Communion

by Paul Morris

Paul. The same name he gave my father and my father gave to me is handwritten on the 1910 13th Census of the United States. Born at the turn of the century in 1897, Paul Ambrose Morris, my grandfather, was the son of Henry Francis and Anna Nora.  I always admired his middle name, much cooler than Joseph, the middle name he gave Dad and then passed on to me. Joseph is a biblical name, but Ambrose is derived from Greek and Roman mythology. Ambrosia, food of the gods, but it was not only god food.  It was used by the gods to confer immortality on special mortals. Grandpa died on September 7, 1973, two months before his 76th birthday and fifteen days before I turned 22. I can barely decipher the doctor’s handwriting on his death certificate: cerebrovascular thrombosis—a stroke. It’s amazing to me that Grandpa lived as long as he did, considering he drank alcoholically and smoked for as long as I knew him.

My nickname Skip came from Grandpa Morris’s love of boats.  I think the old man’s love was infectious, because he passed it on to his son, who then passed it on to me. I used to watch the sailboats in San Diego Bay with my dad and my grandpa, and later Dad would buy his own little ski boat and call it Skipper.   To make a little extra money for his family, my dad delivered laundry to the sailors on the U.S. Navy ships anchored out in San Diego Harbor.  He would wake me at 4:30 am to go with him out to the ships.  Our first stop before the laundry was a donut shop where he bought me hot cocoa and donuts.  I still remember the easy camaraderie of the men in the donut shop--sailors, cops, and dock workers—rough men waiting for work, smoking, drinking coffee, telling jokes, teasing the waitresses.
As I write this now I want to call my father and thank him for those foggy morning water taxi rides out to the ships. I wonder now if the sailors who nodded to me as they picked up their laundry influenced my own decision to join the navy when I turned 18.  That was the only time I ever saw my father cry—when I left for navy boot camp.  Did his father cry when he joined the air force?

Of course it’s only a coincidence that Grandpa died when I was on a destroyer in the middle of the South China Sea, but I remember going to the fantail of the ship to sit and think about his death.  We were trying to outrun a storm, and the U.S.S Hull slipped up and over waves twenty feet high as I tried to conjure up images of my grandfather, a tall skeletal man with a prominent nose and a high forehead.  I once saw a picture of him from the twenties or thirties leaning against an old Ford or Chevy, his foot resting on the bumper.  He wore a fedora and looked a bit like an Irish gangster. Grandpa had not been a good father to his son, and perhaps he pampered his grandchildren to make up for it.  (My dad, another hard man, pampers his grandkids, too.) Dad still brags about the fact that every time his father lost his temper and quit or was fired from some garage, the owners would seek him out and hire him again.  He was that good a mechanic.

When I heard about my grandfather’s death, I asked the higher-ups if I could attend his funeral. My ship was participating in nuclear war exercises off the coast of Vietnam. Although by this time the South Vietnamese were fighting the war on their own, there was still a cold war to be fought.  “Your job rate is critical,” they told me. “You can’t be spared.”  So I sat on the fantail and thought about—what?—my grandfather’s love of boats? how I actually felt about his passing?  After nearly four years in the Navy I was pretty cynical about Vietnam, the so-called war on communism, my job rate, and life in general. I may have wanted to use my grandfather’s death as an excuse to go home, to get out of the navy early.  My grandfather never fought in any war that I know of, and neither did his father Henry. Dad joined the air force at the end of World War II and was stationed in Germany as a military police officer during the Berlin airlift.  Vaguely, I remember Grandpa Morris relating stories about some Civil War soldier in our ancestry.  But I’ve studied his lineage, and I can’t find a male in three generations of his family who would have been the right age and thus qualified to serve in any of America’s wars. War being one of those communion-like experiences that binds men to other men, Grandpa Morris may have wanted to be in combat, but too young for WW I and too old for WW II, he did his part for the war effort as an auto mechanic.

When Grandpa Morris retired from wrenching, Catherine, my dad’s mother, took care of him, hounding him constantly to eat something.  She worked as a cashier and sales person in May Company, an old department store in Los Angeles. “You can’t live on just beer,” she used to plead with him. Taking another swig of beer, he would growl at her to shut up and leave him alone. 

