Apology for Big Rod

Or The Defiler

Charles Holdefer

New York

To the Reader

I come to Roderick H. Gass’s defense because he is remembered incompletely and spoken of unfairly, even malignantly (you’re bastards, some of you: wagging, vicious tongues), which is an injustice I will not let pass, now that my uncle is no longer here to defend himself but is keeping one of the few appointments he ever kept, “’neath the fine green sod,” as he used to put it so bluntly, so continentally, “sucking the roots of dandelions.”

It is not as a fond niece that I make this plea, but out of respect for his love of life. Whatever his weaknesses or lapses in manners, his jokes without punch lines, he possessed this love: his ability to feel this way and sustain it perhaps unsettles you more than his acts. (Speculation about prison is a cheap shot; Rod had nothing to do with a plot.)

Nowadays, who dares argue the case for happiness? My uncle was contrary enough to do so. The mystery of life didn’t faze him: the time he showed it to me he seemed attached to it. Enough, vicious tongues!

You know who you are—but nonetheless, to set the record straight, I begin.

“Don’t let anyone make you happy against your will.”

—R. G.

1

How Rod Grew

Uncle Rod was a fragile and sickly infant, according to family reports, a boy the size of a sparrow, grandmother used to say; a boy as smart as a sparrow, grandfather used to say. (Note: this account will flatter no one.) He didn’t like to eat, which may come as a surprise to those who knew him later in life when his appetite and its apparent lack of effect on his slim figure was a frequent topic of conversation, as was his gold initialed toothpick, which he carried everywhere and pulled out of his pocket at the end of gigantic Sunday meals to poke his gums with, and if he saw you watching, he’d show you the initials, even offer to let you use it. But in those early years he seemed suspicious of life around him, or at least of the life that was dangled in front of him before he was old enough to choose. There were not only the usual childhood aversions to shoelaces, and to vegetables cooked to a watery mush (still a tradition in our family), but also to nursery sayings like “Rex the Dog,” who

In the bog

Ate a pied frog

On a log:

rolled over and died

—or any mention of the idea of heaven. This last left him fearful. A cloudless sky could unnerve him. He had been told that heaven was up there and someday, that was where he’d go, too. For ever and ever. “Up there?” he said, chewing his finger, gazing into the stratosphere. He shook his head, stamped his feet, rattled his untied laces. “No!” Adults found this amusing, and spoke to him of golden streets. Cherubim and heavenly host trailing many wings. His eyes grew bigger. He screamed. According to my father, his little brother cried every day for his first five years—even before he discovered heaven—which made him godawfully disagreeable to be around. My uncle’s famous personal magnetism was in no way evident in the early days. Once, during a tense, dim lunch when they were trying to get him to eat a boiled carrot, according to my grandmother, or it was because a breeze had blown up a curtain, exposing a perfect azure sky, a wide-open vault, according to my father, Uncle Rod threw himself violently on the floor, picked himself up, and threw himself down again, picked himself up, and did it a third time before my grandfather could grab him, stop him, and give him a whipping.

“Say you’re sorry!”

The hand came down, the cry went up: “I wish I was never born!”

He developed into a quiet boy with tender sinuses, fond of insects and throwing a baseball against a barn. He talked to his baseball, named it Carl. My father played with him, of course, but he was older, and interested in different amusements; Uncle Rod learned how to play alone, and actually seemed to prefer it. One day, as a prank, my father wedged a thick stick and left his little brother stranded atop the seesaw. He ran away, abandoned him up there for a long time. (Previously, he’d teased little Rod with angel sightings, fake birthdays, locking him outside in the sunshine—the usual childish penchant for torture.) But that day when my father returned to the seesaw, his brother was unperturbed on his perch, and appeared to have forgotten him. He was talking contentedly to himself. He hollered and hollered when my father let him down. Queerly independent! He was the same about baseball, determined to play on his own, though there was the time my father found him crying under a tree, wetting his mitt with tears and chewing on the laces. When my father asked what was wrong, Uncle Rod looked up with snot on his nose and said that he and Carl had had a fight. (The world was younger then, my father says; my mother, who shares no nostalgia for this side of the family, replies, No, the world was dumber then.) But the next day Uncle Rod and Carl were back together; he was winding up, hurling the ball with a bang! against the barn. In those days there were barns, right in the middle of town. Chicago seemed distant; no one anticipated being swallowed up by the city.

