IBID: A Life

by Mark Dunn

  Day 2: A peaceful, uneventful night. I was first to rise this morning. I checked on the children for any signs of nuclear contamination. They seem fine. I have a rash but it does not appear to be related to fallout. The children are playing Candy Land. Spirits are fairly good considering what awaits us when we open that door. Elsie continues to believe that what I saw was a test pattern. I asked her, “Where was the Indian head, Elsie? Did you see an Indian head?” It will be a trial to make it through two weeks in the same room with this woman, although she is making a peace offering by preparing scrambled eggs. They are powdered but an egg is an egg. And I love eggs.

  Day 5: I’m gagging. I can’t get down another forkful of those powdered scrambled eggs. The children are in their corners after some misbehavior. They are obviously tired of Candy Land and Parcheesi. I don’t blame them but look, I’m not the one who decided to drop bombs on the Tri-State Area, all right? Elsie and I are not speaking. She pushed me off the cot last night. She said that she was going stark-raving mad being cooped up this way and was thinking of taking her chances with the mutants out there.

  Day 7: We had a real scare today. I was trying to teach the children how to play Seven Card Stud (Elsie and I have stopped speaking since I refuse to give up the Lucky Strikes and she is making a federal case out of the lack of ventilation. Look, lady, I, if anyone, should know if there isn’t proper ventilation in here! I built this shelter! Built it with my own two hands, while you were lounging around eating Whitmans in your silk Capri pants!) when we hear a knock at the door. I’m thrown into a panic trying to remember how well I secured that door. I move quickly to it and find the crossbar still in place. There is another knock. Elsie’s a basket case and the cards and poker chips are flying all over the place as the children scramble under the card table. “Who is it?” I ask. I hear a muffled voice. It could be human. I am not sure. I can’t tell what is said. I yell, “WHO IS IT?” as loud as I am able, hoping that whatever mutant creature outside that heavy metal door will identify himself and state his purpose. I hear—or think I hear: “Come out. It’s all right. Come out.” Elsie relaxes. She seems to think this is a good thing. “Don’t you see, woman?” I cry. “It’s a trick. Someone out there wants our foodstuffs—or, or our precious medical supplies.” Elsie laughs in that way that always makes me want to smack her: “Supplies, Sandron? Band-Aids, Rolaids, and Mercurochrome! Yeah, we’re a regular Mayo Clinic in here. Open the Goddamned door.” “Over my dead body, woman,” I say. “We may need them to barter with on the outside. It’s every man for himself in this post-apocalyptic world!”

  Day 9: No one is speaking. We spend the whole day not speaking. I read a Mickey Spillane pocketbook. Elsie sews. The children stare at the walls. They all must think I’m the most heartless father on the planet. And yet don’t they see that I do this because I love them? Because I want to protect their young lives?

  Day 11: Lucy tried to get out of the shelter last night. I woke up and there she was fumbling with the crossbar. “Oh, no you don’t! Two weeks, young lady! It takes two weeks for the fallout to settle. Go back to bed.” I pull her away from the door and she goes back to her pallet and sits down. She gives me the eye. “Better sleep lightly, old man,” her eyes seem to be saying.

  Day 12: Everybody hates me. I’ve never seen such animosity in one family. I’m going to open the door tomorrow. A day early. What can it hurt? A few blisters maybe? I’m going to open that door. A desolate, fetid, war-torn landscape is better than these narrow four walls and a family that doesn’t appreciate you. I’ll take the blisters.

  20. “The painting held me, riveted.” Jonathan’s Diary, 2 July 1960. In fact, so taken was Jonathan with Wyeth’s haunting Christina’s World that later in the summer on a trip to Brookline, Massachusetts to meet with inventors of a talking toaster, he made a special side trip to Cushing, Maine, to visit the Olson farm where Christina lived with her brother Alvaro.

