Grab Your Best Hold Socially Correct People, World War II Combat Aviators, Psychiatry, Christianity and Atheists

Grab Your Best Hold Socially Correct People, World War II Combat Aviators, Psychiatry, Christianity and Atheists

    Since I started writing this unfolding book, my dreams have been kinda all over the place: pro, con and mixed. I get glimpses and snatches, which cause me to take a breath, step back and ponder. 

    However, a good friend, who gets talked to regularly in his dreams by angels known in the Bible, has reported dreams in which those angels are fully behind my I telling it like it was. 

    This morning, my friend reported a dream he had last night, in which I was asking angels to comment on what I'm writing here, and they were demurring. Then, Archangel Michael told my friend to tell Sloan not to use Vaseline.

    Gloria Steinem once wrote a book called, THE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE, BUT FIRST IT WILL PISS YOU OFF.

    As I look back over the first two chapters, all of it happened. I seek no reward, such as book sales, royalties, speaker engagements. 

    I imagine any reward will be cyber attacks and perhaps something more solid, like exploding anti-aircraft shells my father's B-29 somehow weathered during bombing runs over Japanese cities in World War II.

.................

    When I moved out of my third wife Deborah's home in June 1998, I started dreaming and the horrible 16-months black night of the soul began to lift.

    I went daily to the Downtown Birmingham YMCA, to take steam baths, to help flush out of me the chemical buildup of the lovely pills the well meaning psychiatrist had gotten me hooked on, to treat what he viewed as my psychosis and major depression. Three times I had tried to wean cold turkey from the pills, and each time I went into a horrible withdrawal, which convinced me the pills were addictive, like heroin, although the psychiatrist said that was not possible. 

    When I realized the black night was lifting, I tried a different weaning schedule, which was: for a week, I took 3/4 daily dose of the two prescriptions; and for another week, I took a 1/2 daily dose. Then, I went to see the psychiatrist for what I figured was the last time, and to thank and tell him goodbye. He had been my constant ally. I had really depended on seeing him once a week, to help me keep hanging there. 

    He had told me that he was a devout Methodist and he believed in spiritual warfare. However, believing is one thing, living in it, and knowing what it is, is something else altogether. I had lived spiritual warfare for a good while before the black night came, and I was living it again after the black night started lifting. 

    What the black night itself was, I can only guess was something I caused, or my soul needed to experience, and it was implemented from the spirit realms, of which psychiatry is somewhat unacquainted, to put it in a kind light. 

    Anyway, during what would turn out to be our last visit, I asked the psychiatrist for a weaning schedule, and he suggested the same exact weaning schedule I already had chosen. I took that as a sign from Above that I was on the right track, and to take 1/4th of a daily dose of the two prescriptions for a week, and then stop taking the pills. 

    Yet, it would take many months of steam baths, drinking spring water, eating a special diet of no fried foods and no alcohol, and drinking fresh-squeezed leafy green, carrot and beet vegetable juices, for all the pills' chemical residues to leave my body cells. I even had a dream about a rough patch of chemical detoxing headed my way. 

    Parallel, angels were doing things in me day and night, to bring me back to the land of the living, so to speak, and to fix broken things in me, and to heal me of stuff I had no clue even was broken or had happened to me in the past, and to flush the psychic toxins of all of that out of me through my eliminating organs. In all, that took about a year, and it was all I could do to hang with it.

    My New Age friend, who had dreamed of my half-Anglo-African half brother Travis, suddenly had what commonly is called audio spirit hearing. He told me two or three times a day on the telephone what he was hearing from angels about him and me. And about what angels were doing inside of me, some of which was terrifying beyond human imagination. I doubt I would have survived it psychically, or otherwise, if my friend was not on the phone talking me through it.

    He said he was told by angels that my mother had molested me many times in my crib. The angels then took me through each infraction, as part of their healing me. It took about three weeks, two terrifying beyond human imagination sessions a day. 

    So, in the midst and grip of all of that, I was sweating in the YMCA steam room one morning, when another naked fellow about a generation older started up a conversation. When I got around to telling him my name, he asked if my father was the Sloan Bashinsky in a B-29 squadron on Guam during World War II?

    I said, yes. 

