A Part in History
But then came the killing shot that was to nail me to the cross.
Edward Grady Partin.
And Life magazine once again was Robert Kenedy’s tool. He figured that, at long last, he was going to dust my ass and he wanted to set the public up to see what a great man he was in getting Hoffa.
Life quoted Walter Sheridan, head of the Get-Hoffa Squad, that Partin was virtually the all-American boy even though he had been in jail “because of a minor domestic problem.”
– Jimmy Hoffa in “Hoffa: The Real Story,” 1975
This is a long story.
Late at night on April 5th, 2019, I chose to end my mother’s life by allowing her doctor to remove five intravenous lines and a respirator tube that was keeping her alive.
I flew to Baton Rouge from San Diego and arrived at the same hospital where I had been born 47 years earlier. She was lying on gurney and hooked to life-preserving machines, and five needles dripped nutrients and pain blockers into the backs of her petite hands, and her arms were bruised from what looked like more than three days of needle attempts in her collapsed veins, as if their were bruises atop older bruises. I instantly knew what would happen in at 8am in morning, when her doctor would return for his next 8 hour shift; I would tell him that I had decided to remove my mom’s respirator and let nature take its course. I had known that as soon as I walked in and saw her, though I didn’t say that while I listened to her doctor explain how she had been on the liver transplant list for three years but hadn’t stopped drinking, and even if a liver came in her system wouldn’t tolerate surgery; it was unlikely she’d wake up from a coma, but she’d stay alive indefinitely with the respirator and intravenous nutrients; she would likely die with an hour of removing the respirator. He had waited until 9:40pm for me to arrive, and said he’d return at 8am and do whichever option I chose.
As soon as I walked in the door, I knew it would be my final night with my mother.
At around 2am my nose was caked with dried snot and the skin under my eyes was puffy and wet with tears. The alarm on my mom’s intravenous pump screamed and pulsated. I verified there was no bubble, turned off the alarm, and glanced at two of the IV bags. I don’t know why I did. I had read and reread the bags probably four or five times already. It was like opening and shutting a refrigerator again and again, expecting to notice a sandwhich that you had missed the last time. I don’t know what I was looking for. The purpose of life? Coincidence versus a sign from God? Oscar, a quality assurance manager from the Tijuana manufacturing plant that made the bags, had signed off on my mom’s nutrients and opioids only three weeks before.
I had trained Oscar and his team to get their United States FDA clearance, and had led a re-design of the San Diego based intravenous pump that dripped into the backs of my mom’s hands. The pump was old, an outdated model that worked fine but struggled with new software coding, but every company that acquired the brand and hospital contracts kept trying to polish that old lamp and sell it as new. The most recent spent more money than I’d ever earn in my life refurbishing the old machine housings to be an off-white color that matched their other hospital products. The had acquired the previous company for around $4 Billion, and blended the products into an international portfolio with brand recognition, which would eventually lead them to going public and being valued around $6 Billion, which made the investment team even wealthier. Before they did that, they reported to shareholders that they’d launch a new infusion pump within a year of the acquisition; it launched, though it was recalled and cost them hundreds of millions of dollars; aggregate sales were up because they had been selling software packages for the outdated pumps, and those packages synced with other hospital equipment and all were offered at a discount to hospital systems, like the one where my mom lay dying.
My mom would have found that hilarious.
If you knew her humor, you’d know that. She had dark humor and a sharp, sarcastic tongue after a few drinks. But no one ever hear her do that again, and it was possible I was the only one who saw that side of her.
I was my mom’s last surviving relative. Her mom was also a single mom who fled an abusive husband when my mom was five. They fled Toronto and stayed at my Auntie Lo’s house until Granny found a job and could take care of my mom by herself. I was born when my mom was 16; Auntie Lo, Granny, and Uncle Bob had all died in the late 80’s and early 90’s; and the last time my mom had seen our Canadian family was when they flew down for those funerals. She always said that people in Louisiana have family trees, but we had a family stick stuck in the mud.
A large corrugated tube was between her lips and reached down her neck and filled her lungs. The tube was connected to a Philips Respironics ventilation pump that monitored oxygen levels pumped into my mom at around four breaths per minute, and it had a new $36,000 attachment that monitored oxygen levels every time she exhaled. The constant inhalation and exhalation was the loudest thing in her room. I glanced at her exhalation oxygen percentage, but don’t recall what it was.
I glanced at the machine and saw that it must have been manufactured within six months from their San Diego manufacturing plant, which made around 30 ventilators a month and sold them for somewhere between $50,000 and $130,000, depending on which software options and whether or not the hospital systems bought the exhalation attachment, which, because it had a patient’s exhaled breath had to be robust enough to be autoclaved and reused. The first one had been manufactured only a year earlier, finally being allowed for sale in the United Staters after tests with thousands of simulated uses and autoclaves. Their manufacturing capacity was around 35 machines a month. I had worked with almost 200 people on their manufacturing floor and in the offices and loading docks surrounding it; in what would be the funniest part of the story to my mom, the trucks that loaded her machine and drove it 3,233 miles from San Diego to Baton Rouge were members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, and that James R. Hoffa Junior was their president, and Uncle Keith had just be re-elected president of Teamsters Local #5, they guys who unloaded that truck.
My mom would have thought that was hilarious.
It was around 2:40 in the morning. My watch was older than I was, an analog Rolex Oyster Perpetual that my great-uncle Bob had bought when he first immigrated to Baton Rouge from Montreal. It was the simplest of Rolexes, but the best he could afford and his favorite; it was the same one worn by Sean Connery as James Bond in 1967’s You Only Live Twice, and Uncle Bob said it was the type of watch James Bond would wear: eloquent, discrete, and reliable. Uncle Bob traveled the world representing Montreal’s Bulk Stevedoring Company’s American headquarters in New Orleans, which was only an hour downriver from Baton Rouge, where he and Auntie Lo had a comfortable house near Sherwood Forest Country Club and enough room to absorb Granny and my mom when they fled Toronto. Because the Rolex was analog, I could glance at the second hand without processing numbers; that allowed to count my mom’s breath and pulse during a quarter-rotation of the watch’s second hand and multiplying by four.
