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
Late at night on April 5th, 2019, I chose to end my mother’s life.
She was unconscious and in an intensive care unit of the same Baton Rouge hospital where I had been born 47 years earlier. Five needles dripped nutrients and pain blockers into the backs of her petite hands, and her arms were bruised from four days of needle attempts in her collapsed veins. The needles were connected to tubes that went through a computer-controled intravenous pump that beeped false-positive warnings about air bubbles every thirty minutes or so all night.
It beeped again. I verified there was no bubble, turned off the alarm, and glanced at two of the IV bags. I had already seen that 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 don’t know why I glanced again; I was probably so tired that my mind wanted something, anything, to distract me from thinking about how this was the last night with my mom, and how I could have saved her life years ago if I had visited more often. She was dying from liver failure secondary to alcohol abuse, which followed her depression. I hadn’t visited often because of her mood and slurred speech by 3pm every day, and ten years had passed quickly.
Her intravenous pump was outdated, but the software was newly verified and the box had been covered in a new off-white cover that matched about half of the devices in my mom’s intensive care room and, by then, probably half of the hospitals in the western world. The aging mechanical design was on its third corporate owner in fifteen years, and the recent owner was an international healthcare conglomerate who efforts to rebrand themselves and sell for billions of dollars. By coincidence, I had led the validation of the software and a recall of the pump in Europe, and when the conglomerate allowed that pump to be sold in countries with less regulations, and to ship it within America with expensive software patches rather than solving the problem, we parted ways. By another coincidence, I then oversaw building the quality assurance program of the Tijuana IV bag company, which was then bought by that same conglomeration and bundled together to reach my mom’s room three years later.
At least, I thought, Oscar checked the final step.
I’ll tell him about this when I return to San Diego, I told myself.
Only six months before, he had told me that his mother in law was in an automobile accident, and when he visited her he saw the same two bags hooked to her, and knew his work mattered. Oscar’s mother in law survived. My mom would not. At least I had hope that she wasn’t in pain. I had taken too many opioids for a few years, but had finally stopped the year before and decided that I’d start focusing on helping my mom. But it was too late to help her. If there were one time when I could see opioids being warranted, it was when someone was dying, anyway, and additional addictions wouldn’t matter.
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 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.
I glanced at her exhalation oxygen percentage, but don’t recall what it was. Though I had oversee the manufacturing setup for the exhalation device after Philips purchased Respironics a year before, I never saw the practical use of what could have been solved with a cheap disposable O2 sensor. But it was a contract that paid well, and there’s no harm in making something that every other manufacturer was working on. Philips would have just found someone else to do the same job.
We inhale around 21% O2 and exhale around 16%. I don’t recall what Wendy’s number was, but it was close enough to 16% that it wasn’t remarkable. I always knew the number could be useful, but that hospitals had been using respirators for decades without seeing the value and therefore no one knew what to do even if the number were noteworthy. I doubted anyone in ICU had looked at the gadget I had spent a year getting ready for market.
I was unsure how much the machine added to my mom’s insurance deductible; not that I was concerned, but I knew she was meticulous with her bills and would have asked. I wondered what the hospital told her.
Only a few hours before, I learned that she had been in an out of intensive care for three years, ever since she was told her liver was failing and if she didn’t stop drinking alcohol she’d die. She hand’t told me about her liver failure, but she had complained about her healthcare costs a few times and I dismissed them. She had always fretted about healthcare bills, even when I was a kid and I was the cause of most of her bills. She had been meticulous ever since I had braces, and she had to scrimp and save on her minimum wage salary to pay the deductibles. And then there were my wresting injuries in high school, which had added $50 a month to what she had to pay Exxon for what was, according to her, an otherwise wonderful insurance plan.
