Thirty Rooms To Hide In (16 page)
Read Thirty Rooms To Hide In Online
Authors: Luke Sullivan
Tags: #recovery, #alcoholism, #Rochester Minnesota, #50s, #‘60s, #the fifties, #the sixties, #rock&roll, #rock and roll, #Minnesota rock & roll, #Minnesota rock&roll, #garage bands, #45rpms, #AA, #Alcoholics Anonymous, #family history, #doctors, #religion, #addicted doctors, #drinking problem, #Hartford Institute, #family histories, #home movies, #recovery, #Memoir, #Minnesota history, #insanity, #Thirtyroomstohidein.com, #30roomstohidein.com, #Mayo Clinic, #Rochester MN
The same muse must’ve visited Chris a few weeks later because that was the summer he came up with the idea of “Poison Ivy Squirt Guns” – a horrid little invention that should only be spoken of in the classic mad-scientist cackle:
“It’s aliiiiiiive!”
To prepare Poison Ivy Squirt Gun solution, Chris donned his mother’s dishwashing gloves
(“Playtex living gloves, so thin you can pick up a dime!”)
and went into the hills behind the Millstone. There he harvested a bucket full of the shiny three-leaf plants and brought them back to his mad-scientist laboratory. Perverting a page from his Gilbert Chemistry Set, he poured rubbing alcohol into the bucket and boiled the whole mess down to a solution he hoped would be the essence of poison ivy venom. This he poured into the hole on the stock of a water pistol. The exact formula of Chris’s weapon and its effects on citizens has been lost to history and, considering the lessons of Los Alamos, perhaps that is best.
The anger that burned in every room of the Millstone in the summer of ’64 was also evident in the black turn our humor took. The Ridiculous Films developed special effects that made deaths gorier. ’64 was the year my best friend, John Maynard, and I created the “Horror Club.” At school, members of the Horror Club tried to outdo each other drawing the grossest possible torture chambers and dungeons.
(“Here’s the conveyor belt where you get chopped up and here’s where the chunks drop into the vat of boiling goat urine and rat guts.”)
Hours and hours of this grim stuff.
Grim, too, where the things we did to our G.I. Joe doll. Poor old Joe would represent some person who had offended us and for this he had to die. We found a hangin’ tree to string ‘im up and carefully measured the drop, cutting the string the exact length to stop Joe’s 10-foot fall one gory inch above ground. When Joe wasn’t “doin’ the Air Dance,” he’d find himself spread-eagle on a dartboard. Today, old Joe is in pieces somewhere in the landfill outside Rochester. But considering the risks taken in our other games, how we his tormentors survived is the mystery. Especially after we learned how to light our hands on fire.
We’d discovered the lighter fluid for Dad’s Zippo made an excellent sort of sidewalk pyrotechnic. Spray a line along the walkway, set a match to it, and you had just the kind of movie-fuse that whooshed down the mineshaft towards the villain’s dynamite. When some fluid spilled on my hands and poofed to flame along with the fuse, the blue fire surrounded my hand and burned briefly on its own fumes before becoming painful. One-sixteenth of a second after learning how to set my hand on fire I learned it could be put out by slamming my hand under an arm pit. So armed with this new knowledge, I approached poor old Mrs. Buttert with my hand on fire just to see the look on her face and was amazed to see how fast somebody that overweight could move.
With the Zippo fluid now hidden from us, we turned our scientific energies to other projects. We decided the big tree stump near the garden had to go. Heading into the garden shed for the axe, we came out with a shovel and a gallon of gas. We dug a moat around the stump, filled it with gasoline, and the job foreman struck a match.
Wait, cried the job safety manager. Let’s water down the area around the gasoline.
As we prudently doused the area with the garden hose and congratulated ourselves on our caution, we didn’t notice the gas simply spread out over the
top
of the water and now covered the entire garden. This oversight was soon brought to our attention.
The whoooosh-explosion could be heard from inside the house and when Mrs. Buttert looked out the window she saw the four of us through a wall of flame a story high, our images bending like summer taffy in its heat.
Whatever Mrs. Hartman and Jeffreeeeeeeeeeee thought of the huge plume of smoke next door is lost to history. Lost also were four pairs of eyebrows and any memory of how we walked over the lake of flame and escaped the Great Garden Explosion of 1964.
A smaller explosion took place in the basement that summer. I’d determined the batteries to our toys needed to be recharged. All that was needed was for some enterprising young scientist with buck teeth to figure out a way to pour electricity back into the batteries.
Thesis: If one were to snip off the cord of that old lamp in the basement, strip some insulation to expose the wires, plug it in and then touch the two live wires to either end of a battery, should not the empty battery simply “fill up”?
