A Tribute to an Author I Didn't Know Until About a Week Ago

Until a week ago, I had never even heard her name. There were announcements on KBOO about upcoming radio memorials to honor Grace Paley, a short story writer, actist, and mother known for giving voice to the Jewish community of New York.

Last night, "Circle A Radio" on KBOO played their memorial to this wonderful woman who passed away in August at the age of 84. I listened to her voice. I listened to the voices she gave the characters in her stories. She was an amazing writer.

Grace talked of a conversation she had with her father, which sent me into a fantasy conversation with mine. My mind wanders to writing a fictional story of a dream I have of having a conversation with my father. I think of the discussion so strongly that I didn't hear the beginning of a story Grace starts to tell.

She tells a story of her arrest, and since I didn't hear the beginning of the story, I don't know why she was arrested, but she was in jail. The jail, it turns out, was just around the corner from her house. Grace talked about how she could see her kids going off to school. How folks would walk by and say "good morning" to her as she waited in jail.

My father used to tell me a jail story about his father. My grandfather, Louis Johnson, was arrested for public drunkeness or something like that. He spent the weekend in jail, and in the process, my grandmother would pass him whiskey through the bars. My dad told me what the judge had to say when grandpa had his hearing: "I don't know how you did it, Louis, but you are drunker now than when you were arrested."

My dad, also named Louis, would laugh after he told this story. And he would usually tell this story after he had drunk three quarts of Blitz Weinhard beer (3 for breakfast, 3 for lunch, 3 for dinner). I found out later in life he was also hiding whiskey in the garage. I guess it was a way of medicating his pain for the mistake of staying with my mother instead of taking responsibility for his actions and just leaving when he knew for sure they would never be happy together. Maybe he stayed for his kids? I would have rather he left and probably lived.

I got to watch my father committing a slow suicide. Maybe he was too lazy, too tired, too scared, to load a round into the .284 Winchester/Savage that he had gotten many deer for us with, put it into his mouth, and pull the trigger. But what's done is done.

No one had to tell me he was dying when he started the fast track to his death. I was 14, watching TV in the living room as he slept passed on the couch. He suddenly sits up and starts vommitting blood all over. I stood up from my place in my father's favorite chair as my father luanched himself from the couch and headed down the hallway to the bathroom vomitting masses of blood, more blood than I knew could be held into a humans body. The horrible sounds of my father dying I seem to have erased from my mind all these years later. When he was done, he walked to his bedroom, a place he hadn't slept in in years, his Love for my mother being long gone...and laid down to die. He didn't have to tell me what he was doing, I knew.

Many parts of that event have been erased from my memory, almost as soon as they happened. Suddenly my mother is there, just there. She is screaming and crying and trying to get my stubborn ass father up to go to the hospital. Then two of my three sisters are there and they are all in the bedroom screaming and crying trying to get my stubborn father up to go to the hospital. Then my oldest sister, Ferrol, shows up. I watch down the hallway through the open door at the end as the four women work over my father to try to get him to get up. Suddenly, my frantic sister Ferrol starts screaming, "GET UP! GET UP! GET UP!" while simultaneously beating my father, who remembers his Love for his kids, and gets his drunken dying ass off his bed.

The four women whisk him by me and my mother asks, "do you want to come with?"

"No," I tell her. "I'll stay here and clean this up." I realize that I had been standing in the same place since it began. I hadn't moved, and little pieces of the memory were already gone. Not the pieces I wished were gone, but the pieces like; where'd my mother come from, when did my first two sisters show up... Not the stuff I wished I could forget, like cleaning up blood for four hours.

My father, Louis Wilbur Johnson, did not die that day. Then it was like waiting in a line at Disneyland with your best friend. You wait and wait and wait...move a little forward, and wait some more.

I would come home during my long lunch periods from Aloha High School and watch "Perry Mason" with my father everyday at noon. We would cheer like it was a football game and act like we hadn't seen each episode ever before. We had a good time hanging out together in my fathers last days which he spent sober. This went on for a couple of years.

Sometimes when I would come home, my father wouldn't be there. "Is he in the hospital? Is he dead? Is he at the store? Is he at the beach watching whales?" If he wasn't in the hospital, after he would show up I would give him a lecture about leaving me a note. Of course, he never did.

My sister Roxanna tells me a story of a few weeks before our fathers death, she was alone in the hospital room with her.

"Close the curtains," he asks of her.

"Why?" she asks confused.

"Close the curtains," he asks again.

Roxanna starts to panic. "Why?" she asks again.

"CLOSE THE CURTAINS!" our father screams.

Crying and panicky Roxanna gets up quickly and closes the curtains.

"Why'd you want me to close the curtains?" she asks my father through her tears.

"They were coming to take me away," he explains to her.

We finally get to the ride from our long line at Disneyland, but there is only room for one more, and it is the last ride of the day. I watch my father get on. We wave at each other as the chain moves the cars forward on the track, and he is gone...

I have never heard of Grace Paley before until this last week with the announcments to the memorials being done for her on KBOO. The two shows I listened to played Grace reading a short story called "Life." It is a story of a woman who calls her friend and tells her she has cancer and is dying. The character dies a few weeks after Christmas.

My father, Louis Wilbur Johnson, one of the most Loving men one could ever meet, as well as an alcoholic chain smoker until the last two years of his life, passed away on New Years Eve, 1981, a few weeks shy of my 18th birthday. He was 48 years old.