At school, Uncle Rod did not distinguish himself. Under his photograph in the 1942 Seymour High Yearbook, they forgot to write anything. But he stayed out of trouble and unlike his later days, stayed out of the newspapers. The photograph of the teenage Rod is disconcerting: his hair is plastered back too far, and there is a startled look in his eyes, as if he is facing not a camera but a gun. His love of life is not yet obvious. Perhaps, at this early juncture, before the flash and wearing a suit that my father says belonged to him, which was too big for his 120 pound brother, held together with pins up and down the back so that it was treacherous to move, even to breathe, Uncle Rod’s love of life still needed to break free.

But with the other young men of his class, he graduated from high school and marched off pimply into world war. Everyone agrees, the war changed Uncle Rod. He was never the same after he returned from France. Some say he changed for the worse: if, before the war, he’d never particularly impressed people, at least he’d never offended anyone; Roderick Gass the adolescent claimed no attention for himself. But all you have to do is look at Roderick Gass the man in the Army photograph of ’45 to see a transformation: the self-assurance, sweet, dark eyes and trace of a smile, tilted chin, cock of his hat: a handsome man, no doubt about it, with a steady fire so conspicuously absent from his yearbook portrait. This Army photo graced my grandmother’s mantle for the rest of her life. “Roddy’s blossoming,” she called it. “Don’t he look upstanding, American down to his toes?” Though my grandfather always wondered, “Just what in the hell is he grinnin’ about?”

For Uncle Rod had experienced true horrors. He was a passenger in a jeep that struck a land mine, flipped; he was pinned in the mud for twelve hours with a captain whose legs and back were crushed. He watched the man die slowly, a pale, anguished face crying out as he strained to turn around, to touch the limbs that were broken behind him. Sometimes he screamed at Uncle Rod, asked him what he was looking at, why didn’t he do something? He ordered my uncle to act. Rod said afterward he wished he could’ve reached him, if not to help then at least to kill him faster. The man wouldn’t stop crying. His face purpled, then drained; violent shivering, staccato grunts. Pain was in no hurry, seemed to have nowhere else to get on to. At one point Uncle Rod forgot the circumstances and thought they were already in a grave, by some terrible mistake. He cursed his misfortune, to have been allotted such a miserable companion! He closed his eyes and shouted, sang to block the man out. Old school songs, radio tunes: “Yes, dance, hoily boily! Dance! Dance! Dance!” Yet always there came a moment when he opened his eyes or stopped singing to catch his breath, and there was the man, still crying, shaking, begging God in the mud. Uncle Rod tried again and again to help him but he couldn’t move; he watched the agonized face for a while, felt maddeningly neither present nor absent yet inescapably of this clay world. He closed his eyes again to sing. Eventually the man quieted. But his mouth hung open. Uncle Rod, still afraid, sang on hoarsely.

And that was how they heard him. When they pried up the jeep, Uncle Rod crawled out, scrabbling fast, like an insect from under a rock.

His saviors booted him around a little, laughing, then forced him to his feet, took him prisoner. In a makeshift camp outside a village he was put to work salvaging used wire and breaking furniture to be burnt for heat. His diet consisted mainly of potato eyes. One day as he was beating a chair with a stone he felt sick and hungry enough that it dawned on him that he was dying, one more time—his life was indeed a cheap, insect sort of thing—so at extreme risk, he crawled out at dusk and made his escape, with remarkable luck passing through enemy territory and arriving in a village called Tauzé Le Mignon: where, with remarkable misfortune, he was shot through the neck by another American, a man named Albert Livingstone who believed he was from the other side. For this bullet, which passed within millimeters of sure mortality and put him in the hospital for months, he received a letter of profuse apology from Albert Livingstone, and later, a Purple Heart. Uncle Rod returned to Illinois with this letter, his medal, and most conspicuously, a swagger and a lot of morbid talk.

