As if emerging from a dark dream, it suddenly occurs to me that I’ve spent at least half my life looking for my Father.
No, don’t get it wrong: I’m not a bastard. I was born in University Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio, at 2:20 P.M. on 27 May 1934, to Louis Laverne Ellison and Serita Rosenthal Ellison…so I know who my Father was. And right here on my birth certificate, which I’m looking at, it asks in a little box: Legitimate? (Which is about as chill shot a way of asking it as I’ve ever seen.) But, happily for my Mother and unhappily for my biographers, it says right back, and snappishly: yes.
So when I say I’ve spent half my adult life looking for my old man, I don’t mean it like something out of Victor Hugo. (Though it now occurs in the wake of the first realization—and how strange that one awakening of curiosity firecrackers into other awarenesses, seriatim—that I’ve written a number of stories in which kids are looking for their fathers, for one reason or another, to suit the plot. The one that pops to mind foremost was called “No Fourth Commandment,” and it was about a kid who was looking for his father, whom he’d never known, to kill him for fucking-over his mother. Sold the story after its magazine publication to Route 66, where it was adapted into a teleplay by a guy named Larry Marcus, and was retitled “A Gift for a Warrior.” It aired on January 18th, 1963, almost a year to the day I arrived in Los Angeles from Back East, and years later Marcus and the producer of Route 66, Herbert Leonard, did it as the basis of their film Going Home, without paying me for its second adaptation, but that’s another story and my attorney is in the process of talking to them about it, so let’s get back to the point.)
My father, Louis Laverne Ellison
My Father died in 1949, when I was fifteen. And I’d lived with him and my Mother, off and on, for those fifteen years, but I never really knew him, or even much about him. It wasn’t till my Mother was very ill, three or four years ago, and she thought it was all over, that she spilled some very heavy data about Louis Laverne.
There’s a lot of it she won’t be happy if I relate. It is silly, of course, it’s all forty and more years gone, but family skeletons rattle loudest in the minds of those who live in memories, which is where my Mother’s at. Today is nowhere nearly as important as all the yesterdays with my Father. So I won’t go into the circumstances of how my Father practiced dentistry in Cleveland for eleven years. That’s a story for another time, years from now.
For openers, like me, my Father was a short man. Even shorter than I, as I recall. I’m 5252, for the record. He was incredibly gentle: I remember once, when I’d done something outstandingly shitty as a child, he was compelled to take me into the cellar and use the “strap” on me. His belt. Now perceive, please, that there is no faintest scintilla of hatred in this recollection. He was not a brutal man, and about as given to corporal punishment as Albert Schweitzer. But it was a time in this country when such things were expected of a father. “You just wait till your father comes home!” was the maternal cry, and one feared with only half a fear, because I knew my Dad just couldn’t do such things.
But, as I say, on one occasion the punishment fit the crime—perhaps it was the time I shoved Johnny Mummy off the garage roof while we were playing Batman and Robin—and my Dad took me down into the cellar at 89 Harmon Drive in Painesville, Ohio, and he walloped me good.
I got over the stinging in about an hour, though there was a dull, remembered pain for weeks thereafter.
My Father became ill. He went upstairs into his bedroom and he cried. He wasn’t himself for several weeks after. Of course, I knew none of that at the time.
He was gentle, and he looked like, well, the closest way I can describe him was that he resembled a short Brian Donlevy. If you’re not hip to who Brian Donlevy is, check out the Late Late Show.
When he was a little boy, my Father worked on riverboats, as a candy butcher. From that job he got into working minstrel shows. He sang. Really fine voice, even in later years. In fact, he had his photo on the sheet music of “My Yiddishe Momma,” a song Al Jolson made famous; the song was written by a friend of Dad’s, who dedicated it to my Father’s mother…whom I never met. Never met my paternal grandfather, either.
Dad wanted to be a dentist, and he wound up practicing in Cleveland. Around Prohibition time. He was such a sensational dentist, I’m told, that the mob used to come to him for their mouthwork. My Mother worked as his receptionist after they’d been married a while, and she tells me when the gangsters came to get drilled and filled, my Dad insisted they check their heat with Mom. There were times, she says, when her desk drawer was difficult to pull open, so filled with guns was it.
