Part VII
“Edward Grady Partin was a big, rugged guy who could charm a snake off a rock.”
– Jimmy Hoffa, 1975
Two weeks after Hillary Clinton broke my finger, I rode my motorcycle down Airline Highway towards GreenOaks Funeral Home to attend my grandfather’s funeral. I had applied two clean strips of first-aid tape that morning. The tape was still bright white, and it stood out against the black hand grip on the left-side clutch. The break had practically healed, but I liked the look of my fingers buddy-taped the way a pirate learns to wear his eye patch with pride.
Traffic was backed up all the way to I-10, so I slowed down and steered onto the gravely margin and rode past the lines of cars and 18 wheelers. I was focused as if practicing a wresting move: riding slowly on a gravely parking lot was how I dropped the bike three months before. I still hadn’t gotten used to counter-steering, the counter-intuitive way to push a wheel the opposite direction you want to go, and I had to resist the urge to squeeze too tightly on the handlebars all the time, even when there was no threat.
Riding a motorcycle, as it turns out, is like wrestling or martial arts in that it’s balance between relaxation and tension. A sign of being too nervous or worried is too much tension in all things, even the little things we all take for granted, and every time I squeezed the clutch with my left hand to change gears and pass an 18 wheeler or police car I felt a bite of discomfort that reminded me of my final match. Like improving a wrestling move one day at a time, I concentrated on relaxing and flowing with the motorcycle instead of trying to control it. Lea had given me Zen and The Art of Motorcycle maintenance, and though I hadn’t finished reading it I had already seen the analogies. As Coach said, don’t be a headhunter; if you’re using energy it should be for a reason and not just a habit. I relaxed, breathed, and tried to sense where the handlebars wanted to go the same way I would try to sense where a wrestler would move.
I saw the funeral home and it’s lone of cars holding up traffic on Airline. I squeezed the clutch and downshifted to second, and the engine roared and the transmission slowed me down while my right hand rolled off the throttle and kept a two fingers on the brake, just in case. I stayed in second until I reached the police barricade in front of GreenOaks, then downshifted into first and puttered beside them.
Parking was full and they were turning people away. I lifted the visor on my helmet and told them who I was and that I could park anywhere on my motorcycle. They let me pass. I put the bike in first and kept the visor up and drove across the parking lot as slowly as physics would allow.
I was wearing my letterman jacket. Belaire’s colors were orange and blue, and our jackets were a guady fuzzy orange with blue faux-leather sleeves and a big blue B over the left chest. I had added a giant, scripted letter black “Magik” outlined in white hand-sewn across the back. Under my nickname and about the size of two open hands was a hand-sewn patch of a white skull wearing a black magicians top hat, a bootleg Slash patch I had bought a few weeks before. Guns-N-Roses had finally become known in Baton Rouge and made its way to Little Saigon’s hodgepodge of stores. Spring was transitioning into summer, and I wouldn’t have many more days of wearing that jacket, so as soon as I saw the patch I bought it and a travel sewing kit and added it to my back. At the very least, it helped dampen the bright fuzzy orange that even devout fans of Belaire felt was too much.
I had decorated the B with letterman pins. The most prominent was the wrestling pin, two Greco-Roman wrestlers in top-and-bottom position that was understandably the butt of jokes from every other sport who said wrestling looked like two men fooling around. I had lettered in cross-country track and had a small pin of Mercury’s winged foot. I had barely lettered in track; the criteria was showing up to practice and representing Belaire in at least three cross-country meets, and I had done that for two falls leading up to wrestling season; Coach had suggested that as a way to get in shape for wresting season.
Though I had swam earlier that year, I was such a poor swimmer that I didn’t compete and therefore I didn’t letter. I had ridden with the swim team to and from Catholic’s swimming pool for practice, but as my body fat dropped so did my disproportionately heavy legs. And though I had scuba fins for feet, I never could get into a rhythm and I looked more like Uncle Keith’s hound dog-paddling to retrieve a duck. But I had a pin for theater, a pair of faces representing the extremes of human emotion.
Lea and Todd had recruited me into Theater class in 10th grade, the same year I began wrestling, telling me it was fun and an easy A to balance my grades. Lettering was showing up for rehersal, participating in at least one public show per semester, and shooting for becoming an International Thespian, which meant at least 100 hours of service to others even if it’s behind the scenes building sets and helping staff clean up after crowds go home. Todd and I could have lettered ten times over, and we both passed the International Thespian criteria. I mostly helped with sets and cleaning, but had done a magic and knife-throwing act with Todd at every downtown Fest for All and therefore I lettered.
The most remarkable thing on my jacket were the 36 small gold safety pins, one for each pin I had earned that season. It was common bling on the jackets of wrestlers. I, like everyone else, grouped the safety pins in bundles of 5 for easy counting, one pin to go through the jacket or letter and to hold another four by the small hole that formed their springs. Like most people, I put mine on the jacket, under the letter. There were seven bundles of five and one pinned by itself.
Away from traffic, with my helmet up and the small 500cc Ascot barely puttering, I could hear the subtle tingles of my pins as if I had seven tiny wind chimes strapped to my chest. I heard the chimes and breathed in the scent azeleas, and crept along the paved road leading to another police barricade beside a row of television news cameras and people I assumed were reporters holding bulky cameras with zoom lenses. I parked the bike near a couple of police motorcycles, stepped off, and took off my helmet and hung it from handlebars.
I paused. It was a warm spring day and I did not need the jacket, but I used it like a motorcycle jacket, something to slow down road rash if I slid. Mostly, though, I appreciated the look of my jacket and its pins like I embraced my buddy taped fingers. But this was a funeral. I reluctantly removed the jacket and draped it across the seat then adjusted my shirt collar in the motorcycle mirror.
I was wearing a collared light blue shirt under a light grey sweater and tucked into dark grey slacks. I had chosen the outfit for fall’s homecoming dance. I hadn’t really grown much since then, but my shoulders had filled out because of strengthening my deltoids and the natural broadening of men’s shoulders that happens at the tail end of puberty. The sweater was pulled tightly across my chest, and I looked stronger than I was. Around my neck was a custom gold necklace Granny had given me the year before, after her first battle with throat cancer; she had taken some of her old jewelry from before cancer to a jeweler and had him melt it down into a crude rabbit poking its head out of a top-hat and with a wand crossed behind the hat. That necklace was framed in a close-up color photo of my face in the Advocate in an article about the youngest member of the local magic club, and I wore it with the same feeling I had about my buddy-taped fingers and letterman jacket.