“When I was in the hospital,” he revealed, “everybody knew about me. Word got around, they even took pictures. Wasn’t nobody more famous on the almost-dead ward than me.”

At first people were so pleased to see Uncle Rod come home alive, making a fuss over him and his medal, that they forgave him his swagger (not the style in our family) and even allowed that he might’ve earned it, after what he’d been through. And as for the morbid talk (which was more than bad manners with us; until now, a sin)—well, in time he’d get over that and speak more reasonably like everyone else. Wouldn’t he?

But Uncle Rod didn’t change, and acquired a reputation for a swollen head.

“I know what I’m talking about. You might as well kick back and do as you damn please in this world, since the worms are licking at your heels anyway. You hear me?”

If someone tried to improve the conversation by praising him for his Purple Heart, remarking that it must mean a lot to him, he turned the compliment around. He pushed out his lips.

“An intact body and mind are the only hard currency in this world. A Purple Heart, why, that’s just a symbol, and when you see a symbol, if you have any sense, you should smell a rat! I’m for straight words.”

He started referring to himself by a nickname he’d acquired in the service, Big Rod, which the rest of the family found ridiculous—why, he wasn’t big, he was a smallish man with compact muscles. The only thing big about him was his talk. Who did he think he was?

“In the days I got left, folks, you can bet I’m gonna do what I want to do! There’s so much more to be!”

He didn’t feel like holding a regular job. This, this above all brought a stern judgment down upon his head; no prior exploit could excuse it. For work wasn’t just daily bread, though that was nothing to sneer at, at a time when the Seymour City Park saw traveling men sleeping on picnic tables, downstate drifters and ex-farm boys and Mexicans, on their way to or from Chicago. At first, people feared the situation would be as tough as before the war, when the future was thin, thin ice and my grandfather earned ten cents a head for each person he turned in for stealing coal or sleeping under machine sheds at the local railway yard. A deep-rooted conviction held that work was the only shield; work was the glue that held life together. How could Uncle Rod pretend to ignore such a fact? Off and on he sold Fuller Brushes from door to door, when he felt like it; that he managed to make any money at all was testimony to the fact that he had a talent and could’ve done well, if he’d applied himself. Everyone agreed, with his good looks and enormous confidence, he had the makings of a big-time salesman. He could’ve graduated to cars, maybe real estate. And soon it became clear that the economy was rebounding beyond all expectations, everywhere the country was building up. Up! America’s arms were outstretched, eager for my uncle to introduce his charm into the Middle West. Now was the time! My father, who’d spent the war stationed in Virginia, driving a shiploader, came home and found a job right away in Seymour’s new lumberyard—a growing concern—my father and his strong back had a future. But as for Uncle Rod—what could you do for a man who said he preferred to go to the ballpark, and then, brazenly, without the slightest hint of remorse, he did!

He traveled; after two years back in Illinois he decided to visit Albert Livingstone. The letter he’d received in the hospital had impressed him very much. Never had he read such an earnest, eloquent message. That Albert Livingstone was a sensitive soul there could be no doubt; he offered his deepest sympathies, and unfettered friendship; you couldn’t ask for a nicer fellow to shoot you through the neck. My uncle carried the letter folded up in his wallet, and at family gatherings after the dessert plates had been pushed aside would read it aloud. The part near the end, “In our hands we hold too many truths, the triggers of unknown destinies,” my grandmother always made him read twice, though she knew it by heart, and had been heard to repeat it to herself while working over the sink, cutting the bruises out of apples.

Through the VA Uncle Rod learned that Albert Livingstone lived in a small town in northwestern Pennsylvania, a place called Manfred. Uncle Rod drove for two days to get there, looked up the address in the local telephone book, and soon was standing at his door. Before knocking he wrapped a black scarf around his neck. An older woman answered—Albert’s mother, it turned out, once he was inside and the introductions began. She lived with Albert. Uncle Rod had first identified himself as an old friend from the Army, but Albert, a roundfaced young man with a cleft in his chin (so big you could stick a coin in, easy as a pair of loafers, according to Uncle Rod)—Albert began to apologize, for he didn’t recognize my uncle, and asked his name.

