Authors: Mark Dunn
IBID (17 page)
Winny had taught him well.
An important postscript to this story: The day the sledgehammers came out, Jonathan called Rivera and offered to commission the Mexican artist to paint a mural for the corporate offices of Dandy-de-odor-o. Rivera politely declined, but did eventually accept a financial contribution from Jonathan, which compensated him in part for work he did on another mural: a brazen reaction in colorful fresco to the Rockefeller Center debacle. A small
private library in Harlem had the honor of Rivera’s gifted services. “You Americans view all states outside your own Capitalist-strangled system as imperfect, while you blind yourselves to your own blemished history,” Rivera is said to have screeded (in Spanish) as he embarked upon this new commission. “Perhaps it is time to remind you how far your nation has to go in reaching that pinnacle of perfection to which you smugly think you have already ascended.”
I have found no visual record of Rivera’s anti-American library mural, which was inadvertently painted over in the seventies. (The wall now depicts a cavalcade of American presidents up to Gerald Ford as imagined with African-American features.) However, I have read descriptions of some of the images incorporated by Rivera into his mural in Geraldo Rivera’s controversial
The Story of My Grandfather Diego
. Together they form a frightening indictment of an America rejecting the very ideals upon which it was built:
American soldiers issuing Small Pox-infected blankets to Indians in the 1870s. (Interestingly, Rivera had touched upon one of the world’s first acts of bio-terrorism!)
The U.S. Supreme Court declaring unconstitutional in 1918 the nation’s first federal child labor law. (Rivera supposedly has the justices using the backs of young babies for footstools.)
The racially motivated attack on off-duty Black Union officers by citizens of Zanesville, Ohio, near the end of the Civil War.
There was also an unflattering picture of a snoozing, pot-bellied J.P. Morgan, his nose painted the size of a cantaloupe, and another of Andrew Carnegie building libraries with the bones of steel workers who had unfortunately gotten within firing range of the
philanthropist’s hired strikebreakers.And finally, for no reason other than, perhaps, mischief, an image of Frida Kahlo seated before her vanity mirror, grooming her famous eyebrow.
Incidentally, a Ms. Ruby Towers, whom I met in Harlem, tells me that she has a photograph of the lost mural in her possession but would not let me see it unless I helped her “honey-voiced” granddaughter Shauneequa get on the television program
American Idol
. This I could not do.
30.
In time Jonathan and Hunter grew closer.
Jonathan’s improved relationship with his stepson is demonstrated by this letter home from summer camp. Hunter Gleason to Jonathan Blashette, July 51934, JBL.
Dear Dad,
Greetings from Camp Chaubunagungamaug! Camp Chaubunagungamaug is everything that you said it would be! Thank you so much for sending me here! Everyday I go swimming in Lake Chaubunagungamaug or me and the other fellows go hiking in the Chaubunagungamaug Forest and look for nuts or trail markers left by the Chaubunagungamaug Indians who lived here in days of old. It is a swell place and I am making many new friends here. I hope that you send me back to Camp Chaubunagungamaug next year. Oh well. Time to go fishing. You guessed it. Lake Chaubunagungamaug. I hope I catch a big one!
Give my love to Mom.
Sincerely,
Your stepson, Hunter
PS. Tomorrow the Chaubunagungamaug Forest rangers are going to let some of us fellows go up to the top of the Chaubunagungamaug Forest lookout tower to see if there are any forest fires in Chaubunagungamaug Forest or around Lake Chaubunagungamaug. I hope not, because then they’d have to evacuate Camp Chaubunagungamaug! Gee, this letter took an awfully long time to write!
31.
