My Father Drives

                  Nobody liked to drive with my father.  Every time that he got behind the wheel he acted as though he were a gladiator in the Colosseum.  When he was in his teen years, he made his bones by driving trucks all over the Midwest, and that gave him the right to tell other people how to drive.  He would honk and yell at the other drivers and give them instructions on how to drive better.  On our road trips to Minneapolis or Vermont, Dad would prepare the car by strapping the luggage onto the roof to make room for the kids and dogs on the inside.  Then he would test his level of endurance by leaving our house in the middle of the night and drive until he exhausted himself.  Mom was his copilot, and her job was to read the map and to make sure that he had a supply of gum and a Coke at the ready.  When he was happy, Dad would whistle, and when “King of the Road” came on the radio, he would sing along to his favorite song.  I think that our road trips reminded him of his days of being a long-haul truck driver.

As time went by, his driving became worse because, while he was still as aggressive on the road as he had always been, his skills had diminished.  His eyesight became so bad that he would have to ask, after he had stopped for the traffic light, “Jeff, what color is the light?”  I would reply, “it’s red Dad.  I’ll tell you when it’s green!”  If he had to stop at more than two lights in a row, Dad would yell out, without any warning, “Every Goddam Light!”  It was hard to relax if you were a passenger in his car.  Eventually he couldn’t even drive anymore because of his eyesight.  One day, when he tried to take a sharp turn in his little Mazda sportscar, he hit the curb and the concrete scraped the side of the car.  Dad got out of the car, looked at the damage, and handed the keys to my mother.  He never drove again.

This came hard to a man who had few passions, and his love of driving was at the top of his list of things that made him happy.  My earliest memory was that of my father driving a little GM sports car at breakneck speeds through the backroads of Louisville.  It wasn’t a good memory because Dad drove so fast that I was terrified.  Cave Hill Cemetery is juxtaposed between the downtown area and our house in St. Matthews.  The road around the cemetery is full of twists and turns and Dad loved to take them as fast as possible.  I think that I left indentations on the dashboard because I had gripped it so hard in preparing for the crash that I was sure was coming.  Now that he had given up his driver’s license, Dad was deprived of the one thing that he unquestioningly loved.

Fr Hemmerle in Prison

 Book Four Chapter 6

When I first arrived for my visit with Fr. Hemmerle there were already two people in the waiting room. It was a first come, first served basis for who was allowed into the phone room. I didn’t know if Padre was strapped for class so I bought him a phone card that was available for purchase for the inmate in a machine in the foyer. The other visitors could tell that I was new to the system because they had brought in bags of canned food and I didn’t have any. In a weird sort of fundraiser, each can of food that you brought in bought you more minutes with the inmate whom you were visiting. The jail allowed you five extra minutes for each can and you could earn up to fifteen minutes per visit.

I arrived early, expecting a line, knowing that the longer the line the longer a visitor would have to wait to see the inmate. There was only me and two ladies at first, so I knew that I would have plenty of time with Fr. Hemmerle. As it turns out, his brother Bob came to see him on that very same day. Since Fr. Joe Early maxed at at 30 minutes in terms of how long he could visit, I knew that my time was limited. Of course, he should be allowed to see his brother first. Bob took up the first twenty minutes and I had to satisfy myself with a total of ten minutes, after driving for forty five minutes on this early Saturday morning.

My first impression of Fr. Hemmerle had been one of shock; Padre had only been at the Meade County Jail for a short time but his appearance had already changed dramatically. He didn’t want to be seen this way, but he also wanted to have visitors, so the old man was willing to have me see him at his absolute worst. Because he wasn’t allowed to have razors, Fr. Hemmerle wasn’t shaved and he looked like a bum. Even in the woods at Camp Tall Trees he kept his hair clean and tidy; a comb over swept across his almost completely bald pate. But now his hair was dirty and matted down so it did little to cover up his baldness. He was dressed in sweats and a t shirt, which made him look homeless. In short, the Meade County Jail had taken away from Fr. Hemmerle all of his vanities and all that he was left with was a shadow of his former self. Bravely, put without vanity or pride, he faced me for the first time since his trial.