I stood in front of the reporters and television cameras. unsure if I wanted towards the row of police blocking the funeral home’s double doors. Aunt Janice stepped into the doorway and called out:
“Jason! Over here!”
The police looked at her and then at me.
“It’s okay,” she said. “He’s family.”
They would have known that by looking at our faces; Janice and I have her mother’s eyes, the darkest brown eyes can be and slightly narrowed so that it seems we are focused even when we are not. Two of the police stepped aside simultaneously and I walked through the opening.
Aunt Janice squatted down and held open her arms and I stepped into the hug. I was always the runt of my family, even among the girls and women, and if there were any doubt in the policemen’s minds that I was family it was because I was the smallest Partin they had ever seen.
“Look at you!” She said, holding on to my shoulders and looking up and down.
“You’ve grown,” she said. She always said that, even when I had not.
“Your dad’s here,” she said in a whisper. She sighed and said, “He got kicked out of college. But he’s here and says they’re letting him back.”
She sighed again and said, “He didn’t even dress up for Big Daddy’s funeral.”
She didn’t comment on my sweater or necklace. She stood up and reached down to take my hand, an old habit from whenever we would walk together in her busy Houston neighborhood. I didn’t reach up and I walked a bit faster to get ahead. I glanced around the room as if it were a crowd in the bleachers of a tournament.
I recognized a few dozen people, mostly Teamsters from Local #5. I saw a few of my former teachers and one former principal from middle school. Uncle Joe was there with Jason, towering over the teachers who knew him and were smiling and laughing with Jason. Uncle Keith was with Uncle Doug and blending in with all the burly Teamsters around them. Billy Papas and a few of the football players from LSU’s 1954 national championship team were there with a crowd gathered around them, all laughing at the chance to be that close to Billy in person.
In typical Louisiana style, Bill was celebrated as much for his time with LSU as his life in crime. He had recently been released from prison after a three-year sentence for counterfeiting hundreds of thousands of dollars from his St. Francisville home, and his smiling face lined Lamar Advertising billboards along I-110 all the way to the turn-off for St. Francisville. Buoyed by his release from prison, his dental office brought people all the way from Baton Rouge just to say Billy Papas cleaned their teeth.
Walter Sheridan, the famous FBI agent who led 500 agents in the Get Hoffa squad before becoming an NBC investigative journalist, always had to explain Louisiana culture to people in other states and in his book about how Big Daddy was trustworthy despite a criminal background. He said that Louisiana’s people were remarkably tolerant and even celebratory of crooked politics, as if bucking the system were celebrated.
Walter was there in a dark brown suit the color of my eyes. It was appropriate for a funeral. I wondered what he’d say if he realized how much everyone revered crooked LSU football players even more than crooked politicians. I saw two were FBI agents dressed in the old-school style enforced by Hoover in the 60’s, more like comic book’s Men in Black, the Jahova’s witnesses who walked around Aunt Janice’s neighborhood, or the Blues Brothers than the G-Men of Hoover’s day.
What triggered me that they were agents wasn’t just the clothes, it was mostly the poorly concealed firearms on their back right hips and the glaring white spring-coiled wire coming out of their jacket, passing over their shoulder, and attached to an earpiece tucked into one ear. The earpiece wasn’t too surprising. During football lot of men in Louisiana wore small radios with an earbud discretely tucked into their ear during fall weddings and unexpected funerals, or during long wrestling tournaments when they showed up to support their son but with one ear tuned to LSU. But what alerted me was the combination of those ear buds, the black and white suits, and the concealed firearms at a funeral.
The Men in Black comic book was based on Hoover’s G-Men. At one point in history and because of Hoover embraced technology, they had such advanced weapons and surveillance gear that people said it was alien technology and the Men in Black kept Earth safe. In the Life magazine focus on Big Daddy, Hoover showed him strapped to a lie detector machine and surrounded by white coat wearing scientists. Hoover and explained it was the future of police investigations and convictions, and he personally vouched for Big Daddy’s trustworthiness. The day Big Daddy stood up in court as the surprise witness against Hoffa, Hoover said he personally oversaw having G-Men and federal marshals protect my family from inevitable retaliation.
I was never impressed by FBI agents or federal marshals. They had always seemed indifferent and unalert, and these two were no different. They were the age of Tommy Lee Jones when he played the aging MiB agent alongside a young Will Smith, but with pudgy belies and mindless postures that belied the firearms. I never saw a gun, I just knew where to keep one and it’s approximate size. It was 1990, just after the 1988 Miami shootout where two gunmen walked down the street and embarrassed the FBI by defeating an entire team of them on national television; federal agents swere loosing any lingering positive reputations by then. In response, instead of increasing marksmanship, the FBI wanted to either upgrade from 9mm firearms to 10mm, or go back to .45’s; the argument for 9mm’s was that they were easier to conceal and easier to handle the recoil for undisciplined or diminutive shooters; that’s not how I thought then, but in a few years I’d have the experiences – and weapons – under my belt that would let me say things like that.
I doubted the two G-Men carried larger firearms yet, so I assumed they had 9mm’s. Any magician knows that to hide a bottle of wine, a few doves, and anything else you’d like to produce quickly you stand up straight, keep your shoulders broad and your belly tucked in, and let the coat hang over what you’re hiding without printing through the cloth. If they had had 10mm’s or a .45, it would have printed their business so loudly that everyone in the room would have noticed. Amateurs.
I stood by Walter and didn’t let on that I knew him. He asked about my fingers; he was probably the only FBI agent I ever met who noticed details like that. I told him I broke them wrestling in city finals. (I didn’t use the joke about Hillary’s, because I had not yet heard of Hillary Rodham Clinton and would not for another two years.) He asked how I did. I told him I won a silver medal. I did not say that it was my last match; I missed regionals because of my finger, and I was focusing on the win. He smiled and nodded in a way that said, “Good for you.”
I beamed. No one seemed to notice my fingers, and no one had read the sports section or the Fun section to see the articles about me. I leaned in towards Walter a bit and told him I knew how my grandfather did it. He didn’t say anything. I said that you can fool a lie detector test by practicing believing what you wanted to say. Over time, I said, you believe it so deeply that the machine can’t tell it’s not true.