I had sat by Uncle Bob’s side as he died in 1989, just like I was sitting with my mom in 2019. From 17 to 47 the feeling felt the same. I had watched dozens of people die as I fought for their life while wearing that Rolex. He used that watch as a metaphor for life, to keep working it needed to move a bit every day. When he became too week to lift his hand, I took off his watch and he rocked it with his fingertips. When he died, the watch hadn’t moved in almost eight hours. I began wearing it the next day. I wore it when I worked as an Emergency Medical Technician in the rural area around Baton Rouge while I attended LSU in the mid 90’s. I move away in 1997, and my mom had no one else who knew our history.
Uncle Bob died at 64 years old, which seemed old when I wasn’t 47. He had yet to withdraw any of his retirement savings, which American law says you must be 64 or pay penalties. His retirement savings went towards his final year of cancer and dying. He had become a US citizen at 62, before cancer. Granny died a year and a half later, at 63, from throat cancer secondary to smoking. Auntie Lo at 66 two years later, still a Canadian citizen and living off the fumes Uncle Bob’s savings during her final months. My mom inherited their retirement account and planned her early retirement by building a dream home in Saint Francisville, two hours upriver of Baton Rouge. She was 65 years old, and had about five hours left to live.
Her pulse was so faint I had to strain to see her neck artery bulge every few seconds. I held her tiny bruised hand gently, not feeling for a pulse because I didn’t want to dislodge a needle or obstruct the weak flow of blood. I didn’t have to count; all of her vital signs were on display behind her, but it’s what my body does when my mind is fatigued, an old habit from my days on the ambulance team.
My eyes were puffy and bloodshot. I hadn’t shaved in three days. My spine was twisted from discs dehydrating and shrinking daily, mostly from standing but also from the all day of sitting in flights to reach Baton Rouge when I learned my mom was unconscious an unlikely to live. Sitting has around 120% more force on discs than standing, so it pushes out more fluid; without being horizontal and relaxing with sleep, the damage accumulated and my nerves were being pinched by my twisting spine, and the pain was blinding. My body acted automatically, and my mind locked on to things like pulse rates and my watch to not think about how badly I wanted to lie down and sleep for a week.
I looked up and practically shouted, too loudly for a hospital probably fine late at night with only one nurse on duty, one who had stopped checking on noises she heard from my mom’s room after catching me bawling a few times before.
“Why, Wendy?” I howled.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I said, looking at her face and the corrugated tube filling her mouth and making her cheeks bulge, a tube I had absent-mindedly signed off on a year and a half before without thinking about it since.
“Why, Wendy,” I asked softly. “Why?”
I cried for a while and only stopped to wipe my tears off her face a few times.
I called my mother Wendy. She was born Wendy Anne Rothdram to my Granny, Joyce Hicks Rothdram. Granny fled an abusive husband in Candada when Wendy was five years old and took a minimum wage job at CoPolymer so she could raise Wendy in a small house near the airport and Glen Oaks subdivision schools. Eleven years later, Wendy was a 16 year old girl and had me. She had a series of nervous breakdowns, and abandoned me at a daycare center down the street from Glen Oaks High School and fled Loiusiana for California. She returned on her own, but by then I had been placed in the home of a guardian, James “Ed” White, the custodian of Glen Oaks and father of Wendy’s best friend in school, Linda White, and raised in their household. Wendy fought for custody and visited me once a month for seven years while she looked for work that could support me, but she was ashamed of what she had done and of being a teenage mother, and she taught me to call her by her first name so people would assume I was her baby brother. Old habits are hard to break, and I still called my mother Wendy.
“Why, Wendy? Why?” I said again, getting louder as emotions rose like a tsunami after a lull. I collapsed again. My asthma kicked in, and I collapsed and wheezed and, if anyone had been looking, my nose probably seemed a slight blue color. Two minutes later, the length of round of wrestling that my body has ticked off with everything I’ve done since I wrestled in high school, I reached up and clasped her guardrails with both hands, took a deep breath, and exhaled as I pulled myself to my knees. I wheezed a few times from the effort, then heaved again and stood up and steadied myself and took a few more breaths.
I glanced at the monitors and then through her room door and into the dark hallway, took a few more breaths, and turned my gaze back to Wendy. I rested my two big hands over her one tiny hand, completely covering her needles. Uncle Bob’s watch was on my left wrist. Tears dropped onto the back of my hands. I gently touched her fingers and forearm, avoiding the needles.
“I’m here, Wendy,” I said softly.
“I won’t leave you,” I said.
I glanced at my watch. It was around 3:20am. Her doctor would return at 8am for his day shift. I had told him I’d have an answer by then. I knew what the answer would be, but I didn’t have the strength to say it then.
“I’m… so… sorry…” I mumbled to her.
I realized my right hand had left hers and was tracing the biggest scar on the back of my head, an eight inch long scar a finger-width wide and curved like a backwards letter C. My right finger was following the C and counting the sixteen bumps from where stitches healed when I was a five year old kid. I only do that when I’m so tired that my body acts on its own; it’s a level of habit deeper than counting breaths or ticking off two minutes.
I didn’t stop. I slowly traced the back of my scalp and felt the other, smaller scars. I paused on the dent and let my two forefingers rest in it. We never learned how that happened; it would have had to been when I was an infant, with a soft skull that dented instead of fractured. Anyone who may have remembered what happened died long ago. Wendy had always kept my thick hair long, so that it covered my scars. She made a joke of it, saying my mullet was fashionable. By coincidence, my dad’s mother was a hair dresser, and had also cut my hair to keep the scars hidden. But they couldn’t do anything to hide my scars now that I was as old as they had been, and my hair was thinning and had recently started going bald on top.