  It was the brother who met Jonathan at the door and who eagerly took him to the very spot behind the house where Wyeth painted the portrait of the backside of the indomitable Christina, disabled by a disease that no doctor could successfully diagnose. To Jonathan’s surprise, a somewhat older Christina greeted him from that very spot, prone and looking much as she did in the painting except that she was now wearing a bikini and her skin was sunburned to the color of clown noses. Jonathan and Christina chatted for a while, Christina eventually becoming so comfortable with her new friend that she asked jokingly for one of his good legs. “I grow so tired of crawling about, as you can imagine.” Although weary of this only form of mobility left to her, Christina Olson confessed to Jonathan a secret desire for world travel. “I want to see all the foreign capitals before I die. I intend to crawl and slide myself with a slow, methodical caterpillar-like inching along the entire length of the Great Wall of China!”

  Later the three had tea. Refusing to be carried, Christina took a good thirty minutes to belly- and side-slither her way back up to the house. Jonathan and Alvaro waited on the porch. The three later discussed blast furnaces and various tropical fruits each had yet to taste.

  21. It was like taking hose to Hickory. Hickory, North Carolina, has had a strong hosiery industry for years. In 1960, two years before Jonathan’s death, the city inaugurated its hosiery expo, the only exposition and market devoted entirely to the hosiery business in the U.S. Simone Perry, The History of Hickory (Hickory, North Carolina: Hickory Chamber of Commerce Publications, 1999).

  22. Yet Jonathan refused to allow the gentleman to retire. Uriah’s nearly total blindness was evident to all but Jonathan, who apparently could not accept the prospect of losing the services of his faithful manservant. Tarara Masdick in her privately published society memoir Feasting with the Famous, comments on one of Jonathan’s last dinner parties:

  “It was a lovely evening, marred only by the bumbling of the bat-blind butler Uriah, who took my fox stole and deposited it in a place of oblivion, substituted shoe mitts for dinner napkins, and ladled terrapin soup directly from the tureen and onto my barter salad. I feigned inattention when the old man walked a serving platter of Duck Bourgeois right into the kitchen door jamb.”

  23. He enjoyed his coterie of business associates cum friends. Glover, Three Legs, One Heart, 256-59. Among others in the business community with whom Jonathan maintained close ties in his later years was McDonalds Hamburger mogul Ray Kroc. Jonathan had met Kroc several years prior to his formation of the partnership with Richard and Maurice McDonald that would eventually result in majority ownership of the McDonalds fast food enterprise. Over milk shakes whipped up in the five-spindled milkshake “multimixer” which Kroc distributed early in his career, the two discussed Kroc’s dream of corporate success in defiance of a host of medical problems including diabetes, arthritis, and conditions that ultimately resulted in the removal of his gall bladder and most of his thyroid gland. Jonathan, commendatory of Kroc’s pluck and drive, held some sway with his friend, later contending that he was the one who had talked Kroc out of renaming his sandwiches Krocburgers. “I told him,” Jonathan wrote in his diary, “that nobody would buy a hamburger with that name. The entry continues:

  “They would either associate it with crocks filled with Heaven knows what kind of unpalatable imaginings, or assume that the burgers were made from crocodile meat. After I left him, I recalled that in Britain the word has an even more negative denotation. Kroc didn’t always take my advice, though. I recommended early on that he come up with some kind of advertising mascot. Remembering my days with the circus and this one fellow in particular—a Scots kid who made me laugh every time I saw him — I suggested a clown named Ronald. Ronald McDonald. Ray said, ‘What does a clown have to do with hamburgers and French fries? What else you got?’”

  A year after Jonathan’s death, Ray Kroc introduced the world to Ronald McDonald.

  24. “You’re giving money to everyone you meet!” Addicus Andrew Blashette to Jonathan Blashette, 13 August 1960. Youn
g Addy Andy was clearly upset with his father, but there wasn’t much that anyone, including A.A., could do to dissuade him. Incidentally, during those brief moments Jonathan’s son allowed me to interview him, I asked if he might wish to address in more detail his feelings about his father’s late-life benevolence-run-amuck. Blashette declined, stating that everything he wanted to say on the subject had already been told to Glover just moments before the author’s painful gluteal encounter with Blashette’s Tiffany desk-top fountain pen holder.

