My Legacy as Written in the Lives of Kin

By Ben Leib

Because I liked to drink, because I, in fact, drank to unhealthy excess, various folks, family members in particular, enjoyed disclosing their own experiences with the bottle.  Sometimes these narratives took the form of confession.  My paternal grandfather, for example, occasionally confessed his proclivity for inebriates, emphasizing the self will that he had to exert in order to abstain.  My grandmother derided my grandpa’s addiction to opiates in his later years, when he took an ever-increasing supply of painkillers to subdue the agonies of physical deterioration.  Janice, my stepmother, discussed her short-lived but intense stint as a cocaine user, which ended with her holing up in an apartment and hiding from the trees that loomed over the front windows.  Reeva, my cousin, wrote her Ph.D. dissertation on twelve step recovery, which she utilized to address her addictive relationships to both food and sex.

Everybody had a story to tell.  Certainly they were cautionary.  The intended message was stop fucking around.  But there was a confessional element to these tales as well.  Everybody has lived.  Everybody has done things of which they are not proud.  And yet, they take the experience gained through these debaucheries as a point of pride.  The eagerness with which these tales were whispered was telling.

There was another breed of story that I heard.  Also cautionary in nature, folks wanted to inform me about ancestors who had been notoriously liable to the temptations of inebriates.  In my father’s family, these stories were very much the exception.  Although his mother’s line exhibited a very prevalent strain of mental illness, my dad’s kin were, for the most part, pretty upright and responsible folks.  My mother’s family was different.  I barely knew them.  I didn’t have a relationship with a single member of Mom’s clan.  They were, one and all, drug addicts and alcoholics.  They were bikers, hermits, convicts, rapists, gamblers… low lives.  They were violent and uneducated.  I’d met members of her family – my grandparents, my uncles, a few cousins – enough times to accept the verity of the stories I would hear about them later in life.

Learning about my family lineage, both paternal and maternal, I had the superstitious habit of projecting onto my own personality, the traits that I came to believe must have been inherited genetically.  I was like an overzealous psychology student with an inclination toward psychosomatic illness: I diagnosed myself.  Mental disabilities, dubious ethicalities, a do-wrong right mentality, these were my hereditary legacy.  I paid no mind to ancestral heroisms, to the political organizers, the mathematical geniuses, the European revolutionaries, the Pentateuch scholars.  Rather, I absorbed the stories of the misfits, made studies of their narratives as if in them I might discover, if not the key to, then the reason for my own madness.  The tragedy of my own life (for what else could it be) paralleled a history of tragedy over which I had no control.

My mother herself, who’d grown to become one of the most disturbed addicts I would ever meet (and I’d spent time with my fair share of junkies), was the only source I had for information about my maternal family.  Because I did not communicate with my mother’s relatives, it was up to her to educate me on the unforgivabilities of the human condition.  In these stories, I found great justification for my despair.  My great-grandfather, as the only patriarchal figure my mother spoke of, became something like legend for me.  To this day, I possess a feeling of great kinship, an existential bond to this man who I never met.  He became something closer to legend than human.

He was an Irish drunk, an alcoholic of historic proportions.  As medical detoxes were less common in that time and place (that time and place being depression-era mid-western United States), my great-grandfather relied on his regular stints in county jails and other mandated institutional sojourns to dry out for short periods of time.  His condition was hopeless.  He’d sweat, seizure, and hallucinate in the safety of a jail cell, and would dream fondly of the approaching day when he would once again find himself with that old familiar bottle in hand.

He prided himself a car thief.  “In those days,” my mother explained, “that was a really serious crime.  There weren’t so many cars on the road, so it was harder to get away unnoticed.  Also, because cars were kind of newer back then, it was way harder to afford them than it is nowadays.  Stealing a car was like stealing someone’s house.  They took it really seriously.”  Although grand theft auto was the skill by which my great-grandfather supported his family, he was not good at it.  He was wanted in multiple states.  His irresponsibility necessitated a transitory life.  My great-grandparents and their five children were constantly on the move.