“Uncle Bob was right,” I said. I kept my hand atop my head and bowed so she could see the bald spot.
“Hair today, gone tomorrow!” I said as cheerfully as I could.
I knew she couldn’t see it, but I didn’t know if part of her could still hear me or at least discern emotion from tones. I tried to make jokes as I described my bald spot to her. I told her that the bald spot was about the size of her fist – not mine, I said with as much humor as I could muster – and it stops just before the big backwards C scar; combined, they looked like a semicolon.
I took a slow, deep breath and exhaled just as slowly.
“I love you, Wendy,” I said. I hoped she felt me – with active effort I willed myself to hope she heard or felt me, or whatever words mean that somehow what I said or did mattered.
“I’m here,” I said, “and I won’t leave you.”
It was 3:24am.
My dad was Edward Grady Partin Junior, the 17 year old drug dealer at her high school, Glen Oaks, a school of only 300 or so students near the Baton Rouge airport. Wendy lost her virginity to him, and two weeks later she realized she was pregnant. She didn’t have the money for an abortion, and my dad wouldn’t pay for one, saying he wanted to show he could be a better father than his had been. She accepted his marriage proposal and they dropped out of Glen Oaks and eloped two hours away to Woodville, Mississippi, where my dad still had family and state laws didn’t require parental permission for a 16 year old pregnant girl to get married.
They returned to Baton Rouge as Mr. and Mrs. Edward Partin and moved into one of my grandfather’s houses near the thick woods and murky swamps of the Achafalaya Basin. My grandfather was Edward Grady Partin Senior, and my parents didn’t have to change the name in Baton Rouge’s phone book. My dad began growing marijuana in dry mounds hidden deep in the basin, and hunting deer with his small arsenal of long-range hunting rifles. He had learned to shoot from his father, and they grew up hunting deer in Louisiana and elk in the Rocky Mountains and forests around Flagstaff, Arizona, where my grandfather had a cabin. By the time I joined the army, I was an expert marksman and most army toys were child’s play.
My grandfather was the famous Baton Rouge Teamster leader showcased nationally after his testimony convicted International Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa in 1964, and then again after he refused to accept a $1 Million bribe by the New Orleans mafia boss Carlos Marcello to change his testimony and free Hoffa. Pundits in media scoffed at the thought of the mafia bribing someone instead of killing them, but they didn’t realize – or read – that the only way Hoffa could be freed was if my grandfather changed his testimony or admitted that the Bobby Kennedy and the FBI used illegal electronic surveillance in their decade-long pursuit. If Edward Partin died, Hoffa would be stuck in prison for eleven years.
Everyone in Baton Rouge called my grandfather Big Daddy. The pundits also didn’t know that Marcello owed Hoffa $21 Million, and that all of America’s family’s owed Hoffa around $126 Million combined. Nor did anyone realize that Big Daddy practically ran the mafia.
Governor McKeithen ranted to the newspaper: “I won’t let Edward Partin and his gangster Teamsters run this state!”
and: “These [Baton Rouge Teamster] hoodlums make Marcello and the Mafia look pretty good.”
And he told Walter Sheridan, the director of the FBI’s 500-agent Get Hoffa task force:
“Walter, get him out of my state. Now listen to what I am saying to you. Just get him out of my state. I’ll help you do it and I’ll give him immunity. You write it up and I’ll sign it. Just please get him across that state line.”
To silence McKeithen, Walter arranged for cabins in Flagstaff and near Boulder, and my dad and Wendy moved into one of his Baton Rouge houses. It was one of the houses where Big Daddy kept cash and military C4 plastic explosives in the walls, and some of those houses caught fire or blew up when Wendy was a new mother trying to make sense of what was happening. The plastic explosives were already national news; according to Life magazine and known by everyone in Baton Rouge and New Orleans, Hoffa had plotted to kill Bobby Kennedy by asking Big Daddy to obtain them from Marcello so they could blow up Bobby Kennedy’s home with his children inside. If they failed that, Hoffa said, they could put a scope on a sniper rifle and shoot Bobby Kennedy as he rode around in a convertible, like he and his big brother liked to do.
That plot was the basis of Life articles and the 1983 film Blood Feud, where Brian Dennehy portrayed Big Daddy. Even then, he was still portrayed as an all-American hero willing to risk his live and the lives of his family to get Hoffa on behalf of the government.
From his Pennsylvania federal penitentiary, Hoffa had sent word to the families via their shared attorney, Frank Ragano, and another Frank named Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran, a local Teamster president and hitman for both the mafia and for Hoffa, emphasizing “nothing should happen to Partin,” but that if “anyone” could get him to change his testimony using any method imaginable, Hoffa would forgive all the debt of America’s mafia. Even after President Nixon pardoned Hoffa in 1971, the conditional pardon prevented Hoffa from returning to the Teamsters for eight years, so Hoffa kept up the pressure on my grandfather by pressuring the mafia and threatening to expose what he knew about President Kennedy’s assassination. And he told them they’d be cut off from his $1.1 Billion Teamster Pension fund, paid for with monthly cash union dues from 2.7 million Teamsters, untraceable and still in Hoffa’s control, and used to fund mafia casinos and hotels and Hollywood films, all of which then used Teamster labor for transportation and other jobs. By the time I was born, the book The Teamsters estimated that the pension fund had more than a Billion dollars loaned out, including $121 Million to the mafia and $21 Million to the Marcello family alone.
Marcello’s men knew how to read the phone book, or at least knew people who could read, and there were only six Partins in Baton Rouge and only one Edward Partin, and that’s where a teenage Wendy lived with a newborn me, from a time before I had that dent in my head or the big backwards letter C scar. My childhood memories are more violent than what most people experience in war. It’s full of explosions, men grabbing me, Wendy crying and screaming for help, and frequent trips to hospitals.
Another alarm sounded and I realized I was lost in memories and my right hand feeling my scar again.
