SOME LITTLE KNOWN GOLDEN FLAKE HEIR HISTORY
(not for the faint of heart)
On my Great Grandfather Leopold Bashinsky's gravestone in Troy, Alabama:
"God's noblest creation
is an honest man."
The Ides of March, 2023
My and two good friends' recent dreams, and goings on in my so-called waking life, cause me to think The Editorial Board, kinda rhymes with God, are nudging me to write about my father’s company and his family, perhaps to help me shed some bothersome weight and set straight some impressions. Quite a few times in the past, people said I reminded them of the Golden Flake clown. I sometimes wonder if my father ever regretted talking the future family black sheep and skeleton keeper into taking a typing course my first year in high school?
I think I’m the oldest living member of my mother’s bloodline, which wends its way up to Nashville, Tennessee and Cadiz and Hopkinsville Kentucky.
I know am the oldest living Bashinsky in my father’s bloodline, which wends down to Troy, Alabama and then back to Poland, or maybe Prussia-if you don’t count my older Anglo-African half-brother, Travis, of whom I learned in a dream in mid-1998.
My two best men friends then dreamed of Travis.
One friend was a New Ager in the process of being captured and harnessed by the same angels known in the Bible, who had captured and started harnessing me eleven years before.
The other friend was a valued management employee of my father’s company, Golden Flake Snack Foods, which competed head-on with Frito-Lay in the southeastern states of America. He also was being harassed by the same angels.
What my friends reported being told in dreams was, my father’s parents had black servants, who lived in servants quarters. The servants had a teenage daughter my father’s age. My father and the daughter fell in love and she got pregnant.
My father’s father made a deal with the girl’s parents to financially support her and her child after it was born, if she would leave Alabama before the birth and never return. She accepted the deal and left Alabama carrying the child in her womb. My father deeply loved them both, and his heart was seriously broken.
Later, it fell upon my father to keep up his father’s side of the deal. My father used people he knew in his business dealings to do it, with money he provided.
It was not disclosed to my friends, nor to me, if my mother knew about any of that.
Although I trusted my and my friends’ dreams, I felt the need to seek worldly proof. So, I paid my father’s older brother, Leo, a visit.
We did a little catching up, and then he asked why I had come to see him?
Leo was very direct.
I asked him if I had an older brother I didn’t know about?
Leo was looking away and his head snapped around so that he looked me straight in the eye
He said, “I don’t want anything to do with that!”
We talked a little while longer, and then he said, “Your father is very devious.”
I thanked Leo, and left.
I sat on that for the rest of 1998 and through most of 1999.
Around Christmas, I was seized to write my father a letter, in which I explained how I had learned that I might have an older half brother named Travis. I said, if Travis existed, then I would like to meet him. And if I didn’t hear back from him, I would assume Travis existed. I did not say Travis was mixed race, nor anything about his mother or her parents, nor of any deal.
I didn’t hear back from my father, and an annual Christmas gift of corporate stock he gave to all of his children did not arrive.
Now, I wrote the letter, instead of speaking directly with my father, because we were not seeing each other for some time, but sometimes we wrote amicable letters to each other. I felt that was because his second wife, Joann, didn’t want me around.
She had caused the family a lot of trouble, and I had asked my father to deal with it, and he had declined.
She had put my father up to telling me in 1995 that he could not believe a 53-year-old man had never gotten over the death of his son, and I had told him he would never criticize me again to my face, because we would never see each other again, and it would be better for us in the afterlife.
However, I was not able to hold to that vow. I saw him again, after my sister told me he had said he wanted to see me. We had a nice talk. Then, my sister called me really mad, wanting to know what I had done to upset my father? I had no clue what she was talking about. She said he had called Joann crying his eyes out, and Joann had called her about me causing it.
Also in play, from early 1997 through June 1998, I was in a black night of the soul, which had come upon me in two days’ time. I knew it was not of this world. It felt like half my brain had died. The right half. I stopped dreaming. I felt completely cut off from God.
I was being treated by a well-meaning psychiatrist, who was clearly out of his depth, never having heard of a mere dark night of the soul, which I had endured for four years, 1991-1995, and then I had three spontaneous visions in four days’ time, and it began to lift.
After meeting with my father and Joann, the psychiatrist told me Joann wanted me dead.
During the black night, my friend who had worked for my father had three dreams, which suggested I was not in nearly as much danger as I felt every day and night.