I glanced at my watch. 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 America. Because it was analog, and I could glance at the second hand without processing numbers, allowing me to count my mom’s breath and pulse during a quarter-rotation of the watch’s second hand, then multiply by four to get her breaths and beats per minute. I had been a paramedic in the military and college, and I had used Uncle Bob’s watch to count the breaths and pulse of at least a thousand people. He had been the first. I had sat by his side in 1989 like I was sitting with my mom now, and in the same hospital, though in their cancer ward instead of intensive care. I had listened to the beeps of his infusion pump, which may have been an earlier model as my mom’s, but didn’t have any of the expensive software because it was 1989, five years before I’d send my first email. He had bought the watch when he began managing Montreal’s Bulk Stevedoring at their U.S. headquarters in the port of New Orleans thirty years before developing spinal cancer; he had retired only two years before, gotten his U.S. citizenship, and learned he would die at 66 years old, only two years into being allowed to withdraw from his retirement plan and social security without early-withdrawl penalties. When Auntie Lo died at 66 two years later, 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. Her mom, my Granny, had passed away a year before Auntie Lo at 64. There was no one left in our family.
My mom planned to enjoy her retirement. She was 65 years old, and had about five more hours to live.
She worked on her dream home with her boyfriend, a former manager of Exxon turned real estate developer, while I stayed with Auntie Lo and Uncle Bob after he was deemed terminal. Auntie Lo was sloshed by 2pm every day, and I sat alone beside Uncle Bob as he lay on the living room couch andkept his watch wound with micro movements of his wrist. When he could no longer lift his wrist, he asked me to take off his watch and put it on his chest so he could rock it with one finger. He said it was a metaphor for life, that as long as he moved the watch would keep working. He stopped moving but his pulse continued for around 12 hours. I held his hand when he died, and inherited his watch; it probably had another six hours of energy left in it when I put it on and began writing Uncle Bob’s eulogy, where I’d tell almost 100 visitors about it. I left Louisiana for the army a year later and kept the Rolex in storage, but brought it out and used it while I worked as a paramedic in college. I still wore it for special occasions.
Wendy’s pulse was so faint I had to strain to see it. 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. Besides, it wasn’t necessary; all of her vital signs were on display behind her. With one eye on the computer and one on the arteries in her neck, I allowed myself to count her pulse and compare my approximation against the monitor. I always watch peoples’s breath and pulse, an old habit I learned from wrestling and that was reinforced in the first Gulf war, when computers were nascent to even special warfare teams, and we were low on supplies and used gravity to drip IV’s, not pumps.
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 dying. 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. The pain was blinding. To distract myself when my mind locks onto my own pain, I focus on other peoples’s breathing and pulses.
But the pain was too great that night, and my mind was too focused on what would happen in five more hours o concentrate on anything else. My hand came off of hers and I collapsed beside her gurney and let out a bawl louder than any alarm or machine in her room could.
I was on my knees and my hands were planted on the cold floor to prevent my head from falling forward. Tears poured onto the back of my hands, and I bawled and bawled and bawled.
I looked up and practically shouted, too loudly for a hospital but not unheard of in an intensive care ward, and I pleaded with my mom to help me understand what was happening.
“Why, Wendy?” I howled.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
I called my mother Wendy. She was born Wendy Anne 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 howled again.
I clasped her guardrails with both hands and pulled myself off my knees and stood up and took a few breaths. I glanced at the monitors and then through her room door and into the dark hallway. No one would have heard. I 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. We had always joked that I inherited my dad’s big hands and feet; I wanted her to feel my hands on her, for her to know I was there. If possible, I wanted her to joke about my big hands one more time, if even to herself.
“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, and I knew I’d authorize removing Wendy from life-support. She could live for months on them, and would probably die within an hour of them being removed.
“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.
I didn’t lower my hand; instead, I slowly traced the back of my scalp and felt the other, smaller scars. I stopped 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. Wendy always kept my thick hair long, so that it covered my scars.
I lowered my hand back to atop Wendy’s, and took a few more breaths.
“Uncle Bob was right,” I said. I bowed my head and raised my hand to rub my relatively recent bald spot.