Walter had staked his reputation and the reputations of his bosses, Hoover and Bobby Kennedy, on Big Daddy’s lie detector results. According to Hoover, Hoffa had plotted to kill Bobby Kennedy. In a secret FBI file, Hoover said he asked Big Daddy to obtain plastic explosives from his mafia contacts in New Orleans, and said they’d blow up Bobby’s house when he and his family were home one night. Big Daddy refused, saying he doesn’t hurt kids. Hoffa acquiesced, and Big Daddy continued being a mole in Hoffa’s inner circle.
That incident was the main reason Big Daddy was deemed an all-American hero. Hoover said he risked his life and his family’s lives to uphold American values (whatever that means), and to correct corrupt labor unions in America. Hoover didn’t mention that it took a few tries at the lie detector test to get the results he wanted, but he did emphasize that Hoffa was plotting to kill Kennedy and was ruthless enough to kill Bobby’s wife and children in the act; Bobby was mostly adored nationally, and the thought of killing him and his family made people tolerant of whatever tools were used to send him to prison for jury tampering. Hoover so emphasized Hoffa wanting to kill Bobby’s family that Hollywood producers focused on it in 1983’s “Blood Feud,” showing a close-up camera shot of Robert Blake’s face portraying Hoffa as he talked to Big Daddy, the actor’s countenance showing how deeply he longed to blow up the Kennedy family.
A few months after Big Daddy listened to Hoffa plot Bobby’s death – but before Hoover plastered him across national media – Hoffa was on trial for jury tampering. Big Daddy testified under oath that Hoffa had asked him to bribe a juror in The Test Fleet Case. That was a two year old, state level labor trial that Hoffa won, therefore he couldn’t be retried for it, but the charges of attempting to bribe a juror in The Test Fleet Case warranted a new, federal charge of jury tampering. From behind the scenes, U.S. Attorney General Bobby Kennedy personally oversaw the prosecution against Hoffa. Hoover was heavily involved, and Walter Sheridan still headed the 500-agent Get Hoffa task force; he had been a friend of the family – of sorts – since then.
I smiled at Walter. He was only a bit taller than I was. He smiled back. Of course he wouldn’t admit the secret to a trick; he’d make a great magician.
After Big Daddy was portrayed as a hero, Walter spent twenty years enforcing that image. The timing of Bobby and Hoover’s influence Life magazine’s was what sold America on Big Daddy; he had testified against Hoffa in 1963, only ten months after President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed. When the article, ostensibly focused on Hoffa, started talking about Hoffa plotting to murder the president’s little brother in 1962, people reacted so strongly that Big Daddy’s status as an all-American hero was poured in concrete and remained no matter what Big Daddy did after. In his 1972 opus about Hoffa, a massive collection of names and dates and FBI reports, Big Daddy’s name in the index takes up half a page, more than any of the thousand or so characters by far and second only to Hoffa himself. He mentions Mamma Jean, though not by name; he kept referring to her as “an attractive southern woman” to protect her identity; glancing around the crowd at Big Daddy’s funeral, that could have been any one of a hundred women. Doug was simply “Partin’s younger brother,” and no other Partin was mentioned.
Uncle Keith walked over and looked down at Walter and nodded.
“Walter,” he said.
“Keith,” Walter said back.
Keith looked down at me and smiled and said, “Hey Jason, I’m glad you came.”
Walter took the hint and walked away. I looked at Keith and in my periphery saw Walter say something to the two G-Men and one of them say something into his jacket lapel.
“Look,” Keith said.
He was my dad’s little brother, but as big as Big Daddy and with that side of the family’s sky blue eyes and blonde hair. Other than sharing Big Daddy’s thin smile, which, as I mentioned, was mostly a feature in our cheek bones, we looked nothing alike. If anyone suspected us as being family, it was because we were seen together so often over the years and Keith always seemed gentle and protective around me, like a gentle giant trying not to squish the small rabbit that walked around his feet.
“Your dad’s here,” he said.
He sighed and kneeled down to look me in the eyes.
“I don’t know what the fuck’s gotten into him,” Keith said. “I mean, he’s always acted crazy. But this is a lot, even for him.”
I did not know what my dad had done lately. I stood still and listened.
He sighed again and said, “I don’t know. Maybe the FBI’s right, and Daddy’s crazy and your dad is too.”
“Hell, I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe we’re all crazy and just don’t know it.”
He stood up again and said, “You graduating high school this year, right?”
I said yes.
“Look, Jason. I can get you a good job. None of this Teamster bullshit. It’s all politics and wiping the ass of lazy niggers. The plants are hiring pipe fitters. They start at nine dollars an hour and can make 19 if they’re good at it. Hell, you’re the smartest one out of all of us. You’d do fine. You’d earn a good living and not have to do any of this bullshit.”
“You tell your mom that, too,” he said. “She ever wants out of Exxon, I can get her a job at one of the plants closer to town that pays more. She’s a good lookin’ woman and a hard worker, she’d do fine.”
I thanked Keith, then I was surprised to hear myself tell him that I joined the army and would be getting the college fund.
He laughed and said, “Oh, hell! Wait ’till your dad hears that.”
As if on que, we all turned when a voice boomed out: “Justin! I mean Jason!”
“Oh, shit,” Keith said.
My dad walked over and kneeled down. He reached out his arms and closed his eyes and pulled me in. Keith shook his head and walked away, and my dad sobbed on my shoulder for a few gasping breaths.
My dad wasn’t nearly as big as the other Partins. He was around 6’2″, about 6 to 8 inches taller than I was. It was if every generation of Partins pulled out a smaller version of the Martyoska doll and I was the latest. For the briefest of moments, I wondered if I had children if they’d be a smaller version of me.
My dad and I have the identical dark brown eye color, so dark they can seem black in low light. If we’re not smiling, the shape of our eyes has a narrowness that makes it seem as if we were focused on reading something in the distance, or as if we were in deep thought. But his eyes were squinted more narrowly at the corners that day, and his forehead was tense as if he were using those muscles to pull up on his eyes so he could see.
The whites of his eyes were bloodshot, and his cheeks were wet from tears. His black hair was long and matted, but his thick black beard, which used to reach down to his chest like a pillow-sized Brillo pad, was short and looked like it may have only been growing for a couple of months. He reeked. He rarely bathed, even after hunting or tromping through swamps or woods to trim his plants, but this was worse.