It was awkward; all surface stuff. “How have you been,” I asked, knowing that it was a stupid question with my mentor having been in jail for two weeks. Fr. Hemmerle replied with, “as good as could be expected.” The guards had taken away all of his clothes so he asked his friends and to bring him a change of sweats and socks. Steve Pence, a long time attorney who had a lot of connections, was able to send him new clothes and a Bible. Ordinarily, books cannot be sent to prisoners because the pages could be soaked with LSD. The inmates could then rip the pages out of the book and get a high off of the paper. For that same reason, all letters sent to the inmates had to be written on plain, white paper and no return address stickers could be applied to the envelope. “I had no idea that there were so many rules for the prisoners,” I said. Searching for the right words and trying to be delicate, I followed with, “this is not my culture!” Padre laughed and said, “It’s not my culture either.” But we both knew that it was going to be his culture, possibly for a very long time.

Fr. Hemmerle was frustrated because he didn’t know how long he would be in jail and his current living conditions were horrible. The problem was that the jail had an overcrowding problem and the pod that he lived in was supposed to hold only two cells with two people per cell. Each pod had a common area but when Padre was there he had to share the pod with nine people, meaning that five people had to sleep on the floor while four had a bed to themselves. Because he was an old man, and on the side of being infirm, he was one of the inmates who slept on the floor. The only thing that the jail did to make him comfortable was to give him a mattresses to sleep on. If that weren’t bad enough, the jail allowed the inmates to watch television, so the damn thing

  

blared from 10:00 am to midnight, or the whole of the time that the T.V.s were allowed to be on. Nobody could agree on what programs to watch so a lot of arguments, and sometimes fistfights, broke out over which channel was on. Instead of getting involved with conflict over the T.V.s, Fr. Hemmerle wrote letters or read his Bible.

It was a quick visit and one that I didn’t do again. If I were to see him again then my visits would become about pitying him and not about friendship. It sounds like an excuse, but it is a real reason. I prefer to write him letters because I can put a variety of thoughts down on paper and I can do it in my spare time rather than driving to Meade County or the other places where Padre was incarcerated.

Fr. Hemmerle was sent to the Green River Correctional Complex in Central City, Kentucky. It did not go well. The other inmates found out that Padre had been convicted for pedophilia and they were already predisposed to dislike him because he was a priest. There are a lot of Catholics in Louisville but once you get out of the major cities, and into the Bible Belt, many of the rural people are anti-Cathloic. A couple of inmates attacked Fr. Hemmerle at Green River because he wouldn’t give them his canteen money. This was just an excuse for roughing him up and Padre wore a bruise under his eye for weeks after getting punched in the face. The old man was becoming bitter, especially towards the guards who would not, or could not, protect him from the prison bullies. The guards seemed to want to make the lives of the inmates even more difficult by having lock downs for no good reason. Any time that Fr. Hemmerle could get out of his cell and into the yard was appreciated and when that time was taken away he felt even more isolated.

When the physical abuse continued, Fr. Hemmerle requested to move to the Luther Luckett Correctional Complex in LaGrange, Kentucky. The prison system doesn’t like to move people around from one complex to another and finds ways of punishing people who continually request transfers. However, when it became obvious that Fr. Hemmerle was being abused, the consequences were suspended and he was sent to Luther Luckett where his life became much better. There was more of a routine in LaGrange and the inmates were more settled. In addition to writing letters and reading the Bible, Padre found a job working in the chapel. He followed his beloved U of L cardinal basketball team and the Dallas Cowboys football team.

Eunuch

  

Chapter 4 Section 4: The Night Carolina Got Drunk 

The problem with the marriage of Andrew Clark III and Carolina was that he had all of the power and she didn’t have any.  In addition, he made the money and put her on a budget, which Carolina resented.  When she did try to make it on her own, by selling jewelry or encyclopedias, she failed miserably.  Carolina’s final career move was to become a realtor but that didn’t work out for her either.  She was powerless and angry and the only way that she could express her rage and frustration was through drinking.

