Wrestling Hillary Clinton: Part II

“Here, Edward Partin, a jailbird languishing in a Louisiana jail under indictments for such state and federal crimes as embezzlement, kidnapping, and manslaughter (and soon to be charged with perjury and assault), contacted federal authorities and told them he was willing to become, and would be useful as, an informer against Hoffa, who was then about to be tried in the Test Fleet case.

“A motive for his doing this is immediately apparent — namely, his strong desire to work his way out of jail and out of his various legal entanglements with the State and Federal Governments. And it is interesting to note that, if this was his motive, he has been uniquely successful in satisfying it. In the four years since he first volunteered to be an informer against Hoffa he has not been prosecuted on any of the serious federal charges for which he was at that time jailed, and the state charges have apparently vanished into thin air.“

Chief Justice Earl Warren in Hoffa versus The United States, 1966

Though I was only 17, I was a legal adult, just like Hillary Clinton. I couldn’t buy beer like he could, and I couldn’t vote in elections, but I could sign legally binding contracts without parental consent and be tried as an adult in a court of law since I was 16.

I was emancipated from both sides of my family the morning of 03 August 1989, the summer between my junior and senior year of high school, the same day I’d join the army’s delayed entry program.

I woke up on the couch of Ben and Todd’s house and was picked up by my girlfriend, Lea, who was 18 and had graduated from Scotlandville Magnet High School a few months before and who drover her dad’s rusty and dented work van to and from her work dancing at The Gold Club. She was a night-owl and had jokingly complained about having to wake up at 8 am to get me to court by my 9am appointment.

We pulled out of the Abrams’s house while Todd and Ben still slumbered, turned on Florida bulevard, and headed to the downtown court building of the East Baton Rouge Parish 19th Judicial District family court judge, Judge Robert “Bob” Downing. She was still half asleep and not talkative, so she blared Van Halen’s 1984 album instead.

Girls Gone Bad was still playing when she parked the van in the court parking lot. I hoped out with my backback full of evidence bulging from a manilla folder and strode inside. My mom was waiting beside the clerk’s check-in counter. She looked sad.

“Hey, Jason” she said solemnly.

“Hey, Wendy,” I replied stoically.

I’ve always called my mom by her first name, Wendy.

Wendy was born Wendy Anne Rothdram in Richmond Hill, a middle class suburb of Toronto, in 1954. In 1959, the year Coach became an alternate on the olympic wrestling team, her mom fled an abusive husband and moved in with her sister and brother in law, who had moved to Baton Rouge in the early 50’s when Uncle Bob accepted a job managing Montreal’s Bulk Stevedoring office for America, based in the port of New Orleans.

Granny got a job as a minimum wage secretary in one of the burgeoning Baton Rouge petrochemical plants north of the I-110 terminus, CoPolymer, and bought a house just off I-110 and near the Baton Rouge airport so she could commute. Wendy was a latchkey kid who met my dad, the drug dealer of Glen Oaks High School, who lived with Big Daddy’s mother, my great-Grandma Foster, a few blocks away from Granny.

Around New Years of 1971-1972, during Christmas break her junior year of high school, Wendy lost her virginity to my dad and I was conceived.

She didn’t have money for an abortion, so she accepted my dad’s proposal and they dropped out of Glen Oaks and eloped to Woodville, Mississippi, two hours away and upriver of Baton Rouge, where Big Daddy was born and were there were still people who would house Edward Partin Junior and his fiancé.

They returned as Mr. and Mrs. Edward Grady Partin and moved into one of Big Daddy’s homes, conveniently not having to change the name in Baton Rouge’s phone book. She soon had two nervous breakdowns and abandoned us both times; the second time, my dad was gone for a few weeks without telling her when she’d be back. Television showed carefree hippies her age putting flowers in rifles of soldiers and dancing happily to music in sunny California, and radios were relentlessly playing Led Zepplin’s new hit, “Going to California,” and on a whim when she was looking for work she answered a hand-written note on a coffee shops community job board asking for help paying for gas on a trip to California. She had around $40 in cash left from my dad, and she said yes and they left that day.

My dad had left Louisiana on his motorcycle and with a few friends on theirs, and met people in Miami who helped them take a boat to Kingston, Jamaica, to see a Bob Marley concert and buy narcotics in bulk to resell in Baton Rouge.

