“For a story depicting such a seemingly ordinary life, Leatherman’s novel packs a punch. The carousel of themes-abandonment, abuse, adultery, death, depression-keeps the plot lively ... A realistic, captivating portrayal of a man’s life in full.” Kirkus Review
“Mary Kay Leatherman is truly a gifted writer. Vanity Insanity is a deep, fabulous and fun read. I really could not put it down. Readers will recognize themselves in the various relationships and situations in this story about growing up. Mary Kay powerfully deals with life’s issues. At the same time, she shows the impact that faith and spirituality have on one’s growth and personal development, ultimately, bringing freedom and peace to a person. Enjoy—as much as I did!” Father Tom Fangman, pastor of Sacred Heart Church and CEO of CUES in Omaha, Nebraska
This book is a work of fiction. Names, character, places, and incidents either are product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2013 Blue Wave Press
All rights reserved.
American Pie
Words and Music by Don McLean
Copyright © 1971, 1972 BENNY BIRD CO., INC.
Copyright Renewed
All Rights Controlled and Administered by SONGS OF UNIVERSAL, INC.
All Rights Reserved Used by Permission
Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard Corporation
You’re So Vain
Words and Music by Carly Simon
Copyright ©1972 C’est Music
Copyright Renewed
All Rights Administered by BMG Rights Management (US) LLC
All Rights Reserved Used by Permission
Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard Corporation
Let Your Soul Be Your Pilot
Music and Lyrics by Sting
Copyright © 1996 STEERPIKE LTD.
Administered by EMI MUSIC PUBLISHING LIMITED
All Rights Reserved International Copyright Secured Used by Permission
Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard Corporation
Dancing Queen
Words and Music by Benny Andersson, Bjorn Ulvaeus and Stig Anderson
Copyright © 1977 UNIVERSAL/UNION SONGS MUSIKFORLAG AB
Copyright Renewed
All Rights in the United States and Canada Controlled and Administered by UNIVERSAL - SONGS OF POLYGRAM INTERNATIONAL, INC. and EMI GROVE
The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America by Bill Bryson
Copyright © 1989
All Rights Reserved by HarperCollins Publishers
Grateful acknowledgement is given to the following for permission
to reprint the photos in the insert:
Courtesy of Saint Pius Parish and School: here and here, all photos.
© Photographer Bob Dunham: here, top.
© Union Pacific Railroad Museum: here, bottom.
With permission, Warren Buffett: here, top.
With permission, Brookhill Country Club: here, top.
Courtesy of Marian High School: here, bottom left.
Courtesy of M’s Pub: here, both photos.
Courtesy of Sacred Heart Church: here.
Courtesy of NU Media Relations: here, both photos.
Printed by permission of the Norman Rockwell Family Agency: here.
Copyright © The Norman Rockwell Family Entities.
© Curtis Licensing: here. For all non-book uses © SEPS. All Rights Reserved.
© Photographer Jeff Bundy, Omaha World-Herald: here.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, character, places, and incidents either are product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © Blue Wave Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1489560734
ISBN 13: 9781489560735
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013910110
CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
North Charleston, South Carolina
Lovingly dedicated to my husband Michael,
the man who was just
crazy enough
to believe in me and this story
A long, long time ago
I can still remember how that music used to make me smile.
Don McLean, “American Pie”
Vanity of vanities, vanity of vanities! All things are vanity.
Ecclesiastes 1:2
Mad Hatter: Have I gone mad?
Alice: You’re entirely bonkers. But I’ll tell you a secret.
All the best people are.
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland
CONTENTS
PROLOGUE Baby Bookmarks
PART I Hey, Good-Lookin’ 1969 to 1980
PART II Let’s Go Crazy 1981 to 1994
PART III The Day the Music Died 1995 to 1997
EPILOGUE Faith of Our Fathers
PROLOGUE
Baby Bookmarks
Little bookmarks.
That’s what my mom calls babies. Their debuts into this world are marking points that she refers to as reminders of specific times. If she’s in the middle of a story and needs a time reference of an event, she just thinks of her baby bookmarks.
“When did the Shanahans add a sunroom to their house?”
She needs a baby bookmark.
“I think it was right after the bus accident. Remember when Al, the bus driver, drove into their house on Maple Crest Circle? Evidently, he lost his footing or something. And the Shanahans’ house was right at the bottom of the cul-de-sac, so he crashed into the south side of the house. Wait, the bus crash was the year that Faith Webber was born. I remember because we were all standing out in the front yard after the accident, seeing if Al and the kids were OK before checking the damage done to the Shanahan home, and I can remember Ruth Webber waddling out to the scene. It had to be one hundred degrees. That poor thing looked so miserable. She was pregnant with Faith, and Faith was born a year before you, so that must have been September of 1960. OK, so the Shanahans remodeled in 1960.”
Faith marks the events for that year.
The baby bookmarks mark all sorts of things. My neighbor Lucy Mangiamelli is the bookmark for the year of Kennedy’s assassination. Elaine, Stinky Morrow’s little sister, is a bookmark for the blizzard of ’75. Mrs. Morrow almost didn’t make it to the hospital.
