Mother American Night Read online

  P.W. went on to acquire multiple master’s degrees in mathematics and geodesic engineering. By the time he was twenty-nine years old, P.W. became the youngest college president in the United States at Amity College in Iowa. While serving as a fellow at the University of Chicago in 1905, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis of the kidney, known back then as consumption. The doctor who removed one of P.W.’s kidneys didn’t even bother to send him the bill because he figured the other kidney would kill P.W. before he could ever pay it.

  P.W. was about thirty-eight years old when he came out west with Eva because he thought the mountain air might be good for him. He came with the expectation of dying quickly. But he didn’t. Instead, he became quite a big deal.

  First he went to a sanatorium in Colorado Springs and then to Wyoming, where he spent a couple of years working for Uncle Amos on his Mule Shoe Ranch, which turned out to be extremely salutary for him. When it looked like P.W. was going to live after all, Uncle Amos said, “Why don’t you get a place of your own?” He grubstaked him a bit, and then P.W. bought a little homestead called the Westphall Place that was north of Cora.

  It was soon called the Bar Cross Ranch; as a mathematician, P.W. had come up with a one-iron brand that was also a mathematical symbol and easy to apply. He then bought the Wright place, the Johnson place, and the Merschon place and started to accumulate a lot of adjacent land in the county.

  When Uncle Amos died, he left all of his property to P.W.’s wife, Eva, and her two sisters. Her sisters were both farm girls back in Missouri and they immediately sold their shares to P.W. Pretty soon, he had bought himself a drugstore and a grocery as well as a stake in the State Bank of Big Piney, Wyoming. He also became a thirty-second degree Scottish Rite Mason and founded the Franklin Lodge in Pinedale.

  In 1919, P.W. was elected to the first of his five terms in the Wyoming State House of Representatives, where he became Speaker pro-tem before going on to serve two terms in the state senate and as president. Because he didn’t like to ride all the way over to Lander, the Fremont County seat, and because the line between it and Lincoln County ran right through the middle of his house, P.W. introduced the bill in the Wyoming State House of Representatives that led to the creation of Sublette County in 1923.

  To the best of my knowledge, Sublette County, which comprises about five thousand square miles of land, is the only political jurisdiction that is based almost entirely on its watershed. P.W. did put the tiny town of Bondurant in it, but that was only so he could get enough votes from there to make Pinedale the county seat in a hotly contested election that was decided by just six votes.

  P.W. named the county after William Sublette, a well-known mountain man who, along with his four brothers, trapped for the Rocky Mountain Fur Company. In the early nineteenth century people would come into Wyoming through South Pass, the only wagon route through the Rocky Mountains. In 1826, William Sublette blazed a shortcut between South Pass and the Bear River that became known as Sublette’s Cutoff.

  P.W. also tried running for governor twice, but that never worked out for him. The fact that he was quite unlikable had a lot to do with it. He was already in his mideighties when I was a kid, but my mother always felt that it was really important for me to learn whatever I could from him. So I would go out with him on long drives that let me see huge swathes of Sublette County. From the passenger seat I watched that old man take his 1954 Chevy Bel Air into places that I subsequently could not get to in a four-wheel drive.

  I wouldn’t say P.W. was ever loving to me in the conventional sense of the word, but I liked going out with him because he would address me as an adult and I would get to see things I would never have seen otherwise. And so getting to spend time with him as a kid gave me the opportunity to learn a lot of useful stuff about the adult world. My mother definitely felt that it was worth the risk of having us go out to some far distant place where P.W. might suddenly die behind the wheel, leaving me stuck there until someone else came along. Before we left the ranch, she would always say, “If Grandpa falls asleep for a very long time, that means he’s gone. You don’t go anywhere on your own. You just stay by the car.” Fortunately for both of us, that never happened.

  My mother herself always had a mixed relationship with her father. A big part of the problem was that while P.W.’s wife, Eva—my grandmother—was still alive, P.W. had already taken up with Girly Neal, who was like the scarlet woman of Big Piney, Wyoming. She was his secretary and traveling companion and about my mother’s age, and my mother didn’t care for this arrangement at all. Girly herself didn’t help the situation much. Whenever she came down to Salt Lake City, Girly would stay with my mother at her sorority house at the University of Utah rather than at the house P.W. had there.

  Around Pinedale, they called P.W. “the Little Red Bull.” A bunch of different ranches ran a large cattle allotment in common, with the idea being that everyone would put out pure Hereford cattle that more or less matched. P.W. was a full-fledged member of the bull-buying committee, but he had his own goddamned ideas about this particular subject. He believed there was some significant virtue to crossing Hereford cows with Red Angus bulls, and so he bought a Red Angus and turned it out on the allotment. It was a rip-snorting little thing that tore up the turf and fucked everything in sight. That bull didn’t look or think like any of the others, and in some respects it resembled P.W., who at five foot six was kind of diminutive physically.