I was delirious and acting on autopilot, so I shook my head and took deep breaths and stretched my arms up high to get blood flowing. I turned off the alarm and returned to Wendy’s side and covered her hand and forearm again with my hands. I gulped down the rest of my coffee, the fourth or fifth I had had that night. The all-night nurse told me she made it “night shift strength,” but I couldn’t feel it but I finished the luke warm black liquid, anyway. I tossed away the cup and rubbed my hands together briskly to get them warm, then put them atop Wendy’s again.
“I’m here, Wendy,” I said.
I apologized for not visiting more often. I took a few breaths and talked to her about the work I did, and the coincidences about the machines in the room and Oscar. I told her about his family, two kids and a wife, all of whom played music instruments and moved to Tijuana from mainland Mexico to follow their dad, an engineer, to his new job just across the border from San Diego. I can see downtown San Diego from his office, I told her.
That wasn’t true. But, his office was only 16 miles from my condo in downtown San Diego, and I wanted her to get the impression of how close to Tijuana I lived. The time zone change always made it hard to catch her before she was too slurred to understand.
I looked at Uncle Bob’s watch; it was around 4am, but I don’t recall the exact minute. I had four more hours.
I sipped coffee, took a deep breath, and began telling Wendy about The Irishman, an upcoming film by Martin Scorcese about Jimmy Hoffa and the mafia that would have my grandfather portrayed.
Scorcese recruited all of Hollywood’s biggest name actors, Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, and about a dozen others known for portraying tough mafia men. When Wendy and I had chatted on the phone only two weeks before, she commented how all she could see where advertisements about The Irishman, and she laughed and said she was suffering PTSD from seeing the name Edward Partin in the news again. She reminded me of her favorite pun, that she was born WAR and that marrying Ed Partin WARPed her. When she heard about the film, she wouldn’t talk to me about it over the phone.
I told Wendy Frank The Irishman Sheeran died just before his 2004 memoir was published. He was a 6’4″ WWII infantry veteran with 411 days in combat and around 26 hits for the mafia. His confessional book was called “I heard you paint houses: Frank The Irishman Sheeran and closing the case on Jimmy Hoffa.” To paint houses was mafia lingo for painting a wall red with splattered blood, and Frank claims to have killed Hoffa in 1975. The book was co-written, and it took almost a decade of interviews to coax out of Frank.
Scorcese scooped up the rights and raised $257 Million to recruit all the big-name Hollywood actors and make his opus about Hoffa and the mafia. To focus on Frank, most parts of his memoir about Big Daddy would be removed from the story, but they needed someone big and brutal to portray him. Scorcese tapped Craig Vincent, a veteran of other gangster films including working with Scorcese and DeNiro in 1995’s Casio. To match Craig’s dark complexion and northeast Italian accent, Big Daddy became Big Eddie Partin.
To research his role, Craig watched Blood Feud and the few news interviews of Big Daddy published on Youtube, then he called my uncle, Keith Partin, who was running the Baton Rouge Teamsters just like his uncle, Doug Partin, had after Big Daddy went to prison. Craig was looking for personality traits that he could incorporate into his role and help audiences understand how one person could be so trustworthy that he could spend two years immersed in the Teamsters and mafia without raising suspicion, and be so feared that he could spend the rest of his life free from retribution. Keith couldn’t tell him more than restating the obvious and quoting Jimmy Hoffa’s second autobiograhy, published a few months before vanished, where Hoffa answered the same question by saying: “Edward Grady Partin was a big, rugged guy who could charm a snake off a rock.” That didn’t help Craig, so he called my Aunt Janice, who had long since changed her name to match Uncle Tim, but still ran the Partin geneology group on an online forum. She told him the same thing. Craig persisted, and we ended up speaking.
I told Craig more facts than characterization. I led with the obvious: Big Daddy was involved in killing President Kennedy. He had known Lee Harvey Oswald, a New Orleans native, from when Oswald trained in the civil air service near the Baton Rouge airport under the alias Harvey Lee, and Jack Ruby from working with Hoffa. And of course I told Craig Big Daddy’s final words, which is a funny joke Wendy and I had laughed about over the years.
“No one will ever know my part in history,” he had said.
It sounds funny if you pronounce our last name out loud: Part in history. It was one of Wendy and my favorite inside jokes together, unless you count my big feet.
I smiled and hoped she felt it. I held up my left hand, the one with Uncle Bob’s watch, and exaggerated the gap between my two middle fingers, to show her another joke between us. The break was from a high school wrestling match that healed askew, making my fingers bulge apart and look like Dr. Spock’s split-finger salute when he wishes someone to live long and prosper in Star Trek. I lied to her again, and said I told Craig about Hillary Clinton breaking my finger just before Big Daddy’s funeral, and how that could be a movie by itself.
No one knew the name Hillary Rodham Clinton back then, but when Arkansas governor Bill Clinton became president in 1992 we heard Hillary’s middle name and it sounded so much like Wendy’s maiden name that we laughed at the coincidence and joked about my finger and the coincidence of names, because thee Hillary Clinton who broke my finger was the three time undefeated Louisiana state wrestling champion at 145 pounds, and he had broken my left ring finger just below the middle knuckle during our finals match the Baton Rouge city tournament on March 3rd, 1990, two weeks before Big Daddy’s funeral. Though I was no longer living with her then, Wendy paid the dedcutible. I showed up at the funeral with those two fingers buddy-taped, and told the FBI Big Daddy’s final words, and when I returned from war that became one of our favorite ways to laugh together.
I forced a laugh so she’d hear it.
I pointed my left hand at the ventilator and told her how I had solved a manufacturing mistake in early prototypes by pointing to the crossed wires; the design wasn’t improved yet to eliminate the potential of assembling them incorrectly, and instead of delaying launch to redesign that feature, they went to market with a photo of my hand pointing to the correct wiring.
I smiled a genuine smile, because I realized something funny.
I told Wendy: “I had a hand in making your ventilator.”
My smile vanished faster than Jimmy Hoffa in a Detroit parking lot, and I collapsed into a pile on the floor again and bawled and realized that I’d never get to tell her that joke.
