Garbo Senior
It may surprise you to read the words of a dead man.
Those of us who pass over have the right to set things straight. Especially if we kept it all in during our ‘live time.’
Looking back to my own youth, I had been trained to keep it in, to pretend things were the way they were supposed to be. My father was a formidable man who ruled the household with an iron fist.
I followed his model when I got married. It was the middle of the great depression and I was smitten by Rose’s great beauty and innocence. I wooed her and tried to bring her to bed in so many awkward ways. She always successfully held me off with that Catholic crap about “not till we are married”.
“Rose, will you marry me?” I hear it now… the echo of my lust. I paid the priest. His wife was the witness. We had no money so that was it. No family no friends invited.
The sex was short and the upshot was a pregnant wife in a depression, me working two jobs and along comes Janos. Sickly weak, eye problems and me having to support them and pay the doctors bills. We moved in with her Sister and that Jehovah Witness Minister husband. I hated it because I was not the guy who said what happens. He said how much coal we got. How much electricity we could use.
Luckily one of my jobs was in a munitions plant and I got exempt from the military.
After the war her family moved out west. I was promised a job with Rose’s brother George who was in the plastering business.
California was booming in construction and despite my misgivings about leaving Buffalo, Rose and I drove out west in the spring of ’46. There was the problem of money and again we were forced to move in with another of Rose’s brothers. (She had five). Oh yeah… Janos was now in school.
I worked my ass off and saved every nickel of what I made as a hod carrier, then as a plasterer. Eight months later we put a down payment on a two bedroom house 5 miles away in San Gabriel.
Then I was boss. I said what goes. Rose got a job as a file clerk and we started to put away a few bucks each month, I had to keep the lid on spending…like when Rose wanted to send Janos to a dentist. Nobody in my family got sick. We didn’t need nobody.
I was sick of needing help from them. I could take care of Rose and the kid.
From day one Janos was a momma’s boy. I told her “No more kids”, so she seemed to give her attention to him over me . I was just ‘ the good provider’. He was the apple of her eye:
“Janos imitate Frank Sinatra” “Do that dance I showed you” “ Play your harmonica for Uncle Johnny”
He was soft. Not like me and my brothers growing up in South Buffalo. We had to fight for every god damn nickel.
I tried to teach him how to look out for himself by taking advantage of certain opportunities. But he was afraid to grab what was in his reach preferring to take only what came his way.
He left home at 15 to go off to Catalina Island to be some kind of artist. We never talked much. As I say he was really a momma’s boy. I saw nothing in the boy that I admired.
When all is said, I made the home and put together everything that made a family . I worked hard to make it all as perfect as a man could do. Yet nobody said, “Hey Mike , what do you need?”
