I Left It on the Mountain: A Memoir (16 page)

From
The Andy Warhol Diaries

Entry dated Sunday, November 30, 1986

Stuart had a car and we went to Christie’s and Stuart had to hide so they wouldn’t see him—he still hasn’t paid for the flute. They call him every day. Stuart regrets buying it because, I mean, what would he get for it if he tried to sell it?

And then we went over to the piers to the Antiques and Collectibles Exposition (ticket $15). And it’s just the same stuff everywhere. Small and the same, no character. Nothing dramatic. That Modernism Show at the Armory last week was great though. But the guy wanted $5,000 for a World’s Fair service for 8 or 12! I couldn’t believe it. I was asking if I could buy the big spoons because I have a big service and I wore the big spoons out and he told me the price and I said maybe I could sell him my set.

Then we went down to the flea market. And we ran into one of the
Interview
editors, the new one, Kevin Sessums. He was alone.

SEVEN

The Dogged

I felt alone even in that year before both my parents died. “Leave him alone,” was the admonition I most remember my mother saying over and over back in 1962 when she’d warn my father he was being too stern with me when I was doing my sissy best to please him and falling short. Appearing at a loss as he looked sadly back into her concerned eyes, he’d do just that. Relieved, I’d resort to my sissy ways and play with my little sister’s first doll or dance about the house as the radio on the kitchen windowsill played Dee Dee Sharp’s “Mashed Potato Time” or “The Stripper” conducted by David Rose or Little Eva’s “The Loco-Motion” or Bobby Vinton’s “Roses Are Red,” the lyrics of which I’d sing along with my mother while she washed the dishes. When Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” came on she’d stop her scrubbing and grab my hands in her warm, sudsy ones as we’d twist together on the linoleum floor, her blond hair bouncing to the beat. My father once found us like that and cut in. I pouted, thinking he was going to replace me as her dance partner, but instead he too grabbed my hands and twisted with me. My heart raced as I climbed atop his big coach’s feet with my own little feet and rode them as he slid twisting on the linoleum floor toward my mother, whose hands were back in the dishwater. He growled like a dog and kissed her on her neck. He’d been telling her we were going to get a couple of dogs for weeks and took every opportunity to growl like one to remind her of it, since she didn’t want to have to deal with two pets in addition to three young children. She giggled at his growling kiss and shooed him away with a handful of suds, some of the soft white bubbles falling atop my head like the snowflakes I still had yet to see in my Mississippi childhood. My father then dipped his own hands into the mounds of suds in the sink and surprised me by piling them on my head. I secretly imagined them looking like Shelley Fabares’s pageboy hairdo as I began to lip-synch, hands on my hips, to her suddenly singing her 1962 hit “Johnny Angel,” which came on after “The Twist” ended there on the window’s radio. My father went to swipe the suds from my head in an effort to stop my impromptu performance, but I ducked without missing a faked syllable of Shelley’s angelic voice I imagined coming from my mouth. My mother cut my father one of her concerned glares. “Leave him alone,” she warned.

My favorite place to be alone was my parents’ shared closet in that little house in Clinton, Mississippi. I’d sneak into the back of their closet and curl up amidst their shoes, my feet placed in a pair of my mother’s high heels, my father’s big Sunday brogues used as a pillow, the smell of his brushed-on cordovan shoe polish mixing with the remnants of my mother’s perfume that clung to her dresses above me that I’d reach for, barely able to touch their hems with my six-year-old arms as I caused them to flutter in the breeze of my own making, a leafless landscape of longing. I loved lying there hidden in their combined smells and listening to their voices in their bedroom when they had no idea I was in there. Sometimes they’d make voiceless sounds atop their bed I could not decipher, but I knew I dare not move when such sounds were being made.

I was there in the closet when I heard their final discussion about my father wanting to buy those dogs he kept mentioning. He did not pitch it as wanting the family to have pets to play with but as a way of making some much-needed extra money for the family’s expenses. He wanted to buy two Chihuahuas—a male and a female—and breed them in order to sell their puppies, another of his harebrained schemes, as my mother called it, and, as literal as I was little, I wondered if my brain too had hair on it like his, trying as hard as I could to find any way in which I could resemble him and please him more.

“Don’t get smart with me, Nan,” my father cautioned her in that surly coach’s voice I’d often hear him use at basketball practice when, tagging along, I watched him get angry when his scrawny high school team wasn’t scrimmaging well enough. “I’m gonna do this,” he said. “It’s a good investment. We need the extra money. I’ve thought this through. I know you don’t want the extra work around here, so I’ve decided not to go all in with hunting dogs or hounds or anything of that size. I thought these little dogs would be the easiest for you to have around. I’m taking you into consideration in this. I am.”