    The fellow said he was there, too. And, my father kept getting his B-29 lost during flights to Japan, and he had to drop his bombs into the ocean on the way back to Guam, because it was too dangerous to land with all those live bombs aboard. 

    I was lost for words.

    The fellow said, nobody wanted my father on their B-29, and he kept getting moved from one aircraft to another. 

    I was lost for words.

    My mother had told me when I was a boy, that when my father's B-29 was returning from Japan to Guam one night, a propeller had flown off one of the right wing's engines and had soared spinning just over the fuselage (body) of the airplane and then had plunged spinning down toward the Pacific Ocean. If the spinning propeller had struck the fuselage, the plane would have plunged into the sea and all aboard probably would have died.

    My father never talked with me about his service in World War II, but, one night, he was at Dianne's and my home for dinner, and several of our friends were there, and the guys somehow got my father talking about his experiences on the B-29. My friends were fascinated, and I was wondering why he had talked with them about it, but not with me? Perhaps he'd had enough to drink, to loosen him up? Perhaps something in him knew I needed to hear something about what he had experienced?

    My mother had told me that it had really bothered my father that he was killing people he did not know, from a distance, by dropping bombs on them.

    Maybe a year after hearing what the man in the YMCA said about my father and his B-29, I took up with a woman, who was clearly arranged by angels to meet me. The angels took her through a searing, lightning-fast healing that blew her and me away. She emerged as an entirely different person, who was hearing from angels when she was awake and in her dreams.

    When I told her what the fellow had told me at the YMCA, she said she was hearing that my father's soul did not like killing people, and that's why he kept getting his B-29s lost over the Pacific.

    From time to time after the black night lifted, I wrote my father a letter I didn't expect to be answered. Often my letters didn't have a return address, because I was not in America, or I was homeless. 

    In one letter, I told my father, the reason he kept getting his B-29 lost during World War II, was because his soul didn't like killing people. I felt he needed to hear that from someone, before he died and took his shame for that with him into the afterlife.

    Now, I left out something about my father and the psychiatrist and my wife during the black night.

    My psychiatrist's father was a psychiatrist, who had worked at the famous Menninger (psychiatric) Clinic in Topeka, Kansas. My psychiatrist had grown up at Menninger. After medical school and his psychiatric residence, he had run Menninger's free clinic for people with little or no money.

    I think my psychiatrist knew very well that I was not getting better, and that I would not get better because of his efforts, and perhaps that is why he suggested during one of our sessions that I should go to the Menninger Clinic. He said it was a great place, I would really like it!

    I shared that with my wife, and she told my father about it. He said he would pay for it, if it would help me. 

    I shared that with my psychiatrist during our next session. He now was very excited for me to go to Menninger. I asked him, what would Menninger do that he had not already tried? 

    After taking a short course in electro-convulsive therapy, which used to be called electro-shock therapy, he had suggested I let him do it on me. I had replied, I was not going to let me be his first experiment with electro-shock.

    I was not stupid. I still could think. But half my brain, the right side, seemed to have gone away. That's the feminine side, the dream-making side, the creative side, of the brain. The side that connects a person to angels and to God, or to whatever started everything.

    The psychiatrist was not able to tell me what Menninger would do that he could not do. Yet, he kept saying I needed to go there, and my wife was all for it. Can't say I blamed her. I was a mess and a huge load. Can't say I blamed my father. I was pretty sure his second wife, Joann, would like to see me gone.

    My New Age friend wasn't getting many messages from above about Menninger, because he was not yet captured by angels. 

    However, my friend, who had been in top management at Golden Flake, had been harassed by angels since around 1990, and he'd had many dreams about me, and we'd had many talks about all of that.

    I told him about the Menninger thing. He asked what I was going to do? I said it was pompano season on the Gulf Coast. Nos were running close to shore. I could sight fish them off a public pier. I wanted to drive down there and stay in a motel where my Uncle Leo and I had stayed when he took me fishing for speckled trout in Phillips Inlet. And, I wanted to think about Menninger.

    I didn't have fishing tackle any more. My friend was an expert bass fisherman, and he had lots of bait-casting and spinning rods and reels. He loaned me what I needed. I would buy  pompano jigs when I got to the beach.

