Tag Archives: Jerry

Gene Cassidy had a dart board he set up in his living room for friendly tournaments.  A few beers, darts, guy-talk.  Hard to beat for cheap recreation, and with a story of ancestors to tell and a receptive audience, it was a near-perfect venue.

One night when the Cassidy Private Tavern was keeping the two friends entertained, Gene brought up a recent problem that he and Maggie were going through.  For the second time, she had caught him with another woman.  This time, at least, he was not actually engaged in the sex act, but he and the “friend” he had met in a bookstore were going pedal-to-the-metal in that direction.

Dean was compelled to tell Gene some things that night.  He said that Gene and Maggie needed to see a therapist.  He also suggested that Gene take care of his harem-instinct needs with a vigorous fantasy life.

Or, if that was impossible, admit to himself that maybe he is not the best man for Maggie to spend the rest of her life with, given that fidelity from her partner was such an important piece for her.

This would have been solid advice originating from anyone but Dean Colfax.  The fact that there was once a couple called Dean and Maggie added a barb to the pointed remark.

Gene missed widely on his next three throws at the dartboard.  He excused himself, went to the toilet, came back refreshed and threw a bull’s-eye.

Then Gene looked at Dean and said, “You know, you ought to be a shrink.  You’d be good in that business.”

Dean smiled.  Not even Cassidy knew his secret ambition.

Another time, Gene told his friend about his father Albert’s first wife, the alcoholic Arlene.  The woman had a growing attraction to alcohol from her early 20s, when she would drink to excess three or four times a year, always with good reason:  her birthday, her sister’s birthday, New Year’s, sometimes even Thanksgiving or Christmas.

By the time she reached her early 30s, her drinking-lamp was lit every workday at 6:00 o’clock, cocktail hour.  Then 5:00.  By her mid-30s, cocktail hour began soon after waking.

Albert yelled at her and pleaded with her; he tried to enlist the older folks but none of these efforts met with success.  These well-meaning people were incapable of bringing to the problem anything more than a blend of pity, disgust and scolding.

This went on with little change for years.  Eventually, Albert persuaded Arlene to go to Alcoholics Anonymous where one of her drinking friends had started to go.  Arlene got herself dried up, got a sponsor and was managing her addiction.  But one day she got a call from her father.  She refused to tell what they talked about, “It was private, it was just private.”

That night she went out and bought a bottle of gin, the kind with the handle at the neck so it can be gripped well by someone whose hands may not have that much strength or coordination left in them.

She drank steadily over the next 24 hours.  Albert came home from his chief-mechanic job at Tuxedo Cabs in San Leandro, and found her drunk and incoherent.

He filed for divorce the next day.

And since Arlene Cassidy came to Family Court tipsy and used a child’s voice to disguise her state of semi-inebriation, the judge first admonished her, and then awarded custody of the nearly-14-year-old Jerry to Albert.

It was then the summer of 1960, and Albert with his son rented two rooms in a flat with a couple he knew, on Haight Avenue in Alameda.

When Gene took a break in the story, Dean said, “You know, she may have been molested.  Arlene, I mean.  And the dad, there was something in that conversation, that phone call that led her back to boozing.”

Gene stood poised with his dart, eyes on the target.  Then he dropped his head down and his arm went limp and he rubbed the fat of his thumb over the tip of the dart.

“I’m telling you, man.  You could be a fuckova good shrink.  Seriously.”

We could let Mr. Cassidy’s endorsement of non-Doctor Colfax stand as the definitive explanation for Arlene’s disease.  But to complete the profile, we would add the genetic factors. She’d lost both a grandfather and an aunt to alcohol addictions that could not be broken.  Arlene would follow them in death, on the floor of a motel room, bled white from an internal hemorrhage.  This was in 1964, and she was 39.  Her son Jerry would, a month later, turn 18.

Albert’s only sibling was his sister Rita, nine years younger.  He had always thought fondly of her.  Because of his many absences at the ranch and the difference in their ages, they did not have the usual opportunities to develop the inimical side of the brother-sister relationship.  So they got along pretty well in adult life.

Once Albert settled in at the flat in Alameda, he began to get weekly calls from his kid sister.  She shared his pain over the divorce.  She always asked how Jerry was doing in Alameda.

At one point of rising empathy, she asked him if there was something she could do to help out.

Yes, in fact, there was.  Albert had a group of guys he had hung with since he moved to Hayward at the end of the war.  He had not been able to go out with them since before the divorce.  No ball games or nights shooting pool or bowling. Or just getting close-to-hammered at a noisy tavern, with everyone talking above everyone else.

