Roy Agonistes

Conscientious parents find hope in the proverb that “train[ing] up a child in the way he should go,” hopefully guarantees, “when he is old, he will not depart from his [upbringing].” However, parenting is like the DNA lottery, nature and nurture combine in unpredictable ways. The best of intentions often go awry. So, what if a child is not brought up with direction, has no parents, or has no coherent upbringing?  In nearly every case he (she) will certainly “depart.”

The core of the word “agonistes” is the word “agon,” i.e., struggle. That sums up Roy, my mother’s brother. As I examine his tortured life I contrast it with my own, mine is such a blessed opposite. A fault line, the result of alcohol, lack of a religious center, and recklessness, runs through both my parent’s families. But to simply examine a broken life, like a poorly tended plant if not cultivated, in order to show what happens, is a waste of time. It’s obvious.

Why not gaze into the interstices, i.e., the spaces inside the context of a flawed, failed life to find whatever light there is—and Emerson said there is light everywhere; shed enough of it on what one writer called the “blackness of darkness” and we will find something fine and redeemable, in the most broken of people. I want to sell you on my Uncle Roy.

Roy grew up in the chaos of the collapsing marriage of my grandparents. The earliest family story has Roy, sitting in a highchair, screaming, “Damn it, Mama, bring my coffee lolo!” All of this as my grandmother drifted into a backdoor affair with her brother-in-law-soon-to-be-husband.  Roy, stringy and erratic, was living on coffee and pasta and certainly had found my grandpa’s cache of cheap wine. He started drinking early and was a confirmed alcoholic at 17. Newly divorced and newly married, grandma sent Roy to live with my folks in Bishop in 1944. We did not hit it off.

I cast the first stone:  a rock as big as I was, right through the windshield of the dream car he was building on the days he chose not to attend school. He grabbed me from the kitchen table where I dawdled with a cup of what Mom called Calcetose—a magic calcium mix that guaranteed big leg bones [that didn’t happen as you already know]. The cup rolled off the table as Roy took me outside and tied me to a stray chair. With a blowtorch in hand, he said, “You little $#*!— this time you won’t forget, because I’m going to burn your toes off—one at a time. You’ve thrown your last rock.” Actually he was wrong again. I perfected David’s art and brought several Goliaths down in my neighborhood over the next 10 years. It was a threat, of course. He put the torch away and the rest of several months, or even years faded and blurred into time.

I have no answers for such questions as, “Where were your parents?” or “What was Roy doing home?” And, later, “How did he get a hold of a .22-rifle and kill a dozen of pathetic, hoarding-widow Carter’s cats?”  With trembling voice, she would ask Mom, “Haaaave you seeeen any of myyyy kkkkkitties?” Now, Mom had Roy and the Mojave winds. But in those days, folks’ families lived together. Three cousins, my grandpa Frank, my Dad’s mother, and Roy, would live with us on and off over the years.  More than one person occupied a room; people “grabbed” the couch at night.

My generation has few options when age invades. Our children have grown up obsessed with privacy and delegated space. Carolyn and I never imagined us now, as we are now:  She, in another world, and I, living with a gem of a daughter, who bought a house with a parent in mind. She was either behind or ahead of her time. Beware grandchildren, the days of living together as families are coming again. The silly American obsession with the luxury of bounteous Lebensraum [living space] is about to end. 

Roy left high school, did a stint in the army, experiencing only the muck and mindlessness of a soldier’s view of Korea. He returned and, like all our extended family, migratory crows, settled in Bishop. Roy married Shirley—the wrong woman at the wrong time. Instead of collapse, like grandma’s marriage, which had begun when she was 15, Roy and Shirley fell apart—and quickly.

That night of their breakup remains clear. Roy and Ernie [another orphan Mom and Mary Jane had brought into the family circle], dressed, strangely in white shirts and pants—Roy with a GI L-shaped flashlight on his belt. They were taking the lusty, listless Shirley Hall back to Del Mar. “I’m afraid I might kill her,” he told Dad. “Take Ernie, Roy, and come back to work in a couple of days. You and Frank can live with us in Larry’s bedroom.” Family first—again. I took a daybed, fell asleep, listening to my grandpa’s wine-induced heavy snoring—and thought nothing of it. Mom? Now, Roy and grandpa—and the Mojave winds.