Anyhow, you may wonder why I’m talking about all this here, the initial offering of a new column. Well, I wanted to talk about something important for openers, and almost all of this I never knew until a few days ago when my Mother came to visit from Florida. I don’t see much of her, and we’ve never really talked to each other; but she got onto the subject of my Father, as she usually does, and I started prying the real truth out of her about him. Not the bullshit they feed kids about their parents, but who he really was. In all of the things I’ve ever written, I’ve said virtually nothing about my Father, you see, and that’s because I simply didn’t know the man. We were in the same house, but we were strangers. It was as though we vibrated on different planes of existence, passing each other and passing through each other, like shadows.
But when my Mother got around to telling me my Father had done time in prison, in some strange and perverted way I started to realize I’d been searching for “Doc” Ellison almost all my life.
Because of the stuff I’m not allowed to tell, he had to give up the D.D.S. practice. It was Prohibition time, it was Depression time, and my Dad had to support my Mother and my sister and me. So he got into the selling of booze.
Most of this is unclear because my single source of information, my Mother, chooses to blur it all. But as best I can tell, my Dad had friends in Canada, and he would make auto runs up through Buffalo into Toronto to pick up the hootch. Then he’d drive it back down to Cincinnati and Cleveland and thereabouts. After a while, things got easier, and my Dad gave work to a guy he met, a guy who was as down on his luck as Dad had been. And one night, on a run, the guy got busted while transporting the alcohol. So my Dad took the rap, and let the other guy get off. As my Mom tells it, the driver had a family and, well…
My Dad was a gentle man.
So he went to the can. Fairly stiff sentence, from what I can gather, but he didn’t do it all. (And years later, when I wound up in jail, I was always amazed at how facilitously and soberly my Mother took it, and how competent she was at bailing my ass out of the slammer. Now I understand.)
After that, my Dad went to work for my uncles in Painesville, in their jewelry store. I was a little kid at the time, and knew none of what had gone down.
Years went by, and my Dad thought he owned a piece of the store—Hughes Jewelry on the corner of State & Main in Painesville. I was too busy fighting for my life to pay much attention, and I was always running away, but then in 1947, after my Uncle Morrie had come back from the War, it turned out my Father didn’t own anything. He had been the manager of the store, had built up the clientele and won friends all through town—he was the only Jew ever taken into the Moose lodge in Painesville, a town famed for its anti-Semitism—but when the crunch came down, my old man was out on his ass. But it had been my Mother’s brothers, you see, and so there wasn’t much he could do about it. Jewish families hang tight that way. So at close to the age of fifty, my Father had to open his own store.
He couldn’t get ground-floor space on Main Street, so he took an upstairs suite, and sold from there. In his off-hours he sold appliances by personal contact. It was a grueling existence. The fucking climb up those stairs alone was murder. That staircase went almost straight up, and he had to make that climb twenty times a day.
Well, it killed him a year later.
May 1st, 1949, a Sunday, I came downstairs from my room, to see my Dad sitting in his big overstuffed chair by the fireplace, the Sunday edition of the Cleveland Plain Dealer around his feet, his pipe in his mouth. I was still on the stairs, about to ask him for the funnies when suddenly he began to choke.
I watched, helpless and with a kind of detached fascination as he died right before my eyes. Coronary thrombosis. It was all over in seconds. My Mother was mostly stunned, but somehow we managed to get him onto the sofa; the pulmotor squad arrived too late. They couldn’t have done anything. He was gone the minute he started to choke.
All through the next days, I moved like some kind of somnambulist. I was into baseball in those days, and I had a fuzz-less tennis ball that I bounced against the house. For the next month all I did, from morning till night, was stand outside on the front lawn under the maple tree, and bounce that ball off the wall, and catch it in the trapper’s mitt my Dad had bought me. I threw the ball and caught it, threw it and caught it, over and over and over…
It must have been hell for everyone inside the house, the sound of that ball plonking against the wood, again and again, without end, till it got too dark to see it.
We moved away from there soon after, and I went from straight As in school to failing grades in everything. I became a trouble kid of the worst sort. But it worked out.
Ever since then, I now realize, I’ve been looking for my Father. I’ve tried to find him in Dad-surrogates, but that’s always come to a bad end. And all I ever wanted to tell him was, “Hey, Dad, you’d be proud of me now; I turned out to be a good guy and what I do, I do well and…I love you and…why did you go away and leave me alone?”
When I lived in Cleveland, I used to go to his grave sometimes, but I stopped doing that fifteen years ago and haven’t been back.
He isn’t there.