KELLY

My mother monkeyed with me. I wish she hadn't. She gave me so many insights and points of view that she had become a part of my character. So when she monkeyed with me I had to stop her. Otherwise I wouldn't have been myself any longer. I felt no conscious qualms about cutting her off. I was glad to do it. It was a question of her or me. And I had not the slightest desire to turn myself over to anyone. She had had such a hand at forming me, done such a good job of making me think that I was a separate, independent character that it was easy to choose between me and her in a showdown. I was probably so vehement about it because of the undercurrent of the love and connection that had been formed before I finally had to totally reject her. It was a rejection that went down to the very nub. I've gone on rejecting her for the rest of my life. She died in l970. It's easy to remember the year since both she and my father died at the age of seventy, he four years before her, and as I said, it's easy to remember her age at death since she was born in the last ten days of the Nineteenth Century. Paw had slipped away in sixty-six.

Had there been a funeral for her I very likely would have avoided it but there was no need for such a decision since she had made it quite clear that she wanted to be cremated and, if I'm not mistaken, scattered somewhere or other, perhaps at sea, perhaps in some forest in her beloved Ojai, the peaceful place where she had spent her last years. But I don't really remember. Perhaps it'll come back to me later on. Years later I talked to two sets of our closest family friends. Both of them had daughters who were a year my senior. When I was three and Alaine Scott was four we used to go between the two garages behind the little palm tree behind our house on Dillion Street and play "I' ll show you mine if you show me yours." Lainie grew up to be the most delicately sexy and beautifully feminine woman I have ever lusted after.

The Cooper's daughter, Paula, was not so dazzlingly feminine but livelier, quicker and smarter and more lovingly friendly. When we were in our thirties Paula told me that my mother had told her mother, when I was seventeen or eighteen, that in no way was her daughter to accept if I might ask her for a date. Even later, Alaine's mother visited me after many years of absence and confided that she, too, had been instructed in the same manner. Mom had been dead for quite some time when this knowledge came to me so I never had a chance to hear her explanation for that part of her monkeying or tampering or whatever you may want to call it.

I suppose I shouldn't be shocked from having heard about it but I still am. I had thought that there was more fair play going on than there had been. My mother's attempts to control me that I was aware of, were much more straightforward. They went some thing like, "Get a job and if you need to paint, paint on the week-ends." Not at all unreasonable but they soon became a mantra and, after all, it was my life I was wrecking, not hers. I loved my father and fortunately he genuinely loved me so he was more supportive. It pleased him to see me trying to go about a profession that I truly believed in no matter how difficult or hopeless it seemed.

My father was an old fashioned man. He considered himself the head of the household. He told me, "I don't agree with the way that you're going about your life but it's your life, not mine, and as long as I' m the head of this household you're welcome to stay here with no strings attached. And I want you to know this: 'AH'M FO' YAH!' "

My father had been referring to the statement I had told him about four years earlier that Kelly had made. At the time I had a summer job working with Kelly digging ditches when we weren't bucking rivets or driving trucks. Kelly was a lively black man with a gleam in his eye and a spring in his heel. The first months we worked together he was very friendly and told me a lot of stories about his adventures when we weren't digging ditches. In the ditches we would sing crackerjack songs and songs that at the time were called Negro Spirituals. Things like, 'Swing Low, Sweet Chariot, Comin' Fo' to Carry Me Home...' That kind of stuff. He liked to teach me stuff I didn't know about like how to shift the pick-up truck without having to use the clutch or that I shouldn't be bothered by it when a woman had a stinky smell to her. "It all stinks," he remarked laughingly, "so you might as well get used to it." If nothing else, he was certainly the master of metaphor. He knew the sad truth of what he was implying but he didn't bother to explain it any more than that. I guess he figured if I lived long enough and had a nose for it, that eventually I'd come to the same conclusion. His cynicism was the truest kind, cheery and undaunted. He liked catching people off guard. Whenever anything broke down, quick as a wink, he would fix it.

"Kelly, you're the jack of all trades," I once remarked admiringly, "And good at none!" he replied wistfully with an undercurrent of the amused tone of mock self-deprecation he always seemed to take such a delight in. At first I thought he was just being a little sloppy with that old expression until I realized that 'master' was a word he never cared to think about, let alone to use.

Kelly had little formal education but his was the soul of a poet and without his consciously knowing it he was full of literary devices. He had a spontaneous love for alliteration , especially with the letter 'L'. One time when a beautiful, black girl strutted by on the other side of the wire fence that separated us from the sidewalk, Kelly made the most poetic UM-UM-UM sounds I ever heard and then mumbled under his breath, "That's just the way ah likes `em....., long...., lean...., an' lanky!"