“Hair today, gone tomorrow!” I said as cheerfully as I could. I described my bald spot to her. The circle of skin had a half an inch of hair before my backwards C showed; combined, they looked like a semicolon that covered half my head.
I took a slow, deep breath and exhaled just as slowly.
“I love you, Wendy,” I said.
“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.
Bobby Kennedy and J Edgar Hoover had bought that cabin for my grandfather to get him out of Louisiana. That, like most of my family history, was covered in the news.
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 my grandfather died, Hoffa would be stuck in prison for eleven years.
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 my grandfather practically ran the mafia; of course Marcello would offer a bribe instead of a threat.
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.
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.
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: explosions, men grabbing me, Wendy crying and screaming for help, frequent trips to the same hospital where I sat with Uncle Bob and now stood with Wendy.
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.
I turned off the alarm and returned to Wendy’s side and covered her hand and forearm again with my hands. I breathed deeply and tried to stretch to get blood flowing. 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 apologized to Wendy. I said it calmly, sincerely. I told her that if I had known I would have dropped everything and visited more often. I wouldn’t have gone to Cuba, I said. Or India.
I took a three month sabbatical every year, but hadn’t visited my mom in almost ten years, other than a brief visit two years earlier. Her depression and drinking were hard on me. I waited until I could stop drinking and taking opioids myself, and had planned to spend that spring in New Orleans for music and crawfish season, so that I could focus on her. The call from her friend two days before changed that plan.
I took a few breaths and talked to Wendy 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 Wendy. That wasn’t true, but it was only 16 miles and I wanted her to get the impression of how close to Tijuana I lived. Wendy always wanted to travel after retiring early from Exxon, but the booze shackled her to her house and she was in bed by six or seven every night, when it around four or five in San Diego and a bad time to call.
I looked at Uncle Bob’s watch. It was around 4am.
I had four more hours to kill.
I took a deep breath and began talking 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 I spoke with Wendy about The Irishman, I called my grandfather Big Daddy; my father had been my daddy, and everyone in Baton Rouge called my grandfather Big Daddy.
Wendy and I first saw Big Daddy portrayed in a 1983 movie, Blood Feud, taken from the title journalist gave to the public and brutal feud between Jimmy Hoffa and U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy after Bobby’s big brother, President Kennedy, had appointed Bobby with only two goals: remove Hoffa and stop mafia influence in America. Brian Dennehy portrayed Big Daddy in Blood Feud, though my grandfather Ed Partin was more famous than Brian was back then.
Producers chose Brian because he was becoming known for his “rugged good looks” and charming smile; he looked enough like my grandfather that it made sense to risk a new actor. Veteran actor Robert Blake conveniently looked like Hoffa, and he won an academy award for “channeling Hoffa’s rage.” Erest Borgnine portrayed Hoover, and some daytime soap opera heartthrob was Bobby. Wendy and I had watched it together; it got most of what was known back then right. (Coincidentally, Brian’s breakout role would be later that summer in another film with blood in the name, Rambo: First Blood, where he was the small town sheriff and Korean war veteran who led the pursuit of Sylvester Stallone in the first Rambo film. I followed the careers of both of those actors simply because they stuck in my mind when I was a kid watching famous people on TV.)
I told Wendy Frank The Irishman Sheeran died just before his 2004 memoir was published. It 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. 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’s, but still ran the Partin geneology group on an online forum. She told him the same thing. Craig persisted, and
Only a handful of people who knew Big Daddy were still alive. Doug was in a Mississippi veterans convalescent center and his memory was unreliable. I’m the oldest surviving grandchild, and all of my cousins were too young to know Big Daddy well. He had taught me to fish, hunt, shoot, and use a knife, and I was 17 years old at his 1990 funeral. Janice suggested that Craig speak with me.
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.