My dad had lots of Teamster contacts in Miami and the Caribbean who would help anyone named Ed Partin. One of the best examples is the then Teamster president of Puerto Rico, whose name I can’t recall but is easily searched on Wikipedia or other sites. He followed former president Frank Chavez, who, after Hoffa went to prison, publicly proclaimed, “I’m gonna fuckin’ kill Edward Partin!”

Chavez was murdered by his bodyguard almost immediately after, and his successor never uttered a negative word about the Partin family. He was in power when I was born and my dad was looking for drugs in Jamaica and Puerto Rico, which was then being bouyed by American companies to prove capitalism could compete with Castro’s Cuba for raising standards of living, and pharmaceutical companies were making drugs like prescription opioids there with massive tax breaks and loose controls that allowed a new type of drug dealer to emerge; court records of my dad’s arrest wouldn’t say where he got them, but they confiscated a few backpacks full of opioids from him and his friends when they returned.

Wendy returned on her own, but by then the former family court judge had removed me from their custody and placed me with MawMaw and PawPaw, called Mr. and Mrs. James “Ed” White in court records, PawPaw was the custodian at Glen Oaks who had picked me up as a crying infant stuck in daycare down the street from Glen Oaks after the manager called his daughter, Linda White, another junior at Glen Oaks and Wendy’s best friend in high school who was also my emergency contact phone number.

Wendy fought my dad and the Whites for custody, but she was ashamed of her age and what she had done and she taught me to call her Wendy so that when she picked me up once a month and looked for work, people would think I was her little brother. It worked, and old habits are hard to break, and I called my mother Wendy until her dying day forty years later, on 05 April 2019, coincidentally just before “The Irishman” would be released in theaters and Big Eddie Partin would haunt her from the grave.

In 1989 we walked into Judge Bob’s office with me leading the way. He greeted me by my birth name, though he had used Magik for our previous two meetings. He introduced himself to Wendy and she awkwardly mumbled a reply, not commenting on the coincidence that Judge Bob shared a name with Uncle Bob like I had when I first petitioned for emancipation.

He sat down behind his massive dark brown solid wood table, and Wendy and I sat in two chairs facing the desk. I set my backpack on the floor next to me, ready to whip out my manila folder if Wendy disputed any of the evidence Judge Bob had already seen.

She didn’t. She listened to him describe the Louisiana legal process of emancipating a minor.

“In all my years,” he said, “I’ve only seen parents request an emancipation.”

That was usually due to either an unruly teenager as a way for parents to remove financial responsibility from their actions, things like civil lawsuits from vandalism, or to be required to attend criminal court when their child was arrested.

In Lea’s case, her mom had passed away the end of her senior year, and she was emancipated at 17 in order to receive her meager savings account instead of her mostly harmless but deadbeat dad, and to apply for community college without having to track him down. She was the one who suggested I petition for emancipation after Uncle Bob died and Auntie Lo was sloshed and bawling every day and I didn’t have a place to live.

The only other emancipations Judge Bob had seen were teens in the foster system who were deemed not adoptable and kept running away from foster homes; many used emancipation to get a job or to drop out of school before 16, having paperwork to prove to sheriffs that they could, in fact, be standing around smoking cigarettes in the Little Saigon video arcade during school days.

Emancipation has serious consequences.

“Do you understand,” Judge Bob said, “That this is permanent. Jason will no longer be your responsibility, and he can do what he wishes.”

Wendy wasn’t looking at Judge Bob, she was staring down at her hands, which were clasped on her lap with the knuckles white and her forearms trembling.

“Yes,” she said. Then, almost to herself but perhaps to Judge Bob, as if to explain herself, she mumbled, “He’s just like his dad.”

That wasn’t true, and I had evidence to prove it. I brought newspaper clippings of my junior year wrestling results, a full-page, color focus on me in the Baton Rouge Advocate Sunday “Fun” section highlighting the work I did with David Copperfield’s Project Magic when I was staying with Uncle Bob in the Mary B. Jenkens cancer center of Our Lady of the Lake Hospital at the beginning of summer. I’d go upstairs and practice David’s suggested routines that helped develop hand-eye coordination during physical therapy, and gave kids with missing limbs and big scars or other differences something they could do that even the most popular kids and star athletes could not.