At one point the inevitable happened: my great-grandfather, after multiple offences, received a somewhat lengthy prison sentence in Detroit.  He was generally incarcerated for about six months out of any given year.  But those sentences mostly consisted of short stints in county jails.  He skipped out on any court dates that he could.  With three years in prison looming, his family despaired.  Because stealing cars wasn’t the most reliable living, he plied his trade as a refrigerator repair man when he was sober enough to hold a job.  Although he was a liability, he was also a breadwinner.  Though he wasn’t the ideal father, his children loved him.  They wanted their dad around, even if he was a violent, drunken man.

Mom told me this story as we drove up 101 to the River Rock Casino.  Such outings exemplified my and my mother’s relationship.  Once every couple of months, I’d visit Sonoma County.  I’d catch the bus up to the Santa Rosa transit center.  Mom met me there, and together we’d drive to an Indian gaming parlor where she’d play the slots and I’d lose money at the card tables.  The only real visiting we did was during the drive itself.  As my mother described her own grandfather, it struck me how closely she had followed in his footsteps.  I’d witnessed the chains that bound my great-grandfather imprison my mother two generations later, thereby concretizing the precedent for my own alcoholism.  The gears turned.  My interpretive sonar detected with acuity the invisible, subterranean flows of meaning, the rumbles of destiny’s tidal machinations.  There but for the grace of God go I, I attempted to reassure myself.  But where was my grace to be found?  Could the narrative itself provide some sort of map?  Though I dared not heed their warnings, could the tales somehow indicate nodal points in the road where I’d best lay each progressive footstep?

My grandmother, Bernice, thirteen years old at the time that my great-grandfather went to prison, developed a plan.  She wasn’t the brightest kid, but she was astute enough to understand that the President of the United States is a powerful man – powerful enough to pardon any prison sentence.  My great-grandmother was not the most responsible of parents.  She could barely keep track of the children without her husband around, nor did she bother to try.  Bernice decided to pack up two of her younger siblings and pay a visit to the Commander in Chief, Herbert Hoover.

And it is here that the story momentarily shifts focus from my great-grandfather, to my grandmother.  Bernice, along with Ray and Irene, managed to hitchhike from Detroit to Washington D.C.  They managed to get into the White House.  They somehow gained entry to the Oval Office.  They got Herbert Hoover’s ear.  They asked the President for their father back.  And the most unsympathetic President in U.S. history was faced with a choice which required him to weigh emotion against rationality.

More than half a century later, a certain women’s television network, known particularly for making original movies, produced a film based upon this family saga.  It has been quite some time since I’ve seen The Angel of Pennsylvania Avenue, so please forgive any misremembered inconsistencies.  It’s not a film that gets re-run on a regular basis.  It’s not a movie that was released for distribution.  The Angel of Pennsylvania Avenue is a made for TV movie, with all the accompanying schlock and morality.  My great-grandfather is represented as innocent of the crime for which he’s imprisoned.  The film rationalizes details about the story that I find dubious at best.  For example, how was my great-grandmother unable to keep control of three of her children?  These kids were obviously running from something as much as they were running to something.  In the film, the children are helped along their journey.  Happy hoboes, a charming puppeteer, a slew of do-gooding stereotypes populate the American countryside, unselfishly lend support at every turn.  It’s a feel good movie.  The cliff hanger comes when Hoover shuttles the kids out of the White House and sends them on a plane back to their mother.  But the payoff, oh the climax of that magical film: Christmas morning, congregants crowd the pews of a large church.  Grandma Bernice prays to the lord for their father’s release.  In a cathartic moment of emotional frenzy, Papa appears in the doorway of that great religious sanctuary.  A Christmas miracle has occurred.  The film ends with the picture of a benevolent and sympathetic angel, none other than President Herbert Hoover, smiling as he gazes upon the snowy lawn from the White House window.

The general details of the story are true.  My grandmother, my aunt and my uncle travelled together from Detroit to Washington D.C.  They hitchhiked across the country, the oldest of them, my grandmother Bernice, thirteen at the time.  They covered the most ground on a Greyhound bus, for which a sympathetic manager gave them tickets.  They did get Hoover’s ear.  And Hoover, in an unprecedented moment of empathy, pardoned my great-grandfather.  But there the accuracy of that creative piece of religious jingoism ends.  The film made a heartwarming story about an event that, to me, seems so much more amazing in its own sad tragedy.