    Leaving Birmingham on US 31 South, I stopped by an outdoors store to decide if I was going to buy a shotgun to off myself after I got to the beach. I stood a while, looking at shotguns on racks attached to the wall, and at boxes of shotgun shells under the glass counter. I walked back to my car and drove south.

    I caught some pompano off the public pier, but nothing else happened to cause me to feel better. 

    When I returned to Birmingham, I returned my friend's fishing tackle. He said he'd had a dream.

    Grab your best hold.

    In the dream, he and I went to the Menninger Clinic. The front of it was beautiful. The reception area inside was beautiful. The doctors and staff were wonderful. While I was talking with them, my friend snuck through a door and explored the interior. He came back out and said to me, "Sloan, there's nothing back there but dungeons and padded cells. If you come here, you will never leave."

    I shared that with an older woman friend, who had been a Christian intercessor all her life. She said she was hearing, Menninger would keep me until my father quit paying for it. Then, I would be put in the Kansas state mental hospital, where I would live out my days.

    My wife Deborah's mother was visiting. I told them about my friend's dream. They could not take it in.

    When I saw the psychiatrist, I told him about my friend's dream. He could not take it in. I wanted to ask him, "Do you believe in God yet, Doctor?" But what I said was, I was not going to Menninger.

    I began the pill weaning schedule.

    In all fairness to Menninger Clinic, I have never been inside it, and I doubt all that's behind the front entrance is padded cells and dungeons. Angels made that dream my friend had, to tell me God had something in mind for me other than Menninger.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com

How World War II launched Golden Flake Potato Chip Company, and other Sloan Bashiinsky family skeletons

How World War II launched Golden Flake Potato Chip Company, and other Sloan Bashinsky family skeletons

    Yesterday, March 13, 2023, someone told me that her son had been a Golden Flake route salesman for 20-something years, and he had really liked his job until the company was bought by Utz Quality Foods in 2016. Utz told him that he would have to buy his route truck and be responsible for its upkeep, and he declined and quit. I said I had run routes for Golden Flake, and I would have quit, if I were him. 

    She asked me to tell her how Golden Flake got started. I said that is a long story, which will have to wait for another time. I didn't think where we were was a good place to tell what I knew, and I wasn't sure she would care to hear it. Most of it was told to me by other people.

    During World War II, my father enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps. He was sent to Boca Raton, Florida, where the Air Corps had an airbase and B-29 bombers. My father took his family with him: my mother, me, and our black maid and cook, Charlotte Washington, who had come to our home in Birmingham looking for work on the day I was born in Hillman Hospital, in Birmingham, October 7, 1942. I could not pronounce Charlotte, and simply called her, Cha, pronounced Sha, and that's what my mother and father called her, too.

    My father got his pilot wings to fly B-29s. Then, we all went with him to an Air Corps base in Iowa. My father was very good at math, and perhaps Iowa is where the Air Corps decided he would be more useful as a B-29 navigator-bombardier, than a pilot.

    After a while in Iowa, we came back to Birmingham, and my father was sent to an air base in California, I don't know exactly where, perhaps San Diego. From there, he would ship out with the Air Corps to Guam, where B-29s were based and flew night bombing missions to the Japanese isles. My mother left me and Cha with my father's parents, Leo and Cora, and went to California to see my father fly off to war.

    Cora did not like the way I ate, and she tried to force me to eat what she wanted me to eat. I was used to and loved what Cha cooked for me. To force me to eat her way, Cora banned Cha to the servant quarters in the basement. I refused to eat what Cora served me. She took me to doctors, to try to get them to make me eat what she wanted me to eat. They told her she was nuts. Cora kept tying. I still have screen memories of screaming, "I want my Cha! I want my Cha!"

    When my mother returned from California, I was skin and bones. She fetched me and Cha and took us home. Cha told my mother what had happened. My mother told Cora that she would never have a relationship with my father's and her children.

    All of that I would be told by my first wife, Dianne, who had been told it by Cha.

    My mother had never told me why Cora took the sons of my father's older brother Leo to the beach for two months every summer, but she never took Major or me. Instead, my mother told me that Leo's oldest son, "Little Leo", was born with a bad heart, which was true, and that's why Cora favored my cousins.