I made a point of calling David Copperfield “David” to Judge Bob, emphasizing how well I knew him though we had only met once, two years before, when he invited a few of us from the local magic club to join him backstage at the Centroplex during his tours after the annual specials we all knew in the 1980’s, where he made the Statue of Liberty disappear, walked through the Great Wall of China, and made a jet airplane vanish from the middle of a runway. It was because of that year’s tour that the Baton Rouge Advocate reached out to our magic club and made a special dedicated to homegrown magicians.

Though I was the focus of a four-page layout, it was obvious that the number two and three people highlighted bouyed me up. One was Dr. Steve Zuckerman, whom most kids and everyone in the magic club called Dr. Z. He was a neurologist and Baton Rouge celebrity in the spirit of Patch Adams, seeing patients while wearing a stethoscope modified to have a toilet bowl plunger on the end; he secretly kept a dob of magician’s wax inside, and he’d find someone’s card by setting the plunger over the deck and plunging the dob of wax onto the top card, which he had clandestinely slipped on top while distracting them with a joke. One of his photos was about a fourth the size of my full-page face and showed him wearing that plunger; the other was him at a national conference, holding a big glass jar filled with preservative fluid and with a human brain floating inside; he’d wiggle his hands and make the brain spin, showing a selected card tucked into the longitudinal fissure. I can’t recall the card shown in that photo, but I remember that when it was published Dr. Z used it as a printed prediction of a card he forced on a few patients who would gasp that their card was published in the newspaper the weekend before, as if Dr. Z really was a miracle worker.

Dr. Z was also a world-reknowned magician, like a lot of Baton Rouge magicians. He was a close friend of Michael Ammar, who lectured to our magic club and invited Dr. Z to help him perform walk-around, close-up magic for presidential inauguration dinners and other events usually reserved for professionals. He picked that up from Gene Anderson, a vice-president of research at the Baton Rouge DuPont plant and adjunct chemical engineering faculty at LSU, but who also invented magic effects and was famous for creating the torn and restored newspaper Doug Henning performed in his tour and on The Tonight Show with Johny Carson. Gene lectured on the magician circuit and expounded on the part-time professional, how we could do more with our passion for the craft than people who only worked for a paycheck. He had just left Louisiana for a bigger role in Texas, so his name was reduced to a generalization of the type of people who show up at magic meetings in Baton Rouge.

The other person didn’t have a photo and didn’t say much print-worthy, but he was Martin Samuels, a retired manager of DuPont who had coincidentally carpooled with Granny during the 1970’s American-called oil “crisis” that led to skyrocketing gas prices and long lines at gas stations, and catalyzed a boon in Louisiana’s offshore drilling and Baton Rouge’s refining industries. He knew Wendy and had shown her a few simple tricks when he dropped Granny off. Mr. Samuels was an empty nester who put his energy into being president of the International Brotherhood of Magicians Baton Rouge Ring #178, the Pike Burden Honorary Ring, and we held our monthly meetings and performed quarterly public shows in his synagogue, which was in a wealthy suburb that Dr. Z attended during Hanukkah for his kids’s sake. He had appointed me sergeant at arms, just like Big Daddy had been called Hoffa’s sergeant at arms by Chief Justice Warren and Hoffa himself, because he protected the door during Hoffa’s meetings with mafia heads and Teamster leaders, including Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran, who would write extensively about Big Daddy without those chapters making Martin Scorcese’s film adaption the year Wendy would pass away.

“We don’t need the father’s signature,” Judge Bob continued.

He used the indefinite article, “the” father, out of the habit judges have of speaking with detachment to minimize emotional outbreaks or paternity disputes. But no one disputed that I was my dad’s son; we had traits of Big Daddy, but had inherited Mamma Jean’s dark brown and narrow eyes, and we looked so much alike that for years Grandma Foster called me Ed whenever I walked over from Granny’s. Judge Bob, like every judge and police officer in town, knew the name Ed Partin well, whether they associated it with my dad or my grandfather.

“Because of Louisiana’s system of justice,” he said, “I can waive his attendance.”