I lied and told her that I told Craig her favorite pun, that she had been born WAR but marrying a Partin WARP’ed her. I don’t know why I lied but I did; it was probably like telling her I could see San Diego from Oscar’s office in Tijuana, just an excuse to make things more visual for her, and to link her part in the story to Scorcese’s new film.
I held up my left hand, the one with Uncle Bob’s watch, and exaggerated the gap between my two middle fingers. It was an old break that healed askew, and my fingers bulge apart and look like Dr. Spock’s split-finger salute when he wishes someone to live long and prosper in the Star Trek films and shows. I lied to her again, and said I told Craig about Hillary Clinton breaking my finger just before Big Daddy’s funeral, the one Walter Sheridan and I chatted about before I went to the army.
That was another joke we shared – Hillary Clinton breaking my finger. No one knew the name Hillary Rodham Clinton until Arkansas governor Bill Clinton became president in 1992, and that Hillary’s middle name sounded so much like Wendy’s maiden name that we laughed at the coincidence. The 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. 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.
(When I’d write this and check records against my memories, I’d learn that Hillary’s last name was actually Moore, not Clinton, but the joke between Wendy and me was always Hillary Clinton so that’s the name I used and still what my mind sees, regardless of what I learned since.)
I told Craig I’d like to make a film about wrestling Hillary Clinton, I said to Wendy. I forced a laugh so she’d hear it.
That same hand has a curved scar across my forefinger, similar to the scar on the back of my head but smaller. It’s from a machete when I was a kid and helping my dad cut down male marijuana plants before they pollinated the females. I had learned that sensamilla was more valuable and meant sans (without) semilla (seeds), and by eight years old I was probably as proficient as my dad in growing marijuana. He went to prison in 1986, the same year Big Daddy was released, and lost his land and all his money, and Wendy picked up the bill for all of my medical expenses and joked about how much my left hand had cost her over the years.
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, and prepared to tell Wendy the punch line I hadn’t been able to share with her in the year since that photo was taken. “I had a hand in making your ventilator,” I said.
Immediately my smile vanished, 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 wiped my eyes with my sleeves, took a deep breath, and told Wendy about my recent trip to Cuba. I returned only a week before, and though Wendy couldn’t see me, I told her how tanned I had become, and how I looked ten years younger after a month of scuba diving and rock climbing. I told her about the music I saw, how Afro-Funk was similar to New Orleans funk, and that even the buildings and bars were similar in styles. I talked about the time we tried to go diving in Cancun twenty five years before, when she opted out of the claustrophobic scuba gear and snorkeled instead. I laughed so she’d hear me.
I looked at my watch and saw that only three minutes had passed.
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.
Over the next week, I prepared her funeral. I was her last surviving relative.
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 had a tripple bypass surgery two years before, and that was the last time I had called him or we had spoken. He ended the call by telling me to call my mother more often.
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 had to vent.
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 and stepped forward with my left, rotating my body and leaving my right fist behind me. My left fist was by my chest. My right fist began moving 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. I learned to punch from Big Daddy. In some of the Life magazine articles he talked about how he stopped boxing when he broke his punching hand, and that’s why he used a knife or a gun. Punching breaks your hand. I learned that when he helped me prepare for my final match against Hillary. 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, and if he absolutely had no other weapon nearby he could punch with a whallop that would stop a charging bull. I punched my dad a year later, and hadn’t used my fist in anger since. I was about to, and something else happened for the first time in my life: my jaw unclenched.
A lifetime of pent up anger at my Partin erupted from me. My mind was swirling with random images, my dad shouting and pushing Wendy in our first kitchen, Big Daddy holding my dad down and pulling a knife on him, Uncle Keith pulling my bloody from under crushed metal and blood from my slashed scalp filling the floorboard, a war with thousands of burnt bodies piled and blocking my way to the next battle. I vented, and a shout streamed from my open mouth and shook the rafters of heaven, blaming God and myself and Mike and my dad and Big Daddy for Wendy’s death.
