Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [55]
Then came the end of the war. My mother said that when the facts of the Nazis’ atrocities against the Jewish people were revealed, my father sat and cried into the night. Even though he was Catholic, he believed himself to be partly Jewish, because of the Houdini rumor. I remember that years later, when Adolf Eichmann was found and arrested for the crime of engineering the S.S.’s death camps, my father was elated. He would sit in his large easy chair and watch the news of Eichmann’s trial every night, and he kept me by his side, with his arm draped around me. I remember him saying: “They’re going to bury that man in a grave of his own making, six million souls deep.”
With the war’s end came the end of Frank Gilmore’s parole. My father went back to his occasional petty criminal scams, and the family went back to its vagabond life. My parents and brothers would drift from state to state and town to town for almost the duration of the 1940s.
NOT LONG AGO I WAS TALKING WITH somebody about these years when my friend said: “I can’t imagine leading that sort of gypsy life for all those years. It’s heartbreaking to think of those kids living that way for so long. Also, imagine your mother, living on the road with three kids and a drunk husband, and absolutely no money. What would ten years of that life do to a woman, especially one who was raised in traditional circumstances? She must have felt like the most awful of outcasts.”
I have heard other friends say similar things over the years, and yet I have to be honest: I have always felt left out because I was not a part of this time of wandering. It was a vital passage in the family’s history. For all the ways it may have been miserable, it united my parents and brothers in a common range of experience, which I never got to share. I was born apart from that time, and in many ways it made me an outsider among my brothers.
Earlier, I asked if my family had ever been a real family. Did they share in recreational activities, did they attend church together? The answer is, no, they did not. Here are some of the types of experience that my family shared instead:
Once, when my parents were working at the shipyards in San Pedro, California, there was a local dining room that provided cheap meals for the poor and government employees. Frank would often take the family there for dinner. One night, the eatery was serving spaghetti and meatballs, and an older man, a vagrant, was making the rounds of the tables, eating the food that others left behind. When the guy got around to my brother Frankie’s plate, he snatched a meatball without asking and started to eat it. My father flipped. “You crazy son of a bitch,” he yelled. “You like spaghetti?” Frank Gilmore took his plate of spaghetti and shoved it in the man’s face. Then he grabbed the man and began using his face to mop up spaghetti on all the other nearby plates. The cooks came out from back and pulled Frank off the man, and then told him to get himself and his kids out of there and never come back. When they got home, Frank gave Bessie some money and said: “Here. Go back down there and feed the boys, but watch that Guinea son of a bitch. He loves spaghetti.”
Another time, in an Oakland hotel room, my father decided to reenact his famous pyramid of chairs, from his days as an acrobat in the circus. He pulled a dining table over to the center of the room, piled its chairs on top, plus a couple of end tables and upright ashtrays and flower stands, and then proceeded to climb his self-built tower while my brothers watched excitedly. The whole time, Bessie kept saying,