Louisiana, named after King Louis and Queen Anna, and, perhaps because we alternated with the Spanish so often, connected by the Spanish sound for “and,” which was simply “y” but pronounced “ie,” which is something I remember Gene quipping about he didn’t know “why” they did that. We inherited their quirky pronunciations and Napoleonic legal system, the only state in all the United States that used the French based system instead of the British based system that used more predicate cases to make decisions, like the Supreme Court case Hoffa versus the United States that changed the 4th Amendment and allowed all subsequent courts to cite it when granting broad and ambiguous surveillance rights to investigators.

But I didn’t know about the Napoleonic code until Judge Bob told me. He said that based on what I showed him, he could waiver the requirement of having my dad present at our meeting.

I had shown him evidence that my dad wasn’t coming back, a series of postcards from when he had gotten out of prison a year and a half before. He swung through Baton Rouge once and bought me the jumprope and extra-large, extra-strong coil-spring handgrips I carried in my backpack, and a small pewter wizard standing beside a small library of magic books and pointing towards the stars I had seen in Cortana mall and admired, but then he drove off and I hadn’t spoken to him since. He sent postcards from different border states over the next year. Each card showed nature scene on one side, and had a remarkably long letter written in his meticulously aligned and eloquent script handwriting; though a high school dropout, he was surprisingly organized and literate, though he cursed in writing like he did in person.

Big Bend, Texas showed a sunset over the Rio Grand river and Chipas Mountains; his letter expound what an asshole Reagan was, and what bullshit the war on drugs was.

San Diego showed a beach with surfers riding the waves; he said that’s where Audie Murphy flew Big Daddy (he called his father Big Daddy, like most of us did) to meet with Nixon; he called Nixon the asshole who started the war on drugs, and said Reagan was just a puppet of the military industrial complex.

Northern California showed The Lost Coast and a Russian fort; he wrote that we once lived together peacefully, until Reagan fucked it up by taking on Gorbachev and escalated the cold war. Unsurprisingly, he called Reagan an asshole.

Washington State showed either a moose or an elk in front of the snow capped mountains of Olympic National Park; he wrote how Vancouver, Canada, was visible and smart enough to let people smoke marijuana. Regan was still an asshole.

The only postcard not ranting against Reagan was the most recent one from the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, a photo of an elk in front of the snow capped Rockies; his words somehow made anyone reading them sad, because it was obvious he was a grown man reminiscing about elk hunting with his Big Daddy when he was a kid, saying he’d be happy as a mountain man living off the land, and lamenting that he was sorry he lost our land in Arkansas after he was arrested and would try to make it up to me one day. His small but neat handwriting added that he planned on going to law school, and it was signed like all the others, “Love, Your Old Man.”

Wendy had seen those postcards while Uncle Bob lay dying. She had another small nervous breakdown – or at least that’s what I called it – and told me I’d have to leave home after graduating, even though I would only be 17 and wouldn’t have a driver’s license to get to work. She had said that she had to be on her own at 16, so I could do it, too. Like A Boy Named Sue learned, Wendy Anne Rothdram knew that being on your own at 16 year old helped you grow up tough and mean in a harsh world.

I interrupted Judge Bob to remind him of that, looking at him sitting across his desk “She” about my mom as if she weren’t sitting beside me.

“Miss Partin,” he said, somewhat cutting me off and with a tone that implied a question to her. “Would you like to say anything?”

She kept staring at her hands and said no and mumbled, again, that I was just like my dad.

“Well, then,” he said. “The petition for emancipation is granted.”

He looked at me and said, “Jason, I commend you for taking initiative.”

Perhaps as a nod to Wendy, he reminded me that I could be tried as an adult if I did commit any crimes, and that if that happened even he couldn’t help me. Or, though neither Judge Bob or I knew the statistics then, he probably knew enough anecdotal evidence about emancipated kids to warrant warning me.

In reports I’d read during my service as a Court Appointed Special Advocate in the 2000’s and 2010’s, I’d meet with family court judges in San Diego’s massive and sprawling court complex with six family court judges, and we’d cite that there were 400,000 kids officially in the American foster system, and we’d lament that an estimated two to three million kids were unofficially bouncing around homes while their families were incarcerated. If that number seems high, it’s because few people ponder that 1 out of every 120 Americans is incarcerated, so for a country of 350 Million people that’s around 3.5 million moms and dads behind bars. Sociologist like the ones who tout the Matthew Effect on social justice point out that 83% of emancipated kids end up in jail, 30% before they turn 21. Only 15% attend college, and only 3% attend graduate school; given that I finished engineering graduate school as valedictorian, that may be the most remarkable part of my story worth pondering, if only to see how we could help those millions of kids not as lucky as I was.