I reached up and grasped the guardrail of her gerny with both hands and pulled myself up again. I took a few breaths and turned off the false alarm again.
I looked at Uncle Bob’s watch. I had almost two and a half hours left. I took a few breaths, and concentrated.
Her doctor arrived at 8:29am, and the ventilator I had a hand in manufacturing was removed before 9am. I held her hand as she took her final gasps for breath. The doctor marked her time of death at 9:06am. I held on until I felt her go; Uncle Bob’s watch said it was at 9:12.
For the next week, I stayed in town and prepared her funeral and set up a way to sell her retirement home in Saint Francisville and to donate her possessions to the West Feliciano Parish Humane Society, where she had volunteered by fostering stray dogs for almost 15 years.
I found a photo of her that was taken some time half way between when she was in high school and when she died, a photo that would speak to people who knew her at both bookends of her life, and published it with her obituary in the Baton Rouge Advocate. It said:
Wendy Partin Obituary
Wendy Rothdram Partin, a resident of St. Francisville, LA, passed way on Friday, April 5th, 2019 at the age of 63. Wendy attended Glenoaks High School in Baton Rouge, LA, and retired from Exxon Mobil. She is survived by her son, Jason Ian Partin, of San Diego, CA. She was preceded in death by her mother, Joyce Rothdram, and her aunt and uncle, Lois and Robert Desico, all of Baton Rouge, LA. During her retirement, she became a master gardener and enjoyed helping people with their lawns. She enjoyed cooking, and took food to anyone she knew who was ill or grieving. Wendy loved animals, and worked with local shelters to foster dogs until they found permanent homes. She passed away unexpectedly from liver failure. In lieu of gifts or a service, please spend time sharing what you love with your neighbor, listen to what they love, and help each other.
Published by The Advocate from Apr. 8 to Apr. 9, 2019.
To plant trees in memory, please visit ________
The photo I chose of her was just before she began drinking daily, and she still looked young and healthy and vibrant in it; that’s how I wanted the world to remember her.
Mike called and we met to plan Wendy’s ceremony. He had always been a good guy, the type of person you’d want as a father. He had been valedictorian of LSU’s engineering class during the Vietnam conflict, and was 71 by the time we stood together at Wendy’s house. Three years before, he had had a tripple bypass surgery, and that was the last time I had called him or we had spoken. He ended the call abruptly, almost angrily, telling me to call Wendy more often. He was right, but I had always been stubborn and had never listened to Mike.
We stood in Wendy’s living room and caught up on what we had been doing over the past fifteen or twenty years. He said something that triggered my mind: he had known about Wendy’s liver failing when we spoke two years ago.
I held up my right hand and asked him to pause.
“You knew?” I asked, making sure I hadn’t misunderstood.
His eyes instantly showed regret. I paced furiously. I took deep breaths. My jaw clenched so hard my front right tooth ground off another chip; it was already missing a corner from when Hillary Clinton pinned me after breaking my finger and I fought the pin for almost a full minute. I always clenched my teeth when straining extra hard, and when I felt the chip break I knew I was loosing control. I realized I was about to vent, and that chipping my tooth meant I was no longer in control.
I swallowed the tooth chip and moved away from Mike and circled Wendy’s spacious kitchen, fists clenched and jaw locked, my eyes searching for a target. My gaze settled on Wendy’s new stainless steel refrigerator, a French door style with two long doors side by side. It was as big as the Chicago Bears football player Mike used to watch with me, William “The Refrigerator” Perry.
I couldn’t delay any longer. I planted my right foot behind my left, my 14 Wide foot spreading out and my big toe grasping Mother Earth like the Titan Antaeus did to gain his strength when wrestling Hercules. My body rotated and my right fist settled by my hip bone. My left fist was by my chest, closer to The Refrigerator and poised to defend my face or body. I took a deep breath, and my weight shifted to my right foot and my body began to rotate and my right fist began to accelerate forward/
My right hand is scarred, too, but less visible than my left. The first two have been broken a few times, and the bones healed to make those two fist knuckles extra thick. I had done that intentionally when I was training to wrestle Hillary Clinton, following the advice of another wrestler who was also the state martial arts champion in a Ku-Kempo style that emphasized intense fist punches. When I wrestled for the Fort Bragg team in 1983, Royce Gracie used Jui-Jitsu for the first time and dominated the mixed-martial arts world, changing the hand-to-hand fighting style taught to special operations soldiers to be more like Ju-Jitsu.
I rarely punched, and had out of anger only once, and that was against my father and that was Wendy’s favorite story about when I returned from war; the only other person who got away with punching my dad had been Big Daddy.
Punching breaks your hand. In many of the Life articles, they highlight his time as a young heavyweight boxer and quote him as saying he quit when he broke his fingers punching. That’s partially true. Most experienced street fighters know that you break your fingers easily on a skull or even a jaw, which is why a defense is to turn towards the punch and lean in so their fist hits bone. Big Daddy broke his fist in his early days of union work, and since then, he told Life, he only used his fists if there were no other option; that’s why he always carried a knife and a gun and was always surrounded by big men who were armed and fiercely loyal to him. If there were no other choice, Big Daddy’s punch could stop a charging bull, when a broken hand would be better than the alternative.
If I were to answer Craig Vincent’s question with hindsight, it wasn’t just Big Daddy’s smile and charm that led him in be safe inside Hoffa’s savage kingdom and rooms full of mafia hitmen, it was that he was always the toughest, most well armed person in the room. That’s why he smiled all the time. Even at Hoffa’s trial, when Hoffa and the room full of other men Hoffa thought were loyal and they signaled a death-mark, Big Daddy told reporters, “I just smiled.” It wasn’t a trait, it was a complex story behind the scenes and that would take an entire movie by itself, I told Craig.