As he sobbed, I realized he had bathed. His hair wasn’t oily and it smelled like Dr. Bonners peppermint soap. The odor was just his shirt. He wore a simple white t-shirt with yellowed armpits and what was obviously black marker hand-writing across the front in big, bold, irregular letters that took a lot of rubbing back and forth with the marker to become as loud and obvious as his voice. The sentence said: “Fuck US actions in Panama”
Though unpunctuated, there was no doubt of the exclamation point he intended; there was rarely any doubt what my dad thought about anything.
He pushed me back and held on to my shoulders exactly like Janice had, which is how their momma, my Mamma Jean, always did. His eyes were still wet and his forehead furrowed, but he smiled a rare smile. When he did, he instantly changed into someone that seemed happy and maybe even charming.
He said, “Boy, you’ve gotten bigger!”
I tried to recall how big I was the last time I saw him. There was a brief moment a year before, when he swung through town and took me out to buy the handgrips I used all season, but that had only been for an hour and he talked about jail and what an asshole Reagan was the entire time. Before that must have been when I was around 120 pounds, so to him I was much, much bigger.
I smiled and nodded.
His tucked his first finger behind his thumb and built up tension like a spring, then unleashed it onto my chest where it thumped and sounded like a drum in my ears. It was such a hard thump and my chest was poked out so much that whoever was listening to the aging FBI agent’s lapel probably heard it and thought someone was getting slapped.
“Son,” he said, “I tell you: by the time I was your age I was already wearing the same jacket I wear now. How old are you now? 15?”
“16,” I said.
“You gonna stay in school?” he asked.
Sixteen was the legal age to drop out. To him, his question was relevant, because both he and my mom had dropped out when he was 17 and she was 16 and pregnant with me. They were married in Mississippi, where state laws didn’t require parental consent for a 16 year old girl to get married, and moved into one of Big Daddy’s houses by the Achafalaya Basin and the murky Commite River, the river where the Local#5 safe had been found beneath a concrete bridge in a thickly wooded section of the basin. Around that time, I was removed from their custody by Judge Pugh after my mom left and my dad was arrested for selling opiates and weed, then I bounced between him and my mom, Auntie Lo and Uncle Bob, Granny, and foster families since. He probably didn’t know what grade I was in.
I said yes and I started to tell him about my letterman jacket and the awards I was getting, but he cut me off.
“You got any cavities yet?” he asked as he reached towards my face.
I brushed his hand aside and said no. I started to tell him my braces were off, but he cut me off again with another non sequitur.
“They kicked me out of college in January for wearing this shirt,” he said, pulling his shirt forward against his body to emphasize the words he had penned with a black marker.
The arm pits were dark yellow. That explained the smell: he hadn’t washed that shirt in three months.
“But I sued them and they let me back in,” he said. “And I wrote an essay that won a national contest about the right to burn a flag. I get to go to Washington DC and read it to congress.”
Burning flags had been on the news a lot, too, because a 1988 supreme court ruling upheld the freedom of speech in our constitution, which led to a lot of Reagan supporters saying it was un-American and trying to get people put in jail for it. Every day people have an opinion about the Supreme Court’s opinion, and I was surprised that my dad would write something congress would like to see. I would have guessed it was a rant against Reagan, but that wouldn’t have won a written contest.
He poked his finger into my chest and his eyebrows narrowed and he said, “When I get there, I’m gonna go there and tell them what bullshit it was to send the marines to Panama!”
“It was the 82nd,” I said. “I’m going to be one of them.”
His face cringed, not because he had listened, but because I had interrupted his incessant flow of thoughts. He poked his finger into my chest again and said, “That’s goddamn unconstitutional. You can’t target one man with the whole army. Bush is just Reagan’s puppet.
He poked his finger into my chest with everyone one of those final words, emphasizing that Bush was just Reagan’s puppet.
“They’re both a couple of goddamn dictators,” he said. “They’re all the same: fucking hypocrites.”
“He focused on two pounds of pot,” he said, switching back to Reagan, “Yet he fucked all of Nicaragua selling drugs and guns. Reagan should have gone to jail for that.”
He was referring to what was daily fodder for daily news, The Iran-Contra Affair, where the Reagan said he “didn’t remember” his administration overseeing the CIA funnel money and weapons to Iraq to fight against Iran by either buying or selling drugs to cartels in Nicaragua. I never could keep track of all the details, but it was the scandal of a generation and considered worse than Nixon’s Watergate scandal that led to him resigning soon after he pardoned Hoffa from prison. My dad received no pardon, and did a year in prison for having exactly 2.0 pounds of shake weed in the cracks of our barn, the minimum amount for federal charges. The deputies had scraped the shake from cracks in the barn, where my dad dried the cut plants a year before, and the pile of evidence contained just as many dead bugs and rat turds as unusable stems that fell into the cracks as we trimmed plants, but they weighed everything together and it came out to 2.0 pounds. I don’t know how much it would have weighed without the death bugs and rat turds, but it was such worthless shake that even my dad hadn’t bothered to scrape it from the cracks and smoke it.
“That mother fucker fucked me hard,” he said, referring to Reagan again.
It was an old argument I knew well. Reagan’s administration paid for the war on drugs unconstitutionally, but none of the pot growing hippies organized a legal defense against it. He had sold marijuana for years, and in truckloads weighting hundreds of pounds above the two-pound limit. But, my dad was, in a way, right about the day we were arrested.
We were minding our own business in his cabin when six 4×4 trucks came bouncing down the road and around 20 armed deputies got out and surrounded our cabin and drug us out. There was one sheriff and two sheriff deputies in a marked 4X4 truck, but everything else were deputized unemployed local hunters, and they drove their trucks and jeeps and carried their hunting rifles and shotguns when they took us. They were my dad’s neighbors in the small town of Clinton, Arkansas, where he bought groceries. They were deputized in lieu of training local police, more like a wild west posse than anything you’d imagine existed in 1985.
To be paid, the Reagan administration rushed a war on drugs bill through congress that had a small part about paying local deputized soldiers with whatever they confiscated from perpetrators. It was akin to pirates being paid by booty they confiscated from burning ships or ports after bombarding them with cannon fire: 1/3 of anything confiscated went to the posse, 1/3 to the sheriff department, and 1/3 to the county’s prosecuting general attorney. After we were drug from the cabin I went back into the foster system, my dad went to prison, and the locals sold his land but kept his truck and guns.
