Thirty Rooms
To Hide In
Insanity, Addiction, and Rock ‘n’ Roll in the Shadow of the Mayo Clinic
Luke Longstreet Sullivan
Thirty Rooms To Hide In
Insanity, Addiction, and Rock ‘n’ Roll in the Shadow of the Mayo Clinic
Copyright © 2011 by Luke Longstreet Sullivan.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission from the author.
ISBN (eBook Edition): 978-0-615-48150-0
eBook published by
MC Writing
GONE
A poem by my mother, 1981
You disappeared before they were born,
all of them –
except maybe the first
when you weren’t quite gone
just beginning to go –
not over a cliff
with punctilious grace
leaving me most of a body to mourn;
not with somebody’s gaudy wife
a flick of rue on your face
a farewell flourish on the MG’s horn
and a monthly check
to prove your going was done.
No, you just disappeared
in bits,
like grain from a sack invaded by rats
a farmer finds
empty,
still standing in the corner.
FUNERAL
Rochester, Minnesota, is a privileged white enclave of conservative Republicans nestled in the south of a Democratic state. It is the little town where kings come to fight cancer and Presidents go for surgery. When Kennedy’s best and brightest call for doctors, the phone rings here in Rochester’s centerpiece, the gray marble slab of medicine that is the Mayo Clinic.
A few blocks away from the Clinic on Fourth Street is the First Methodist Church. In the chapel this hot July day, dressed in black, sit many of its good doctors, all friends of the 45-year-old surgeon who lies in the oak and brass coffin up near the altar.
We six surviving sons of the doctor have been seated in the pew second from front. The people sitting in the row behind us can see our shoulders heaving in sobs.
Er, no ... wait a minute.
They see our eyes are red and hear our sniffling, yes, but at least one of the good Christians behind us has figured out that our watery eyes, runny noses, and shaking shoulders are actually the result of an attack of wild but stifled laughter. Something hilarious has just happened in our pew but from the undisturbed faces of most of the congregation, whatever it is that’s so funny remains our secret.
Perhaps out of embarrassment for us, the good Christians turn away and look instead to the end of the pew where our mother sits. She is gazing up through her black mantilla at the sunrays pouring through the high stained-glass windows. Her lips are moving. Perhaps they think she is praying but she is not.
* * *
An hour earlier, my family was in a two-car motorcade driving through the July heat toward the church.
In front is the Towey Funeral Home’s limousine, ferrying my mother and the two youngest; me, 11, and 9-year-old Collin; we are both wearing suits and ties mothballed since our last fidgety visit to church years ago. Holding Mom’s hand is her brother Jimmy, in from Philadelphia to help settle affairs. The car is appropriately solemn.
Thirty yards behind the limo, in the family car, are my four oldest brothers.
The radio is up loud playing the Beatles #1 song, Paperback Writer, and all four boys are laughing their asses off.
Driving is the oldest, Kip, still sporting a California tan from his freshman year at Pomona College. Next to him is Jeff, a pale Minnesota 17 and in the back, the two middle brothers, Chris and Dan; 14 and 13. All four are laughing so hard there is talk of slowing the car down so their raucousness won’t be detectable from the limo ahead.
The laughing had started with a joke from Kip, the 1965 State High School debate champion. He’d wondered whether, after our father’s eulogy, the minister might allow “fifteen minutes for rebuttal.”
Gales of laughter. Slapping of vinyl car seats. Wiping of eyes.
“We really ought to pull back,” Jeff cautions.
Kip says, “Here’s the cool part. Turn it up.” And the elder two in front sing along with the Beatles in voices practiced from four years of performing in their own rock-and-roll band, The Pagans.
“It’s a dirty story of a dirty man, and his clinging wife doesn’t understand.”
The car drops back 40 yards. The storm of laughter passes. Deep breaths taken.
A pack of Philip Morris Multifilter cigarettes is passed around.
They ride in silence for a mile. Chris turns to Dan beside him in the back seat and inquires, “So, does one hold applause until after the preacher guy or … what?”
He’s teed up another joke to get the storm going again but the levity is short-circuited as their car pulls up in front of the church.
Stepping out on the passenger side, Jeff chirps, “Good turnout,” as if the crowd gathering here under the noon sun is a party or celebration. The tears of laughter come again.
But now, as they approach an observant congregation, the four older brothers realize the need for decorum. They discover casting their eyes downward not only looks appropriately mournful, it keeps them from locking eyes with each other. Even a glance will set off the reflex, renew the conspiracy, the competition to assess the comic potential of the serious moment, to ferret the absurdity, to nail the inappropriate remark that pops Rochester’s conservative adult bubble. Going through the church doors Jeff silently muses, “It’d be nice if they had a TV,” and files the wisecrack for use later.
