Daddy (No Secrets)

NOTE: Following is another chapter in what may become a full autobiography titled No Secrets.

My father was like a monster in the closet that periodically emerges to administer punishment. In his case, with a belt on the butt. After I got to be seven or so, Mother would complain about something that I did and he’d tear into me. Once or twice a year. Enough to keep me on my toes. Even when all was normal, the enforcer was lurking.

When I was in high school, I brought home from the library Marriage and Morals by Bertrand Russell. Mother perused it and found a section that advocates “free love,” or “open marriage.” She was scandalized and showed Daddy a paragraph when he came home for dinner. He reacted, “You can’t check out any more books.” Mother replied, “Well, let’s let him check out one book at a time.” He agreed.

So I brought home a book by Franklin Roosevelt’s Attorney General, Thurman Arnold, a famed trustbuster. The title, The Folklore of Capitalism, was all they needed to see. They freaked out and forbid me to read it. But after mother woke up in the early morning and discovered me reading it in the living room, they backed off.

Daddy would whip Sally, my older sister, too, though less frequently. Nevertheless, he once went after her with such fury Mother feared he would seriously injure her.

With ulcers eating up his stomach, he was always ready to explode. His father was a sharecropper and when he was young he worked the farm too. Almost his whole life, he worked hard, real hard.

The only thing I remember about him from our seven years in Arkansas was the Jewel Tea truck he drove while distributing and selling sundries. He was a non-entity. Gan-Gan, my mother’s father, was my de facto father.

I don’t know why my parents moved to Gan-Gan’s farm after Sally was born in Dallas. Daddy once told me he was drinking heavily during that period. My sisters recall being told that the family departed Dallas because Daddy injured himself delivering large blocks of ice, which was his job, and couldn’t work.

But around the time I was born and they moved to Arkansas, Daddy decided he would divorce Mother as soon as I left home. He decided to wait because he didn’t want people to say about him what they said about his father: that he left his kids when they were young. (Then Mary’s unplanned birth delayed his departure another ten years of love-less marriage.)

So I find it curious that the move to the farm and his decision to divorce happened about the same time. He was handsome, charming, and, as I learned later quite a flirt. So he may have had an affair or did something else to make Mother jealous.

Prior to his funeral, I asked his younger brother why Daddy and Mother left Dallas. My uncle stood up and walked away without saying anything. (Later, at the funeral, when I sat down next to him, he moved to another seat, disabusing me of my notion that we were close.)

Daddy’s first wife died suddenly. I think he was still heart-broken by that. And maybe he was worn down by having to be “the man of the house” after his father left home. The Great Depression and World War Two traumatized many of his generation, leaving them numb. Being the only man at home and having a bad back, he didn’t join the armed services, but the war must have affected him too.

Needless to say, I never observed much warmth between my parents. They were hardly role models for a happy marriage. No wonder neither my sisters nor I had children.

After Mary finally graduated from high school, while he was living and working in Houston, Daddy told Mother about the divorce by mailing her the papers. He was not very good at handling or communicating his feelings. Even going to a hospital was a traumatic event for him, so he hardly ever did it.

Daddy’s father lived in Corpus Christi. We’d visit there from time to time. When he was sixty or so, he married a woman who was thirty or forty younger than he was and severely disturbed emotionally. They had a child, who had a hard time herself.

During those visits, Daddy, his father, George, Sr., and his siblings would mostly drink and play 42 and Moon, two games played with dominoes. They were very serious about it and played for money, a penny a point.

Daddy was serious about everything. The main lesson he taught me was, “A job’s not worth doing unless it’s worth doing right.”

We’d go over to his mother’s house in Dallas for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Usually there was lots of tension in the air. The females would prepare the food and the males would go in the living room and watch football or play 42. I did enjoy one cousin in particular who was closer to my age and my uncles, who were quire lively.

My father’s older sister married several times and had several children. The last I heard, the children were all still at odds with each other. His younger sister married twice and had a troubled second marriage. My father’s two younger brothers were married a number of times, never had children, had many health issues, and died at fairly young ages. His mother was rather strict. She harshly criticized Mother for spoiling me. I didn’t like her very much.

After I had settled in San Francisco, one of my cousins moved to the Bay Area. I visited them once or twice, but he and his family never accepted my invitation to come see me in San Francisco. Once my father and I visited them on the peninsula. At one point, out of the blue, my cousin started talking about the shape of my lips (they are thin). It felt very creepy to me.

All in all, not a healthy extended family.

But the saving grace was that my father managed theatres and I got to see lots of movies and eat popcorn free of charge. (Now, I must have popcorn when I see a movie.)

