The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss (4 page)

All told, our grandfather fathered and raised eight children, four with each of his two wives. By the time I showed up, he was known among his descendants as Dad Kemp. He had been born prematurely in Janesville, Wisconsin on December 9, 1873, a child so small he fit comfortably into a shoebox lined with cotton. His mother, Nancy Narcissa Luce Kemp, used the warming oven of her kitchen stove as an incubator, which obviously worked. Dad Kemp enjoyed a robust life until his death in 1959 at the age of eighty-six. By then he’d witnessed two world wars, the Korean War, the Great Depression, Prohibition and its repeal, the Dust Bowl, and the launch of new technologies ranging from the automobile and electric light to radio, TV, and Sputnik. He married his first wife, Margaret Lucretia (Lu) Hossak, in 1900. The story was that Lu’s mother had murdered Lu’s father in his sleep as a result of his constant abuse, which, if so, is perhaps the closest thing in the family closet to an actual scandal. Lu died giving birth to her fourth child, Margie, in 1909.

After returning to Paonia with Honey, his second wife, our grandfather held several jobs, beginning in the local fruit industry. From 1927 until 1932, he served as Paonia’s town clerk and later as an accountant at the local power company, a position he held until he lost his sight to glaucoma in his late fifties. His impact on us was profound and lasting. I only knew him in the final decade of his life, but even then he was a character, and many of the quirks of personality that Terence and I shared can ultimately be traced to that man, whether due to genetics or from traits we picked up from being around him. He loved language, loved using it, loved writing it, and that’s surely one reason why Terence and I, both avid readers, took an early and lifelong delight in books, language, and all their possibilities. He had a touch of the Irish bard in him, though he wasn’t Irish; the Irish side of the family was my father’s. I remember my grandpa using a white cane on the rare occasions he went out. More often I encountered him sitting in a rocking chair in front of the tiny potbellied stove in his living room, always ready to reel off a story about his life on the prairies during the pioneer days. He seemed to have an endless stock of stories and was always happy to share them with an attentive and fascinated grandson.

Our grandfather was famous for his colorful phraseology. For instance, he called something new or unusual a “fustilarian fizgig from Zimmerman.” A summer downpour was a “frog strangler,” and a delicious meal or dish was “larrupin’.” I have no idea where these phrases originated, but they have persisted in our family to this day. In fact, his fustilarian fizgigs from Zimmerman may have been my first introduction to the notion of something incomprehensible and alien, from another dimension or place. Needless to say, that concept became useful much later when we started dealing with DMT and other psychedelics. The things seen on DMT were and are fustilarian fizgigs from
somewhere
(even if only in one’s consciousness) and the characterization is at least as apt as Terence’s later descriptions of these alien entities as “singing elf machines” or “bejeweled hyper-dimensional basketballs.” I’ve seen fizgigs defined as a kind of fireworks that fizz as they whirl. Even better. It seems quite apt to describe the objects seen on DMT as fizgigs of the mind.

Our mother, smart and well read, had surely been influenced by her father’s love of books and words as well. She was a small-town girl; indeed, our childhood home was on the same block in Paonia as hers, just a half a block or so up Orchard Avenue. All three Kemp sisters were known for their beauty and could go out with whomever they wanted, though what “going out” meant in those days is probably not what we mean today. Occasionally, Hadie and Mayme, being close in age, competed for suitors. Mayme was exceptionally bright and managed to skip a year in school, allowing both sisters to graduate from Paonia High School together in 1931. After graduation, our mother attended a business college in Grand Junction about seventy miles west of Paonia; later Mayme followed her there. Such training was one of few options open to bright young women at the time.

Joe and Hadie McKenna during World War II.