Of everyone in prison, people from broken homes and with mental challenges like my mom’s depression and my dad’s obvious anger and intemperance dominate more than race. In other words, white, black, brown, red or yellow means less for success than your parents and peers. San Diego’s judges would know my background, only so that we could candidly discuss how to help the three kids I represented for fourteen years. Of all success stories, the most persistent way to defeat the Matthew Effect continues to be a mentor or inspiration, usually through school and almost always through sports. I was lucky to have stumbled upon Coach at Belaire, which is why he’s such a big part in my story. But, though I would be an engineer who oversaw manufacturing lines, I would never see how to mass-produce Coach.

Judge Bob finished by saying, “I wish you well in the army.”

Wendy didn’t move or change expressions. She didn’t know I wanted to join the army, and I don’t think she heard what he said.

Judge Bob’s hand lifted a bulbous inked stamp and brought it down with a thud that left a raised seal on a piece of paper ironically longer than a legal-sized sheet but with only a single sentence in the middle that said:

“Jason Ian Partin is hereby emancipated and entitled to all the privledges thereof.”

He took a fancy fountain pen from a stand on his desk and scribbled his name and the date across a raised seal of the state of Louisiana, a large mother pelican in a nest with three baby pelicans staring up at her and the words: “Union, Justice, and Confidence.”

He slid it across the desk to me and I beamed. I had languished in the foster system for seven years, bouncing between PawPaw and MawMaw, Uncle Bob and Auntie Lo, my dad, Wendy, and a friend of Wendy’s who looked after me when she was in her bouts of depression. I had taken on the challenge of finishing my emancipation before school started so I could join the army and get a driver’s license and then focus on wrestling. I began the process as Uncle Bob lay dying, and Lea coached me on what to expect and how to prepare. It had worked, and I had the signed bigger-than-legal-sized-paper to prove it.

Judge Bob stood up and shook my hand and wished me good luck. He told Wendy he was glad to have met her and that she should be proud of her son, but respected her space and hands still clinging to each other. Her upper lip quivered and she said that she was.

We left Judge Bob’s office and walked back to the clerk’s counter together side by side. In a way, I felt like she had intended 16 years before, that she was more like a friend than a mother, and that we had simply grown tired of playing together.

As Judge Bob had suggested, I asked the clerk to file a certified copy of my emancipation paperwork for court records, which would eventually be available online, just like the paperwork from when I was first taken into custody by the state of Louisiana. I folded my copy and tucked it inside of my manila folder and put the growing packet into my backpack and walked towards to exit door to meet Lea and head towards the downtown army recruiter’s office.

Wendy, who was only 5’1″ had to look slightly up at me to get eye contact, held her watery gaze into my eyes for a moment before saying, “I love you, Jason.”

I didn’t reply, but something moved us to hug each other. I heard her sniff from beside my ear, a sound as subtle as the b in subtle. but one I’d hear as loudly as a referee’s whistle thirty years later, when she lay dying and I stood by her hospital bed in the same hospital where Uncle Bob died and I performed for Project Magic. We parted and I walked toward Lea’s van, my mind already on the future. I wouldn’t seen Wendy for a few more months.

That following Saturday, the Baton Rouge advocate would print my name in their weekly court summaries. It would say:

“Jason Ian Partin was emancipated on August 3rd”

I would cut it out and add it to my manila folder, which by then would include my army contract and a copy of my driver’s license. It would also have the copy of my 1976 custody report I which is also available online for reasons I don’t understand. It was from the same office but written by Judge JJ Lottinger, whom I recall but not well enough to describe. It tells the same story I just told you, but from a court’s detached viewpoint, though the years of appeals are lost like Big Daddy’s records from when Bobby and Hoover hid them.

In it, Judge JJ mentions “the trial judge,” who was the judge who removed me from Partin custody. Judge Pughe, a creole name pronounced like describing a bad smell, Pee-Yew, died by alleged suicide soon after, and many people in the court system assumed that Big Daddy, who was already known for kidnapping kids and murder without being able to be prosecuted because of his federal protection, had orchestrated Judge Pughe’s death.