If Rita could be there, cook a meal for Jerry, ask about his schoolwork, make sure he comes home earlier than Albert, that would make the dad’s life one step closer to tolerable.

So it began.  Twice a month, after work, Rita would take the bus from the Transbay Terminal in San Francisco to Alameda, and spend Friday evening there till Albert got home.  Then he would give her a lift to Oakland where she lived.  This routine may have saved Albert’s sanity.

One Friday night, Albert never did leave to meet the guys.

To help keep her company, maybe watch an old movie on TV, Rita had invited her latest best-friend-from-work to hang out for the evening and then spend the night at Rita’s apartment in Oakland.

From the first five minutes that Albert spent with Mary McAllister, he knew she was going to be special for him in some way.  He would not have been able to say what.  Not necessarily a prospective mate, maybe just someone your kid sister will bring back around every few weeks, someone who happens to make you feel good.  There was something she had that he wanted to spend more time with, to get to know better.

She was droll, with a self-amused swagger.  She found him funny, he could tell by the way she laughed.  They both liked the same sweet and sour sauce on ribs from the Chinese restaurant.  They learned this quickly because Albert soon called one of his friends to tell him something had come up.  The guys would understand.  Albert went out and brought  back Chinese food and the three of them talked and talked and talked some more.

Albert had never before enjoyed talking like this with a woman.  He wanted more.

Mary, from her side, liked his funny way of telling a story and how he laughed at her remarks, real, attentive, not phony like some guys who have designs on the woman’s body while they fake interest in her ideas, her jokes.  Maybe it was the 17 years that separated them.

She thought that was a lot, almost too much.

But he was still handsome for a man in his late 30s, as lean and spry as a younger man.  She also liked seeing the way he was toward Jerry, who came out of his room to go out with his friends and, hours later, leaned in to the living room to say goodnight to the three adults listening to music and talking.

There would later come to light a darker side of Albert’s parenting that would place on Mary a burden of heartache.  But early on, it was well hidden.

Perhaps Albert looked particularly good to Mary because he did not seem afraid of a woman with a young child.

Mary McAllister had taken quite a hit from one immature, poorly-thought-out decision made when she was 19.  She thought she was in love and that she need not keep active her previous caution that had kept her alert for threats of exploitation.

It might have been weird dating a much older man before the disaster with Teddy Corbin, a pretty boy her own age, with clever hands, the one time in her life when she had dropped her prudent vigilance.

Teddy had been working in the print shop of Riverport Community College, where Mary had enrolled after high school to learn business skills.  All she knew how to do in the world of work was baby-sit and work in her parents’ company, McAllister Boat and Bait, a resort on the San Francisco Bay Delta.  They rented boats and sold tackle and bait and beer to fishermen, sun lotion and wine and picnic supplies to the boating crowd.

Mary found herself brave and proud and determined when she learned that she was pregnant one month before her wedding date.  Teddy had reassured her when he proposed that they enjoy some unprotected intimacy, because, after all, they wanted a family right away and the wedding had already been planned.

The same week Mary learned that she had a child growing in her womb, she also learned that her fiancé and three of his friends had been caught in a sting, a bust of their counterfeiting ring.  Defenseless against the copious evidence, they pleaded guilty and were incarcerated.

Mary had had no idea he was involved in a criminal enterprise, though after the arrest many little puzzle pieces all fit together.

She broke off all ties with him.  She left the apartment she had shared with her college chums, moved back into her room at McAllister Boat and Bait, and gave birth to Mikey.

Her mother took care of the little one.  Mary found work at the phone company in San Francisco.

That first night Rita introduced them in Albert’s Alameda apartment, Mary knew he was going to be special in her life.  Maybe it was that mythic love at first sight that many dream about.  But, to be ruthlessly honest, we know this is quite rare, with reality forever ready to barge back in and break up the fantasy.

Mary’s heart did open rather quickly to this older man who still had his looks in spite of the sad story of his first wife’s drinking problem.

And he was funny.  And he seemed to think she was pretty.  And he did not seem to care that she had a child and had never been married.

Teddy Corbin had steeled her against precipitous romance, though, so she took it cautiously at first.

But Albert continued to have no problem with her infant and was a decent man who was funny and fit, and that argued for taking a chance.  And she liked what he had shown her of his parenting style with Jerry.  If he can be OK entering into marriage with her baggage, then why should she balk at being stepmother to a teenager six years her junior?

Mary and Albert were married within a year.  Soon after, she conceived Gene, stopped her work with the phone company, and became the full-time mother of three boys.

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