Davison was dubious midwife at the birth
. I cannot substantiate Harlan Davison’s claim that he was present at the creation of Alcoholics Anonymous. True, Jonathan’s trusted Man Friday was in Akron on a Dandy-D business call the very same night in 1935 in which William Griffith Wilson and Dr. Robert Holbrook Smith brainstormed together until dawn, but neither Wilson nor Smith mentions his presence in their personal accounts. Still, among Davison’s papers I have found what might have been his ultimately unsuccessful contribution to the evening’s session, “Twelve Steps to Sobriety.” The two pages are coffee-stained. (Legend has it that Wilson and Smith each drank fourteen cups of coffee that night, could not sleep for days, and surgeon Smith, in particular, was so jittery as a result that he allegedly had difficulty the next morning placing a patient’s rejected gall bladder into the organ pan). If the document is authentic, it is easy to see why it was dismissed by the two founders, since it incorporates none of Wilson and Smith’s dependence upon the power of religious faith, and at times the spiritually untethered Davison rejects divine assistance altogether. I have found no mention of either the document or Davison’s possible participation in the birth of AA within Jonathan’s papers, nor in any of Davison’s correspondence. Therefore, I draw no conclusions and submit the following document in its entirety without further conjecture or commentary.
Twelve Steps to Sobriety
A draft
by Harlan Davison
1. We admit that we are presently powerless. We embrace the fact that our lives are controlled by the demon liquid spirits.
2. The existence of God still open to question, we look for a power greater than ourselves with a more temporal address. A respected uncle, an admired high school football coach, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Clark Gable are all good choices. A good choice for women would be the ever-popular Dolores Del Rio.
3. We make a decision to turn our lives over to that power greater than ourselves, unless in the case of Clark Gable, he does not answer our correspondence with anything but an autographed picture of himself as Fletcher Christian.
4. We take a good, long look at our lives, where we have been, and where we have gone wrong. We do not take this inventory in a saloon because it may prove counterproductive.
5. We are specific about what we have done for which we should be ashamed. We make a detailed list. If necessary, we purchase additional Big Chief notebooks.
6. We make the decision to remedy defects in our character that have diminished the lives of others. This step does not necessarily involve the removal of unsightly facial moles.
7. We drink strong black coffee whenever possible, many cups of it. Our teeth become stained but we bear the stains as proud emblems of our sobriety, for lips that taste coffee do not taste liquor, Irish coffee excluded.
8. We make a list of all the people we have hurt. We prepare to make things right with them all, excepting those who have passed away, and in such cases we then prepare to make things right with their children, and if they died childless, we prepare to make things right with a close neighbor or perhaps the family butcher.
9. We make our amends to all those we have harmed in order of the grievousness of the offense. Maiming others with our automobiles would be highest on the list. At the bottom, perhaps, would be making a sarcastic comment to a newspaper vendor when he greeted us innocently and cheerily, only to have our sour mood darken for a moment his beautiful sun-kissed morning.
10. We look deep within ourselves and find those things requiring change, and we change them for the better and when we are wrong we admit it promptly, even if this admission involves chasing after the wronged party and wedging him between furniture to get our point across.
11. We drink more coffee. If necessary, we chew and swallow the grounds. We reek of the stench of coffee, but we rejoice in it, for it represents the essence and incense of our rejuvenation.
12. We share these steps with other alcoholics in need. We come together in groups and say our name and drink coffee and smoke cigarettes and eat lard-shortened doughnuts and sugar fry cakes and acknowledge that we are men and women on the road to sobriety and health through fellowship and mutual support. We celebrate our rebirth as alcohol-freed Americans, ready now to make sober contribution to the life of this great nation, and so we go clear-headed with raised chin and elevated spirits, and with renewed determination to get ourselves off the breadlines and into a job. And Clark Gable willing, we shall succeed.
32.
It was all over but the shouting.
Even on the best of days Dandy-D’s vice president for international marketing William B. Worthington would shout his opinions and instructions in a voice so deafening that Jonathan was forced to put an Ear, Nose, and Throat specialist on staff to administer to the injured. Eventually Worthington left to go to work for a turbine manufacturer. In a raised voice, the departing company man confessed that he could not help himself; he came from a long line of shouters, mostly ministers. There is a rich history of bellowing from the pulpit, the phenomenon, curiously, the subject of perhaps the longest book title in American publishing history:
Shouting: Genuine and Spurious in All Ages of the Church, from the Birth of Creation, When the Sons of God Shouted for Joy, until the Shout of the Archangel: with Numerous Extracts from the Old and New Testament, and from the Works of Wesley, Evans, Edwards, Abbott, Cartwright, and Finley, Giving a History of the Outward Demonstrations of the Spirit, Such as Laughing, Screaming, Shouting, Leaping, Jerking, and Falling under the Power &C.,
by G. W. Henry (Oneida, New York, 1859).