After Hoffa vanished in 1975 and my family lost its federal protection, Judge JJ inexplicably transferred to family court from his 30 year career in legislative law, where he served under three governors who had tried to rid Louisiana of Big Daddy the same way the Kennedy’s tried to rid America of Hoffa. He barely mentioned my dad or his equally inexplicable unprosecuted drug arrests, but he oversaw Wendy’s transition out of depression. He commented on Judge Pughe’s uncanny choices that weren’t described in notes and had no predicates, which may be why he went against the traditions of Napoleonic laws and would cite predicate cases.

Even with the legal jargon, it tells the story of Wendy and me from an outsider’s perspective, which is more detailed than the once sentence Judge Bob stamped. Together, the two documents are bookends of our mere ten years as legal mother and son. When she lay dying, I’d recall Judge JJ’s version more than the one I just told you.

On 29 September 1976, Judge JJ Lottinger of East Baton Rouge Parish 19th Judicial District filed the following report for posterity to see:

This is a suit by Edward Partin, Jr., plaintiff, seeking a divorce from his wife, Wendy Rothdram Partin, defendant, after having lived separate and apart for more than one year following a judgment of separation from bed and board. Plaintiff also seeks custody of the minor child, Jason Ian Partin, and the defendant reconvened asking that she be granted the permanent care, custody and control of the minor child.

The Trial Court had previously, by ex parte order, awarded the temporary care, custody and control of the minor to Mr. and Mrs. James Ed White. Following trial on the merits, plaintiff was awarded a divorce as well as the permanent care, custody and control of the minor child, with the temporary physical custody of the minor child to remain with Mr. and Mrs. James Ed White. The defendant has appealed this judgment as it regards the custody of the child.

This couple was married when plaintiff was 17 and the defendant was 16 years of age. Nine months following the marriage, they gave birth to young Jason. While we are not concerned with the facts surrounding the separation and divorce, it was apparently one of incompatibility as defendant testified that at the age of 17 she found herself married to a man who did not love her and so she left. Her testimony was as follows:

“As I say I was emotionally upset. I was receiving little support from Edward. I was scared, very confused. I didn’t know exactly which way to turn. I felt I had no one to listen and help with the situation at hand.”

Several weeks later she returned and lived with her husband again. She found that the situation hadn’t changed, and felt she had to get away again. She heard of a man who wanted someone to share expenses on a trip to California, so she quit her job and with her last wages left with him. She testified that she had no sexual relations with this man, and plaintiff does not accuse her of such. Following this trip she returned to Baton Rouge still emotionally upset. Her husband was suing her for separation and told her he was going to take custody of Jason. She went to live with her aunt and uncle, got a full time job with Kelly Girls paying $512.00 per month.

In February, 1975, the defendant’s mother was injured in an accident and she moved in with her to care for her. In September, 1975, following the recuperation of the mother she returned to live with her aunt and uncle.

During these above periods of time, the minor child lived with Mr. and Mrs. White. The Whites came to regard Jason as their own and, although the separation judgment awarded custody to the plaintiff with reasonable visitation privileges to the defendant, the Whites decided the defendant-mother could only see the child two days a month and that she could never keep the child over night. The reason the defendant did not contest custody at the separation trial was because at the time she felt unable emotionally and financially to care for her son.

We note that the petition for separation was grounded on habitual intemperance, as well as abandonment of the husband and the minor child. There are no other grounds listed for the separation nor for custody. The petition for the separation and custody of the minor child was not contested by the defendant, and a default judgment was granted. Defendant testified in the instant proceedings that the reason she did not contest custody in the separation proceeding was that she was not financially or emotionally capable of caring for the minor, and that knowing the Whites were going to be caring for him, she knew he would be in good hands.

Though the petition for separation had as one of its allegations “habitual intemperance”, the plaintiff in the instant proceeding testified that he had never accused his wife of drinking, nor had he ever seen her drink.

The welfare of the child is the main issue that the Court is concerned with. This issue is more important than any wishes or wants the parents may have. Fulco v. Fulco, 259 La. 1122, 254 So.2d 603 (1971), rehearing denied (1971). As a general rule, and in particular where children of young age are involved, preference is given to the mother in custody cases. This preference is very simply explained, the mother is normally better able to care for the child and look after the education, rearing, and training necessary. Estes v. Estes, 261 La. 20, 258 So.2d 857 (1972), rehearing denied (1972).