In 1932 Herbert Hoover was not the most admired man in the United States.  Infamous for his inability to relate to the populous which he represented, Hoover faced the battle cry of the American media once it got wind of these three children begging for their father’s pardon.  The president was confronted with a tough decision: either lose more credibility in the eyes of a struggling nation, or abandon his fundamental policy of penal retribution.  He chose the latter.  My great-grandfather was pardoned for his crimes, and released from the Detroit prison.  But Hoover always got his cake and ate it too.  My great-grandfather was wanted on felony warrants in multiple states.  After the media blitz surrounding his incarceration, authorities across the Midwest learned of his whereabouts.  He was extradited within days of his release and re-imprisoned elsewhere.  “He was pissed off.  Mom had actually fucked him over and he ended up serving more time than he would have if he’d never gotten that pardon.”

Furthermore, because the family’s assets were limited, Bernice had very little in the way of compensation for the benevolent folks who helped her and her siblings to reach their destination.  “Mom said that she had to ‘trade feels’ for rides.  Now I can only guess what that means.”  So my grandmother prostituted herself in order to secure transportation for her and her two siblings.  The expression “trade feels” left me with a lot of questions too.  Who was feeling what?  Was Grandma Bernice giving hand jobs, or simply showing off her tits?  Was this quaint euphemism an understatement?  Was Grandma actually fucking dudes in the cabs of trucks while her siblings waited patiently on the roadside?  “I don’t know if I told you this,” my mother informed me, by way of further genealogical explication, “but Aunt Irene spent years working as a call girl.  Do you remember her at all?  Even as an old woman, she looked like a hooker, in those high heels and sequined miniskirts.”

Mom told me the story and my world suddenly made sense.  Hookers, alcoholics, neglectful parents and car thieves – this was my legacy.  I listened and was granted the key, the missing piece that I’d sought all along.  I knew now.  I understood my roots.  Bernice, who I’d known a bit, was an angry, abusive old bitch.  My mom, whom I adore with the love and empathy only accessible to one who truly, deeply, profoundly understands, knows, inarguably, the object of their affection, was crazier than a shithouse rat.  Forget my dad’s family history of political insurgency, refugee emigration, scholarly pursuit, noble rebellion; I was a member of mom’s clan.

“My brother, Doug, wrote this sappy editorial comment about the film.  That lying, asshole, piece of shit acts like mom and grandpa were some kind of saints.  He says that my grandparents died of natural causes, and that Bernice was forced to become the head of their household.  He claims to be writing my mother’s biography – like the real, un-fictionalized version of events – but if that’s the story he’s going to tell, he might as well make another TV movie.  Did I ever tell you how my grandfather died?  He was a hopeless alcoholic, and he couldn’t take care of himself anymore – let alone his family.  One day, he decides that suicide is the best option.  And what better way to kill yourself, what better way to ensure that you don’t survive, than to use a shotgun?  My grandpa shot himself in the face with that shotgun and he lived!!  It’s like, Jesus, you can’t even do that right?  He lived for like three years after that.  The only time I met him, he was in the hospital.  It was terrifying.  He was missing half of his face.  He looked like some kind of monster, you know, with this big hole showing all the bones and blood inside.”

It’s sick, I know, but my mother and I laughed the entire time she was telling me this story.  While I can still find the humor in the making of a family film based upon biographical events in the lives of a teenage prostitute and a drunken criminal, it’s now more difficult for me to see comedy in my great-grandfather’s attempted suicide.  But, at the time of its telling, I cackled with hysterical abandon.  Something about my mother being horrified by this hapless bastard who was her grandpa, something about the utter absolutism of his failure… It was funny.  But the laughter was also an uncomfortable symptom of the lurking knowledge, the sinking awareness, that there, with no cognizable grace to my name whatsoever, went I.  I related to my dead ancestor.  I now saw that my own shortcomings were written in blood.  The genetic material that coursed my veins predestined tragic failure, a failure upon which my lineage was founded.  And in that moment, I fully expected to spend the end of my days in a hospital bed, breathing tubes crammed down my esophagus, half my face blown to fragments.