    But what does all of that have to do with how Golden Flake got started? It has everything to do with it, which I also learned from Dianne, who was told it by Cha.

    My mother wrote my father a letter describing what his mother had done to me, while his father did nothing. My mother insisted that, after the war, they would move away from Alabama, to get themselves and me away from his mother and father. 

    I don't know if my mother also said, to get herself away from her Puritan mother and father, who had let her older brother run wild, but had treated her like a convent whore nun, which had made her a prude, to the point (she much later told me), she could not walk naked before my father in their bedroom. (I loved my mother's parents, and they loved me.)

    Imagine what it was like for my father to get my mother's letter not long after he arrived at Guam and began flying night bombing missions to Japan, while Japanese anti-aircraft guns were trying to shoot down his plane. (I saw the black and white photos he took of Japanese cities on fire, and anti-aircraft flack all around his airplane.)

    I doubt my mother told my father in letters to him during the war, that she had been physically violent with me. 

    I had a spring-loaded rocking horse. I was riding it hard one day in my mother's bedroom, where she was doing something. It was making lots of noise on the wooden floor, and I was making lots of noise with my mouth. She told me to stop making so much noise. I kept at it. She yanked me off the horse and grabbed her hair brush and started hitting my fanny with her hairbrush, which broke. She yelled, "God durned you, you made me break my good nylon hairbrush and I can't get another one because of the war!!!" 

    She started raining blows down on my head and shoulders with her hands, which I tried to fend off with my hands and arms, as I kept yelling for Cha, standing in the doorway, to save me!!! I imagine if Cha had tried to intervene, she would have been fired and I would have been in far graver peril.

    My father was very good at math, electronics and mechanics. He had earned pilot wings for the B-29, and now he was a navigator-bombardier. He secured the promise of a job with an aircraft manufacturer in Ohio, Akron, I think. We would live there after the war.

    Only then did my father's father get involved. He wrote my father a letter, in which he promised that he and his brother-in-law Cyrus would buy a company in Birmingham and make my father a junior partner, if my father and his family remained in Birmingham after the war.

    My Grandfather Bashinsky and Cyrus had been in the newsprint business, and when World War II started, they converted the factory to a munitions plant, where they made 37 millimeter and smaller cannon shells for American fighter planes. (I saw some of those shells in my grandfather's home, and in the home of his mother in Troy, Alabama.)

    My father and mother accepted my Bashinsky Grandfather's offer, and he and Cyrus, whom my mother, and thus everyone else, called "Uncle Cy", went looking for a company to buy. 

    Uncle Cy had married my Bashinsky Grandfather's younger sister, Helen, who had tragically died of some kind of galloping pneumonia or tuberculosis not long after they married. 

    I much later learned, from whom, I can't recall, that my Grandfather Bashinsky had insisted Uncle Cy not remarry and dishonor Helen, and Uncle Cy complied. My mother loved Uncle Cy, I had named my Bashinsky Grandfather, Poppa Granddaddy, and that's what everyone in my family called him.

    Anyway, Leo and Cyrus found a company they liked, called Magic City Foods. It made potato chips and a few other packaged snacks, such as perhaps peanuts, popcorn, fried pork skins, peanut butter and cheese crackers. It had been established in the 1920s by people in Birmingham, Alabama, in a grocery store basement. 

    The company now had a manufacturing plant and warehouse on Lomb Avenue, in west Birmingham, near the Rickwood Field baseball park and the Alabama State Fairgrounds. The company had several routes in Birmingham, and, I think, a route or two in Montgomery and maybe one in northern Alabama. Those routes received their Golden Flake products by train.

    A deal was struck.

    I was told there was a great surprise! We were going to see it. I think by then I was 5 years old.

    My father drove. We were on the road for a while. We reached a building with a quonset hut next to it and stopped. It was a cool, cloudy day, like maybe in March. 

    I was told, this is the surprise. My father's new job. I felt awful inside. Like, doom.

    My father learned the business from the ground up. 

    He started out in the manufacturing plant, as a mechanic on the cooking and packaging machines. He got to where he could take them apart and put them back together.