My dad had a right to be angry, but I had gotten over it and so should he, I thought silently. I didn’t have to go to prison, I thought, but I had to bounce around strangers’s homes and get beat up by kids in middle school for two years. My dad could learn about moving on and looking forward from Coach. All of us could.
I stood still as he ranted about Reagan, but my mind wandered. No one approached us, either because of the angry look on my dad’s face or the stench of his t-shirt. I had grown up used to that; any time I had been with my dad in public, he was usually ranting about something and people just ignored us. I thought about the book Hitchiker’s Guide to The Galaxy solving invisibility not with a cloaking field, but a “somebody else’s problem” field that led people to walk past a smelly, ranting man and a little boy without a second glance; there was no difference with a room full of people in suits, police, FBI agents, and family. Whatever my dad did, people tended to ignore him; the only exception was his neighbors in Arkansas and the truck loads of deputies who arrested us.
The pastor announced that services would begin soon and that the family and pallbearers would be allowed inside for viewing. My dad suddenly looked sad again. He stood up and reached down to take my hand. I did. It was easier than dealing with his reaction if I didn’t.
We walked through the wide double doors and stepped into the main parlor. The two G-men stood just outside the door, where they could see both inside and out simultaneously. I didn’t see Walter anywhere. Behind Big Daddy’s casket was a wall of flowered wreaths from people, unions like the teacher’s union and a few skilled trades like electricians and pipe fitters, but the most obvious was as wide as the casket was long and about 3 feet tall, but housed on two large easels so that it stood about 6 and a half feet. It was shaped like an 18 wheeler truck, with black wheels and bright yellow flowers for most of it. Across the trailer part, written in red flowers, was: “With Love, Local #5.”
On one side of the massive wreath and standing at around the same height were the males in my family, Kieth, Doug, Joe, Donald, another Don, and Jason, the Zachary Bronco football player who was about two years younger than I was but already much bigger. Beside them was Billy Papas, Billy Papas was beside them, looking just as big and handsome as ever. I recognized a couple of equally huge Teamsters, but I could not tell you their names; I just recognized them from years of swinging by Local #5 with my dad or Keith.
On the other side of the wreath were the female Partins. Mamma Jean was noticeably absent. She had fled Big Daddy with their five children in 1962, but Walter found them and offered a deal if they pretended to be a happy family for a few more years, at least until after Hoffa’s appeals against Big Daddy’s testimony. Bobby Kennedy bought her a big house four hours away in Houston, near a local FBI office and far enough away from Baton Rouge and New Orleans to reduce impulsive retaliation, yet close enough to still visit a couple of times a year. Keith and my dad chose to stay in Baton Rouge near Big Daddy, but my aunts chose Houston.
Cynthia and Theresa joined Aunt Janice. They were all just as tall as Janice, around 6’1″. Their collected daughters were there. Tiffany was a year older and already graduated. She was a homecoming queen just as gorgeous as Janice and Mamma Jean, and all of us shared the same dark brown eyes as my dad. The other cousins shared a mix of my eyes and Big Daddy’s, and one, Jennifer, looked so much like Jason that most people probably assumed they were brother and sister, just like if you saw Tiffany and me together you’d assume we were siblings.
Almost hidden from sight next to Doug because she was so tiny, I saw Grandma Foster. She was Big Daddy, Doug, and Joe’s mother; after Grandpappy Grady left her in the 1930’s, she met and married a man named Foster who had long since passed away and I never met, but apparently he was a good man to my grandfather and uncles. They adored their momma and at least one of them was always at her house, and Big Daddy had lived with her the first two years after he was released from prison. Everyone had tears, but she was bawling.
My dad let go of my hand and stood beside Big Daddy and bowed his head and rested against his whole body against the casket. He sobbed quietly, and you could see his shoulders rising and falling as he tried to catch his breath.
I walked over to Grandma Foster and I kneeled down beside her. Her face made a contorted view of simultaneous sadness at her loss and happiness to see me.
“Oh, Hon…” she said. “I’m so glad you came.”
She opened her arms and stepped into a hug and sobbed on my shoulder. She leaned back and looked at me with Big Daddy’s eyes, though faded from cateracts that had plagued her in her 80’s. She was 91. As a child, some of her older neighbors in Mississippi had been slaves; they were all poor like her, she said. Their husbands walked out on them, too. Bless their hearts, she implied; she wasn’t religious, but her feelings were compassionate and her words always sounded a bit like the New Testament.
Big Daddy didn’t rape that little girl, she said. All women thought he was handsome and charming, she said, and some felt badly when he didn’t want them all the time. And when Big Daddy moved to Baton Rouge to run Hoffa’s Teamsters, she said, he brought her and his little brother’s with him. He was a good boy. So was my dad. So was I. No one did anything to anybody, it was all just a misunderstanding.
She stared at me from beside Big Daddy’s casket. Tears pooled in the wrinkles around her eyes, and she stared at me, the third generation of her sons, grandsons, and great-grandchildren; one of my younger cousins from Big Daddy’s marriage after Mamma Jean had had a baby, and Grandma was recently a great-great-grandmother.
“You ain’t supposed to outlive your children,” she said between breaths.
That expended her energy and she collapsed onto my shoulder again and sobbed some more. She pulled back and rested her hands on my shoulders and stared into my eyes. Her face wore something resembling a smile. Like Big Daddy, Jason, and me, Grandma often had a subtle smile resting on her lips because of her cheek bones, not because of any mood. But when she smiled for real, her eyes became animated and lifted up the corners of her mouth. She smiled at me while tears rolled down her cheeks, as if different emotions were colliding inside of her little body and spilling over to whomever was nearby. Her blue eyes were gray with cataracts and spoke with almost 90 years of experiences; though wet with tears, they glistened with the joy of someone who found the good in every situation.
She locked her gaze on mine. Her smile slipped into the more natural smile I knew, and she said: “You a good boy.”
“You was always a good boy,” she said. “Always visitin’ your old Grandma.”
She rubbed my tricep up and down affectionately, almost like petting a dog, and her eyes would have illuminated a dark room.
“Your dad is a good boy, too, Hon. Don’t be mad at him. He had it rough growin’ up.”
She had expended all of her energy, and she collapsed back against my chest and sobbed nonstop for about a minute and a half.
