By Jim Rix
Today is my 77th birthday, a week after Moristotle’s, and only five days after that of our Tulare, California, high school classmate Donald Richert. I mention Don because Moristotle – I’m going to call him Morris from here on because he hadn’t yet become Moristotle….I mention Don because Morris has told him and me (and more than once) that he can remember first meeting us, although neither Don nor I can remember meeting Morris. Don and I, Morris says, were playing Roshambeau (or Rock Paper Scissors) on a school activity bus the summer before we three entered high school. Maybe we were playing it with too much gusto to remember, but just enough gusto to make a memorable impression on Morris? Anyway, we have remained in touch for some of the ensuing 64 years. We remember each others’ birthdays.
Why am I telling you this? Well, I’m not sure it’s me who’s telling you. Morris said he’d take care of preparing a blog version of a recent autobiography I wrote for a book that a teacher we all knew in high school is preparing about her days in Tulare. It beats me why she asked me to provide an autobiography, but not Don or Morris. But that’ll have to be another story, or maybe a footnote. Obviously, this wasn’t in the autobiography I sent her, and that’s why it’s possible that Morris is writing this.
The autobiography I sent to the teacher also didn’t include the stuff I wrote in my book Jingle Jangle, about the religious and moral lessons I learned from my mother. The autobiography I sent to the teacher started, “After being graduated from TUHS,” by which time the religious and moral lessons had already been learned, one of them in connection with my practical use of a stash of Playboy magazines, which my mother happened upon one time. And I’m not referring just to the stash, but also to my use of it. As often the case with my brilliant mother, her lesson on this occasion was delivered with a simple chuckle, delivered in response to my off-the-cuff use of the punch line to a Woody Allen joke, “It’s not so terrible. After all – it’s sex with someone I love.”
God and religion were not discussed one way or the other in the Rix household. As a teenager, remembering that I had gone to church a few times in my distant past, I asked Mom about it and she said that my dad had been active in the Episcopal Church. When I asked her why we didn’t go to church after Dad died (when I was 7), she said that it was too much trouble getting three boys ready for church each Sunday. I got the impression that she had better things to do on her day off. And the few times I did go to church, I found the sermons platitudinous.
Another lesson had to do with nincompoops – specifically, how I was not to take any shit from them. I was twelve at the time, the year before we moved to Tulare. A man on my paper route wasn’t paying me the month’s fee ($1.50) for delivering the now defunct San Francisco News to him. The third time I visited him to collect, he even claimed he had already paid me. Mom asked me whether I was sure he hadn’t paid me. I said I was. Well, the upshot was that she went with me the fourth time, and ended up manhandling him to get the money. I use “manhandled” in its most basic sense of grabbing a man by his nuts….
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| $5 per book, $50 per box of 18, shipping included |
Hmm, I still have a few thousand hardbound copies of Jingle Jangle that I’d love to find readers for, so…if you’d like to learn more about what my mother taught me, let me know where to mail your copy. Only $5, shipping included. And, if you would like to help me put Jingle Jangle into the hands of still more readers, I’ll send you a whole box of 18 (individually shrink-wrapped) for only $50, shipping included.
Morris said he’d like to serialize my autobiography, and that’s okay with me, as long as he does the work. I have something else I’d personally rather do: get started writing the novel version of the nonfiction story told in Jingle Jangle, about the wrongful conviction and eventual exoneration of my cousin Ray Krone, for a rape and murder he didn’t commit. Because Ray had been convicted largely on the testimony of a quack forensic odontologist who claimed that the bitemark on the victim matched Ray’s “snaggletooth,” I plan to title the novel Snaggletooth, “based on a true story.”
So, let’s end this installment here. We can take up next time with the part about “after being graduated from TUHS.”
| Copyright © 2020 by Jim Rix |
Speaking of quack forensics experts, the latest John Grisham legal thriller is very critical of our so-called "criminal justice" system. The Guardians features a not-for-profit organization ("The Guardians") dedicated to identifying wrongfully convicted individuals and trying to get them exonerated. It attacks things you too, Jim, attacked in Jingle Jangle, like jailhouse snitches and junk-science witnesses. It also comes down hard on prisons as warehouses for blacks, and on prisons run by private companies whose primary motive is making profits. I think Ken Burns’ recent exposé, College Behind Bars, focuses especially on the last two points. I haven't seen it yet.
ReplyDeleteJim, it is past midnight and I'm still reading and rereading this, and still trying to figure out if this is in some sort of code, or if there is maybe a puzzle involved. I didn't have anything profound to comment, but I just wanted to let you know that this is the most amazing, free-roaming, wide-ranging bit of writing I have come across in a long, long time.
ReplyDeleteOkay, a couple of questions: Do you have children, and did you manage to cultivate the same sort of relationship with them that you had with your mother? If so, is there a CliffsNotes version of how you managed that feat?
I too find my autobiography somewhat puzzling.
ReplyDeleteI have 3 children and yes we have the same sort of relationship that I had with my mother. Our relationship was not cultivated by any conscious effort but by osmosis.
Osmosis: a word to live by, apparently, and certainly an excellent word to teach my six-year-old son.
ReplyDelete