“Can’t you go back to selling encyclopedias on the side?” she asked. “That sounds a lot more respectable than selling silly little dogs.”

“Nan…”

“Go ahead. Do what you want. You always do,” she said, sighing extravagantly in that way she had when she knew she’d lost yet another argument with my father, that lowest note her throat could make, no letters needed to make sense of it. It was close to the kind of sighs that could erupt from her more slowly, one right after the other, then rapidly in succession, when she and my father were making those other indecipherable noises atop their bed. Those sighs of hers, however, would ring out more triumphantly. They were more loosely formed—livelier—than her one dull, low sigh of defeat.

“But they can’t live in my house. No way,” my mother said. “No dogs in this house no matter what size they are. I’m putting my foot down about that. I’m not going to clean up after them. They have to stay out in the yard. No house pets. I have enough work to do around here. And they are all your responsibility. Yours, not mine.”

One of my mother’s dresses suddenly fell on top of me when I grabbed its hem instead of fluttering it in my excitement at the thought of our family having two small dogs, the dress’s hanger clanging to the floor by my side.

“What in the world was that?” asked my mother.

My father opened the closet door. “Kevin?” he called my name, peering in to see the dress having fallen atop me and my feet still inside a pair of my mother’s high heels. “This does it. Out!” he shouted. “Out of there! Right now! Out!”

“Howard!” said my mother. “Howard! Please! No, now. Leave him alone!”

“Not this time. See what leaving him alone does? He’s in there trying on your clothes. Goddamn it. Get out here, boy.”

I removed my feet from my mother’s high heels and on my tiptoes tried to hang her dress back up. “Leave it!” my father yelled, and grabbed me by my shoulders and jerked me into the light of their bedroom. He grabbed the dress from me and threw it at my mother. I still had the smell of his cordovan brogues in my nostrils, which mixed with the stronger smell of liniment that lingered on him from his time in the locker room that morning. “What were you doing in there?” he wanted to know.

“Being alone,” I said, telling him the truth.

“Oh, Kevin…,” said my mother.

“Don’t ‘oh, Kevin’ him,” said my father. “You pamper him enough as it is.” He turned his attention back to me. I watched his anger redden his face, the ridges of each of his high, handsome cheekbones stubbled with a day’s growth of his dark beard, which, when he was not angered by my presence, I’d dare to touch and run my fingers along the way I’d seen my mother absentmindedly do when they watched television together curled up entwined on the sofa, the feel of his stubble like the splinters on the wood outside he’d already bought and secretly hidden in the garage for the doghouse he planned to build if my mother gave her final approval. I’d found him stacking the wood behind an old tattered tarp the week before when he had told me not to tell my mother what he was up to. I had helped him lift a board out of the trunk of his car and cried out when a splinter of it lodged into my thumb. He hadn’t even gone into the house to get the pair of tweezers my mother used to groom her eyebrows, the same pair she always used to pluck the stray splinters in the past that had lodged themselves into my fingers or feet. She was the splinter remover in our family, not my father. He looked stumped by my cries. The large splinter taunted us both where it stuck out of my little thumb. My father quickly stuck my throbbing thumb into his mouth and, in so doing, shocked me, despite the pain, into silence. The splinter was a big one and had not lodged too deeply, so he was able to dig it out with his teeth before licking my wound with his tongue—like a dog would lick me if we got one, I thought when I looked at where the splinter had been and where my father’s spittle now soothed its sting. “Don’t you dare tell your mama about this pile of wood yet,” he made me promise, then wiped my tears away. “We’re going to build a doghouse with it if she lets us. If not, then I’ll be in the doghouse myself,” he said—which my literal little mind was trying to picture, my tall, lanky father folded up to fit inside such a tiny structure.

I wished I had had a splinter for him to bite out of me in that moment he angrily pulled me from the closet. I wished there was something else he could tell me to keep a secret instead of being appalled by mine. “I’ve a good mind to whip you good, boy,” he told me. “Walk back in that closet and get my big black belt.”

“Howard. Don’t. Please. Leave him alone,” begged my mother.

“Damn it, Nan. You’re the one who needs to leave us alone now. I’m gonna do this. Sometimes a son needs a daddy who’ll whip him instead of a mama who won’t.”