  25. Jonathan’s entrepreneurial spirit, coupled with a virtually non-existent screening process, brought all manner of investor-hungry schemers to his doorstep.

  Others included:

  Theatre impresario Darrell Platt, who sought $75,000 to mount a new Broadway production of Streetcar Named Desire featuring Don Knotts as Stanley Kowalski and Irene Ryan as Blanche DuBois.

  Environmental artist George Dellums, in negotiation with Buckminster Fuller to top the architect’s famous geodesic domes with nipples. (The word “negotiation,” Jonathan quickly learned, involved little more than pleading with Fuller’s secretary to allow him into the architect’s office.)

  26. The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Philadelphians. The publication (Racine: Alternative Voices, 1960) created, as might have been expected, an ecumenical firestorm—one that singed Jonathan as well. Assuming that his financing of Umberger’s trip to the Wadi Qumran would remain unpublicized, Jonathan was surprised and dismayed to find his name prominent upon the book’s acknowledgments page. The Epistle of Paul the Apostle to the Philadelphians, allegedly translated from the “other” Dead Sea Scrolls, “the ones they don’t want you to know about” was discredited by a multitude of Biblical scholars. Most regarded the book as a blasphemous hoax. Both Umberger and Jonathan were blasted in both the religious and mainstream press for attempting through this proposed addendum to the Bible to alter the “Holy Word of God.” On the religious television program Life is Worth Living Bishop Fulton Sheen became so exercised over the publication that his speech lost all coherence and the producer was forced to cut away to a rerun of December Bride.

  The religious community was up in arms over the book for several reasons. Umberger contended that not only was it written by the Apostle Paul, but that it had every right to be added to the Pauline canon. More audaciously, Umberger defended the validity of its content, which, if accepted, upended 2,000 years of doctrine and tradition addressing the role of women in the Christian church. Anticipating this reaction, Umberger pushes his case full-throttle in his introduction, excerpted below:

  “The Apostle Paul was no dummy. He knew that his advice to the early Christian Church would not be regarded lightly. He took seriously this opportunity to guide and shepherd the growing Christian flock, even if it meant back-pedaling on some of his previous positions on important issues facing members of the Church. It was in this spirit that he wrote to the congregation at Philadelphia. Paul began by making passing references to his early pronouncements on hair braiding and the wearing of gold and pearls: ’Perhaps I was a little too unyielding in my opinions proffered to good Timothy on this matter. Women have always braided their hair and they will continue to braid their hair and who am I to make them feel guilty about it? Say to the ladies, ‘Braid if you must, but not excessively so.” As to the matter of accessories, perhaps I was a bit too severe here as well. Gold and pearls if worn with decorum and a certain modesty of presentation, should not impede one’s ability to worship.’

  More important was Paul’s modification of his original position on the role of women in the family of Christ, a position which religious patriarchs (ignorant of the Philadelphia epistle which apparently never reached its intended recipients) would eventually set in stone, its contours etched deeper and deeper with each succeeding generation, as male dominance of the Christian Church solidified and then fossilized over two millennia. ‘But as to this matter of the role of women, I know that I have said on a number of occasions that women should keep silent. (The Corinthians I especially singled out on this point.) Yes, I was wrong and I admit it. Sometimes I simply do not think things through. You will recall my directive to the slaves at Ephesus to obey their masters. What was I thinking? We are held in thrall—all of us — only to the Lord our God! Slavery is wrong! wrong! wrong! So say I about the women. Speak up and praise the Lord as loudly and as heartily as the men around you! Shake off the shackles of gender-slavery placed upon you. Preach and teach the word of the Lord, and enrich and aggrandize the family of believers! We are—all of us—master and slave, man and woman, equal in God’s eyes! Didn’t Jesus tell us this? I really should have paid closer attention.’”