One afternoon a big, burly truck driver showed up with a huge box of rivets while every one else at the trailer factory except Kelly and me were out to lunch. "Who's going to take these?" "Ah'll take `em," answers Kelly, brushing off the black dirt from his black face as he emerges from the ditch we had just finished digging. "Put `em ovah he-ah." That done, the huge driver asks the little man his most important question, "Who's gonna sign for `em?" "Ah'll sign fo' `em," says Kelly, as he grabs the big man's receipt book and with a great flourish inscribes an enormous K-E-L on the blank page then proudly hands back the book. Its crumpled and tattered edges are brimming with little tongues of protruding purple carbons fluttering a high staccato pitch in the brisk wind. The driver tidies up the loose carbons with his monstrous hands, smoothes out the book a bit, and then squints hard at what it was that Kelly had written. "What's this?" he says, looking up with a puzzled expression on his face, "KEE?" Kelly's dark eyes roll slowly sideways until they set-lock into an almost walkable path connected to the eyes of the driver. "NO SUH! That's KELLY," he announces with a calm tone of stately pride, "Ah'm Irish! Favorite colah bein' GREEN!"

He later asked me whether I thought that driver might have taken him for Black Irish. I thought it was a high likelihood with a name like his.

Kelly was fond of spoofin' people especially the new guys who had just come to work there. I had been assigned one job I really hated because it was so boring and monotonous until Kelly lent a touch of color to it. I'd have to drill out about fifty brass fittings a week that needed the diameter of their interior shaft to be an exact dimension right down to a hundredth of a millimeter. Rather than cast the fitting part exactly, it was cheaper for the company to make a rough cast and then have a low-paid flunky like me drill out the shaft hole to the exact, needed diameter. If I pushed down too hard on the drill press the damn thing would get stuck and ruin the fitting by scarring it up but if I didn't press down hard enough it would take an interminable length of time to drill out the shaft hole. Finally Kelly saved the day by making a really great use of the fine brass filings left over from my tedious work. They were so fine that it would take a month or two to gather up a good handful of them but Kelly would come into the machine shop every day and meticulously sweep up his precious gold dust, sift out the grime which accompanied it, and carefully store the brass filings in a little glass jar. I enjoyed this ritual a lot especially since he would always crack me up with his stories and jokes as he went through his sweeping, sifting and storing routine with a kind of exaggerated, precious daintiness that one might have expected from an effeminate goldsmith. It was really funny just to watch his comical, unpredictable movements and gestures, let alone to listen to his devilish quips and raucous stories.

One sunny afternoon, Kelly caught the latest, flaky, new employee off-guard while he was standing outside the building on a cigarette break. The man was leaning on a rustproof-red, painted steel pole. With his left hand he supported his tall, gangly frame which was gently angled toward the pole. His right hand made lazy, up-and-down arcs as he puffed away on his diminishing cigarette. Kelly had already twice sashayed up to this new guy, I think his name was Harold, talked about silly things like how bright the sun was for that time of day and about how he wished that whoever was in the rest room would finish up since he really had to pee in the worst way. The door to the rest room was always left open when it was out of use but Kelly had snuck around while nobody was watching and propped it closed. Kelly was now standing alongside Harold in the bright sun for the third time as he squinted at the closed rest room door. "Gawd," says Kelly, "I wish that guy would finish. Ah can hardly stan' it! In fact ah can't stand any-mo-ah. Ah'm jus' gonna pee right he-ah!" And he quickly unzips his fly and tosses the brass dust all over Harold's leg. The cigarette goes flying as Harold leaps out of the way of what in the glistening sun looks like something other than gold dust. Kelly jumps up and down slapping his leg and laughing like a monkey. It was the kind of monkeying I didn't mind in the least.

Later on, for some reason unknown to me, Kelly seemed to be down on me. He withdrew a lot, gave me disapproving looks so I too, withdrew.

A couple of weeks passed before Kelly said, "Say....Ah've been noticing sumpin'! Yo been thinking sumpin'." I gave him a puzzled look, but I knew what it was he was talking about. He repeated his observation, "Yo been thinkin' sumpin' haven't yah? Yo been thinkin' ah'm AGAINST yah, haven't yah? Well, ah'm gonna tell yah sumpin'; Ah'm not agains'yah. Ah'm FO' yah!"

I think my father was really touched when I told him about Kelly's comment. I think it moved him a lot. My father's repeating of it four years later gave me enough heart to last me for the rest of my life.

One time Kelly tried to shoot his ex-girlfriend and the fellow she had taken on as her new lover behind Kelly's back. They had really fucked him over. They had gone on a wild shopping spree with Kelly's credit cards and then took off for San Francisco. Kelly got his-self a gun, tracked them down, and squeezed off a few wild rounds in an alleyway parking lot. He missed. The judge let him go but told him next time he wouldn't be so easy on him and not to try it again. As far as I know he never did.

© 2004 - Muldoon Elder