When Uncle Rod told him, Albert Livingstone’s expression changed. Petrified. All of a sudden he looked like a fish, my uncle claimed—like after you catch it, and you hit it over the head with the butt of your knife, before cutting it open. That’s how his eyes went, all glassy. Like a stunned fish.

“P-please sit d-down,” Albert stammered.

Rod made himself comfortable while Albert’s mother brought them coffee and wedges of spice cake. My uncle asked Albert how he was doing, and Albert answered faintly, “Fine …” Upon being pressed, Albert revealed that he was going back to college with the new government money, which didn’t surprise Uncle Rod in the least. Anybody could see he was a smart fellow, even with his stunned fish eyes, which kept moving down to the scarf around my uncle’s neck, then looking away … but always, coming back.

Sitting up very straight, Albert inquired, “What, uh, are you doing now? How is your health? Are you feeling—is your condition—all right?”

By now Albert’s mother had joined them. She was a squat little woman and anybody could see that in thirty years Albert would look just like her.

My uncle didn’t answer Albert’s question straightaway but complimented Mrs. Livingstone on her spice cake, which was surely the finest spice cake he’d ever eaten, so moist, unlike any other spice cake you cared to talk about, which stuck in your throat, a very unpleasant experience, you could say painful, defeating all enjoyment—why would a person even offer something that stuck in your throat? But her spice cake wasn’t like that, he wanted her to know; it was a true privilege to fork it into his mouth: so moist. “Isn’t that right, Albert?”

Albert nodded, staring at my uncle.

“I s’pose you’re wondering why I wear this scarf around my neck?” my uncle asked.

When Albert heard this, a shudder went through him, he gasped and flopped once in his chair. Albert’s mother turned and told my uncle she thought it made Army men look dashing. She blushed.

“Because if I don’t,” Uncle Rod said, “MY HEAD FALLS OFF! HAH HAH HAH HAH!”

Albert’s mother looked at him, her lips working, then to Uncle Rod’s horror, Albert Livingstone began to cry. “What is this?” his mother said, in a high panicky voice. Uncle Rod stood up. “What is this?” she repeated, and would continue to do so for the next few minutes, over and over, so that it almost drove Uncle Rod crazy, “What is this?” while he was trying to communicate with Albert. My uncle rushed to him, saying he was sorry, he was really all right—he started pulling at the scarf around his neck. Albert threw his hands up in front of his face.

“No, no!”

“What is this?”

“Look, Albert, look. There’s hardly nothing—I got a beautiful neck! Really, look!”

“No, no!”

Uncle Rod had to corner him on the couch: “Albert, Albert! I’m healed, I’m a new man, don’t you see?” “What is this?” “No, no!”; till eventually Albert saw, was reassured, and then, the struggle over, wrapped his arms around his chest, panting. The flush on his face became blotches. But even as Albert calmed down, and they straightened the cushions, his mother became ever more distraught, insisting, to the point that Uncle Rod wondered aloud if he should leave. Albert nodded briskly, agreeing this would be for the best, so after a hasty squeeze of the hand and a final wave through the door, Uncle Rod got back in his car and drove away from Manfred, Pennsylvania, vowing never to forget this day. An hour down the road he stopped at a roadside diner where he took the letter out of his wallet and read it, one more time, and began to cry.

To his amazement when he returned to Illinois there was another letter from Albert Livingstone waiting for him, in which he professed his regrets. And with such courtesy! Thereafter my uncle received a Christmas card every year from Albert Livingstone, with a short account of what was happening in Albert’s life, and with cordial wishes for Uncle Rod’s own. “You feel important just reading his words,” Uncle Rod observed. “He means them. It’s more than just nicey-nice shit.” No one would’ve dreamed of saying anything critical of Albert Livingstone in my uncle’s presence, for he respected the man who’d almost killed him with a devotion bordering on reverence.

