Our Lady of Dogtown – Chapters 11-14

Chapter 11
My mother did not succeed in becoming an interesting person, so she fell hopelessly in love with barbiturates. This led to even more breakdowns and setbacks.

While my mother had a revolving door link with mental wards in St. Louis, and my father grew coffee in the old Aztec country of México, I spent time with my grandmother, and she taught me many valuable lessons.

What Molly Malone had learned in her life, filled as it was with death, separation and marital betrayal, commanded respect.  Her eyes, dark blue, still looked as innocent and untouched by experience as they must have been when she was ten.  Yet because of her age, Molly was a woman who had a history, and that invested her with authority.  My grandmother implied in what she said, and in what she did not say, and even in her body language that whatever was happening, she had seen it all before.  Molly was usually very calm, very quiet, but her silences had more meaning than her words.

Perhaps the greatest gift my grandmother gave to me was her love of baseball.  My father enjoyed baseball, too, but my grandmother was passionate about the game.

I grew up a follower of the St. Louis Cardinals.  A highlight of my boyhood was 1963, when voters selected the infield of Bill White, Julian Javier, Dick Groat and Ken Boyer to start the All-Star Game.  Of course, the next year was even better, as the Cardinals beat the New York Yankees in the World Series.  The Cards were playing below .500, in seventh place, in mid‑June 1964 when the arrival of speedy young Lou Brock sparked a revival of both team and player.  Brock, who had been hitting .251 with the Chicago Cubs, hit .348 the rest of the season and stole 33 bases as St. Louis hurtled into the midst of a four‑way race for the pennant that was settled only when they took the flag with an 11‑5 win on the final day.  After surprising Yogi Berra and the Yankees in the World Series, the Cardinals were themselves surprised when Manager Johnny Keane left to take the Yankee helm.  The club slipped into the second division for a couple of years under the management of their great former second baseman Red Schoendienst.

To go to Sportsman’s Park on North Grand Avenue was to experience baseball intimately.  My grandmother had been a long time fan of the St. Louis Browns.  No doubt, free tickets to the games inspired her in the early 1940s, courtesy of Browns’ manager Luke Sewell.  My grandmother’s older sister, Alene, married Henry Law, a cousin of Sewell.  The relationship was significant enough that Alene’s oldest daughter was named Dorothy Sewell Law.

In early 1965, my mother interviewed for positions as a buyer with department stores in Hartford, Connecticut and Little Rock, Arkansas.  Finally, in mid-March, she accepted a job with H.P. Wasson’s, a department store in downtown Indianapolis.  When we left St. Louis, she thought it was for good.

When I left Dewey School toward the end of seventh grade, I really had to give up my friends and acquaintances: Mike Buha, Tom Cook, Georgia Diamandis, Philip Diekmann, Dennis Doyle, Mark Edelmann, Randy Faulkner, Lewis Foulk, Wrenae Gilmer, David Greco, Sam Hanke, Melody James, Rita Kraft, Frank Loar, Jimmy Mangosling, Bobby Mayer, Greg Overturf, Dennis Rapplean, Richard Rice, John Steimann, Steve Stillwell, Terry Vancil, Dennis Visos and Patti Willis.

We lived on the second floor of a two-bedroom apartment on Adams Court, in the Meadows Apartment Complex, off East 39th Street.  It was the first time since we left my father in October, 1961, that my mother and I lived alone.

While my mother took the bus every day to H.P. Wasson’s, on the Circle in downtown Indianapolis, I walked several blocks to Public School #11.  During those brief periods when my mother had to be in New York City, I stayed in the apartment by myself.  I was 13-years-old. All that summer, I made many trips to St. Louis by Trailways bus.  After arriving five hours later from Indianapolis, I walked several blocks through downtown St. Louis to the bus stop for the Forest Park connection.  After the bus let me off at Kraft Street and Clayton Avenue, I walked to my grandmother’s apartment on Berthold Avenue.

Although my friends from the neighborhood remained intact, I had already stepped beyond the provincial limits of Dogtown and now existed in another world.  I was a transient, just passing through, an outsider.