Already crying, I handed my father his belt. “Touch your toes,” he told me. I bent over and did as he said. My mother threw her dress on the closet floor and stormed off toward the kitchen. She turned on the radio as loud as it would go so she wouldn’t hear my cries coming from the bedroom. The sound of “Green Onions” by Booker T. and the M.G.s filled the house. I continued to cry and imagined my mother dancing on the linoleum floor, so lucky to be the one all alone now. I stuck my thumb into my own mouth and longed to touch my father’s stubbled cheek that felt like splinters. I raised my butt higher in the air in both surrender and defiance. I thought about the Chihuahuas coming our way.

*   *   *

After my father built the doghouse—but before the Chihuahuas arrived—it replaced my parents’ closet as the place into which I loved to crawl and be alone. I had helped my father unroll the chicken wire he used to build a fence around the little house, as well as the latched gate. He had put an old pair of sweatpants of his inside for their bed and decided it would be best to make the doghouse three sided, leaving one side completely open, giving him easier access to the dogs if they, like I so often did, refused to come to him.

I was lying atop the sweatpants inside the enclosure when he finally brought the two dogs home. My little brother and sister were playing in the yard and came running to see them. Our father, holding a tiny dog in each arm, knelt in front of us all and introduced them to us. I had never seen him be so gentle in all the six years I had known him—not even when he held my almost-two-year-old little sister in those same sinewy arms of his and sweetly sang her songs that came on my mother’s kitchen radio.

“This little brown one here with the snub nose is Chico,” he told us. My little sister too quickly went to touch the brown creature and he snapped at her. She jumped back with alarm. My four-year-old little brother laughed at her. I stayed put, curled up on the sweatpants, taking it all in.

“Careful, now, Karole,” my father told my sister. “Chihuahuas are nervous little dogs. You have to treat them with tenderness. Do you know what ‘tenderness’ means? It means you just touch them with one little finger maybe,” he told her. He placed Chico, shivering from fright, on the sweatpants next to me. I wanted to show Chico I knew how he felt, so often had I shivered from fright myself in my father’s presence. My father then took one of my sister’s little fingers and petted Chico with it before reaching out to pet me on top of my head with his hand, the full force of all his fingers mussing my hair, as if I really were a dog lying there. “Kevinator, are you gonna help me take care of these critters?” he asked. “You’re the oldest. You’re gonna have to help me out here, boy.”

I sat up, excited to be included in this endeavor of my father’s and with one finger, as he had just instructed my little sister, I reached out to pet the tiny dog my father still held close to his chest. “This little black one here with the sharper face is Coco. Coco and Chico, this is Kevin, Kim, and Karole,” he said, introducing his two new dogs to his three children.

“Well, they are cute,” said my mother, who had come out of the house to take a look at them. She picked up Karole to take her back in the house and change her diaper. “I’ll tend to this one. You teach the boys there how to pick up the mess these dogs are gonna be making in our yard. Dogs don’t wear diapers the last time I checked,” she said.

Kim didn’t stay, though, and followed after my mother and sister. My father and I, watching them all disappear into the house, were left with our two new dogs. That is the way I began to think of them: Chico and Coco belonged to my father and me. They were ours. It would be the four of us against the three of them who had just walked away from us.

In the coming months I took it upon myself to feed the dogs each morning before first grade and hang out with them inside their pen every chance I’d get. Being alone with Chico and Coco was the newest way I’d found to be alone myself. I could now be alone, I was happy to discover, without really being alone. My father was amazed at how well I bonded with the two dogs and they with me. Often they would ignore him when I was around. I’d spend warm autumn afternoons after school curled up with them on those increasingly dirty sweatpants inside their makeshift doghouse. I was the one who took torn newspaper pages from
The Clarion-Ledger
or
Jackson Daily News
—never from the sports pages after my father had yelled at me once for tearing those out before he’d had the chance to read them—and picked up the dog droppings in the pen so they wouldn’t smell up the yard. Chico, I discovered, liked to be petted on his back haunches and Coco under her chin. Chico liked the little red ball my father brought home one day for them both to play with, but Coco liked the rubber bone I’d helped him pick out as a toy for them. He even brought home a flattened basketball one day from the gym to enhance their bed, and Coco loved to curl up inside its concave center as I, pretending I was the kitchen radio, sang her to sleep with my own rendition of Ray Charles’s “Hit the Road Jack,” though she seemed to prefer Dion’s “Runaround Sue.”