This story paints, in very broad strokes, Patrick’s take on meeting my mom, getting married, and becoming a parent. Although Patrick titled this piece Havana, that Cuban city is referenced only in passing. His narrative is sometimes harsh, judgmental, and crude, so I withheld its publication for eight years.

I don’t believe my mom ever read Patrick’s site (she proudly loathed all things cyber-related and would ask her daughters to find and print things when a computer was absolutely required), but she would have considered some of the things he said hurtful.

As I’ve mentioned before I do not mean for this site to be a hagiography. Now that my mom is gone I’m sharing this summary, warts and all, because it’s part of who my father was.

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Back from New York, a total fracaso for earning money for my junior year, my girlfriend broke the news. She was pregnant. I was twenty-one, Donna eighteen. We went to Georgia, to get married, and our witnesses chickened out before we got to the justice of the peace. Then we decided maybe an abortion would be a good idea. By now we had spent a few weekends together, and a lifetime shared no longer looked so attractive, at least not to me.

Donna was sweet, passionate, flooded with hormones and juices. But she had a certain bovine tendency, physically and in her behavior.

I met her on a blind date. I ducked into the back seat of the Chevy coupe, and here was this blonde with blue eyes saying hello in a thick, honeyed voice which virtually warmed my loins. She wore a peasant blouse down off the shoulders, and her breasts were fleshy melons gleaming in the dome light.

In the front seat was Gloria and a guy whose name escapes me. It was the first and only time I recall seeing him. Gloria, sitting down at a table, was a raving beauty. Her face and neck and shoulders and arms were downright luscious. But when she stood up, to dance with me for the first time in the Student Union, it was as though she had had a transplant from the waist down of the hips and legs of a fat lady from the circus. It was a pity, for she had a pretty face and a sweet disposition, somehow all the more grotesque for that very reason. She should have been bitter at her bad luck. Nobody likes to be a freak.

We were on our way to a performance by Claude Rains, by then reduced to podunk tours. He read Romantic poets and set pieces from classical theatre, but everybody remembered him as the Invisible Man.

Donna’s hand was hot and sweaty in mine in the car on the way back to meet the girl’s dorm curfew. The fullness of her thigh against mine in the back seat strained my jockey shorts. Her blond hair came loose at the temples and stuck to her skin in the Florida heat.

Two weeks later, after final exams were under way, we double-dated again — Gloria was with a different guy — and saw the Don Cossacks leap across the stage while high-pitched tenors sang of wolves on the steppes. Afterwards we cruised in the back roads around Tallahassee. Donna spied some blackberries, and Sunday afternoon we set out to the woods on foot.

“So you went blackberry picking,” Mom said when I told her I had met a girl at FSU. “Is that what they call it now?” She winked at Mr. Wickline, a regular winter guest from West Virginia. Except when my brother or I hitched home for the weekend or a holiday, he occupied our bedroom, a converted garage.

“More like wild oats, if you ask me?” Wick put in. Mom’s rude humor always embarrassed me. Off-color jokes had been her system of sex education, and while I felt shame for her and plead innocence, at the same time I had very explicit fantasies about girls. Talking about it I didn’t like; daydreaming about it was a different thing altogether.

Georg was a Russian graduate student who had sometimes lent us his Chevy coupe. Georg was in math theory, a total looney. Donna collected loonies. She selected friends by their relative nuttiness. Georg wore hexagonal, rimless spectacles, magnifying his mad eyes to a terrifying size. His black shock of unkempt hair led you to believe he was a recent escapee; yet his smile resembled more the thin-lipped demented scientist in charge of the asylum.

Georg met us outside the Student Union. His arms clasped books and papers to his chest. His glasses hung low on his nose as he sucked on a hand rolled black cigarette. He held the cigarette backward, the heel of his hand cupping under his chin as he reached out with a pucker.