I was about to punch that refrigerator with everything I had inside of me pent up from a lifetime of repressing Partin genes; then, something happened for the first time in my life: my jaw unclenched and my mouth opened wider than it ever had as a scream of pain and anger and desire for Wendy to be back so I could hug her and forgive everything erupted from the depths of my mind and body.
The rafters of heaven rattled and my right fist flew faster and faster. My hips rotated and so did my shoulders, aided by my emptying lungs and collapsed diaphragm and giving my punch more weight than it had ever had. My two right punching knuckles aligned with the two phalange bones behind them, and those aligned with the wrist bones to make a solid path for force to flow that would connect the point of impact all the way to my big right foot grasping Mother Earth and channeling my anger at Father Time into whatever I hit. My eyes closed, which also had never happened in training or combat.
My two knuckles impacted the refrigerator and the metal caved in and glass crashed inside. My eyes opened as my right hand pulled back to shoulder level, and I saw a two inch deep crater.
I had punched correctly, at throat level, in-line with every part of my body and the most effective punch I could have mustered. Had there been a photo when my knuckles were two inches into the refrigerator, you could have drawn a perfect line between my knuckles and the base of my big toe. The punch wouldn’t have stopped a charging bull, but that refrigerator didn’t have a chance.
Instinctively, my hand opened and thrust forward with a follow-through; the palm near my wrist bones hit refrigerator just above the head-sized dent, as if going for a neck or nose shot and still in line with my arm, shoulder, spine, leg, and foot planted behind me. My right palm embedded about a half inch into the metal, and glass rattled and crashed inside. My hand retracted and the door popped open a few inches and things began falling to the floor but I didn’t look down yet; my left elbow was following through and my head and torso were rotating away to put more energy into the hit on the left side door. The impact made an elongated dent about an inch deep.
I stood there, fists by my side and hips lowered, ready for another round. I became aware that the refrigerator was bleeding milk and cranberry juice and was no longer a threat to anyone. I was breathing again, but panting.
I felt better.
My breath stabilized and I looked at my right hand. The skin above both knuckles had smushed and blood was filling the wrinkles on my aging, Partin-sized hand. I looked down at the spilled milk oozing across the floor and, as if Uncle Bob were still a part in me, I chuckled inside my head and told myself there was no use crying over spilled milk.
I stood up straight and relaxed and turned and looked at Mike. I wanted to make sure he was okay; it must have been terrifying to see me scream like that.
He was staring at his feet and his hands were in his pockets, something he only did when thinking deeply about something. He was sobbing. He looked older than he was. I had to think about it; he was probably 75 by then. I was 47, the age he was when he cheated on my mom and left her and she began drinking. We had never talked about that. There was no need. My mom had bouts of depression, and Mike had been kind and loving with her for 17 years. People grow. We had never talked about my military experience, either; the closest we came was when he watched Forest Gump and told me he wasn’t drafted because he was in college, and that seeing Forest Gump made him imagine what war must have been like. He wasn’t too far mistaken.
“In all you’ve done,” he said, still staring at his feet.
“In all the places you’ve been,” he said.
“Have you learned…” he looked up and waved his hand across the kitchen and into the living room, which Wendy had decorated with fine wooden furnishings and fine art, preparing for her ideal retirement.
“…what’s the point of all this? Of life?”
For the first time since I learned my mother was dying, I chuckled a genuine chuckle. I asked: “Did you ever read The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?”
My chuckle must have been contagious, because he looked at me and smiled the smile I always remembered. Mike was a nice guy, and always had been. I’m sure he made a good father to his new family.
“Well,” I said. “It turns out that people from the Galaxy got together and made a program to give them the answer to life, the universe, and everything. It took 10 Million years. In that time, they debated if God existed and fought wars and all the things people do. When the computer finished, it said: ’42.'”
I paused and waited.
“42?” Mike asked.
His head was cocked sideways; he seemed to have a reprieve from grieving. I felt relaxed for the first time, and I leaned into whatever I was saying; I was an observer, watching myself speak and Mike listen.
“Yep. 42. That’s the answer. The problem is, no one knew the question. So they built another computer to spend 4 Billion years finding the question. That was how Earth came to be. We’re that computer, and we spend our time debating God and fighting wars and collecting stuff.”
I waved my hand towards Wendy’s living room. I think he and I were talking about the same things.
“42!” Mike said with a smile. I smiled back and said: “Yep! 42.”
“Maybe that’s all there is to it,” I said.
“Did you see that Elon Musk just launched his convertible into space?” I asked. He had. “Well, Elon was such a fan of 42 that he plastered Hitchiker’s Guide stickers all over his car and launched it into space because he could.”
“Maybe that’s all there is to it,” I repeated.
We stood smiling at each other for a few moments. I had missed Mike, and I think I needed that moment to allow a few good memories to shine through the dark curtains of my Partin family.
I stepped over the mixed liquids on the floor and opened the left side of Wendy’s refrigerator. My elbow had left a respectable dent, but not enough to warp the frame like my punch had. I fumbled around and found a bag of frozen peas and wrapped it around my right knuckles. We left the house and went for a walk, and chatted about where to spread Wendy’s ashes, life, the universe, and everything.
I asked Mike: “Did you see that President Bush’s doctor had a letter published in The New York Times about cardiac stents?”
He hadn’t.
“Bush had the same as you, but the doctor said his weren’t necessary.”
Something like 2 million a year aren’t,” I said. “It’s just like spine implants. We’re trying to solve that,” I said.
“You know,” I asked for the first time, “you’re the reason I became an engineer?”
Mike said, “I’m glad that doctor friend of yours talked me out of spine surgery. What was his name again?”
“John Kirkpatrick,” I said. “He’s starting a medical school in Florida. Something like 80% of all people would get better if they waited two years, like you did.”
“Yeah,” Mike said, “I was lucky I wasn’t working back then.”
His back had been hurting after he quit Exxon and focused on becoming a home builder, MR. Homes, a pun on his name, Mike Richard. Wendy had suggested that. There was a real estate crash soon after and he had no work, but of course Mike would look back at that as being lucky. He had always been a nice guy. Wendy never said a negative thing about him, and neither could I.