I, Benjamin Howard Keller, have the dubious honor of being the bookmark that no one talks about. We all know it, though. My birth on October 7, 1961, in Omaha, Nebraska, marks the year that my father walked out on my mother, my two sisters, and me. I will forever be the neat little marker of the old man’s amazing disappearing act. He left three weeks before his only son was born, as though he didn’t even want to meet me, let alone raise me. I’ve worked that one out, though. A man who walks out on a woman and three kids without looking back—I don’t want to meet him either.
Mostly, babies mark less personal or noteworthy events—like, Lovey Webber was born the year two local schools merged, or my best buddy A.C. was born the year Bob Devaney took the head-coaching position for the Nebraska Cornhuskers, not personal but important to me. At the time, the event was big news. Now it’s just conversation filler. For my mom, a baby bookmark is there to help her remember what year it happened. The baby helps her find her place in time, sort of like an old song. The order of it all adds a secure feeling that temporarily lessens the pain of the death of a friend or the rejection of a husband or father. The order is functional.
Maybe that’s why my mom can never remember the year that my business burned down. No baby was born that year. At least not in o
ur little world. Nineteen ninety-seven was just a blur to her. “How long has it been since the fire? It can’t be that long ago. Are you sure?”
No marker.
Most of us lost our place that year. So much more than the fire of my business burns in our memories. Great loss ravaged that fall. For me, 1997 brought about a challenge to faith, a questioning of dreams, and an incredible suffering, all for which I had never asked.
Years have a way of building up, quietly assembling upon each other. People, some random, some purposeful, have lined those years for so long, all the while demanding that we assign them as one or the other.
That’s easy.
We just hold on to those who leave their mark.
PART I
Hey, Good-Lookin’
1969 to 1980
If boyhood and youth are but vanity, must
it not be our ambition to become men?
Vincent Van Gogh
You’re so vain, I bet you think this song is about you.
Carly Simon, “You’re So Vain”
1
The Creek
1976
We weren’t supposed to be anywhere near the creek, but we were.
I looked down at Hope Webber, who was standing at the creek’s edge, her head hanging low. I called to her as I ran down the hill from the Wicker house, “Hope, we’ve been looking everywhere for you. Everyone is worried sick.”
When Hope slowly looked up at me on that awful day, I could see dirty tears trailing down her cheeks like several sad little creeks. The slightly overweight fourteen-year-old with the dark hair and blue, almond eyes cried, “Ben, I can’t find Grandma. What if she got hurt? What if I never find Grandma?” She sniffed loudly and coughed. The stain of those dirty tears spilled over the front of her favorite David Cassidy T-shirt. My voice shook as I caught my breath and coaxed Hope to me, away from the nefarious creek. “Hope, we need to get out of here…”
The creek was a perfect place to play as a kid.
Long before the tragedy at the creek, before the adults of our world deemed it evil, my buddies and I wore a path between the Morrow and Mangiamelli houses that took us to the best area by the creek. I can’t begin to count the hours we spent down along its winding bed, finding bugs, building forts, fighting off imaginary bad guys, and getting dirty.
My neighborhood was situated along a bank that hosted the Papillion Creek, quietly inching its way around our city, hiding down in low, tree-covered areas, connecting one part of the city to the other side. People pronounced the word “Papillion” in many different ways. We just called it the creek.
Seven little houses laced our curvy little cul-de-sac, each one a carbon copy of the others except for their tired colors—pink, beige, white, and goldenrod—and the backyards of each house on Maple Crest Circle sloped gradually down toward the creek, making mowing a nightmare. At the base of those backyard hills grew amazingly tall, spindly trees that reached to the sky in great clumps that we called a forest. In dry times, the creek was shallow and no wider than five feet, and in flooding periods, it was deep, wide, and dangerous. The trees that congregated all along the creek like worshipers at a church service created the best place in the world for a kid to hide and pretend to be anywhere other than Omaha, Nebraska, in the seventies.
As I stumbled over fallen branches, I yelled, “We found Grandma, Hope. She’s fine. She was napping on the Shanahans’ driveway the whole afternoon. She’s never been happier. Let’s head home.”
Grandma, an old, overweight Basset hound, had been the Mangiamelli family pet for as long as I could remember. Lucy Mangiamelli had named the pup “Grandma” because, well, everyone loves a grandma. The neighborhood kids had taken her into their hearts and looked out for her as their own. If a neighbor spotted Grandma roaming on a nearby block, he would open his car door, let her crawl in, and drive her home. “I found Grandma a few blocks over, sniffin’ in somebody’s rosebushes.” That’s just how it was. “Grandma chewed up another shoe” or “Put Grandma outside. She stinks!” Mrs. Mangiamelli would scream from her kitchen window.
Hope ran toward me and hugged me very tightly, wiping her dirty tears on my shoulder. “Ben, thank you. Grandma is alive! Grandma is alive!”
Hope and I had grown up together in the Omaha Maple Crest neighborhood. Until my mother explained to me that Hope had Down syndrome and what that meant, I had always assumed that Hope was just a person who was born with a more forgiving nature than most.