“I do hope you know what you’re doing.” He dropped a set of keys into my palm, having somehow fished them out of a pocket without releasing his death grip on the papers. “Be very careful. Take fifty dollars.” He pulled tens and fives from various books in which they had been serving as bookmarks.

He went his blithe way up the red brick street toward his apartment. Leaves were falling, piles swirling as he passed. He stopped and bent over, his tongue endeavoring to free the butt sticking to his lower lip. The tip touched his chin, making him skip a step off to his left. Finally it fell free. He ground it to a pulp with the sole of his shoe and moved on.

When we returned to give Georg back his car keys, we found him flung out on his back on his bed. His fly was open, his soft penis lying like a pet on his belly. [To avoid embarrassment] We took a walk through the cemetery across the street. He was having tea when we returned, and we knocked at the window until he came to himself and let us in.

Any way you look at it, Georg was a weird guy. The three of us sat at the kitchen table. He sat doubled over, his legs wrapped around each other, one elbow resting on the table, a cigarette held between his thumb and forefinger. To take a puff, he stuck out his neck and achieved the last inch to the filter by puckering out his lips. Once in a while he flung himself back in the chair, the light flashing on his thick spectacles, made an enigmatic comment on what we were telling him, only to curl up again around himself and suck at his Galoise.

Since the doctor in Cuba had sent Donna hollow-eyed out of his office, too far gone for a safe abortion, we had gradually narrowed the possibilities down to the only one available at that place and time: we would get married.

The problem was how to do it without getting kicked out of college.

We reasoned that if it were a fait complit they would have pity on us, and maybe even let us into the married student housing, World War II barracks off campus where the rent was minimal. Mostly graduate students and new faculty members lived there, but we knew at least one couple with a kid who were still undergraduates. Granted they were married when they arrived on the campus, him on the GI bill.

This time we didn’t try to rope anyone into going along as witnesses. The justice of the peace in a small Georgia town called his wife out of the kitchen to sign the certificate, and he himself signed. When we got back to Tallahassee, Georg had arranged a dinner party in the Cherokee Hotel.

My brother Jack was there with his girl friend, whom he would soon marry. David Wade, the poet with whom I had tried to land a job in Long Beach at the Lido hotel, recited his poem “Beheaded the Peacock,” and Georg made spastic toasts with Mogen David wine. The most memorable dish was the salad. Each of us was served a quarter of a head of cabbage with a red sauce reputed to be Russian. I think Donna ate shrimp cocktail as a main course.

After dinner, Donna and I returned to the basement apartment I had been until a few days ago been sharing with David Wade. We made love with the kind of abandon you can enjoy only when you know pregnancy is no longer a worry.

A few days later, I woke up slightly after dawn, and Donna was sitting up on the bed, her back against the wall. In her hand was the butcher knife from the kitchen. She didn’t look as though she would use it on me; rather it seemed as if she had been warding something off as I slept. I gently slipped the knife from her fingers and shivered at the blankness of her blue eyes.

The labor was long and terrible. I had to hold her on the bed, sometimes with the help of a nurse. Once she tried to get out the third story window, so much in pain was she.

John Patrick weighed over 12 pounds, and in the end they had to make a cut.

From then on, she noticeably came more and more to resemble her grandmother, her father’s crazy mother. Not only physically, but in her manner and gesture. It was not a pleasant thought, that the object of my passion was on her way to being a bright-eyed crone, fond of cats, putting on the flesh during a whole lifetime.

When, to top it off, she showed little interest in sex, and once left her diaphragm in for so long she became infected, the strain started to get to me.

I held down two jobs – that’s a sixteen-hour day, and played the occasional weekend gig with a trio back in Eau Gallie. Riding the straight concrete band of State 50 toward home in the middle of a Saturday night was suicidal. Only the wide verge saved my butt, although the swamps could have taken their toll.

So in fact the stage was already set for the drama about to unfold.

Next: Coop

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Source: 56havana.wpd dated 6 July 2014 in his Florida Stories folder