My Grandpa Johnny… he was a goddamn movie star. He was my Ricky Ricardo, a handsome, dark-skinned man with a sharp little mustache and slicked-back hair. He wore a button-down shirt, slacks, and a hat with a goddamn feather in it, even on a Tuesday. He was a hero in my eyes. But he wasn’t a soft man. He was born in Mexico, came over young, and walked right into the heart of the goddamn American machine. He was a butcher in the slaughterhouses of Bellflower, a white man’s country back then. He earned his place. He told me the stories, showed me his hands, those beautiful, gnarled, and completely messed-up hands, scarred from a lifetime of knife work. He told me how they’d get the cattle, how he, a young, strong bastard, would grab the cow’s head, hook his knuckles under its chin, and yank it up, holding that thousand-pound beast in place for the sledgehammer. A beautiful, ugly, and completely brutal ballet of death, hundreds of times a day.
He was a union man. A provider. A bomber in the goddamn Army, before they even had an Air Force. He’d come home from that slaughterhouse, that beautiful, honest, and completely savage job, and he’d bring sticks of salami, huge cuts of meat. We ate like kings. He was a good man. A great man. He and my grandmother, they were a product of their time. Slept in separate rooms, just like on I Love Lucy. But the love… Christ, the love was there. It was a tangible, beautiful, and completely honest thing. They’d bounce it back and forth. He’d look at me, this little, feral bastard, and he’d praise me. Call me “jefe.” He made me feel like a goddamn giant.
But there was a… sickness. A quiet rot. He was a veteran, and the VA, in its infinite, beautiful, and completely fucked-up wisdom, they just… medicated him. Pills came in the mail, in these big vanilla envelopes, trays of thirty white jars with high-tech labels, a goddamn chemistry set of unknown, unknowable poisons. And he just… took them. We didn’t know what was wrong with him. But the pills, they’d make him “wacky.” They’d make him tired. One day, he went downtown, came back “pippish,” wearing a new, gold-nugget watch and a ring, trying to look young. A quiet, sad, and completely transparent mid-life crisis. And the gold, of course, turned his goddamn skin green. It was all fake.
And the pills, they had a darkness. I was a young man, came home from school one day, and there was screaming in the kitchen. My grandmother’s kitchen, the quiet, safe, and completely holy place. And he was there, with crazy eyes. A look I’d never seen. He had a knife in his hand. A knife. And he was yelling at Bertha. “You fucking bitch! You’re cheating on me! I’m gonna cut you!” And my grandmother, my beautiful, sainted, and completely terrified grandmother, she was hunkered in the corner, holding a goddamn bag of bread like a shield. I just… I walked in. A kid. “Grandpa,” I said, “give me the knife.” And he… he just broke. The crazy eyes left, and he was just a broken, old man. I took the knife. It was the goddamn pills. It had to be.
He got sick. Cancer. That beautiful, ugly, and completely honest disease that eats us all in the end. I remember walking into the hospital in Linwood, the same goddamn hospital I was born in, a quiet, strange, and completely perfect circle. I remember taking him home. I remember loving on him. I’d comb his graying, turtle-like hair. I’d sit with him. His body just… ate itself. The bones started to show. The man, the hero, the giant, he just… disappeared.
The last time I saw him, he was just… a sound. A quiet, gurgling sound in a dark room, drowning in his own goddamn fluids with every, single, ugly, beautiful, and completely necessary breath. I remember I kissed his forehead. It was waxy. Cold. A quiet, terrible, and completely honest preview of the end.
I wasn’t there when he finally passed. I was in another state, living my own stupid, beautiful, and completely fucked-up life.
But that man… that quiet, strong, and completely complicated bastard… he was one of the strongest, silent heroes I’ve ever had in my life. A man who wrestled cattle, who flew in bombers, who loved his grandkids, and who fought his own goddamn demons in a quiet, pill-induced haze.
Even now, just… just telling you this story…
Christ.
He was a good man.