Despite her humble origins, our mother was a remarkable woman who didn’t spend her entire life cloistered in Paonia. After completing her courses, she moved to Delta, the county seat thirty miles from Paonia, and took a job in the clerk and recorder’s office. She was living in a boardinghouse when she met a handsome fellow tenant named Joe McKenna, who had recently arrived from the Colorado town of Salida to work as a shoe salesman. After a protracted courtship, our parents married on June 10, 1937. Our father was an adventurous sort and fascinated by flying; he managed to get his pilot’s license the same year he was married. In 1939, he rented a plane and flew our mother to an Elks convention in Chicago. On the way back, they ran out of gas and had to put down in a cornfield somewhere in Kansas, turning the trip into more of an adventure than they had bargained for.

Our parents eventually moved to Oakland, California, where our father sold shoes again for a while. After the United States entered World War II, he enlisted, opted for flight school, and waited to be called up. He found a better if more dangerous job as a steel rigger in the Kaiser shipyards in nearby Richmond, where many of the new cargo vessels known as Liberty Ships were being built at a great speed. The young couple’s California interlude ended abruptly when the call arrived in 1943. My father’s dream of serving as a pilot ended when he was passed over for flight training in favor of higher-priority cadets. After training, he reported for active duty with the rank of tech sergeant and departed for England to serve in the 615th Bombardment Squadron. By August 1944, he was a top gunner and engineer on a B-17 bomber flying over Europe and Germany.

During that period, our mother worked in Oakland as a personal assistant (the term then was “secretary”) to Henry J. Kaiser, one of the iconic industrialists of the day, now remembered as the founder of Kaiser Aluminum, Kaiser Steel, the HMO Kaiser Permanente, and the philanthropic Kaiser Family Foundation. How she landed in the office and sometimes, literally, in the lap of Kaiser, I am not certain, but I fantasize that the comely young woman must have caught his eye at a company function staged for the benefit of the shipyard workers. Subsequent discreet enquiries would have revealed her to be fresh out of business school and eminently qualified in all the secretarial arts—typing, dictation, filing—as well as being quite easy on the eyes. Old Henry J. must have made an executive decision that she was just what he needed to give his office a little class, to say nothing of an efficient assistant. I have no idea if there was ever any real hanky-panky between them; I doubt it, but I do remember that Dad used to tease Mom about it. The fact is I think my parents were so much in love and enthralled with each other that there was no room for jealousy. Dad was a very lucky man to have our mother, and he knew it; they were in love right up until the day she died.

After surviving his combat missions, our father returned and became an instructor at what I believe was the Army Air Field in Charleston, South Carolina. He mustered out of the service shortly after VE Day, 8 May 1945, when the war in Europe ended. After reuniting out East, my parents embarked on a road trip back to California. My mother’s job at Kaiser was waiting and my father expected to work at an insurance company in San Francisco. Their itinerary included a stop in Paonia, where, on the spur of the moment, they decided to stay. They temporarily moved in with Dad Kemp, in our mother’s childhood home, until they could build a house of their own.

From my perspective, staying in Paonia was either the best or the worst decision they ever made. I have often speculated about how differently our lives might have been had they stuck to their plan and settled in the Bay Area. Upon reflection, I’d say it was probably a lucky turn of events, because it allowed us to grow up where we did. The perspective of age has helped me appreciate what a special place Paonia was then, and still is, though in our youth both Terence and I hated it and wanted nothing more than to escape, as eventually we did, each in our own way. Now I might consider expending almost equal effort to live there again, though the practicalities of life make it quite unlikely that will ever happen.

One reason our parents suddenly decided to put down roots was tied to the fact that Mayme and her husband already had. Mayme, a homebody, was more timid and less adventurous than her older sister. After the business-training program in Grand Junction, she returned to Paonia and took a job at the Oliver Coal Company. There she met a young coal miner named Joe Abseck from Somerset, a small town just a few miles up the North Fork of the Gunnison River. Mayme kept an orderly house and an orderly life. During that era, women were supposed to find fulfillment in raising kids and being good homemakers, and most men would have been surprised if not offended to learn that a young housewife might have greater ambitions. Yet my mother and her sisters were all smart women—smart enough, I suspect, to let their men think that as husbands they were in charge.