Carolina refused to get a job when her real estate career fizzled.  “What do you want me to do?  Sell women’s clothes at the dress shop?”  The problem was that without a job, and no career, she had lost her purpose.  She had failed at raising a family, hadn’t done anything that she could be proud of and had no purpose in life.  Carolina did not know how to make herself happy.  One night, when she was alone and tired of her own company, she wanted to get out of the house for a while but the kids were too young to leave by themselves.  Carolina didn’t have the money for a babysitter so she decided to take a break from her life by taking a couple of drinks.  Beer wouldn’t do the trick.  She wanted to get drunk and get drunk fast, so she raided Andrew’s stash of whiskey.

When the kids heard their mother sing, they knew that something unusual was happening.  The Clark house was devoid of any happy noises so if Carolina did sing it wasn’t a happy tune or a popular song.  She sang an old World War I song that she picked up from an old movie and the lyrics went like this; “The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, in your stomach and out your mouth.  Did you ever think as a hearse goes by, that you will be the next to die?”  The kids didn’t know what to make of the dark songs that their mother was singing while drunk.  The other boozy song that came dribbling out of her mouth went something like this; “nobody loves me, everybody hates me, I’m going out to eat worms.”

Andrew came home to see his wife laying on the bathroom floor with vomit drooling out of her mouth.  “I wish I were dead,” she said as he approached her.  “I wish I were a man.”  When she realized that it was Andrew who was in the bathroom with her, and not one of her children, she called him names.  “You are a eunuch,” she said.  “You couldn’t get it up with a ten-foot pole.”  She was mixing but was too drunk to know or care.  Andrew took this abuse, probably because the kids were in the next room, but also because he knew that she was partly right and had been caught off guard at this insult.  It was at this point in the night that no one would forget that Carolina inexplicitly hit her husband.  He wasn’t expecting it, and it didn’t hurt, but he was so surprised that, out of reflex, he hit her back.  It was just an innocent smack on the shoulder.  Carolina stood up suddenly, laughed at the light hit, and her body language all but dared him to hit her again.  “Eunuch!”  She infuriated Andrew by taunting him.  “Eunuch,” she scolded her husband over and over again.

The second hit wasn’t a light smack.  The whole room felt like it erupted in Carolina’s mind and she was temporarily blinded.  Andrew did a ‘round the world’ swing and hit his wife square on the cheek bone.  A bright light temporarily blinded her.  The reverberations echoed throughout her brain; the inside of her cranium felt like it had been hit with an electrical shock as she crumpled to the floor.  The blood flowed easily from the newly created wound as she lost control of her bowels and bladder.  When the shock settled in, Carolina threw up all over the bathroom carpet, and the scent of stomach acid and too quickly consumed whiskey filled the room. 

Andrew hadn’t meant to hurt Carolina and felt so guilty about punching a defenseless woman that he nursed his wife by applying cold compresses onto the cut on her cheek and her bruised forehead.  It could have been a nice moment when he picked Carolina off the bathroom floor, allowed her to drape her arm around his shoulder, and let him to guide her upstairs to the bedroom.  In a fit of self-control that even he didn’t know he possessed; Andrew did not react as Carolina continued to taunt him.  “Eunuch,” she repeated, knowing that this one barb had easily pierced the veneer of Andrew’s fragile ego.  “Eunuch,” she said again.  The children heard this fading voice as they hid in their bedrooms, even though they didn’t know what the word meant.  The last words of the evening that the four Clark children heard were “I wish I were dead.  I wish I were a man.  Nobody loves me.  I wish I were dead.”

The next morning Carolina had to ask what happened to her cheek.  The children suggested that she must have fallen in the bathroom and hit her head on the tub.  Andrew kept his mouth shut and said nothing to disabuse the family of the made-up story.  The family coped with the incident by pretending that nothing unusual had happened.  However, there was a noticeable strain to the relations between Carolina and Andrew.  They became cordial to one another as their marriage never recovered from Carolina’s drunken outbursts.  There was an undeclared truce; neither one talked to the other, but they didn’t provoke each other anymore either.  A cold war that would last for the rest of their married life began in earnest the night that Carolina got drunk, and the frost that had settled on their once happy relationship would not melt away until one of them died.