Results of experiment: When the battery exploded, the seam of its silver casing was facing away from me and so it was the wall above Dad’s workbench that was spattered with hot battery acid, not me. Had the battery’s seam been facing other way, this book might well have been titled
The Horrid Face With Buck Teeth
.
After a long day of torturing G.I. Joes, defoliating the garden, and playing with crackling workshop electricity, nothing quite hit the spot like a good cigarette. By 1964, I was in fourth grade and smoking regularly. With two friends, I formed the “LBJ Club” (for Luke, Bill and John, as well as a tip of the hat to the country’s new President). We’d steal our parents’ cigarettes and gather behind garages, in culverts or in barns to smoke.
The act of smoking, of putting flame to dried weeds and taking the toxic gasses into my pink fourth-grader’s lungs was unnatural and the first inhalations produced wet coughs forceful enough to resemble regurgitation. Of all the insane things we did at the Millstone, this one came closest to killing us.
I wonder what Mom was thinking when this shot was taken on a tense little family trip to north Minnesota in the summer of 1964.
My father’s Mayo Clinic psychiatric record, November 17, 1964
The patient Dr. C.R. Sullivan consulted me on this date regarding marital problems ... It would appear that he never drinks during the day but in the evenings when tensions rise, his drinking complicates the total situation.
By fall of ‘64, Roger’s drunkenness reached a level that even Mom, thick of skin from years of abuse, could no longer bear. The night’s booze had begun to linger on Dad’s breath when he arrived at work the next morning. His boss, Dr. Mark Coventry, weighed in expressing concern and now with pressure from two sides, Roger grudgingly agreed to see a Mayo psychiatrist. “But he is very slippery about any promise to stay with him,” warned Mom in a letter to Florida.
Two problems made this effort futile. Alcoholics are fabulous and convincing liars. And psychiatrists are not chemical dependency counselors.
Roger lied to his psychiatrist, minimized the amount he drank, and attributed the few thimblefuls he did drink to having a hysterical wife. His psychiatrist believed the lies Roger told him and so his conclusion was essentially written backwards. Where the psychiatrist wrote
But in the evenings when tensions rise, his drinking complicates the total situation.
his logic flow should have been
But his drinking in the evenings makes tensions rise and the total situation is not complicated … dude’s an alkie.
There are no records of any subsequent visits Dad made to the psychiatrist and it’s likely he broke the promise almost immediately. Given the treatment model of the times, it hardly mattered.
On Thanksgiving Day, 1964, just nine days after the psychiatrist made those notes, Roger’s drinking “complicated the situation” again; he went on a bender and we had to leave the Millstone, this time abandoning the holiday turkey on the kitchen counter. The seven of us had our Thanksgiving dinner in the restaurant of the Howard Johnson’s hotel downtown and managed to have a good time of it. “It was classic us,” remembers Chris. “We didn’t know whether to weep or burst out laughing. So we laughed.”
The Ho Jo dining room was empty except for one large nearly identical family sitting on the other side of the room. No father sat at their table either and we assumed they also were alcohol refugees, sharing what Chris described as “a sort of generic grief in our culture, but still calling it their family’s own.” There were stolen looks and the occasional eye-lock while we muddled through another broken evening telling jokes, making fun of Dad, and jabs at our own emotional itinerancy. We relished the dysfunction of it. Being different was cool.
The next day, we crept back into the Millstone and it was quiet. Mr. Hyde was gone and upstairs asleep on the bed in his clothes lay the doctor.
Mom, December 4, 1964
The weekend faces me again, like a nightmare ogre. Only the thought of Monday morning – like a carrot dangling ahead of the poor donkey – sustains me through Saturday and Sunday. Every year the pretense of gay holiday festivities is harder to assume. My poor poor helpless children . . .
* * *
The word “divorce” had been said as early as 1958.
“After Collin was born I took him to Florida to see his grandparents,” Mom remembers. “Of course, that trip sparked another one of those horrible rages. Even selling the tickets didn’t buy peace and he of course purchased them again and forced me to go.”
Sitting in an Adirondack chair on the shore of Florida’s Lake Winnimesset, she wrote Roger a letter. “It was a long letter. I suggested I would agree to a divorce if that would make him happy,” Mom recalled. But upon returning to Rochester, Roger never even mentioned the letter and, looking back now, Mom knew a divorce wasn’t ever in the cards. It wasn’t written policy but no Mayo Clinic doctor could expect to retain his job with something as unseemly as a divorce on his resume.
But now, in late 1964, Mom finally had enough. A divorce wasn’t going to happen. The psychiatrists hadn’t helped. Family friends weren’t able to help. Warnings from Dad’s boss didn’t help. And now even though it was school season and mid-winter with Christmas just around the corner, Mom realized it was time to leave Roger and move her six boys out of the Millstone. The woman who’d been shamed out of taking music lessons, who’d hidden her $5 books while her husband spent hundreds on booze, and who’d stood in a wind tunnel of verbal abuse, finally dug in her heels and said something she regrets to this day.