Mike seemed happy with his new family. I asked him what was different for him, as in how had he grown, and he beamed with joy and pulled out his phone and showed me a photo of an 26 year old young lady in a wedding dress and dancing with Mike. The photo of him in a suit looked less than two years old.
He said: “My love for that little girl.”
His eyes radiated and he said: “I look forward to her holding her own child one day and me being there for her. It’s that love for a child that makes life worth living, Jason.”
I couldn’t breathe for a few seconds and he mistook my pause for wanting to look at the photo longer. I didn’t correct him. He had suffered enough. Mike was a good guy. He left and I threw away the peas and cleaned up Wendy’s refrigerator. She had made jambalaya only four days before; I reheated the leftovers and put some calories in my body.
Two days later, we carried Wendy’s ashes and the ashes of one of her rescue dogs to the banks of Thompson Creek, one of the few waterways in Louisiana that moved quickly enough to be clear, not murky like most of the bayous in the flat terrain of southern Louisiana. It’s where Wendy had wanted to retire when Uncle Bob lay dying, and it’s where we would spread her ashes.
Four people who knew her later in life joined us. All knew of me by name, and one had used Wendy’s phone to call me when she went into a coma. They watched me limp down a small and rare hill to the creek with Mike by my side.
Mike stood over me and I knelt in the mud and poured the ashes of Wendy’s cherished Angel, a tiny fluffy dog she had first fostered twelve years before but had not found a home that would love Angel as much as she did, so she kept searching until Angel passed two years earlier. Angel’s box was inscribed, “Until we meet at the Rainbow Bridge,” a fabled place where pets and owners meet in the afterlife. Angel’s ashes sank to the bottom of the slow moving stream, and I poured Wendy’s ashes in after.
Slowly, piece by piece, ashes began to drift away. A stream of ashes formed and picked up speed as they drifted to the center of Thompson Creek. I pulled a knee out of the bank and planted its big foot and put both hands on my wet and muddy knee and pushed. I was so unstable that Mike, though in his 70’s by then, reached down and helped me up. I wiped away tears and Mike and I watched Wendy and Angel drift away. He was crying, too.
Thompson Creek empties into the Mississippi River, and it would carry Wendy and Angel past Baton Rouge and New Orleans and into the Gulf of Mexico, where they’d mingle with all waters on Earth and travel the world together in search of therr Rainbow Bridge.
At that thought I collapsed back into the mud and bawled so loudly and strongly that snot from my nose covered my forearms and dripped into the muddy bank by where Wendy and Angel’s ashes were only barely visible. I stared up at the light blue morning sky and words seeped from my lips:
“How? I don’t know how…”
I looked down at my knees in the mud and my hands held upright. My right hand was swollen, and the cracks were only barely healed. They were out of sight, because my hands were palm up. Tears fell on my palms, and I glanced around at the four people staring at me silently, and more words escaped:
“Just be happy…”
There will be nothing religious in what I write. I learned that from Uncle Bob taught; on people’s death beds, all of their lives unfold and wonder creeps in, and the nicest thing we can do is realize everyone will be there and we have not, so never add your opinion to their minds. In the thousands of deaths I’ve seen since, Uncle Bob was right. Opinions are like assholes, he had said; util he knew for certain, he said he’d keep his asshole out of sight. Uncle Bob always sid he wanted to live without regrets, and that’s how he wanted to die. He passed peacefully, or at least that’s how it seemed to me. People use religion to express extreme circumstances, like Jimmy Hoffa writing my grandfather was the killing shot that nailed him to a cross. I’ve never wanted to add doubt to anyone by offering my thoughts or opinions about things I don’t understand. But this is what happened: I was watching myself have a conversation with God, whatever that means to you, and God wanted me to be happy.
Since I was a teenager, I had wondered how to honor my mother and father, people who were more flawed than anyone I could imagine back then. The bible is mute on how. It has examples of everything else and some are self explanatory, like thou shall not kill, not bear false witness, not lie, not commit adultery; but, there’s nothing on how to honor your mother and father. I hadn’t thought about it in decades, yet on the banks of Thompson Creek I was asking anyone who could listen what I could do to honor my mother, and that’s what happened.
I asked, I answered, and I saw it all happening from a place I don’t understand.
After I picked myself up out of the mud – Mike knew me and others sensed I had to do it myself – we all spoke about Wendy, then walked back to her house and at leftovers from her freezer I had thawed earlier that morning. I had cleaned up the floor and bent the door back enough to stay shut. No one asked about the dents, but we all talked about how good Wendy’s shrimp and corn soup always was, and how well gumbo freezes and how everyone liked to make extra so they could freeze some, too. A neighbor who didn’t know Wendy well had left a bottle of wine with a note for Wendy to get well soon, but I wasn’t ready to joke about that yet; besides, it was a red wine, and anyone who knew Wendy well would have known she preferred white Chardonnay.
We arranged to sell Wendy’s house, and I invited the Saint Francisville human society to sell all the furniture and artwork inside and donate it to the center where she had adopted Angel and probably twenty other dogs over the years, though those dogs were long since adopted by families who could love them as they should be loved.
All I wanted was one small suitcase of family treasures. I dumped out the clothes I had brought from San Diego and put a few treasures in their place. I thought about taking some of the artwork, but all were too big for carry-on. Each one was worth more than the $36,000 respirator attachment I knew so well, which was coincidentally the same amount I received for college after seven years of military service. Our aunt was Edith Lang, the widow of one of Canada’s wealthiest men and owner of Canada’s largest private art collection; most paintings had been donated to museums, but Aunt Edith had shipped a dozen or so with themes of country houses similar to Wendy’s, and of dogs hunting and playing on them. Local people at the auction would probably pay $100 or so for each of them. Maybe they’d end up on one of those television shows where people learn they picked up valuable art at a yard sale, never knowing the history of the original owners.