However, by January of 1966 my mother skidded off course and we were back in St. Louis, specifically living with my grandmother again in the apartment at 6655 Berthold.  I was in the eighth grade class at Dewey School.  Though I had only been absent from my Dogtown friends for six months, life had changed among us, and we all had less and less in common.  Soon I was glad my mother and grandmother decided to move to Clayton.  The move from Dogtown-to-Clayton only consisted of a mile on the map, but it was a profound relocation.

Before the school year finished, I lived in Clayton and still took the city bus to Dewey School each day.  Every afternoon after school, I waited for the Forest Park bus, across the street from St. Mary’s Hospital.  During February and March of 1966, I had no idea that my great-grandmother Shaw was a patient in the hospital.  I had never met Bessie Shaw, and no one spoke about her.  Between my mother and grandmother, if someone betrayed or even disappointed them, the two women erased that person from family history.  There was little discussion to follow, and what happened was always impolite.  The two women shared this trait, which I have also acquired.

For as long as I can remember, my mother and grandmother educated me specifically in the history of the Malone family.  The whole Sheridan family was overlooked. No one spoke about them, except for Liam Sheridan, my grandfather, who my mother always held in high esteem. Otherwise, the whole lot never mattered.

Molly Malone especially had no use for my father.  He was Catholic, and that was reason enough.  My grandmother had also married an Irish Catholic and it only produced immense heartache, because my grandfather Malone conformed to the worst stereotypes.  He drank and screwed all the time.  His affair with the daughter of a friend resulted in a child, and my grandmother avoided further humiliation by divorcing him in 1944.  My grandmother knew the same fate awaited my mother, and she could barely refrain from clucking her tongue in a “told-you-so-manner” when my parents divorced after a decade of marriage.

Chapter 12
When my grandmother and her two sisters were together, a rare event, the atmosphere was like a symposium of experts.  Each sister had a different truth to reveal about her early life in the South.  The experience of growing up in a coastal city on the Gulf of Mexico, deep in the Old Confederacy shaped their lives forever.  The Civil Rights Movement of the early 1960s was outlandish to them.  There was always the sense that the three sisters were both Irish and Southerners. Overwhelmed by the British in Ireland, and later overwhelmed by the Union Army in the Old South, the story of this Malone family was about surrender but not defeat.

The stories told round the dinner table were repeated continuously; nothing had to be recorded on paper.  The narrative of the Malone family arrival in New Bern, in the Carolinas (now North Carolina) in 1745 was the starting point.  This oral tradition was no different from the seanchie reviewing the genealogy of the clann.  The Irish custom remained intact, despite the exile from Ireland and the gradual migration from the Carolina Colony-to-Tennessee-to-Alabama-to-St. Louis.  The Chieftains no longer ruled, but the ritual of talking about family ancestors remained vital.

Shortly after Bessie Malone’s death, I left Dewey School and enrolled at Wydown Junior High School.  It was the third school I attended during my eighth grade year.  I knew I would attend Clayton High School in the fall, so it made sense to join up with the class before September.  My school days – the silent gliding on of my existence – the unfelt progress of my life: Elm Grove, Walker, Dewey, Public School #11, Dewey, and next, both Wydown Junior High School, and Clayton High School.

Clayton was a Jewish enclave.  Many of my acquaintances had grandparents who survived the Holocaust.  Snatches of Yiddish were spoken throughout the neighborhood: in the hallways of school, the delicatessens and restaurants.  Written with Hebrew letters but formed by German, Aramaic, Russian, Polish and various Romance languages, Yiddish was spoken for 1,000 years by Jews from France to the Ukraine.  Yiddish is a mediation between the clashing cultures of the holy tongue of Hebrew and the profane languages of Christian society.  On the eve of the Holocaust, Yiddish was spoken by two-thirds of world Jewry.

The destruction of Yiddish-speaking Jews in Europe by the German Nazis was another horrible lesson in the dangers of statelessness and the vulnerability of exile.  The goal of many Jews in Clayton, as elsewhere in the United States, was to gain the best formal education possible.  A profession, like medicine and law, could be used anywhere.  Jewish heritage underscored the loss of identity in every country of Europe.  One must always be prepared to leave the present country for a new homeland.