At first, I mostly loved cowboy movies with Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, and Hopalong Cassidy. Then in 1952 when I was eight the first realistic Western, High Noon, was released and it captivated me. I saw it fourteen times. With its story of the loner standing up for what’s right against the whole town and even his new bride, I think it may have helped shape my character for the rest of my life. I’ve often been a minority of one.

Daddy worked afternoons and nights seven days a week, so I’d only see him during dinnertime. The family would eat while watching the evening news on television. We didn’t talk much when he was there.

Daddy and I basically only discussed sports. He certainly never told me anything about sex. When he did want to talk to me, which may have happened only three times in my life, it would be a long rambling monologue.

When I was twenty, I was very involved in the Northaven Methodist Church young adult group, including two major theatrical productions. One of my best friends, Frank Murray, was an older man who sold beauty supplies. He was gay but I had no idea. He’d give me a ride home and I’d sit in his car in front of my house continuing our philosophical conversations. And for a church play I was asked to play the role of a gay man, the title role, in Edward’s Albee’s “An American Dream.”

Mother was worried and told Daddy to warn me about homosexuality. One day while driving in his car, he gave me a fifteen-minute lecture that mystified me. I knew next to nothing about heterosexuality, much less homosexuality. I hadn’t even realized that the American Dream was gay! So I just listened and said something like, “Ok.”

But he did buy me a Vespa motor scooter for my paper route and, without complaining, he did pay for the windows I’d break when I’d zoom down the street, throw a bundled paper toward the porch, and hit a window.

During my high school years, he switched to the South Loop Drive-in Theater and hired me to work in the kitchen, where I’d cook hundreds of hamburgers a night. At home, he never cursed. But at work, he’d cuss up a storm. It was like Jekyll and Hyde, a hidden side of him that stunned me.

Unlike most drive-in theaters that were known for adolescent sexual activity, Daddy was proud of South Loop’s reputation as a “family theater.” A child’s playground in front of the screen was very popular. Daddy would go for tours on the back rows snooping on patrons with a flashlight. When he found some objectionable sexual behavior, he’d force them to leave. Years later I deduced that those tours probably gave him a sexual thrill.

Then he horrified my mother and surely disturbed many of his regular customers by showing And God Created Woman with Brigitte Bardot, the French sexpot known for being photographed nude on the beach. The film is rather tame by today’s standards, but back in Dallas at that time it bordered on pornography.

Once as we were leaving the house, a film with Sophia Loren was on television and he made some disturbing comment about the size of her breasts.

He was surely a man with a dark side. Just how dark I was yet to learn.

He disapproved of my involvement in the civil rights movement and reduced his financial support because of it, though his income was increasing. But he still let me use his car to drive around Dallas in 1964 to gather canned goods for Freedom Summer in Mississippi.

After I graduated from high school Associated Popcorn Distributors, Inc. hired him to be Vice-President-in-Charge-of-Sales selling concession supplies to the Astrodome in Houston and theaters throughout the Southwest. He was a great salesman, the business boomed, and he began to earn big bucks. His crowning achievement was being invited to join the Dallas Athletic Club, an exclusive country club where he played golf. He bought several pieces of land throughout Texas, including the place in the Hill Country where he retired.

But when his best friend at the company died, the remaining partners fired him, much to their later chagrin, for the company’s business collapsed without my father massaging his contacts.

Daddy then made a serious mistake. He invested in a jewelry company and when the Texas oil economy tanked, he eventually had to declare bankruptcy and salvage what he could. Gradually he was forced to sell most of his properties and squeak by on Social Security. A sad downfall.

His new wife, Wilma, was about twenty years younger and was a loving, compassionate woman who took good care of him in his later years when he was very ill. She was good for him and he became noticeably happier.

Still he never gave my sisters or me praise for our accomplishments. On occasion, I’d try to explain my life commitment, but I don’t think he ever understood. Once I told him, “I think you should tell Mary you are proud of her.” I don’t think he ever did.

One day I told Wilma, “You know Daddy has never visited me in San Francisco. I’d really appreciate it if you got him out there.” A few years later, she did, and we had fun touring around. Wilma kept saying, “Well, anything goes in San Francisco.” She was a serious evangelical Christian, but had a tolerant streak.

One of her siblings who had several children got into serious trouble of some sort, which led to Wilma and Daddy adopting two of the children, who were in grade school at the time. Whenever I’d visit, I’d notice that Daddy would treat the children like slaves, ordering them around to do this or that. That treatment bothered me, in part because it reminded me of how he had treated me. But I never really challenged him about it.