I picked up a photo of Granny’s father, my Grandpa, Harold Hicks. He died before I was born, but was a famous hockey player in Canada for a while and retired as manager of the eastern Canadian railway system. All news articles about him spoke of how much of a talented athlete and wonderful person he had been. I shook my head and sighed, wishing Wendy was here so I could joke about nature versus nurture and wonder which grandfather I felt the most inside of me. If I asked the refrigerator, I know what it would have said. I put the photo back, because Grandpa Hicks was just a story to both Wendy and me.
I put Auntie Lo’s cast iron gumbo pot in my suitcase, and filled it with a few of Uncle Bob’s gold-plated cocktail glasses, the ones for highballs he had bought the same weekend he bought the watch I was wearing. I hadn’t known Wendy had saved them; had I known, I would have made a highball with her and raised a toast to him and said we should all live and die without regret.
I put in a photo of me from just after the first Gulf war, when we were still in worn desert fatigues stained with months of blood and melted asphalt, and took off our kevlar helmets for the first time and wore the maroon beret of the 82nd Airborne. I was smiling in the photo, and Wendy always liked it and had kept it in her office, which was full of medical bills from the past three years of visits to intensive care. I left the photo of me with my ex-wife, Dana, visiting Wendy almost 25 years earlier; I had a copy at home, Dana and her daughter would be waiting for me when I arrived back home in San Diego; I’d just tell Dana that Wendy kept the photo displayed, even after our divorce.
I picked up Granny’s retirement watch from CoPolymer, one of the many chemical plants north of Baton Rouge’s airport, where she had retired and they gave her the watch only two years before she died. It was tiny compared to my big hands; I thought it would barely fit around the wrist of an eight year old girl. I turned it over and read the inscription: “To J. Rothdram for 25 years of service. CoPolymer.” The battery was dead, but I knew Wendy would have extras in her office so I rummaged until I found one and replaced the battery. The second hand began moving. I glanced at Uncle Bob’s watch and set the time on Granny’s.
Mike arrived and picked me up and drove me to the Baton Rouge airport, and I caught the first plane home.
My mind swirled with memories the entire flight, and my eyes were so puffy and red that people avoided typical small talk and kindly left me alone. I arrived into San Diego late because of the long flights, but I had two extra hours of daylight because of the time change. I took a Lyft from the San Diego airport to my condo two miles away and was greeted by Dana and her eight year old daughter, who opened her arms and pulled me into a hug and said:
“I’m sorry your mommy died, Uncle J.”
She handed me a gold trinket she had bought for me the day before; I chuckled because it was a Texas Longhorn, the mascot of a rival team from I had when I wrestled for the LSU Tigers. For an eight year old girl from San Diego, she probably grouped all things southern into one image in her mind. I said thank you, and hugged her again and unsuccessfully tried to not cry.
I realized what Mike had meant, though perhaps only as well as he understood combat, and that was good enough for me.
I pulled away and held the little girl’s shoulders gently. I smiled. I told her I had something for her, too. I reached into the outer pocket of my carry on bag and removed the small nylon pouch and pulled out Granny’s watch and handed it to her.
She beamed. She had never seen an analog watch before. I showed her the inscription, and told her that the J stood for Joyce, but that her friends called her Jo or Joy.
She liked Joy and tried to put Joy’s watch on her wrist. I had to help. It fit perfectly.
“Uncle J?” she said.
“What’s up, Sweetie?” I asked.
“Joy’s watch is wrong,” she said.
It was still on Baton Rouge time. I told her that and helped her take it off and showed her how to adjust the time. It was 2:20 in the afternoon San Diego time, but I had set Granny’s watch at Wendy’s. At that realization, my mind jumped back to all the things I saw on Wendy’s walls and in her office when I was deciding what to take home, about Big Daddy and my dad and all the books and movies that got my family wrong, and how I wanted to yell at Wendy and Granny and Auntie Lo and Uncle Bob and tell them to take better care of themselves so they’d be around to enjoy life after retirement.
I felt an impulse to tell the little girl some of my family’s history and hope she’d learn from it. But it was a long story, and not fun to tell. I put the watch back on her tiny wrist. It was still 2:20, but the second hand was almost around and the minute hand was close to the one.
I asked her if she knew what time it was. She beamed and said, “Time to play!
She was right.
I stood up and reached down and her tiny hand vanished inside of my Partin-sized one. My knuckles were swollen, but it wasn’t noticeable because I always had knobby knuckles, and the cracks had healed so there was no blood showing. I led us outside, and we played until the sun set on San Diego time.
The Irishman was released to theaters a few months later, and box office sales tripled the $257 Million investment in Marton Scorcese’s epic about Jimmy Hoffa and the mafia. Covid-19 pandemic hit a few months later and shuttered theaters worldwide, but Netflix streamed The Irishman and it set global viewing records. There were just under 8 Billion people on Earth back then, and approximately a Billion of them watched Craig Vincent’s version of Big Eddie and his small part in history.
Around the time Netflix began streaming The Irishman, President Donald Trump signed an order to mass-produce respiratory devices in case Covid hospitalizations kept growing and exceeded the current supply; one million Philips Respironics ventilators were ordered, and they copied the manufacturing instructions and sent them to automobile manufacturing plants. I don’t know how much taxpayers paid for each one, or if they bought the extra software options, but I know that the design hadn’t been changed and they were using the same manufacturing instructions I had mentioned to my mother as she lay dying.
When I realized that, I looked towards the sky and forced a smile and reminded Wendy about that machine, and I told her I had a hand in helping people during the pandemic.
But the joke fell flat, and I collapsed onto my knees and sat there crying for probably half an hour with no one listening. I looked skyward and repeated Mike’s question. I was there, fully feeling the pain. No one answered.
When I finally stood up, I was alone began writing Wendy’s part in history.
This is dedicated to my mother, Wendy Anne Rothdram Partin; may she rest in peace.
Go to The Table of Contents