  Getting the little red bull kind of represented the way P.W. dealt with everything. Had someone else tried this, they would have gotten some shit for it, but with P.W. people were willing to say, “Well, he may know something about this,” and so they let him do it. But I don’t think anyone ever came up with a solid answer to the question of how they felt about either one of them, the bull or P.W. They all had mixed feelings.

  Even though P.W. did amazing stuff for the area, including selflessly laying in a lot of the ditch line and road line and creating the shape of the county, he wasn’t the easiest person in the world to get along with. He knew he was a hell of a lot smarter than anyone around him in terms of raw intellectual horsepower, and so he was snappish. It was a character trait that became even more pronounced in my mother.

  On June 19, 1955, when I was nine years old, P.W. wasn’t feeling all that well and so he drove himself to the hospital, where he then died at the age of eighty-eight. He had outlived his doctor’s diagnosis by fifty years.

  TWO

  NORMAN AND MIM

  When my mother, Mim, was a freshman at the University of Wyoming in 1924, she was diagnosed with Pott’s Disease, which was then called tuberculosis of the bones. She went to a quack doctor who had just gotten into the wonders of this new X-ray process, and he turned his X-ray beam on her hip for forty-five minutes.

  The result was that she almost died of radiation sickness. She threw up for days, all of her hair fell out, and much of the skin on her hip was sloughed off. She was then informed that, regrettably, they had sterilized her. This was the Roaring Twenties, and my mother, who was a wild thing, believed she was now sterile, which made her even wilder when she recovered.

  She kept a smoking-hot date book that included the night she met my father at the University of Utah in 1928. My mother was somewhat Victorian about it, but it was pretty clear that she and Norman just did it all night long. At various points in their lives, they both confessed to me that the reason they had stayed together for all those years was because they had never had better sex with anybody else.

  Unlike my mother, my father was raised under oppressive Mormon circumstances. His father was a farmer in Bountiful, Utah, but the family didn’t have a lot of money and they were always struggling. In the summertime, my father had to drive the family vegetable truck to the farmers market at four o’clock every morning.

  Norman did, however, come from what amounted to Mormon royalty. On his side of the family, I ha
ve an ancestor I don’t know how many times removed who signed the affidavit attesting to the reality of the golden tablets. That put my father pretty high up on the scale of credibility within the Mormon community. His entire family had been devout all the way down the line until my mother came along and snagged him.

  By the time he graduated from the University of Utah in 1928, my father was not nearly so serious about being a Mormon. He still wanted to be regarded as a religious person but in the way that one is as a member of the burgher class. His goal in life was to become a banker.

  Physically, my father didn’t look much like me at all. He stood about six foot two and was well proportioned, a fine-looking man who could charm the scales off a chicken foot. He was also a great hand with the women. I would sit down with him and my mother for dinner in a restaurant and by the time we left, we would know all there was to know about the waitress.

  My mother and father had an explosive connection that neither of them could exactly explain, and so when they decided to get married in 1929, my mother said, “All right, Norman, if you want to get married in the Mormon Temple for time and eternity, I’ll do that.” And he said, “No, I’d rather not.” So they got married in the lobby of the Hotel Utah in Salt Lake City, right across the street from the temple.

  With the beginning of the Depression, my father began to wonder about the wisdom of becoming a banker in Salt Lake City. Instead, he became the salvation of P.W., because my grandfather realized he was not smart enough about business to hold on to this large, kind of ungainly ranch he had assembled. And so P.W. happily turned the ranch over to my father.

  For many years, my parents were kind of like the right-wing Wyoming version of John and Jackie Kennedy before they ever had kids, a glamorous couple who were both really attractive and well known for being able to have a real good time.

  Then my father decided to run for state senate. During his first tour of duty in Cheyenne, he and Mim were having it off, as they were inclined to do, at the Plains Hotel, and it turned out that there was one egg left in my mother’s ovaries. Much to her surprise and their mutual consternation, she got pregnant with me. At the time, she was forty-two years old. They had been fucking like minks for twenty years and had no expectations that this would ever happen.

  She had to go to Jackson Hole to give birth because there was no hospital in Sublette County, and it turned out she was actually carrying twins, which they didn’t know because this was in the days before ultrasound. When my identical twin brother looked out into the physical world on October 3, 1947, he decided that he was not interested and gave up right at the moment of birth. As I later learned, Elvis Presley’s twin brother had done the same thing.

  My mother never told me about any of this until I was about thirteen or fourteen. Other kids had imaginary friends who mysteriously disappeared as soon as they entered puberty, but mine stuck around. I never thought of him as having a name because he was too completely integrated into my life.

  One day I said to my mother, “I feel this presence surrounding me all the time and it feels a lot like me. Do you have any idea what could cause that?” And she said, “I have an idea.” She told me about my twin brother, and since then I’ve always been living for the two of us, which has made my own life immeasurably larger.

  One of the best things about being an interruption in my parents’ meteoric political career was that they both felt like I was this kid who had come to dinner and would leave just as mysteriously as I had arrived. So they spared me any set of expectations. They asked nothing of me and only ever disciplined me periodically.