During those years, the thaw between us melted. One turning point was when he was still married to Mother and heard two sermons about racism and the civil rights movement. Those sermons were an epiphany for him. He told me about it and said he had been wrong in the past. He didn’t express explicit appreciation for my involvement in the movement, but it was implicit, which was comforting.

But when Mother invited her spiritualist friends over for me to give a report on LSD, he fell asleep in his recliner.

Later, when Mary was in high school, he softened even more. I couldn’t believe how much he loved their poodle, Choo-Choo. He’d sit with that dog in his lap for the longest time.

Once he visited me for about a week and stayed with me in my apartment. I enjoyed his visit, especially our road trip north to Bend, Oregon, spending the night next to a beautiful lake. In the city, like a young child, he’d be thrilled by the sound of fire, police, and ambulance sirens. Once walking down the street, a hooker passed in front of us, he stuck up his cane horizontal to the ground, and made a suggestive comment. I ignored him.

In early 1987, his youngest sister told me, “Wade, you should go see your father. He really needs you.” She said it in a way that indicated that was all she wanted to say, so I didn’t ask why. But I felt that I was hitting my head against the wall with my work in San Francisco and I had never “wandered.” So I saved up some money, bought myself a BMW motorcycle, sold or gave away most of my possessions, and hit the road not knowing for sure where I’d go. But Daddy was on my mind.

First I found Gary Snyder’s mailbox in the Sierra foothills and left him a copy of a Ralph Waldo Emerson biography with a note asking him to suggest to his good friend, Robert Redford, that he use the book to make a film about Emerson. I thought good footage could be made from Emerson’s support for the abolitionist John Brown, and the fact that when one of John Brown’s men escaped from the Harper’s Ferry incident and went to Emerson’s home for help, Emerson gave him a horse and buggy that he used to go to Canada.

When I arrived at his “ranch,” as he called it, outside Harper, Texas, I learned that he was in trouble with the authorities for sexual abuse of one of the children he and Wilma had adopted, a girl about 12 years old. After dinner, Wilma went to bed and left us alone to talk. He told me that he’d been accused of fondling the girl and had agreed to go to a certain number of therapy sessions in exchange for charges being dropped. But the authorities were threatening to file charges against him anyway.

Though he never totally admitted the crime, he left no doubt in my mind that he was guilty. But he was 75 years old and I did not want him to go to prison. So the next day I consulted with my friend from high school, Mike Doughty, who was a social worker. He recommended that I talk with Daddy’s supervisor, partly because Daddy’s primary caseworker was on vacation, and urge him to honor their agreement. I did andthe supervisor assured me that charges would be dropped. Later, they were.

I continued on my journey with an empty feeling in the pit of my stomach. Some time later, I learned that my father had engaged in similar behavior with my older sister when she was about the same age. When Mother found out, she was outraged. No wonder she wanted to divorce him!

Shortly thereafter, in my own mind, I basically disowned the Hudson family.

Since neither of my uncles had had children, I was the last male on that branch of the family tree (there was some distant Hudson male who may have kept his branch alive, but we weren’t in touch with him). Once I asked Uncle George if Daddy was concerned about the family name dying with me. George said he was.

But I didn’t care. I felt George Sr.’s branch of the tree was deeply poisoned. I did not particularly want to keep it alive. Still I loved my father and would visit occasionally, often with other family members. Once his older sister, Jenny, asked me to give her a foot massage. She was a social worker. She probably understood me better than any of them.

Daddy and I talked pretty much only talked about sports and politics. He was basically a right-wing populist. He hated “the Rockefellers” as much as I did. The last long conversation we had before he died was when Ralph Nader was running for President in 2000. He asked me who I liked. I told him I hoped Nader would get 5% of the vote to qualify the Green Party for federal funding during the next election. He said he agreed with me. I was thrilled and relieved. That was more than we had ever agreed on anything about politics and he was 88 years old.

He died a long slow death consumed by Parkinson’s disease. Over the years, he got more and more stiff. The last time I visited him, he was frozen solid. Lying with his back to me, he said, “Son, do you ever cry?” I said, “Yes, I do from time to time.” He replied, “Well, so do I.”

After a while, he said, “I feel I was not a very good father.” I answered, “You did the best you could.” I could have also told him that I appreciated his repeated support for my independence and had picked up from him his moral concerns, his interest in politics, and his dedication to hard work.

Not many people came to his funeral in Dallas. After Wilma warned me not to say too much, I said a few words and so did Sally and a few other people. Then we scattered his ashes at a golf course in honor of the passion of his life.

When I headed back to California, I swore that I’d never set foot in Texas again.