can't imagine that I ever did anything to deserve whippings like those. I can still see the blood. There wasn't a lot, mind you, but does there need to be?

There were other things, like threatening to take an axe handle to me or hitting me for not wanting to eat dinner.

But thinking of things like these, it's no wonder I've got contempt for authority and some pretty deep-set anger issues.

Anyway, I've had that in the background for 35 years, and it's hard to set aside, but I hate seeing him dying by inches. The trigger for the "full-on Alzheimer's" was a "mini-stroke" in January of 2006 that also brought on Capgras Delusion (the belief that a close relative is an imposter). My mother was now her own twin sister, the guy in the mirror was an imposter, and there were people coming out of the photos on the walls.

He would freak out over the mirror and the photos. He couldn't tell time. He could barely find his way to the part-time rent-a-cop job he took in 2006. Couldn't fill out his timesheet. He accused his wife of infidelity. He kept hallucinating people--he saw people screwing in the family car. At one point he asked me the number for 9-1-1.

Given the choice, I'd rather die of a stroke, in my sleep, than go on for a few more years after that in a waking nightmare like his.