33.
Clara could bear no more children.
As disappointed as Jonathan must have been to learn that the surgery would prevent Clara from giving him the biological child he had always wanted, his feelings go unregistered both in his diary and in correspondence from this period. Furman wonders if this might not have been a silent acknowledgement of the fact that the odds were already working against him; even without the fibroid tumors, Clara might still have had difficulty conceiving, given that Jonathan was in possession of an undescended testicle—a condition that generally reduces sperm count and the odds of “hitting the target.” Or as Odger delicately put it, “See, ol’ Jonny was born with three legs but only one ball. Ol’ Tweedledee was tucked away up in his stomach somewheres. Back in those days, why, the
doctors they didn’t generally go about the business of dropping those suckers into the oat bag. And even if this had been standard procedure, they’d probably have been too distracted by that extra danged leg to notice that the boy was one nut short of a Mars bar.”
34.
“Clara and I have decided to adopt.”
Jonathan Blashette to Andrew Bloor, 28 March1935. AnB.
35.
“Clara says he’s the most beautiful baby she’s ever seen. Even famed engineer and bridge designer Bascom Caruthers left his blueprints to come down from the attic to give him a look.”
Jonathan Blashette to Andrew Bloor, 17 May1935, AnB.
36.
“We are going to call him Addicus Andrew, after my father and a very dear friend.”
Ibid. Bloor’s response, coming only a few days after his retirement from Oberlin College, was touching. The complete letter follows. JBP.
May 21, 1935
My dear Jonathan,
You have moved me to tears. I am watermarking my stationery with this shameful welling of my lachrymal glands! I was never blessed with a marital union and so I have never known the joy of fatherhood. You are finally, in your forty-eighth year, partaking of that experience and I wish you all possible happiness.
I have just remarked that I have never known the joy of fatherhood. That is not entirely true. For I have come to think of you as my own son. You have opened your life to me as has no one else and I feel each day the ligature of that special bond we have forged. Yes, like that of father and son. I hope that your birth father will forgive me for trespassing here, but it is true.
I wish all good things for you and Clara, and for little Addicus Andrew Blashette.
Next month I will be moving to Omaha to take up residence with my sister Evetta and her husband Sven. I will not know what to do with myself. Teaching was my life. I will wear the mantle of “emeritus” proudly, but will so miss the classroom and all my students.
Evetta is a blessed soul. Her husband Sven, however, often tries my patience to the extreme. On my last visit, he brought his catch of the day boastingly into my bedroom and dripped fish water upon my bed. He is illiterate and frequently requests that I read product labels to him. These readings seem to entertain him in a way that I cannot comprehend and I am often required to recite a particular label more than once and employ different voices, especially highly pitched ones that remind him of women from the Orient. I refuse to do this in the presence of my sister. It is an act of humiliation I reserve for Sven alone. Yet sometimes when the recitations are over, I feel strangely invigorated and eager for our next session. I do not understand the reason for this.
Congratulations again on the adoption. I look forward to seeing the child on my next visit to “Chez Blashette.”
Give him a little hug for me.
Your friend always,
Andrew Bloor
37.
“Adopted Son of Deodorant Executive Kidnapped. Family had the child for only six days.”
New York Dispatch
, 23 May1935.
38.
“God, oh God, what did I do to deserve this?”
Jonathan’s “Letter to God,” JBP.
THE SHIFTING SPOTLIGHT
1. “
I just heard the news.”
Nydia Blashette to Jonathan Blashette, 24 May1935, JBP. Jonathan’s Aunt Nydia, sensitive to the emotional toll the kidnapping was taking on Jonathan and Clara, continued to write to the couple, often including verses of inspirational poetry she had penned during stolen moments from her job as hash-slinger at the Fort Ituska Logging Camp Mess Hall. Far from being the balm to Jonathan and Clara that Nydia hoped they would be, the verses served only to sharpen the pain of loss that the couple felt. It is not difficult to see why Jonathan and his wife found the poetry so objectionable, as illustrated by the following excerpt.