  My mother was incredibly cruel in a way, because she liked to make me her Little Lord Fauntleroy, which was unwelcome even when I was six years old. I was a boy in blue knee pants, and when she held bridge games with women of a certain age, she would put me on display. I would go around pouring Constant Comment tea for them all while making light conversation.

  Although I was definitely the miracle child and the gift from God, both of my parents were raging narcissists, and so I was the miracle child because it suited their narcissism. But it did not suit their narcissism that there was now a third candidate vying for attention, and so they didn’t always keep me around.

  I never had a nanny, but I did have a bunch of broke-down alcoholic cowboys who were like nannies to me. They came and went, but some were long-term. There was a guy named Red Riniger who was a true cowboy and had an amusing way of approaching everything. Red was built out of beef jerky, and I spent an awful lot of time with him. There was a machine shop on the ranch because whenever anything broke down, we had to fix it. Red figured I would go down to the shop and start dicking around with stuff anyway, and so he taught me how to weld when I was four years old so I wouldn’t blind myself. Most of our rolling stock was a lot older than me, and so we were constantly taking apart engines and repairing them because we couldn’t afford to have someone come in from town to do it. When I got older, I turned out to be pretty good at it.

  The ranch hands were all different than my mother and father, which was an asset as far as I was concerned. I once told my father I wanted to be a cowboy, and he said, “John Perry, a cowboy works for a salary. A cow man is someone who owns a ranch. That is what you want to be.” And so I didn’t learn how to brand cattle until the herd on the ranch was mine, and I formally became the cow man.

  I like to say that I was raised largely by drunken cowboys and farm animals, and that is not as outrageous a statement as you might think. The Bar Cross was kind of a self-contained world, and it does take a ranch to fuck up a child.

  THREE

  HOME ON THE RANCH

  Even before the Supreme Court made their decision in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, my father thought that children everywhere should be going to integrated schools. He was nothing if not a fair-minded person. When I was five years old and about to start kindergarten, my father decided to introduce a bill in the state senate that would create an equal rights law in Wyoming.

  Back then, the state’s Democratic Party represented its white working-class people, and so Rudy Anselmi, the Democratic minority leader, said, “I don’t know, Norm. In principle, I agree with your bill. But let’s make this particular. We got this gal down there, this Negro lady who can’t get a job because she’s a Negro. Would you hire her to teach your son?”

  And my father said, “It’s amazing that you ask because I’m just setting up a school on the ranch for my son and some of the other kids who live there, and yeah, if she was qualified, I’d hire her.” When my father met Juanita Simmons, he was impressed and hired her for the job. After that Rudy Anselmi enlisted everyone on his side of the aisle to support the bill, but it still took them five years to get it passed.

  In 1952, there were no black people in Sublette County aside from Juanita and her husband, Jetty, who worked as a locomotive engineer in a switching yard. In the entire state of Wyoming, there were probably only somewhere between three and six hundred black people scattered along the Union Pacific railroad line. Juanita came to work as our teacher in an old schoolhouse at the Finn place that had two rooms. One was the classroom and Juanita lived in the other. Her husband, Jetty, would sometimes come up to stay with her but not as often as she or I would have preferred, because I thought this guy was God. Jetty drove Mallet locomotives, the biggest piece of rolling stock ever to hit the rails of the Union Pacific. Back then his job was kind of like being a rocket pilot. I thought he was coolest thing going.

  For twenty days every other year, I went with my parents to Cheyenne while the state legislature was in session and attended school with a bunch of Catholic kids at St. Mary’s, right next to the capitol. As the only Mormon there, I suffered a lot, mostly at the hands of the nuns. This was pre–Vatican II and my going to school there was always a weird little break in the rhythm of my life.

  As a kid, I read like crazy. My parents
bought me books, because it was fifteen miles to the public library in Pinedale. One thing that I read that was of pivotal importance was The Book of Knowledge, a twenty-volume encyclopedia for kids. I read every volume and that was fundamental for me, because it was my Internet. It really was. It introduced me to the idea that there were people out there who had gone to the trouble to find out how things worked and wanted to convey that information to others.

  Although I was curious at the one-room schoolhouse, I wasn’t a particularly good student. I was never worth a shit when it came to getting my homework done, and I’m still not. I also realized pretty early on that I could make a lot of headway on charm alone. But even that required some doing, because I was completely unsocialized at first. Whenever I got out among others who were my own age, I had virtually no social skills at all. I had to come up with a way to essentially reverse-engineer charm.

  After I finished fifth grade, they closed down the little schoolhouse and started busing all the students into Pinedale. There were times when there was so much snow that the bus could not get into town, but we had snow planes, which had been cobbled together on skis with a big airplane engine on the rear that could really get up and going on a packed surface.

  At home, things were not so great. My father was an alcoholic, but back then it was difficult to be someone of note in Wyoming politics if you weren’t. He would go on binges sometimes, but he was never a mean drunk and not abusive in any way. He did make me angry and disappointed me a lot, though, in the way he took abuse from my mother that he didn’t deserve and wouldn’t have had to suffer if he hadn’t been drinking.