  27. The attack came out of the blue. It shook Jonathan to the core. Glover, et al.

  28. “This is not what I meant.” Andrew Bloor to Jonathan Blashette, 2 September 1960. Bloor continues:

  “It serves you not a whit to give all your money to these crazy people. It would be different if there were some nobility or high purpose to their causes. There is not. Nobody is approaching you with a proposal to find an end to cancer, Jonathan. Or even to try to get that godawful hour-long Lucy and Desi thing cancelled. I’ve always been supportive of your goals, your dreams, your choice of female companions, all of your major life decisions. But here I must draw the line. You are writing the final chapter of your life in Crayola and I will not have it! You were put here for a very important reason. This is not it!”

  29. Jonathan’s reply was scathing. Jonathan Blashette to Andrew Bloor, 6 September 1960. Responding to Bloor’s last charge, Jonathan writes:

  “You have been telling me this for years, Dr. Bloor, and I still do not to this day know what you mean. You are like the psychoanalyst who sits and nods while the patient fumbles and flounders and doesn’t get a clue. You do not know what it is that will bring wonderful affirming purpose to my life any more than I do. All you’ve had is a feeling, old man. A feeling that betrayed you and betrayed me. I will hear no more of it. If these people want my money, so be it. I am doing nothing with it. My dream of making any kind of mark has melted away in the barren desert of my dried out, dried up, withered, broken-hipped, wife-bereft, freak-legged life. So why not let that money go to those who still have dreams with a pulse? What do you want from me? I am a man. That is all. A man who did some things. I didn’t save the world. I did the best I could with what I was given. Let’s end this discussion, once and for all. I’ve had enough of it.”

  30. “Dear Mr. Blashette Stop Regret to tell you my brother Andrew Bloor passed away last night Stop” Evetta Paton’s telegram is preserved in Jonathan’s papers. It is slightly crimped and discolored on the right edge where it had apparently met with some form of moisture.

  31. It was a deep depression lubricated by great quantities of alcohol. Alvira Paine, The Last Days of Pompous: Twelve Stories of the Famous and their Final Season (Charleston, West Virginia: Royce Press, 1970), 190-222.

  32. “Uriah, my good man, there is something terribly wrong with these shoes.” Author’s interview with Zachary Hensley. The very inebriated Jonathan simply hadn’t the wherewithal to remove the shoe trees from within.

  33. The nightmares did not recede for several weeks. Jonathan’s sleep was often disturbed by images of Bloor’s funeral in Omaha and attended by feelings of enormous guilt. No doubt, Jonathan was plagued by worry that the harsh words he delivered to his friend and mentor might have contributed to his death. During this period, perhaps for subconscious diversion, Jonathan also dreamed that he was being pursued by disembodied lobster chelae. In another dream he was called upon to address an annual stockholders meeting wearing only ruffled rumba pants. Jonathan’s Diary, various entries.

  34. “You’ll be Abishag to this David.” Alvira Paine, The Last Days of Pompous, 190-222. Wishes for comity between the two never materialized. Cloretta Connell withdrew her services to Jonathan three full weeks before Uriah was to return to resume his duties as Jonathan’s manservant. Jonathan,
who wasn’t happy with even a temporary loss of his trusted man Uriah, went out of his way to make the young nurse and companion feel uncomfortable and unappreciated in her duties, putting to active use the ubiquitous drool cup, and on at least one occasion staging his drowning death in the koi pond. Such shenanigans were not at all in keeping with Jonathan’s usual gentle and sensitive nature. Unfortunately, many of his last months were spent in broken spirits, often rising to heavy frustration and anger. God and fate were the usual objects of his bitterness and rage; but on occasion, a young nurse, pizza delivery boy, supermarket sacker, or his own son might find themselves inadvertent victims of Jonathan’s contempt for youth and its taunting promise.