I didn't even tell him that I was spending four hours every morning, planning how I would kill myself the next day, and after figuring that out, I relaxed knowing that day was my last. I came up with the same escape plan every morning: go somewhere alone the next day and slit my wrists with my Swiss Army knife.
Despite my internal hell, I saw clearly what was going on around me, but I mostly kept it to myself, because I was so totally fucked up, that who was I to talk about it? And, who would listen to a crazy person, anyway?
My 3rd wife, Deborah, made friends with my father, and they visited from time to time. Based on what she told me, she and my father really liked each other, and he was really concerned about me. I told her it would not last, Joann would end it. No way, my wife said. One day, Deborah came home heartbroken after visiting my father. Joann had ended it.
My younger brother Major’s first wife called me around that time, to say, at a party the night before, my father’s stockbroker, whom I knew, had told her that my father had told him that he loved me, but he could not see me because I wanted him to choose between him and Joann, and he could not do that. I called my father and told him what I had been told. He said it didn’t happen.
I felt horrible for Deborah having to endure what I was going through. Her back went out something awful. A chiropractor was not able to help her. A neurosurgeon put her in traction, in bed. I waited on her hand and foot. She only left the bed to bathe and use the toilet.
Two weeks into that, Deborah shrieked one morning, “What’s wrong with my back?!!!” I sat on the bed beside her and said, I didn’t think we suited each other any more, it was nobody’s fault. She said she thought I was right. The next day, there was nothing wrong with her back. That was my signal to move out, but it took me two months to do it, and then the black night began to lift.
I never put my father to choose between me and Joann. What I did was put him to deal with her, when she caused his family trouble, and he never dealt with it.
The irony was, back when my father told me that he wanted to marry Joann, I said that was his business, he would have to live with her. Did he love her? Yes, he said. Did he want to live out his days with her? Yes, he said. Then do it, I said.
My father said Major didn’t want him to marry Joann. I said it was none of Major’s business. My father thanked me, and asked if I would be his best man and carry Joann’s ring at the wedding? I said, yes, I would be honored to do that.
Thus did I unwittingly set myself up to be my father’s best man in ways neither he nor I could possibly imagine.
My father married Joann at Mountain Brook Baptist Church, in 1968. I was his best man and carried Joann’s ring. Major was not there, he had moved to San Francisco, California.
Years later, Major told me why he had not wanted our father to marry Joann, and why he had moved to California: my father and Joann were seeing each other while our mother was dying of cancer.
My mother had told me she knew my father was seeing another woman. I knew they had a fight some years prior about him seeing another woman. I heard enough to be convinced my father was a womanizer before he met Joann.
For example, the valued Golden Flake employee, who would dream of Travis and his mother and her parents and my grandfather, had told me of being with my father and other Golden Flake management men, when my father said he felt sorry for young men, who, because of AIDs, “could not have the kind of fun we once had.”
I can’t help wondering if my father’s womanizing, alcoholism and other troubles were rooted in the loss of Travis and his mother?
Yes, I know my going down this path will not please some, nor perhaps a lot of people. I’m sure they very much would prefer that I stick with what fell out of me in about two hours time on a public library computer in Helen, Georgia, in late August 2005.
When I typed the last sentence on the library computer, my cell phone rang and I ran outside the library to answer a call from my father’s lawyer, John McKleroy, who had been a classmate of mine at the University of Alabama School of Law, and then we were classmates about a decade later, when the law school offered a masters in tax law program, taught two days week in Birmingham, for two years.
John told me that he had been trying to reach me for two days, to let me know the sad news that my father had died.
Later in this unfolding book, you can read what I wrote that day on the Helen Library computer about The Hit and Miss Club. It received kudos from every person who read it and got back to me about it.
Meanwhile, there is much to tell, which led up to what I wrote that day in Helen, and which came after.
One thing that came after my father died was he started coming to me in dreams, as an ally. He sometimes still does that all these years later. However, he did not visit me in a dream last night, after the family black sheep and skeleton keeper finished writing this report.
So, perhaps I went astray in writing all of that? Or, perhaps wrote it to show me that my father and I never got over the death of our sons, and although I gave him ample reasons to disinherit me, he didn't. If he had done it, I would have lived longer on the street, and I can't imagine I would still be alive.
sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com
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