Doug walked over and I glanced up at him. From my spot kneeling, he was a giant framed by the yellow 18 wheeler. I couldn’t see the red letters behind his bulk. He stuck out his right hand and said, “We’re glad you’re here, Jason.”
Grandma looked up and I gently stood up and shook Doug’s hand. It wasn’t that much bigger than mine, but while my fingers were long and knobby, his were thick meaty sausages of strength. His smile was the most Partin smile of anyone in my mind, even compared to Big Daddy’s, because it was more like a kid’s, simple and genuine and without anything hidden behind it. I smiled back and we released our handshake.
Grandma turned and hugged Doug; he didn’t kneel down, but he held her in his timber logs of arms as she sobbed into his belly.
My dad walked over and clamped his right hand on my left shoulder so hard that I was surprised; I pulled it off without thinking, keeping my thumb next to my fingers and leveraging his fingers back so there was no choice but for him to let go. He probably would have reacted to that, but Doug gently moved Grandma Foster aside and stepped forward and extended his hand to my dad.
He smiled and said, “I’m sorry for your loss, Ed.”
My dad’s right hand shot out like a rattlesnake at prey and slapped Doug’s hand away. I heard the unmistakable sound of flesh being hit with a open hand; the “smack!” was so loud that a few people startled and looked towards us.
My dad stepped forward with one foot and brought both of his hands by his hips. He flung his hands forward and put his weight behind them in what was, I noticed, a decent stance with a low center of gravity, and he bellowed: “Fuck you, Doug!”
His hands hit Doug in the chest, far above his center of gravity, sending him tumbling backwards with his arms spinning like cartwheels. Everyone in the room was watching by then, and we saw Doug flying backwards and heard thumps of his hard soled dress shoes on the wooden floor as he unsuccessfully tried to stop himself. He crashed into the Local #5 wreath hard enough to shift the easels and dislodge a few flowers that fluttered to the ground; briefly, he slightly leaned against the wreath with both arms outstretched like a movie scene invoking Christ on a cross, the red words “With Love” visible beside his right shoulder. His feet were planted, and his center of gravity was close enough over them that with a bit of weight on the wreath he’d be able to stand straight at any moment.
Billy Pappas tackled my dad, and another LSU football player and three of the huge Teamsters followed close behind, just like an they’d pounce on an opposing receiver unlucky enough to be catch the football when five of them were nearby. Like my match against Hillary and from the fight in A Boy Named Sue, the image that stuck in my mind was my dad kicking like a mule and biting like a crocodile, though he was actually just pushing and swinging without much effort. Still, it took all five of those big men to hold him down and drag him out of the funeral parlor. I don’t recall if the two FBI agents did anything remarkable.
As Billy and the others drug my dad out the funeral parlor doors, my dad bellowed exactly what was on his mind:
“Fuck US actions in Panama!”
There was no doubt about the exclamation mark: it was the last thing I heard before the doors closed. Surprising to many people but not to someone who knew the Partin males, almost everyone went back to what they were doing. A few asked who that was they drug out. When Billy and the other four men returned, all attention returned to them and everyone forgot the crazy Vietnam Vet (or whatever he was).
While everyone gathered around Billy, I walked over to Big Daddy’s casket and peered in.
His eyes were closed. He wore a tailored navy blue suit that made his physique look more like his old self than what he had become the past few years. He died when he only 66, but he had grown weak and deflated in prison and had seemed older. The suit was cut to emphasize his broad shoulders, and made him look younger in death than he had seemed in ten years. His hair had been pure gray since the late 70’s, but in his casket it was still thick and wavy like it had been in his youth and as long as I had known him.
I fingered the backwards letter C shaped scar across the back of my head mindlessly, a habit I had since I was five. My hair still had enough of a mullet to keep it hidden, but I could feel the slick hairless skin and the bumps from when sutures pulled my scalp together and the skin healed in folds. It was – and is – an eight inch scar curved to fit under the palm of my hand, but I only traced a few inches before I caught myself doing it and stopped. The pattern was familiar, which is why I think I did it when lost in memories.
I realized I was slightly nervous, like walking onto a mat when I wasn’t warmed up enough. I took a deep breath and caught a whiff of Big Daddy’s after-shave. I never knew the brand, nor had I smelled it on anyone else. Most people used common aftershave, like wrestling teams used inexpensive fungicide, but Big Daddy spent money on the best of everything.
I took a few more breaths and his after shave became less noticeable, and that’s when I focused on what was inside the casket again.
His massive hands were folded across his chest, and even in death it seemed he could reach up and whomp! the hell out of you. His makeup artist did a remarkable job of making his face seem more youthful, and his perpetual Partin grin was on his face for the rest of eternity. A white silk handkerchief with a scripted capital letter “P” poked up from his lapel pocket of his tailored blue suit.
An embroidered handkerchief was one of Big Daddy’s trademarks on the rare occasions he wore a suit and tie. A Teamster joke went: a Teamster only wears a tie on two occasions, at a trial by jury and at his funeral; but Big Daddy wasn’t a typical Teamster. He wore a suit whenever he wanted to be in charge, which was usually only when he was away from Louisiana and had to make an impression on people who didn’t already know him.
In Walter Sheridan’s book, “The Fall and Rise of Jimmy Hoffa,” Walter mentions Big Daddy telling him about his embroidered handkerchief when he first met Big Daddy at the Andrew Jackson Hotel in Nashville. Big Daddy was on the lobby pay phone, describing what one of Hoffa’s associates looked like Walter, who was staying at a hotel a few blocks down the street. Big Daddy suggested he just walk over and see for himself.
Water asked how he’d recognize my grandfather. He wrote that Big Daddy said:
“I’m pretty big and I’ve got a handkerchief in my breast pocket with a ‘P’ on it.”
Walter walked over and met Big Daddy for the first time. Ten years later, he wrote about his first impression:
“As I started back up the street and toward the corner, a big man with brown wavy hair came around the corner walking toward me. I looked at his breast pocket and there was a handkerchief with a “P” on it.”
(Walter was slightly mistaken: Big Daddy had wavy dark blonde hair that turned blonde with hints of red by the end of the summer, something people called “strawberry blonde” and said the sun and chlorine from neighborhood swimming pools bleached it. Maybe the Nashville lighting or the color of Big Daddy’s suit made his hair seem darker that day; it’s a small detail, but one that stood out to those of us who knew Big Daddy and talked about he, Doug, Keith, and a few of my cousins all had his strawberry blonde hair.)