Two memories float through my mind … one riding with Roy on the liquid fuel route and one of those “street fight” lessons in the living room.

Plagued with itchy measles and quarantined from school, I “took the route” with Roy, as we used to say. He sang something about the “Cliffs of Dover,” perhaps a WW11 song, alive, again, with song and jokes—and terrible [but often funny] language. “Watch this &%$#! dog when I fill this tank. This #$%& will come full tilt around the corner to attack my rear. That’s when I turn his face into a snowman with this propane,” which is what propane does:  Freezes then melts and leaves at least second-degree burns. GRRRRRRRRRR. Spray—a full nozzle. YYYYYYYYYREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE.

“See what I mean? That *%$#@! never learns. Remember that, Larry. Don’t be like me and never learn a damn thing. I run in circles, drunk.”

Lesson learned.

Nights after work, restless Roy would tease me and Gene, my brother. He often said words he told us not to tell Mom. Gene committed the unpardonable. He squealed. The next night, wrestling and joking with Roy, I told Roy that Gene had “squealed.” He grabbed him, pinned him. “You’re damn lucky I don’t have my switch blade. Instead, I’m going to give you the ‘mark of the squealer,’ a curse on you in the whole neighborhood." Gene screamed a healthy, sincere scream as Roy drew a jagged line from the corner of his mouth to his cheek. We both imagined blood. For some reason he simply walked around the house crying [he was 5-years-old] until the “cavalry arrived.” Mom gave him a hug and so did Roy. Street fight and a valuable lesson [?] learned. 

Roy and Frank followed us to Escondido and became part of the destruction and reconstruction of “Thompsonville.” Many a day while sitting in the store, he would talk and joke. No one was even close to Roy’s wit. Now my son, Marcus, carries the good-wit DNA, without the bad language. He’s brilliant and, like Roy, never forgets, so when he sees an opening, he will take it.

Sunday evening my brother, Gene, misdialed my Marcus, thinking he was talking to his Mark. Instead of setting him straight, Marc rode the conversation, and Gene, seamlessly playing the other Mark. I won’t elaborate, but my Marcus-Roy has fooled Gene, taunted him every bit as much as Roy ever did. A kinder, gentler, Christ-centered “Roy” lives on in the quirky humor. Ask Gene.

In Escondido, Roy even sobered up, took a job driving a cement truck, paid bills that people had thrown in the "dead bill bin"—literally. In fact, they thought Roy was dead.

But how long can an alcoholic work around alcohol? It would be like putting the fat boy in Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. The laughing stopped; the eyes became bleary. Cheap wine [40 cents a pint]. He yelled at Mom while Dad was looking, restlessly for “another endeavor” in Ventura, California. Now a senior, and now the “Dad” again, I took over. Roy slumped over the kitchen table, then, from nowhere, he had a knife, a Mexican-made knife. Laughing in a drunken stupor, he threw the knife at me—which stuck in the doorway.

My Goliath friend, Jim Berguam, loaded Roy in the car, and took him back to an all but abandoned trailer on grandma’s property, where her second husband lived even though she had died four years earlier. “I’ll be all right,” he said. “The rats are as big as beavers. I’ll have to shoot the *&%#-*%&$! with my .22 rifle.”

A few years later, Roy died of a heart attack while working as a cook on a large fishing boat off the coast of Washington, where he is now buried in a pauper’s grave.

Now in my late Winter Years, I see Roy clearly and graciously. In fact, he was often a point of reference for “funny.” My folks remembered other Roy antics and we reveled on summer evenings, talking about those Roy-Frank years in Thompsonville.

But who are we to judge? “For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged.” Looking for the best deal in town, take this one. It’s the only deal in town in these uncertain times. “We can only forgive and repent,” said the scholar-great, Hugh Nibley. And for me, that sums it up.

Roy struggled, “lost,” then, in the end, will win.