My uncle told the story many times of what happened that day in Manfred, not because he liked talking about himself, as some say, puffing himself up, but by way of personal explanation, and humility, for it was after that day and the tears he caused that he resolved never again to tell a joke (and everyone in the family can attest to his faithfulness to his resolution, and to how much Uncle Rod loved jokes) with a punch line.

Above all, from that day he seemed more conscious of the future, and ready to experiment with it. He wasn’t just out to make merry. Truth was, his battle with Death was only beginning. He abandoned selling entirely for a time to size up his possibilities, announcing that there ought to be a worthier way to make a go of it, a more fundamental destiny, here in the heartland. Eventually he ran out of cash and his car was repossessed, so he took a job in a squeaking training gym in Chicago where he ran a towel service and carried buckets of crushed ice. One day, when three fighters in a row showed up drunk, he was asked to try his hand as a sparring partner. Thus began Uncle Rod’s short (and famous, in our family) career as a boxer.

He didn’t go very far, wasn’t particularly good, but at the start scored some local upsets. Once the Sunday Tribune printed a large action photo of Uncle Rod in its Sports Spotlight, “Big Rod pummels Harlan (the Hammer) Hancock,” which created a sensation in the family, thoroughly redeemed him, gave rise to wild, unfounded hopes—which just as quickly evaporated. To all this Uncle Rod shrugged. Even if he’d fought his way to the top, he reminded, there were never any fat dream purses to be won at bantamweight.

Still, Uncle Rod’s boxing days are remembered by some in the family as his apex, for after his retirement from the ring his choice in professions as well as his conduct became, in their eyes, less and less respectable. He still wasn’t married, preferring instead a series of female “little friends,” as Grandma called them (the burgeoning sentimental side of his life—more on that to come), and at this time he established his first contacts with the Van Allen School of Mortuary Science, which later, for other reasons now too well known and controversial, proved so unfortunate. At this time he simply worked as a model. “It was easy money,” he always said.

2

Introducing Me

(Learning to Cry for Someone Other Than Myself)

My first memories of Uncle Rod are happy ones. He was very good to us children. I was still small, my brother Raymond still yowled pinkishly in his crib, dangling his head between the bars. It was after a Sunday dinner, I recall, when Raymond finally fell asleep and we went outside to sit in the backyard in the shade where the gnats were terrible. They attacked your ears, flew in your mouth. A neighbor’s dog was barking hysterically, probably the snap-and-tear death of another ground squirrel, and we worried the commotion would wake Raymond. I remember that I felt like crying as I clutched a book to my ribs and tried to spit out a dead gnat.

Oh, those Sunday afternoons! It was all too clear, they were designed expressly to drain the sweet juice out of life. This particular Sunday was interminable, so hot and sticky, so boring, with the gnats and grown-ups who just kept on talking, talking, for hours and hours, despite the gnats: it was inconceivable how they could find so much to say.

Yes, I wanted to cry. Today there was something in the tone of their voices that touched me deep inside, made my throat constrict, even though I didn’t follow their meaning. Inflections of anger, mistrust, which I instinctively recoiled from and wished they would stop. Yes, please stop! Why did they carry on so? Years later my father told me their conversation had to do with a lie Uncle Rod had told, about money; my father had lent him $200 to pay for a divorce, for a marriage that had lasted six weeks, but Uncle Rod had invested the money instead in his new business, color TV converters.

Few people remember color TV converters anymore. This was when color TV was still a novelty, and most people couldn’t afford one. Rod was selling a kit to help others convert their old black-and-white sets to color. The kit included a frame, adjustable to fit any size of TV, and a pliable rectangle of tinted, transparent celluloid. The celluloid was multicolored: the top was blue, which gradually became lighter toward the middle, where there was a band of pale yellowish grey, which further down took on a greenish hue, till the bottom became solid green. You fixed the converter over the screen of your black-and-white TV, and you had color. It worked best for programs like westerns, where there were plenty of outdoor scenes. Uncle Rod was big on the idea and might’ve made a lot of money if he’d had more support, but my father scoffed and wouldn’t help him anymore. Even in later years my uncle defended the gadget, saying it had become a collector’s item.

oh, oh, I loved it