By the time Mayme married Joe Abseck in 1934, he and Joe McKenna, my father, were fast friends. I suspect they bonded in part over getting to double date the two prettiest girls in Paonia. Doubtless many of the young men in town were disappointed when Mayme became the first of the Kemp sisters to be taken out of circulation. In 1941, Joe Abseck moved to Ogden, Utah to work as aircraft inspector at Hill Field, now Hill Air Force Base; Mayme stayed on at the coal company. Their two daughters, identical twins, were born in September that year. Mayme and the girls joined Joe in Ogden in 1944; after the war they all returned to Paonia—and stayed there.

The trick was how to make a living in the rather narrow local economy. Joe and George, his younger brother, decided to start an electrical appliance and repair business. When my parents made their fateful stop, the Absecks urged my father to become their partner. The new venture made sense: construction was booming across the country as a wave of enlisted men returned, all looking to forget the war, settle down, build a house, have a family, and live the American Dream. For my parents, the prospect of a “normal” life in a quiet little Colorado town must have won out over the lure of big-city excitement on the coast. My father signed on.

Thus marked the founding of A&M Electric (as in Abseck and McKenna), the name under which the business thrived until it was sold decades later. My father, however, afflicted by perpetual restlessness, was by then long gone. After a few years at A&M, he cashed out and began working for a Denver company, Central Electric Supply, as a sales rep in western Colorado and northern New Mexico. His position at Central Electric, a mid-sized firm managed by a Jewish family, proved a better fit; he worked there until his retirement in 1972. It was the kind of job you could expect in those days, but not anymore—lifetime employment, modest but livable salary, a good pension. He was on the road every Monday, beyond the reach of the home office, and spent each weekend in Paonia with the love of his life. Mom spoiled him outrageously; there was a chocolate cake waiting for him every Friday, and steak and baked potatoes for dinner every Saturday. It was a point of pride with Dad that he could afford steak once a week, and indeed times were good back then on his $20,000 a year.

The good thing about the new job was that it didn’t tie him to a desk. Being in constant motion appealed to our father, though it may have had adverse consequences for the rest of us, given his five-day absence every week. After a few years, he got a small plane and covered his territory by air. This allowed him to be home more. The plane also transformed one of the major stresses of his job, driving the mountain passes under treacherous conditions, to one of the major pleasures of his life, flying the mountain passes under treacherous conditions. He didn’t mind that at all; in fact, I believe it was one of the few times when he really felt free.

Being a weekend father probably made putting up with his sons more tolerable, at least for him. In later years, as we began pushing back against parental constraints, his absence undoubtedly changed the family dynamic in profound ways. His traveling was probably healthy for our parents’ marriage, however, in that it kept them from ever tiring of each other. If “Terry and Denny” had never happened along, it might have been a perfect marriage.

There is little doubt that our presence threw a wrench into their idyllic fifties fairy tale. Elder relatives have told me that kids were never part of the plan, or at least not part of our father’s. Our mother might have had other ideas and “pulled a fast one,” as one relative suggested, by getting pregnant with Terence. After that, another fast one was almost inevitable, and four years later that led to me. Whether I was an accident or deliberately foisted on my unsuspecting father, I’m grateful for the outcome.

Until her death in early 2012 at age ninety-seven, Aunt Mayme was the beloved matriarch of an enormous and tight-knit brood of grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and great-great grandchildren, all of whom can be traced back to her and her daughters, Jody and Judy. Both “the twins,” as we called them, married local boys and have lived in the area their entire lives. Thanks to them, I am blessed with a loving family of cousins, nieces, and nephews, and still feel tied into the ancestral village where it all began. On my rare visits, I am welcomed with love like the proverbial prodigal son, which I suppose I am.