By the start of high school, I felt my “otherness” instantly.  The Jews outnumbered the goyim at Clayton High School.  The more common surnames were Ackerman, Blumnethal, Crasilneck, Friedlob, Goldberg, Goldfarb, Goldring, Goldsticker, Koelkebeck, Librach, Mayorwitz, Mednikow, Polakoff, Rosenthal, Rothberg, Schuchat, Shatzman, Wiederaenders, Yawitz and Zuckerman.  Most of these students were the descendants of Ashkenazic Jews, from Central Europe.  Some historians believe that the Ashkenazic Jews are descended from the Khazars, a tribe of Turks who converted to Judaism in the 11th century.  The theory is that a large tribe of Khazars chose Judaism over Islam or Christianity as a neutral position.

The put-down vernacular in the hallways easily favored Yiddish: putz, schlemiel, schlep, schlepper, schlimazel, schlock, schlub, schmuck, schmutter, schmutz, schnook, schvartze and shiksa.  The attitude of humor was ironical, of course; irony as practiced by the Jews and the Irish can be wielded as a weapon, but it is above all a kind of armor.  It is adapted as protection against all manner of psychic injury from enemies, from friendly fire, from self-inflicted wounds.  Irony creates distance, a certain knowing detachment, while acknowledging membership in the club of human weakness and folly.

Yet there were other, more conventional Yiddish words that made the Jewish experience sound wonderfully exotic: chutzpah, glitzy, gunsel, kibitz, kibosh, kvetch, meshuga, nosh, nudnik, oy, rebbitzin, tochus, yarmulke, yenta, and zaftig.

Many of the Clayton High School girls were groomed to be a Jewish-American Princess.  The Jewish-American Princess is the product of a poorly understood process whereby a Jewish mother clones her personality and places it in the body of her daughter.  Symptoms vary but always include manipulative self-centeredness and a compulsive need to redecorate.

There were also new foods to experience, like bagels, blintzes, borscht and sour cream, gefilte fish, knishes, lox, matzah soup, pastrami.  Some of the Orthodox and Conservative Jews kept Kosher – food that was ritually fit to eat.  Kosher food must meet the complex requirements of Jewish law, and the supervising rabbi verifies that such is the case for a given food item.  There are restrictions on which foods are permitted during different times of the year, and a procedure for slaughtering permissible animals with minimal pain to the animal.  The rabbi’s role is to decide questions of Jewish law.

Most all Jews kept some aspect of the kosher laws, such as not eating pork or shellfish.

Perhaps the best place for such food was Bob and Evelyn Protzel’s Kosher Deli on Wydown Boulevard.  Protzel’s Deli sold only flayshedika or pareve foods – that is, nothing containing milk.

Although I was a goyim, I kept track of the significant Jewish holidays so I could miss certain school days, like everyone else.  My motives were not holy at all.  The three major holidays were Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Chanukah.

Rosh Hashanah celebrates the creation of the world, and as such is the New Year for calculating calendar and sabbatical years.  Yom Kippur – the day of repentance, is the holiest and most solemn day of the year.  Its central theme is atonement and reconciliation.  Chanukah – The Festival of Lights – marks the defeat of Assyrian forces that had tried to prevent Israel from practicing Judaism.  Judah Maccabee and his brothers destroyed the overwhelming forces, and rededicated the Temple.

Most of my friends had already experienced a bar mitzvah, just before I moved into the neighborhood.  A bar mitzvah is an important rite of passage for a Jewish boy at the age of 13 and one day.  Girls become bat mitzvah at age 12.  This is usually celebrated by the adolescent being called to read from the Torah at the shabbat closest to their bar/bat mitzvah.

As is common in Judaism, there is often a party afterwards, which can vary from the simple home reception to an ornate “theme” celebration.  Until a boy reaches bar mitzvah age, he is responsible only as part of chinuch (training).  After the bar mitzvah, the boy is legally an adult in the eyes of Judaism.  This means the following: he is now counted for a minyon (prayer quorum of ten).  He is responsible for wearing tefillin.  He is eligible for aliyot (being called up to read the Torah).  He is responsible to fast on fast days.  He is responsible for observing the mitzvot.

Allegedly, the first public bat mitzvah ceremony was for Judith Kaplan Eisenstein, the daughter of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, the founder of the Reconstructionist movement.  Most movements in American Judaism have since adopted the ceremony.