Dad and I used to visit them for monthly haircuts. Dad was a pretty good barber.  Grandpa was almost always in bed when we arrived at their cramped apartment in Pomona.  Grandma and Dad had to coax or curse the old man from his bed until eventually he emerged tall and gaunt from the bedroom wearing a faded flannel robe over baggy brown slacks, stopping at the refrigerator for his perpetually unfinished half-quart can of 102 Beer.  Now, after almost twenty years of sobriety, I realize that as a child I saw nothing strange in my grandfather’s behavior.  I’m sure too that my father saw nothing abnormal then or now about his father.  This was how the men in my father’s family behaved in the twilight years of their lives.  I accepted this, their version of reality, well into adulthood.  Several years after Grandpa Morris died Dad sent me a cardboard box full of his father’s old clothes.  Without a hint of irony, I struggled out of bed many, many mornings and put on the old man’s blue flannel bathrobe to face yet another hung-over day.
Dad always cut Grandpa’s hair first.  The old man sat like an oracle on the high stool with a white sheet draped over his shoulders.  Speaking in a low and solemn voice, the quiet hum of the electric clippers measuring his tone, he lectured my dad about how he should do his job at the prison.  Amazingly enough, my dad was tolerant of his father’s criticism.  Sure, he might tell Grandpa that he didn’t know what he was talking about, but around me he treated the old man with restraint and respect.  When it was my turn to climb up on the stool, Grandpa Morris went back to his ambrosia and Raleigh Cigarettes.  I wish I could remember more of the stories he punctuated with stained yellow fingers.  Grandpa shook so bad that a gulp of beer required both hands to bring the can to his lips. Despite what the booze was doing to him, there was still a lot of dignity in that old man.

When Dad finished my hair, Grandpa would tell Grandma to bring him the cheese and a sharp knife.  It was same ritual every time we visited them. Although Grandpa’s hands shook badly, once he laid the blade against the block of cheese he steadied himself and shaved off a wafer-thin slice.  Setting the cheddar aside, he reached for the Monterey jack and pared off another sliver.  Then Grandpa reached across the table and lifted the cheese to my open mouth.  After feeding me each piece, he pushed the big can of 102 into my face as a chaser.  I used to suck on those beer cans until my eyes were watering and the beer spilled over my cheeks onto the kitchen floor.  Grandma Morris’s kitchen was immaculate, sparkling chrome, shiny red naugahyde, black and white polished floor tiles and countertops—the whole kitchen sterile as a hospital, clean as a church.  Frantic at even the thought of a dirty floor, Grandma, who had just finished sweeping up our hair clippings, would rush to the sink for the sponge. These haircuts were my introduction to manhood, where men ate cheese and drank beer, while the women in their lives were left to clean up after them.

As cynical as that last statement sounds, I don’t resent what my father and his father taught me about being a man. Their methods of instruction might be troubling, but their fellowship was real, almost tender in its attempt to bond son and father and grandfather to tradition, a terribly flawed tradition, yes, but preferable to the God-fearing traditions preached on my mother’s side of the family. Unlike my mother’s parents, Paul Ambrose and Catherine Elizabeth never went to any church that I know of.  There were drunks and philanderers on Dad’s side of the family, but at least they weren’t fanatically pious like Helen Smith or Helen Bott, my maternal great grandmother and grandmother respectively.  Helen’s Smith’s husband was a pedophile who, according to my mother, molested her and several of her sisters.  Midwesterners transplanted in Los Angeles, California (surely America’s version of Sodom and Gomorrah), the Smiths carried their religion with them across the prairies and mountains to the Pacific Ocean, founding their own church and camp-meeting style Christianity.  When I was seven or eight years old, one of those devout Sunday school teachers at the two Helen’s church in Pomona told me I was going to hell because I couldn’t behave myself in Sunday school.  As terrible as it might be to feed a young boy beer, nobody on my Dad’s side of the family ever threatened me with hell.  If I had any religion to lose, I probably began losing it soon after I received that threat.

Of course, one could say that Grandpa Morris was in fact leading me on a path of ruin by feeding me beer.  But I would argue that the communion with my father and his father is as spiritual as anything found in a church, and right or wrong it has made me the man I am today. According to the census rolls of 1910, Great Grandpa Henry was a day laborer. Grandpa was an auto mechanic, and my dad worked as a prison guard and later became the warden of Folsom Prison.  Me, I’m a teacher.  Each generation has achieved a bit more knowledge from the proceeding generation about what it means to be decent and human and manly.  My position as the last Morris with no children makes me the last male in several generations of hard men.  I am sober, and probably much more humane and sensitive than my father, his father, or my great grandfather were.  And yet, as I’m sure many of my students would agree, some spark of their rigidity exists in me.  In the end I am the sum total of their striving and yearning, their loves and hatreds, their failures and successes.