No argument is made that the mother is not now morally or emotionally fit to care for the child, or that the house in which she lives is not a proper place to rear a child. In fact, the Trial Judge admitted that it was a fine home.

The Trial Judge has not favored us with written reasons for judgment, however, we must conclude from various statements by the Trial Judge that appear in the record that he could find no fault with the defendant, nor was there anything wrong with the house in which she lived. It thus becomes apparent to this Court that the Trial Judge applied the “double burden” rule to the defendant. We have already ruled that the “double burden” rule does not apply in this situation, and thus, under the established jurisprudential rules, we can see no reason why the defendant-mother should not be granted the permanent care, custody and control of the minor child with reasonable visitation privileges granted to the father.

In consideration of our above opinion, there is no need to discuss the specification of error as to the ex parte granting of custody to the Whites.

Therefore, for the above and foregoing reasons, the judgment of the Trial Court is reversed, and IT IS ORDERED, ADJUDGED AND DECREED that the defendant-appellant, Wendy Rothdram Partin, be and she is hereby granted the permanent care, custody and control of the minor, Jason Ian Partin, and IT IS FURTHER ORDERED, ADJUDGED AND DECREED that this matter be and it is hereby remanded to the Trial Court for the purpose of fixing specific visitation privileges on behalf of plaintiff-appellee Edward Partin, Jr. All costs of the appeal are to be paid by plaintiff-appellee.

Judge JJ was being kind; “nine months later” is legal code for a shotgun marriage, meaning the parents knew they were expecting and were either forced to marry or rushed the ceremony so that they could say their child was a honeymooon baby; gestation takes ten months, not nine like society continues to say, probably out of politeness to the proud fathers of some brides or the doting mothers of others; my parents had neither.

There is a mistake or exaggeration by Judge Pughe that Judge JJ probably didn’t investigate. Wendy did not live in a “fine home” like Pughe said. It was a shithole, a cockroach-infested bottom from hovel in a two-story red brick apartment complex across the busy Florida Boulevard and across from Belaire’s Little Saigon, behind a greasy stand-alone building with an all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet inside. It had no air conditioning, but Wendy kept the windows with torn screens closed to keep out the ubiquitous Louisiana mosquitos and the swarms of flies that hovered over the Chinese restaurants festering industrial trash bin that was the size of our measly living room; on a positive note, it reduced the stench of the restaurant’s oil friers that othewise made everything in our complex smell like putrid Kung Pao Chicken. Our neighbors were mostly people on some type of state subsidy, which Wendy was either ineligible for or was unaware of. But, it had the state-mandated separate bedroom for me, and was cheap enough for Wendy to pay rent despite earning only $512 a month delivering phone books and doing temporary typing jobs for the Kelly Girls job placement organization.

In hindsight, it’s easy to see why she was so focused on her new boyfriend, an engineer from Exxon who was entrepreneurial and building homes far from neighborhoods whose home values plummeted every time someone saw the crime rates coming from affordable housing in their districts. Wendy was still young when I was emancipated, only 16 years older than when she had me, and only ten years after she was a girl sobbing in the same office where I broke our contract. She was still the same gorgeous blonde my dad had lusted after, and she had a full life to live ahead of her.

Had I know then what I know now, I would have held Wendy’s hug longer, told her I loved her, too, and canceled my plans to join the army. I would have focused more on her favorite pun that explained why she left us, that she was born WAR, Wendy Anne Partin, but marring my dad WARP’ed her.

When I returned from war, she’d smile and chuckle and use that pun again, and it would become an inside joke that we would share without telling anyone our back story, a trait we had shared ever since 1979 and Big Daddy was in the news every day and about to go to prison for a generation of crimes that had been shielded from site while Jimmy Hoffa was alive. I’m sure we would have planned to watch The Irishman together, and laughed like old friends at how much they missed the mark on Big Daddy.

But, despite being an adult on paper, I was still a kid with a lot to learn, a stubborn and self-centered human who was, like Wendy said, more like my dad and Big Daddy than I knew to admit.

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