Finally all six brothers are together again, seated in the sanctuary a row back from the front pew, and the service begins. With eyes safely locked now on hymnbooks shelved behind the first pew, the conspirators relax, relieved to see we can finally exhale smoothly without the rippling diaphragms of remembered laughter. The attack passes as the minister guy drones on – somethin’ about lambs of Jesus, somethin’ about Trumpet of Gabriel.
Half-listening, Dan looks down at the fold-away kneeling pad and whispers, “Hey, check it out. A footstool.” Folding it down, perhaps a little too quickly, the squeak of the hinge is loud in the quiet heat of the church.
To the six boys the sound is a set-up for a hundred unsaid jokes.
“Mind if I put the ol’ dogs up for a spell?”
“Nice funeral. We should do this more often.”
And when the laughter threatens to boil over, we realize it will be our unmasking. The good Christians will know they have infidels in their midst. Atheists! Even the name of that rock-and-roll band: The Pagans! And them, laughing at their own father’s funeral.
But the dam holds. Maybe one or two of the congregation wonder what just happened on the family row up front, but most do not. To our relief, our mother doesn’t notice either. She is looking fixedly up at the sunrays which angle down through the stained glass windows that rise nearly four stories.
The ceremony ends. As the organist plays Nearer My God To Thee, pallbearers begin to push the coffin containing the body of Dr. Charles Roger Sullivan slowly down the aisle.
As the coffin rolls past, each one of us realize as if for the first time, “My father is in that box. He’s dead. He’s never coming back.” And our tears of laughter are replaced with the other kind.
The Millstone in 1928 and 2008.
THE MILLSTONE
Rochester, Minnesota, is a rich little town. The Clinic had been producing buckets of cash since the 1920s – and let it be noted here, 1920’s money was real money. The large ho
uses that began springing up around the Clinic were baronial estates built in a time when “cutting corners” meant cutting actual corners, like the edges of magnificent scrolled woodwork surrounding a home’s five or six fireplaces. Many of these estates went up on the hills southwest of the Mayo Clinic, an area nicknamed “Pill Hill.” Our home, however, was four miles out in the country.
You couldn’t just pull into the driveway of the home my father purchased in 1954. That would be the cymbal crash without the drum roll. No, first you had to drive up into the hills and after turning off onto successively thinner and thinner roads, you came at last down a lane shadowed by 50-year-old balsam fir trees which stood like bodyguards obstructing your view of the house until the last possible second.
And then … then when you turned into the driveway between the giant stone gate posts, you’d had the proper warm-up for your first viewing of the great house we called the Millstone. This would be the part where the opening horns of Tchaikovsky’s Capriccio Italiane would begin and the camera would crane up and pull wide to show the four acres of Minnesota summer that were the sovereign kingdom of the owners.
It wasn’t the size of the Millstone and its grounds that made you want the house; it was the sense of stability to the thing. It had been there a quarter-century by the time my father pulled into the driveway and the ivy already clung to its sides; the red slate roof was veteran to a thousand Minnesota snowstorms, and the windows on the third floor looked down on you and said no matter how long you lived, the house would outlast you. Even as an owner, you only visited.
Half-timber English Tudor in style, with a mix of brick, stucco and wooden accents, it featured a circular tower topped with an imperial cone, giving an overall effect of a castle masquerading as a family home.
My father came up with the name Millstone in a sour mood as he signed the first of many checks assuming ownership. In Biblical times, of course, millstones (once they’d served their grinding purposes at the mill) were tied around the necks of condemned prisoners before pushing them into deep water. Had it been my mother who’d named the house, she’d have christened it with a gentler, more poetic name – in fact, she did so, in two letters: “Green Gates” in one, “Meadowlark” in another.
Like many homes of English design, the rooms were small and you warrened your way from one to the next. Kip, seven years old when we moved in, often found himself calling to his mother from “somewhere” to ask “where he was.” It was indeed a large house.
Sudden wealth is an idea America has grown used to, even bored with. But in 1954 it was still called without embarrassment the American Dream and here at the Millstone it came true for my parents, Roger and Myra. Since moving to Rochester in 1950, the young couple had lived in a tiny farmhouse and now found themselves moving into a 30-room mansion.
Back in the farmhouse, they’d had only a few rooms to furnish and so the first year at the Millstone saw rooms that were sparsely furnished or bare. But they had money now and Roger and Myra weren’t ashamed to spend it. In the year 1954, they began living their American dream without a trace of today’s cynicism or self-consciousness. This was a time long before America became aware of its consumerism, its debt, and its profligacy. Myra and her hard-working husband had done their time. They’d scraped by on a medical student’s salary, lived off the vegetables from the farm’s garden, burned Sears catalogs in its furnace against the winter, taken the bus on their big night out and split the entrée when they got there. Now after a year of residency at the best and most famous medical institution in the world, Roger had been asked to join the staff at the Mayo Clinic full time.