Walter kept meticulous notes that would be used in trials against Hoffa, and at their second meeting in Walter’s hotel room a few days later, his description of Big Daddy evolved. Walter wrote:
“When Partin got to my room, he sat down on the bed and I sat at the small desk next to him. He was an even bigger man than he had appeared in our brief meeting earlier.”
It was a pattern everyone expressed in books, stories, and legends: the longer you knew my grandfather, the more he seemed bigger and in control of every situation. A funeral parlor makeup artist can be talented, but it’s hard to capture the feeling of being near my grandfather and seeing him as bigger than you imagined, or sensing yourself as smaller. No suit or handkerchief or bucket of after shave could reconstitute what he was like in life and in person.
I stared at Big Daddy in his casket like I had stared at the scoreboard only two weeks before, lost in thought and pondering the difference between what I felt at that moment and how I remembered feeling in the same spot before. In the case of the scoreboard, I was remembering fighting against being pinned only a few hours before; at the funeral, I was remembering was seeing my grandfather as I did when he was younger, getting bigger in my eyes even though he should have been getting smaller as I grew, and of the day I saw him when he first returned home from prison. Like with wrestling, there were gaps in my memory I couldn’t explain. I stared at Big Daddy’s dead face and tried to remember.
The pastor called for people to begin seating, but I lingered over Big Daddy’s casket. My mind was locked on the past, rehashing every detail I could remember. I recalled every word Lea and I talked about when we were a few years younger and I tried to describe what it was like to be near him alive. I was only only 13 when he was released from prison and moved in with Grandma Foster. I didn’t have the vocabulary to express how I felt, so I used movie scenes Lea and I had already discussed.
“It was like being in a room with the head of God from Time Bandits,” I said. “But all I could see was his face and nothing else.”
In Time Bandits, a pirate ship full of midgets had stollen a map of time from God and were using it to steal riches from kings across time. His head was pursuing them, and whenever He showed up they would try to run away but the head would get bigger and they’d be running backwards towards it, as if pulled in by a black hole. They barely escaped every time His head appeared, and in every scene the head seemed to grow bigger and God’s voice boomed louder with each passing second.
“You mean his head got bigger?” Lea asked.
“No.” I said. I fumbled for my words and said, “He stayed the same, but we got smaller.”
I paused to search for an example but didn’t have one. I said, “My uncle, Doug, was just as big as him but whenever he smiled Doug seemed as small as one of those midgets.”
“And everyone else in the room, too,” I continued. “They all got smaller and that made him seem bigger. He’d smile and say something but I couldn’t hear what he said. All I could see was his face and smile.”
“I could hear other people talking and laughing, but all I saw was his face and smile,” I repeated, as if saying it a different way would explain it better.
I hesitated and said, “That’s when they kept talking about him raping that girl. I didn’t know why they’d all laugh at that.”
Doug and my uncles were in front of Grandma Foster and laughing about a girl being raped; even if the Life magazine article were true – and I don’t know the truth – there wasn’t a hint of compassion in the room, only admiration for Big Daddy; that’s the image that stuck in my mind, worshiping his smiling face like some people idolized God or any infallible being.
“That’s horrible,” Lea said. “What did you say to them?”
I nodded my head as if to say nothing, and I said, “Nothing. I was frozen. That’s the point. I felt myself shrinking, too.”
“I could see Grandma,” I said. “She was talking to me while everyone was laughing as if she didn’t hear them.”
I laughed and said, “She kept calling me Edward. She thought I was my dad at first.”
As a kid, I looked identical to my dad when he was my age. The 1963 Life magazine feature dedicated about a third of a page to explaining that misunderstanding among many misunderstandings in Big Daddy’s history. They highlighted my entire family – all except Mamma Jean – and an entire page showed Big Daddy and his five children atop the new state capital crow’s nest, pointing toward Tiger Stadium. My dad’s 10 in that photo, and in every photo of me around that age no one can tell us apart; I was born on seven years later, and to a woman Grandma’s age that must have been a blink of her wrinkled can cataract covered eye.
“She kept correcting herself and calling me Jason,” I told Lea, who was already calling me Magic – with a c – and it seemed natural to tell her the name Grandma used.
“I think she was just overwhelmed at having Big Daddy home and all of her family around her,” I said.
Lea said that made sense.
“But it was also like she was charmed by him, too,” I said, still unsure of how to describe the first family gathering when Big Daddy returned home from prison.
In his two autobiographies and in many press releases, Hoffa focused on that rape to try and prove Big Daddy was incredulous Hoffa stuck to his story even after he was released from prison an published in 1975’s ““Hoffa: The Real Story.” That was thirteen years after Big Daddy testified against him (and only a few months before Hoffa famously vanished from the parking lot of a Detroit dinner on 30 July 1975.), so to his dying day Hoffa was emphasizing that rape and other things that were kept from the jury during his trial. They even downplayed his kidnapping two local Teamster’s kids as “a minor domestic squabble” that got out of hand. The jury was so enamored by Big Daddy that they only debated four hours before believing his word over Jimmy Hoffa’s.
The reason the jury had to trust either my grandfather or Jimmy Hoffa is because of Big Daddy’s tailored suits. In one of their later meetings, Walter wanted to put a recording device on my grandfather. It was the best technology the FBI had back then, but it wasn’t much different than what the two G-Men wore at Big Daddy’s funeral and therefore it was difficult to conceal. By the time I was in my 40’s, tiny wireless video and audio bugs were so common most people had a few; Google Glasses combined them into something the size of an eyeglass screw, and everything was recorded to your phone or Google Drive. But in 1962, that would have sounded like science fiction, and the best technology Hoover’s G-Men had were described by Walter when he describes Big Daddy’s tailored suit:
“Early the next morning Joh Cassidy met my plane and we drove in his car from Dulles to National Airport, arriving just in time to meet Partin. We then went directly to the Justice Department where Jack Miller had arranged for Al McGrath and FBI agent Bruce Fischer to meet us in my office. Fisher had special training in recording devices and had with him a small recorder, slightly longer and wider but not quite as thick as a pack of king-size cigarettes. It was the smallest workable equipment available and was designed to be either taped on the small of the back or thigh or carried in a coat or trouser pocket. Fisher tried every possible way of secreting it on Partin, but Partin was so big and filled his clothes so snugly that there was always a detectable bulge. We finally reluctantly abandoned the effort. Partin decided he would go ahead anyway to the International headquarters to see Hoffa.”