Chapter 13
Later, while a student at Webster College, my education was neither meticulous nor intense, and therefore not particularly fruitful.  Like the Mock Turtle, I studied reeling, writhing and the different branches of arithmetic – Distraction, Excesses and Mockery.  My main objectives were to avoid the military draft for the Vietnam War and to prolong my adolescence.

At first, I planned to take a degree in sociology and be a social activist, like Father Daniel Berrigan, the Jesuit.  I spoke with other Jesuits at Marquette University, and took lodging at Catholic University in mid-April, 1971, for the anti-war demonstrations in Washington, D.C.  But my ideals quickly soured, cynicism set in; and I switched to English literature, where so many frustrated writers end as pipe-smoking teachers in tweeds.

Like William S. Burroughs, as an adolescent I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous.  They lounged around Singapore and Bangkok smoking opium in yellow pongee silk suits.  They sniffed cocaine in Mayfair and they penetrated forbidden swamps with a faithful servant boy and lived in the native quarter of Tangier smoking hashish and languidly caressing a pet gazelle.

Later I realized my mother was the first storyteller I knew.  I was raised by one of the most imaginative women ever to come out of St. Louis, a woman who had a history she continuously falsified.  Mother made up her history as she went along and it was always difficult to tell with mother what was real and what was not real.  Her powers of exaggeration were vivid and refined.  Her imagination was extraordinary and could not be contained.  Mother was a seanchai of prodigious gifts, and she saw no particular virtue in admitting the truth anyway.

For a time, my room rang with the iron of fine words and the names of great masters were articulated with fastidious intonation.  Witticisms were canvassed, depending for their vitality on knowledge of the English language as delivered with an Irish attitude.

Still, the life long occupation with being an entertaining source of shrewd anecdotes was perhaps the worst of all my delusions.  There were many periods when I experienced a histrionic point of view with no hope of outward expression except by writing immense letters.  This was a natural way of conversing with absent friends, based on my actual or imaginary role as a writer, always ready to bequeath my memoirs to posterity.

I was always writing la historie de familia, a document where perhaps the art of digression was never so successfully cultivated, and treating the subject as a comedy of incoherence.  This was naive, yet still promising, as all serious work and purpose is auspicious.

Yet, often enough, I was afraid that anything I wrote would contain the bitter diction and haughty attitude of a solemn memorialist.  I was also afraid that anything I wrote would be a work of revenge and ridicule, of self-adoration and self-pity.  I was never certain if it was possible to draw a line between the imaginary and the autobiographical.  Yet fragments were the only way to tell the story.  There was no point in a traditional narrative, since my parents didn’t exist in linear time.  Everything was episodic.

The memory of my parents was an obsession which more than paid for any misgivings I had about corrupting experiences, to gain the momentary illusion of reality, even at the expense of a terrible and lasting cruelty.  By writing about my parents, I was describing my own impoverished and uncertain prospects.  I had no choice but to write until I no longer felt disreputable.

The catalyst for this role was Henry Miller, the great vagabond of American literature, a prolific epistolary writer of modern times.  In spite of his lengthy period of obscurity, Miller was obsessive about writing, especially letters to friends.  When he was in his early 30s, he tried out techniques, pastiches and dramatic scenes in his letters.  He often wrote several 20-and-30 page dispatches in one day.  Miller’s trip to New York City in 1935 was chronicled in an 88-page letter to his friend Alfred Perles, the longest letter of his career. When he was in his early 80s, Miller wrote one woman 224 letters over a nine-month stretch. In between that period, he led an interesting existence; and that life is mirrored in his letters.

For me, Miller was a prophet, a guide, a father.  I wanted to be his disciple, pilgrim and spiritual son.

Chapter 14
During this same period, some color photographs of father circulated among the family in St. Louis.  He was still living in the midpoint of Old México, where Kathleen Sheridan had finally joined him years ago.  His sister, Lauren – a woman I had met only once when I was young, made the trip in the mid-1970s to see the matriarch of the family.  Years passed before the images surfaced in Dogtown.

In the photographs Jamie Sheridan appeared visibly happy as he stood in front of his near-derelict quarters.  Other selections showed him with Kathleen Sheridan, my grandmother, who wore the fixed grin of a death’s head.  Even in her late 70s, she still appeared as a woman of celestial vapidity. I would always remember her for a voice of dry dismay dying in a sanitarium.

