My mother, Barbara King, is in a hospital in San Antonio, Texas, and as I write this I have no idea if she will survive. Developments in the last two days have given us hope, where before there had been precious little. I have returned to my wife and daughter in Las Vegas. Tomorrow I shall return to my job, if it still exists.
As I sat beside her in Intensive Care, wires and tubes attached like moss on a live oak tree, I thought about her and her place in the world. She was never famous, or even really tried to be as far as I know. My father left an indelible mark on popular culture, although mostly as an often-incorrect footnote to a bigger man’s life. The phrase “Ladies and Gentlemen, Elvis has left the building” was first uttered at a December 1956 Louisiana Hayride radio show in Shreveport, Louisiana. My father, an at-the-time up-and-coming singer/songwriter, had the unenviable task of following Elvis Presley on stage. The MC made the announcement to prevent a riot.
My mother was there, as was I, apparently, for I was born on June 20 of the following year. Barbara Ruth Martin was born exactly nineteen years and one day earlier. She hated that middle name and never used it.
I’m not the best writer in the world, and God knows I’m not up to this task, but I think it’s important for people to know a few small things about this woman.
There was a girlish quality to her, and girlish from a very specific Bobby socks and letter jacket time. It became muted over the difficult years, but when she was my Mommy it was still strong and amazingly alive.
One day in second grade, as I sat on the toilet before school, she came in the bathroom and said, “How about you and I skip school and go to the park instead?” I was scandalized. I had no idea that such a thing was even possible. She convinced me, and we spent the day playing in the park. It’s still there, on the river just east of downtown Uvalde, Texas.
At the time we were living with her parents, Spike and Nina Martin. Nina is still alive, and came to Mom’s bedside this last weekend. Spike was a gifted architect, and died very young of liver disease in the late sixties. We traveled a lot back then, driving all over the West on Eisenhower’s new interstate highway system in huge Detroit cars. Mom rode in the back seat with my two sisters and I. She had just seen the movie “Goldfinger,” and to entertain us as we drove she excitedly retold the entire movie, scene by scene. She thought it was one of the best movies she’d ever seen, and as she told it she was certainly right. Was it possible for any movie ever to be better than my mother’s lively version of “Goldfinger?” Nope.
She tried to sell a car once, and made the mistake of bringing us kids along, making us promise not to talk about how much oil it burned. We were giving a test drive to a girl from the Dairy Queen and Mom had almost closed the deal when I could no longer restrain myself and pointed out the billows of smoke behind us, which I personally thought was a pretty neat feature. The sale did not go through, obviously, and she was quite upset with me.
She was very pretty when she was young, and resembled Veronica Lake. She was also divorced, and so was a “tarnished woman” in the eyes of oh-so-polite Uvalde society. Regardless of the fact that the divorce was because of my father’s bursts of drunken violence, she had to put up with an amazing amount of shit. I remember a few nasty and just-loud-enough-to-be-overheard whispers at the grocery store. The old “it’s hard to settle for hamburger when you’ve had steak” chestnut was a great favorite. She worked at the bank, and the campaign of viciousness finally culminated in the bank president’s wife getting her fired for being “too pretty.” There had been no affair, not even a hint of one. She was just perceived as a potential threat and eliminated.
To find work she had to go to San Antonio an hour-and-a-half away. She rented an apartment there, while we three kids remained in Uvalde with our grandparents. She supported herself by tending bar, and visited us on the weekends.
On one of these trips back home she met the widower father of one of my sister’s classmates, and they hit it off. His name was Dudley, and he was a great guy. We just adored him. He taught me to ride a bicycle. There was talk of a wedding.
Finally my mother could afford for us to join her in San Antonio. We lived in a government housing project between the airport and the railroad tracks, which ran right outside our window. When a freight train came through you could not turn the television up high enough to hear it. The morning after we arrived she took us to the Globe store, and allowed us to each pick out one toy. I got a bag of six-inch-tall astronaut figures.
She still worked nights, though, and we regularly spent the night at another family’s apartment in the same complex. It was one of these nights that my grandfather arrived all of a sudden to pick us up and take us back to Uvalde. Dudley had killed himself, although the girls were told he had been cleaning his gun when there was an accident. That was the standard children’s explanation at the time. I was told all of the grisley details, however, because somehow they thought I could handle it. It was the summer between my fourth and fifth grades, I believe.
Dudley had blown half his head off with a shotgun, although it apparently took a while for him to die and there was some weirdness about the landlady not letting the police in to help him.
It was two weeks before he and my mother were to be married.
We eventually moved on. Mom saved and scrimped, and we were able to buy a house of our own. My great-grandmother bought one a few doors down. Eventually Spike and Nina moved in with us.
One Halloween, our favorite holiday, Mom let me stay up late. It had been the most amazing Halloween ever, with homemade popcorn balls and lemonade, and a John Wayne movie called “The War Wagon” on after the news. When it finished, she put the girls to bed, then told me she had a surprise. There was another movie coming on, and it was the scariest movie of all time (other than “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” of course), and she was going to watch it with me.
So we turned off the lights and curled up on the couch together and watched the 1953 George Pal classic “War of the Worlds.” Good lord, was that a great movie. Being no fan of the clergy (her troubles in Uvalde had begun with gossip in church), Mom laughed like crazy when the priest got fried by the martians.
About halfway through the movie, Gene Barry and Ann Robinson had holed up in a deserted farmhouse, and it looked like they were going to escape the martian menace safely. Suddenly one of the martian cylinders smashed into the ground right beside the farmhouse, knocking it over. My mother actually screamed and jumped up into the air, landing on my lap. We started laughing hysterically. That night was probably the happiest of my entire childhood.
She went through a lot more stuff, much of it very bad, but that’s all I can stand to write. I know it’s a jumbled mess. I need to step back, my jaw is tightening again and my eyes are burning. She’s got another surgery scheduled for about half an hour from now. I’ll write more later, because there’s much more to tell, but for now I just had to let people know something about her.
I don’t know if I believe in God or not; I probably do. If you’re there, please take care of her.
Update: I just got word that she came through the surgery well, and they’re giving her a 25% chance of recovery. It had been 10%.
