Black surf pants. Now there's something you don't see every day. Obviously, I loved wearing surf pants, even at Christmas. The man in the photograph in our kitchen on Cypress was Kenny Morse. He and mom dated for several years throughout the 60's. They both loved playing golf. He owned his own company and installed fire prevention plumbing in the ceilings of Southern California businesses. He never would marry mom because she had us two kids. Several years after they broke up, mom found out that he married another woman, who had two kids. Go figure.
On the table is a bucket of Kentucky Fried Chicken. Whether it was this visit or another, Kenny got upset about something. (He had a short fuse, though he never took his anger out on anyone physically or verbally. He just took off out the door.) Anyway, he stormed out the back door and left that day. A few minutes later, he returned through the back door, grabbed the bucket of chicken that he had brought, and left again. We laughed, actually.
Typically, mom would not hear from him for several days or more. Then he'd call or return once more as if nothing had happened. He lived in an apartment in Downey, which was the typical bachelor pad, with large accumulations of dust behind the interior doors that were never closed. He was good friends with a couple from Texas whom mom also knew well. They adopted a young boy whom we met. As he got older, they realized that his biological heritage was part African-American, though they weren't overt racists, just moderately so. I later learned that he was also gay, having landed a role in the Broadway chorus of La Cage Aux Folles. I always wondered if they were more mortified that he was part African-American or totally gay.
No comments:
Post a Comment