Later images also showed mother and son in front of la Iglesia San Pedro Apostle in gray, overcast light.  I pictured the rain still dripped off the roof and the water rushed down the gutters of the nearby dirt street.  They also stood in the kitchen of their crude dwelling that, according to reports, lacked both plumbing and electricity.  Yet father looked genuinely happy and content.  He had aged better than mother.

As I studied the photographs from México, I could not help recall all the years of struggle   mother and I endured in small, cramped apartments – living from paycheck-to-paycheck.  While father could build his own house in the Sierra Madre of México our only means of transportation were the city buses.  I detested the man who was my father.

Despite my intense bitterness, I wrote father a letter after 15 years of silence.  The letter was a straightforward salutation, without any accusatory charges.  Yet I received no reply.  Of course this did not surprise me.

If Jamie could write his autobiography, he would probably depict himself as caring for his aged mother, reading the Bible, and helping the poor, like St. Vincent de Paul.  He had a mission; he was turning into the new Messiah.  However, at one point, Jamie was so dissatisfied with Padre Antonio Frias that he sat down at the kitchen table and composed a letter on wrapping paper, addressed to God.

An Open Letter
– date unknown [1978]

I, Jamie P. Sheridan, in the presence of Jesus Christ, humbly beseech your guidance in understanding the practices of the priests and sisters here in Chapulhuacan, Hidalgo. In the year 1968 in the Parish of San Pedro having six Santos Angeles was the great server of the Lord fulfilling his duties as the Lord commanded.  I then went to Tamazunchale and lived with Sr. and Senora Sheridan, of the Hotel Tropical, who are very nice people, and lived with them as a member of their family for eight years.

Senor Armando Lopez Rubio said come live in Chapulhuacan, and then we came here and started to live in this town.  Here is a town that has a Roman Catholic Church!  The priests that are to this church are never here.  Why?  Every day they have to run to the ranches.  Away from the work.  For I will say without batting an eye this is the most sinful town in the World todayWhen we had our house built and could move into live we had this idea that this was our Paradise.  Well everything from building the house to its finish we did with the Father Son and Holy Ghost.  Then we started to get acquainted with the Church at this time, the priest was Frias [Padre Antonio Frias] and he was never at the church, always on the bus, going to Tamazunchale, or the capital Mexico City.  Also this same priest Frias would never make house calls.  He always sent the sisters to pray.  He did not want to confess very many people here.  He always seemed to enjoy turning us away from receiving Holy Communion.

– Jamie P. Sheridan

The God of Jamie’s prayers and letters was not the domestic one of husband and wife, children, petty cares, cooking, arguments, and reconciliations.  For years, his God was the monastic one of eunuchs in the desert.

Sometimes it seemed he was no longer himself, Jamie the son of Liam of Castlebar, but perhaps rather a true disciple like Simon Peter son of Jonah of Bethsaida.  Jamie had been sent to México, a divine calling from the Messiah, yet he was never sure of his true purpose.  So, he worked his plot of land, remained humble and lived as an ascetic. Jamie was easily confused and so his own mother occasionally seemed as saintly as Mary of Nazareth.  Since his arrival in the village, Chapulhuacan had gone astray like Jerusalem of old, and the inhabitants seemed oblivious to his correct example.

At night the heavens of México sparkled above Jamie, while below, the earth wounded him with its stones and thorns.  He had stretched out his arms; he struggled and complained as though the whole earth was a cross on which he was being crucified.  As he closed his eyes, Jamie grew frightened.  He heard the hungry dogs begin to howl, felt the entire neighborhood prowling around the house like a wild beast.  Afraid, Jamie reopened his eyes.  The sky had filled with a few more stars and gradually he felt comforted.  His mind illuminated by starlight, he forgot his restlessness.  Jamie closed his eyes again, re-massed those thoughts that had lingered on Louisville Avenue, the South Pacific Ocean, El Hotel Tropical, and tried to put them in order.  But it was so difficult.

Finally, an air of sanctity and beatitude hung over the bedroom.  Jamie breathed tranquilly and fell asleep.

© Dancing at My Wake 2011-2012