They had arrived.
And that October 7th, so did I; a bare month before we moved into the giant house.
“We acquired the home we will probably live in for the rest of our lives,” wrote my mother in a letter to her parents, “and added another little boy to our wonderful family! There will surely never again be two such momentous events in such a short period of time in our family!!”
Other than Dad dying and our moving out of the Millstone, she was right.
In front of the haystack in the Low Forty in October of 1962.
Front row from left: Luke, Collin, and Dan.
In the Back: Jeff, Chris and Kip.
SKELETONS IN THE CLOSET
40 years after we moved out of the Millstone, I’m sitting in my mother’s study going through a box of old family photographs.
Was there some kind of national photo law in the ‘50s?
(“Okay, on ‘three’ I want everyone to look into the sun, squint hard and make an ugly face, alright?”)
It’s likely that the proud fathers were all saying, “Look at the birdie,” but in the pictures everybody is staring flat into a retina-frying super-nova.
I squint back at the photos. I can see the details. They’re right there in front of me, but no matter how I try to inhabit the moment captured there, it is a fly suspended in amber – I can see but not touch.
I want to stick my head through the black-and-white plane and look off to the left and to the right, to see what was happening before each picture was taken, what happened after. But each paper memory is frozen; every football hangs in the autumn air forever an incomplete pass; every set of birthday candles forever about to be blown out. The photos are clear but they don’t show me what happened to my family in July of 1966. They don’t tell me who my father was, or what went on in the hotel room where he died, or why it seemed perfectly normal to be laughing at his funeral.
After that day in the church pews, my brothers and I relived the hot summer of ’66 many times. But in the years of reminiscing, the stories seemed to become shortcuts; they became what we remembered we remembered. We started to agree on things, to rehearse the history and over time the story of our father’s death began to feel abbreviated, assembled by committee; like a JFK Warren Report where each citizen could recount only his point of view – a car backfired, a lady fell to the grass – and the thing ultimately remained a mystery. On the cop shows, they’d call my father’s death a cold case.
My mother enters the study. She’s carrying some carousels full of my father’s collection of photographic slides. As we talk, I begin to take them out and one by one arrange them in chronological order on the floor; this pile, 1950; that pile, ’51. When I finish organizing, there on the carpeting of my mother’s study we see a graph; a mathematical goodbye letter Dad left for us to read 40 years after his death.
1950 is a tall column of Kodak moments, a foot high.
The stacks for ‘51 through ’54, not as tall.
‘55 through ’58, smaller still.
Until the last column.
One slide.
1962.
A hundred slides in 1950. And one in ’62. It’s as if Dad didn’t move out of our lives all at once but packed a chair off in 1950, a desk in ’53, bit by bit until ’62 when he was gone, leaving this one last slide which stands out in its solitude the way a good-bye letter stands out on the mantelpiece of an empty house.
Tellingly, it isn’t a picture of us but of the house we lived in – taken in the summer of ’62 and, from the look of the shadows’ vertical drop, around noon. The bright sun throws the windows of its many rooms into shade and I wonder what we were doing in there the moment the shutter snapped outside.
The photographic evidence examined, my mother and I discuss where else I might find pieces of my family history. Stories that haven’t been rehearsed. Artifacts of my father’s life that aren’t already on display in the family museum.
All history, including family histories, involves archeology of a kind – we uncover things. The archeologist unearths bones, translates hieroglyphs; as does the family historian in his way, unearthing old photographs instead; reading old letters, old newspapers. We both try to reconstruct our ancient skeletons and if some parts are missing, we make guesses, piece together what we can and step back to look at the thing.
I have
only these slides and photographs, which I’ve looked at many times. Maybe I can dig somewhere else; through some other box, through my brothers’ diaries maybe, or the letters my mother’s packed away. Perhaps then the shape of the dinosaur will begin to loom out of the mist.
I pick up the first thread and think, there’s also that old photo album from my father’s childhood. And the family films, there’s those. Plus the notes from Dad’s psychiatrist; nobody’s ever asked to see that file, much less the medical examiner’s report. Dad’s doctor friends will probably remember things, too. There’s even that police officer in New Ulm who arrested Dad. Is he still alive? And of course, there’s Mom. She could retell the story. Maybe I’ll just dig it all up with a noisy smoking backhoe and sift through everything under a bright bank of klieg lights. Maybe then I’ll be able to reach through the amber, to lean into the photograph, and All Will Be Revealed.
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