Myra, 2005
My decision to leave was made in an instant. It came on a night of another ceaseless, tormenting, inescapable, long-into-the-night harangue.
I had confined it to the kitchen as I often did. It was more of the same, just hours and hours of his quiet drilling voice, his vicious invective, a poisonous stream of accusations one after another. Along with half-closing my eyes, my only other defense was silence; any attempt at an answer would only inflame him.
I was standing at the sink having all this ugliness dumped on me and when he put down his reloaded glass to go for ice, I swatted it into the sink. This was the first and only violent gesture I ever made. And then in that moment I whispered through clenched teeth, “I hate you so much I could kill you.”
I might just as well have shot him. The color left his face and he leaned against the counter and slowly sank to the floor. He looked as if he he’d finally gotten what he’d been waiting for. The horror to me was not so much that I could have said such a thing, but that I could have meant it. I knew right then I had to leave.
Mom in a letter to her parents, December 7, 1964
The first decision is whether anything is to be gained by waiting another day to move out of this house. The prognosis is poor – even under the best of treatment, should he succeed in overcoming it, there are years of psychiatric care to go through – and my children haven’t that much time – nor have I. My love for him is dead – and probably irretrievable.
So what does it profit any of us to remain in our present situation? Nothing that I can see, only more damage done to the boys. My decision therefore is to leave this house as soon as possible, enroll at Winona State College and when I am qualified to teach fifth/sixth grade, move to another part of the country. That requires I have the courage to give up this house (which despite all I do dearly love), give up the life of ease I have come to enjoy, face the necessity of going to work, and hope that I have made the best decision for the future well-being of my boys. I hope I have what it takes.
Mom, December 14, 1964
[The letter bears our new address: 2551 13th Ave. N.W.]
Dear Momma and Poppa: So it is done. We moved out of the Millstone on Friday the 11th – from the house where Collin was born, where Luke has lived since he was a month old; in truth, the only home any of them but Kip and Jeff remember. But ever since our first few years there, it has not been a happy home. Perhaps my most serious mistake was in having stayed there so long.
The decision to move out was made a week ago yesterday. While his manner and attitude toward me was not markedly different, his treatment of Kip and Jeff was degenerating rapidly. Every morning they left home in a fury – and arrived back to find him lying in wait for them in the evening. He did not wait for an excuse – but launched out at them with insults the moment they walked in.
Monday night I told him that one of us had to move out. He refused to do it – in the face of every argument I could offer. Wednesday I rented the house and began the necessary payments for utilities. Thursday I arranged with Allied to move us out on Friday.
I wish I could say the boys are happy here – but they are not. They have only their clothes and one or two possessions with them, so there is a feeling of being adrift. And the move itself has been traumatic. They have been fretful and argumentative for two days – it is hard to keep them content even for a few moments at a time. But I hope this will pass.
Each of the six of us reacted differently to the new house. Much of the time it felt fun, like we were on one of our motel retreats. At least we were out of the battleground of the Millstone and our military readiness stood down to Def-Con 3. But when the novelty wore off and we looked out at the postage stamp of winter that was our back yard, we realized we weren’t vacationers but exiles. We continued to fight as much as ever but a new camaraderie developed, too. We didn’t have our big back yard with the wolfhounds pounding through the snow, we didn’t have our regular neighbors, our usual paths through the woods to our friends and our forts. It was just us now.
It might have been this feeling that led me to sit down in my room with Mom’s antique quill pen and inkpot to scribe – in “olde tyme” calligraphy – this screed.
DECLARATION OF A NEW HOME
When in the course of human events it becomes nessary [sic] to have a family split up, it does not mean we die down in work, chores, and duties. It means we should even work harder and longer. We must work and make this house as strong as it has never been before. It does not mean we argue among ourselves and say this person does your chore or the other guy takes it. It does not mean we be assigned to do all work, but each one do a little bit more and make this house a little bit better!! And if one does not believe this he is not one of this family!! –Luke Sullivan
I briefly considered charring the edges of this seminal document to give it an authentic pre-Colonial feel but opted instead for a long John Hancockian flourish at the end of my signature. I tacked my Magna Carta to our front door and was sure Mom’s reaction would be a sort of Vince Lombardi attaboy fist pump. I was surprised when she came through the door with tears in her eyes. I remember her hugging me in the little living room. I remember feeling the house, for all its deprivations, was safe.
Mom had pulled it off. When the emergency flares hadn’t worked, she’d gotten the women and children into the lifeboats and lowered us to safety. But on the very day we left the Millstone, Grandpa became ill. Within a week her brother Jimmy would be calling to say, “Perhaps it’s time you come to him, Myra.”