My right fist accelerated towards the refrigerator. My hips rotated and so did my shoulders. 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. I was still venting to God when my two knuckles impacted the refrigerator; the metal caved in and warped the door and glass crashed inside.
I was aware that my hand hurt, but I wasn’t in control yet. My right hand pulled back to shoulder level; somehow, instinctively perhaps, I opened my hand and thrust forward again, hitting the refrigerator with the padded palm, still aligning my wrist bones and still throwing my weight behind it, and I hit it just above the head-sized dent, as if going for a neck or nose shot. More glass rattled, and the door popped open. I followed through with a left elbow that put an elongated dent in the left door.
I stood there, fists by my side and hips lowered, ready for another round. I was panting and watching liquids ooze from the bottom of the open right side door.
I felt better. 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 stood up straight and relaxed, then turned and looked at Mike. 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.
“In all you’ve done,” he said, still staring at his feet.
“In all the places you’ve been,” he said, then 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.
“Have you learned what’s the point of all this?”
I chuckled a genuine chuckle for the first time since I heard Wendy was dying.
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.
“Well, 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 clarified.
“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.
“42!” Mike said with a smile, and 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.
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. 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. Uncle Bob taught me that; 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.
But this is what happened. 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 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.
In a bit of irony only Wendy and I shared, the truck drivers who delivered the paintings were Teamsters. I looked towards the sky and forced a chuckle about that, hoping Wendy would hear my laughter, then I collapsed again and sobbed by myself for probably a half hour.
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 wrapped the glasses in my old wrestling hoodie. I hadn’t known Wendy had saved it.
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, and I’d be seeing her and her daughter when they picked me up at the San Diego airport later that day.
I picked up a photo of Wendy’s grandfather, my great-granda Harold Hicks, in his Toronto Mappleleaf’s uniform. That was another mistake I’d correct when writing this; he never played hockey for the Mappleleafs, that photo of a jersey with the big M was for the Maroons, a team no longer around. Wikipedia has a page about him, and it says he played for the Maroons, Boston Bruins, and a few other teams before becoming manager of Canada’s eastern rail system. His obituary says he was respected by everyone who knew him both in his years of hockey and his decades of managing people in public service, and that he died in 1968. From what Granny told me, all of that was true, and he was the only grandfather on my Canadian side of the family that I heard about. Granny had fled an abusive husband and moved to Baton Rouge to live with Auntie Lo and Uncle Bob when Wendy was five, and never changed her name back to Hicks, the same way Wendy never changed her name back to Rothdram after she fled my dad. I’ll never know why they kept the married names of abusive men.
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, but I don’t recall what time that was. I put Granny’s watch in a small nylon zippered pouch I used when traveling to hold an extra wallet, book, and anything else I’d want nearby without reaching up for my carryon bag.
Mike arrived and picked me up and drove me to the Baton Rouge airport, where I caught the earliest plane home.
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 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 pulled away and held the little girl’s shoulders gently. Out of habit, I noticed Uncle Bob’s watch and her breathing, though her pulse wasn’t strong enough to make the artery on her neck beat. 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 the little girl.
She beamed. She had never seen an analog watch before. I showed her the inscription, and told her that the J stood for Joy. She liked that and tried to put the 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. 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, and for a brief moment I thought about telling the little girl about Granny and Wendy and Uncle Bob and Auntie Lo, and showing her the things of theirs that I brought home.
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. Mike was right, and I felt a surge of happiness for him and his new family. There’d always be time to talk about my Partin history, but there would only be that day to play. It was only 2:20 in the afternoon, and we had an entire city to explore. 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, 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 told Wendy I had a hand in the pandemic.
The joke fell flat, and I knew what I had to do; it wasn’t as much a choice as it was an urge that I accepted.
I spent the pandemic writing my version of history and dedicated it to my mother, Wendy Anne Rothdram Partin. May she rest in peace, wherever she and her Angel may be.
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