Getting my brother out of the Navy was not very easy. The reason he was there in the first place was because a judge gave my parents the decision of either another stint in the Juvenile hall until he turned eighteen, and then a few years in the adult jail or the military. So on this day, after our mother told the Commanding Officer of the impending situation, together they had to work out the next step...going back in front of a judge. The other problem was with just whom would her son marry? There was no other option but for him to do the honorable thing, to marry the girl. And of course there was the question about what to do about the one that he didn't marry. And what about his loyal girlfriend.
Disgrace. Humiliation. My father left the car with the shattered windshield in the driveway for his son to see when he came home. Along with a court date and a wedding to plan. It was enough to make anyone take to drinking. It was just the thing to push my fragile father over the edge, forever.
The little blonde girl from Wichita Falls, Texas came by the house shortly thereafter with her pimply faced sister, Mary Lee, to announce that she had nowhere to live. She sat down and told my mother just about the most ridiculous story my mother had ever heard. "Kitten" as she liked to be called, had left home with her sister in the company of two servicemen heading to California where she planned on becoming a famous singer. Her sister wanted to become an actress. I sat across the table from Kitten, and upon hearing this, my mother buried her head in her hand and sighed. The servicemen, Kitten said, had left her and her sister in a coffeeshop in Pacific Manor, and not knowing anyone, that evening they sought out people their own age. They had been staying as overnight guests with one boy's family, but now had worn out their welcome. They had nowhere else to go, and no money. But, she said since my brother was the father of her unborn baby, she planned to move in right away. My mother was speechless. I was speechless. We didn't have any extra room in the house, so not knowing what to really do, my mother gave the sister money for a bus ticket back home and the pregnant girl stayed in my brothers room until he came home. Later on that afternoon, my mother received a call from the Wander Inn, the bartender asking that she come and get her husband who was passed out on the bar. He had the car, so she sent a cab to pick him up, and she drove the car home.
That evening, Linda Crawford and her mother, and my brothers’ other girlfriend, Carol came over later that evening crying and really upset. My mother gave Kitten's sister, Mary Lee a bus ticket to go home and Kitten moved into my brothers’ room. No one knew Kitten's real name until we drove Kitten and my brother to get the blood test for the marriage license. She got real snarky when you used her real first name so I won't mention it out of respect. On the way home, my mother stopped off at Nanette’s for Stylish Women and bought Kitten a real cute gold brocade dress and white high heels that she would wear at her wedding. She looked like a professional singer she said. I picked out her corsage at Weldon’s Flowers and Gifts. Mary Lee cashed in the bus ticket and stayed somewhere in town.
My sister, played the “Wedding March” on the church organ. Her husband and my mother and father, attended what we called “Kitten's Wedding”. Kitten threw the corsage at me as she got into the Yellow Cab with John saying she was allergic to flowers. My parents gave them a honeymoon dinner at Nick’s, a one night honeymoon at the Seaside Lodge and paid three months rent on a cute little house in Moss Beach, and allowed her to make a long distance telephone call to some little dusty town outside of Wichita Falls, Texas to talk to her mother and step dad. Later we found out Kitten and her sister had come to California seeking out her biological father after ditching sophomore classes one day. They had hung out in the Greyhound station and got the two servicemen to pay their way.
So anyway, my brother came home on Thursday, the judge changed his sentence to community service on Friday; they were married on Saturday. My brother started his new job on Monday and settled into married-and-pregnant life with his just turned sixteen year old childbride. Kitten took the fifty dollars she had won as Second Runner Up in a local beauty pageant and bought her own wedding ring with a tiny little diamond.
When the baby girl was born, we went to the hospital to visit but soon left because my brothers’ friend Dave Nordstrom was in the room with Kitten, sitting on the bed and holding her hand. My father apologized as though he was entering a strangers room, interrupting new parents, and brought us back to our house in silence. He then went to my brothers where they stayed up late working on cars and listening loudly to the Rolling Stones. A baby had been born, my brothers friend was spending time with Kitten in the hospital, and there was silence about it all. I thought it was strange. That evening, Linda’s mother and Linda came over to show us Linda’s new baby boy who had been born a week earlier. My mother watched Ed Sullivan and said she didn't feel like talking much, but she smoked a lot more than usual. I went to my room and listened to late night talk radio on KYA. My father came home and made it as far as the bushes along the porch step. My mother covered him with a blanket so he wouldn't catch cold.
Two years later, Kitten's Baby Number Two came along. My mother had some baked goods to bring over to the PTA that evening so my father volunteered to drop the food off and then go to the hospital to see his new grandchild. From what we were able to piece together, on the way to the hospital my father stopped at his father's grave in Colma, and then continued to drive to San Franciscoon to 2667 Octavia Street instead of 3600 El Camino Real. On his way home, he missed a curve and drove into a living room on Parnassus, shearing off a telephone pole and a fire hydrant along his path. From viewing the pictures that my brother-in-law took at the wrecking yard, the telephone pole was a direct hit. Fortunately no one else was killed. After the funeral a woman in a fur coat approached my mother and apologized saying that she had told him not to come by that afternoon. After apologizing, the woman just walked away.
When my parents taught my brother about the birds and the bees, they should have told him how to calculate a due date for a pregnancy too. Just before he died, my brother and I had a long talk about life and things we had never talked about before. We had always been friends so after a long and chronic illness, an unhappy marriage or two, and a bunch more kids, he “drank enough beer to make that Budweiser guy rich”. He told me that he knew that his first baby girl was not his child. He said men can tell those things instinctively, but he just couldn’t get Kitten and her French fry loving sister to leave him alone. And anyway, our parents were so busy with the wedding plans and saving their own face that they never stopped to ask my brother what he thought about the whole thing. He never took Kitten with him to Tijuana, he took Linda with him. He said that Kitten and her sister stayed at Dave’s house that weekend. Linda’s baby was my brothers’ first child. Dave ended up marrying Kittens sister, had four kids and was killed in a motorcycle accident with his brand new motorcycle on his 32nd birthday.
And since we were talking about those three years that had changed our family forever and how those events had brought such stress on all of us at one point or another, that night just before he passed away, I told him it’s very perplexing to me how people will go to great lengths to keep important truths from being known. And then he said, (and these were the last words I ever heard him speak) "All lies kill."
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