“You’re my angel, Ben.” Hope patted my back again and again. “What would I do without you? Grandma is alive!”
I felt a little awkward as Hope praised me, hugging me, patting and patting. The dog had never been lost. I had done nothing to save the day, and as Hope patted, I knew that over a dozen people were looking throughout the neighborhood for her and had been for the past half hour. I had done nothing but sneak down to the forbidden creek to see if Hope might have wandered there. Hope kept patting.
A nauseating hum startled us both. Hope’s head slowly turned toward the sound of a radio coming from across the creek, barely twenty feet from where we stood. A very fuzzy and almost inaudible beat buzzed as Hope hugged me. With the sun darting in my eyes, I could vaguely make out the shape of a long car hidden among trees on the other side of the creek. I finally deciphered the ominous tune as “I’m Your Boogie Man” by KC and the Sunshine Band coming from the car, the bass of the music thumping against my heart. I’ve hated that song ever since that day.
“Hope, we need to go back. Let’s go see Grandma. She’ll be excited to see you.” I wanted to sound more grown-up than my fourteen years, though the truth was that I was very scared to be standing by the creek bed, and my urgency to see Grandma was more of a safety precaution than a canine homecoming—and quite honestly an attempt to break the embrace that I knew was innocent but kind of awkward for this fourteen-year-old dog hero. We needed to get back.
We weren’t supposed to be anywhere near the creek, but we were.
2
Feast of the Immaculate Conception
Monday, December 8
1969
Several years before Hope and Grandma and the day by the creek, one frustrated nun struggled through a morning at Saint Pius X Church in the center of Omaha. The years leading up to the day by the creek and the years that followed shaped my life. Grandma and Sister Mary Matthew are linked only by my memories, but I assure you, they are linked.
Had it not been for the nun’s insane organizational obsession, her intense devotion to the Virgin Mary, and her strong aversion to giggling little girls, this page might have been blank. Thank you, Sister Mary Matthew.
On December 8, 1969, the eight grades of Saint Pius X Grade School of the Catholic Archdiocese of Omaha held a procession for the Feast of the Immaculate Conception. Sister Mary Matthew’s objective was to have each girl in the entire school with the name Mary, first through eighth grade, lead the procession with Father Spokinski at the all-school Mass celebrating the Feast of the Holy Day. On that day, all Marys,Mary-Combos, Maries, Marias, Mauras, and even Maureens were encouraged to open the service. First, middle, and Confirmation names were all included. In Catholic schools in the sixties, few girls did not fit this prototype.
I do not know, nor have I ever met, Sister Mary Matthew. I wasn’t even there on that cold Monday in December; I attended Franklin Public School at the time. I do know, however, what happened that day in great, though disputable, detail since I’ve heard three different versions from three very good friends. I can clearly see the procession and the tall, rickety nun hovering over the girls and lining up the Marys all according to height, as I’m sure she assumed Mary herself would want. I’m told the Kelly girls shone that day as each was included: Mary Ann, Mary Ellen, and Mary Catherine. The shortest girls entered first, with the tallest of the Marys at the end, right in front of Father Spokinski and his two freckle-faced altar boys. In my retelling, I added the freckles and the tall, rickety nun for effect.
The whole thing sounded so innocent to me, at first.
So most of what I tell is unconfirmed, but what I do know for a fact is that a first-grade girl by the name of Theresa Marie O’Brien stood quietly in front of Martha Mary Monahan, another first grader whom she had never met. The two first graders had no idea at that time that the fact that they had grown up to such a height at that particular moment, dictating their positions in that line in this holiest of processions, would change the course of their lives forever. What was to be an amazing opportunity for Theresa Marie and Martha Mary, two of the three authors of the versions of the events that day, was instead a source of frustration for the orderly Sister Mary Matthew.
In the “feast line” stood the plethora of Mary-types, quietly facing the altar as the older students, posing as song leaders, began the opening hymn “Immaculate Mary.”
Immaculate Mary, your praises we sing.
You reign now in splendor with Jesus our King.
Ave, Ave, Ave, Maria! Ave, Ave, Maria!
The really cool part of being a Catholic song leader during the sixties or early seventies was the added bonus of playing light yet silly instruments as a pleasant backdrop for the vocal performers. Guitars, triangles, blocks, castanets, recorders, and maracas were replaced in the late seventies by a brief stint of the ever-overrated liturgical dance, featuring the “older girls” in dance slippers and graduation gowns flouncing down the aisle, leading Father Spokinski to the altar like feathery, floating flowers. The Catholic Church is not without its own passing and regrettable fads.
According to some of the versions of the story, Faith Webber was clanging her triangle, leading the “masses.” I enjoyed those versions, since I like to think of Faith Webber, Hope’s older sister, doing anything. I can only imagine her standing out with perhaps a special lighting around her that set her apart in the way she always appeared to me: beautiful, glowing, and ever elusive. Faith’s long, smooth, dark hair lay across her shoulders as she perfectly and seriously tapped her triangle to the beat of Sister Alleluia’s opening song. More on Faith later.
Vanity Insanity Page 1