No recording was made and no juror ever actually received a bribe, so Hoffa and his attorneys suspected a mole, an insider who was feeing information to prosecutors. When Big Daddy stood up in court, the otherwise stoic Hoffa’s face sank and he went white and said, “Oh God, it’s Partin!” My grandfather told the jury Hoffa implied that he take $20,000 from the Teamster safe and give it to a juror. Hoffa denied it. Because there was no recording, the jury had to trust one man or the other; they deliberated a mere four hours before believing the handsome, smiling man in a tailored suit with an embroidered “P” on the handkerchief poking out of his front pocket more than what was considered the most famous and powerful man in America not a Kennedy.
“But there’s another Edward Grady Partin, one the jury never got to hear about,” Hoffa wrote in his final autobiography thirteen years later, still frustrated about that trial in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and how he was railroaded into prison. A fan of puns, Hoffa entitled Chapter 10, which was focused on my grandfather, as “The Chattanooga Choo-Choo.” His humor quickly dissipates, and he continued:
“This Edward Grady Partin is mentioned in criminal records from coast to coast dating from 1943, when he was convicted on a breaking and entering charge, to late 1962, when he was indicted for first-degree manslaughter. During that twenty-year period Partin had been in almost constant touch with the law. He had had a bad conduct discharge from the Marine Corps. He had been indicted for kidnapping. He had been charged with raping a young Negro girl. He had been indicted for embezzlement and for falsifying records. He had been indicted for forgery. He had been charged with conspiring with one of Fidel Castro’s generals to smuggle illicit arms into communist Cuba.”
I had read all the books about Hoffa as a kid: they were laying all over everyone’s houses. None explained how one man could charm a jury so quickly.
“Everything was in slow motion,” I told Lea when describing the day Big Daddy returned home from prison.
“It was like that scene in Star Wars,” I said. “The one where Luke was in the tree fighting Darth Vader in slow motion.”
I hesitated, reaching for the words like I’d reach for anything I could grab when outmatched in wrestling. Lea let me search quietly.
“It was like when Luke cut off his head and saw his own face,” I said. “But…”
I took a deep breath and committed the way I’d commit to a shot when I was down a point and the timer was running out. I said:
“I saw that scene in my head while I looked at Big Daddy.”
She raised one of her dark eyebrows and asked, “You saw your face in his?”
I shook my head no and said, “No. I saw the scene in my memory. He was the same.”
I took a breath and said, “I looked around and saw everyone laughing and I didn’t want to be like them.”
She nodded and hugged me tightly. “That’s what that scene was about,” she said into my ear. I was shaking. She held me until I stopped.
For the next three years whenever I visited Grandma Foster and saw Big Daddy there, Lea and I would rehash that conversation with whatever movie made the most sense. Sometimes it would be funny, and I’d imitate Obi Wan Kenobi waving his hand at Storm Troopers and controlling their minds by saying, “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for,” but instead saying, “He did not rape that young Negro girl.”
After forty years of doing the same, my memory has molded into a conglomeration of those stories, but the first two and that conversation with Lea still seem the most authentic: Time Bandits and Star Wars, and everyone growing smaller and me not wanting to be like any of them. I look back at books like Walter Sheridan’s, where they say Big Daddy seemed bigger every time, and I see their mistake; the mistake was wanting to be like him and not noticing you were getting smaller. AS Walter, an FBI agent and news journalist focused on facts rather than feelings said when he met Big Daddy again after only a few days had passed: “he was even bigger than I remembered.”
Standing above Big Daddy’s casket, I searched for that feeling of shrinking but could not find it. I saw the memory and thought maybe I felt it, but it was just the memory triggering a heightened response and not a response based on anything there. He was dead. Just like Uncle Bob, I’d never see him again. I wondered what we’d learn going through his things. Uncle Bob had been so transparent that nothing we found shook our view of him, but I suspected Big Daddy would be different. He had guns, money, and explosives hidden in the walls of all his houses, and boxes of folders and files from decades leading the Teamsters. I had helped Auntie Lo go through Uncle Bob’s things, and he had a few souvenirs from his travels to China and Japan and an ornate cedar box of gold cufflinks and Swiss watches I had never seen, but there was nothing hidden that would surprise anyone, especially the FBI. I suspected what we discovered in Big Daddy’s old boxes and in Grandma’s house would surprise everyone.
Tiffany walked over and stood beside me. She was Tiffany’s daughter, a year older than I was and always a hand-width taller. She reached around my shoulders and hugged me; we were the only two of our cousins old enough to remember details about Big Daddy from before he went to prison in 1980 and therefore saw how deflated he was by 1986. I turned and stood on my toes just a bit and hugged her. I didn’t need consoling and neither did she, but we had been friends since we were toddlers but hadn’t seen each other in almost a year, and it was good to see an old friend among our shared family. I leaned into the hug for a few seconds.
She had adored Big Daddy. One thing Life magazine got right was his love of family, especially the girls, who he dotted over and protected and who no man in Baton Rouge would dare dishonor. An entire page of the magazine was dedicated to Tiffany’s mom, Aunt Janice, when Janice was 12 years old and staring up at Big Daddy’s smiling face; there was no doubt to dozens of millions of Americans who saw that photo: Edward Grady Partin was a big, rugged man who loved his daughter more than anything in the world and she idolized him, so he must be a good man and it must be for the greater good of America if he risked her life and the lives of his children. He really was an all-American hero to most people. Now he was dead, and if the news hadn’t covered his funeral and reminded people of the past, most Americans would have forgotten he had ever lived.
Tiffany said we should sit down. I followed her, but whoever planned family seating hadn’t reserved a seat for me. Janice suggested I sit behind them in one of the rows reserved for visitors, but that seemed somehow either offensive or embarrassing. Instead, I said I’d stand, and I walked over to the two G-Men and stood by them.
From there perspective by the doors, the entire funeral parlor was in view. I watched probably two hundred people from all over Louisiana and a few from the International Brotherhood take their seats. A few moments later, the pastor stood behind an ornate podium with a massive open bible. I felt less like family and more like a benign observer, just like the Men in Black beside me.
The pastor began services, and everyone practiced their right to remain silent. I watched everything from my stance at the back of the room as if I were co-captain on a team, planning for the future.
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