    He ran a sales route for a while, I recall him coming home nights in a route truck.

    He became the potato buyer for the company. He traveled a lot to Florida, south and north Alabama and North Dakota, courting potato farmers, getting their confidence, buying their spuds. 

    He wanted to make Golden Flake grow, while his father and Cyrus wanted to keep it like it was.

    When I was in high school, my father bought out his father and Cyrus, after they had the company appraised. They did not give it to him.

    After that, Golden Flake began to grow.

    Perhaps that story is best left for another day.

    Perhaps what needs to be told now is the rest of the letter from my mother to my father in Guam story, which was provided to me by Poppa Granddaddy    himself.

    I had worked summers at Golden Flake, in the plant, in the warehouse, and running vacation routes for route salesmen.

    I had attended and graduated from Vanderbilt, and was in my senior (3rd) year at the University of Alabama School of Law in Tuscaloosa.

    Dianne's and my first child died of sudden infant death syndrome.

    A law school buddy a year ahead of me, now practicing law in south Alabama with his father and his father's law partner- they were trial lawyers, meaning they got paid if they won- persuaded me to try my hand at being a country lawyer. 

    My lawyer buddy and his father loved to hunt and fish and play golf, and go down the gulf coast. As did I.

    They sent me to a very respected defense lawyer in Troy, Alabama, to have a chat. Pi Brantly had grown up with my father in Troy. Pi's son had died tragically.

    Pi had a spare law office, and a very good legal secretary. He said he was referring to other Troy lawyers the kind of cases he did not handle, and I could have the spare office, use of his legal secretary, and he would refer cases he did not handle to me.

    We walked over to the drug store on the town square, where Pi introduced me to several lawyers, who welcomed me, said they looked forward to seeing me in Troy.

    Dianne, now pregnant again, and I agreed with a developer to rent an apartment in a new apartment building under construction. 

    Out of the blue, I received a letter accepting me as a member in the Troy Country Club.

    It was a done deal.

    I told my father about it. He asked why I wanted to do it? I said, I loved to fish and hunt, and go to the gulf coast and fish, and I could do lots of that, if I lived in Troy. He said that was no reason to do it.

    I told Poppa Granddaddy about it. He reached into a drawer of his desk and pulled out a letter my father had written to him from Guam, saying, "As things now stand, we will not live in Birmingham after the war."

    Poppa Granddaddy said my father once wanted to leave Birmingham, but he changed his mind and that turned out well. Poppa Granddaddy did not say WHY my father had changed his mind, nor what had happened to cause my father and mother to want to live somewhere else after the war ended.

    My father sent me to his and his father's lawyer, John Gillon, whom I knew somewhat. John said, let's go to the law library where there is more room. Most of the lawyers in the firm were there.

    John asked me what I knew about living in a small town? 

    I said, very little. 

    John said, "All you have to do is drive out to the golf course on Saturday night and drive around it to find out who is fucking who's wife."

    John was a devout Christian and Bible scholar, and a very smart, shrewd attorney.

    The other lawyers burst out laughing.

    The death of our baby boy had really disturbed my relationship with Dianne. I might well have been susceptible to being one of the men on the Troy golf course on Saturday nights.

    My Great Grandmother Bashinsky died and was to be buried in Troy. Dianne and I drove from Tuscaloosa to Troy. When we reached the cemetery, we saw Pi, who greeted us warmly.

    I saw my father and Poppa Granddaddy standing some distance behind Pi. I walked over to them with Pi, who offered my father his hand to shake. My father and Poppa Granddaddy turned their backs to Pi and me, and said nothing.

    I looked at Pi, he looked at me.

    I was really embarrassed.

    Dianne and I drove back to Tuscaloosa.

    My criminal law professor, himself an Alabama law graduate, who, I learned much later, had gone on to join the US Army and prosecute Nazis at Nuremberg, told me a federal judge in Birmingham had lost his law clerk and was looking for a replacement.

    I hand-wrote United States District Judge Clarence W. Allgood a letter, asking for an interview. He hand-wrote back, inviting me to come. 

    I went. 

    Mostly, we talked about hunting and fishing. He said I had the job, if I wanted it. I said, I wanted it.

    I drove to Troy and told Pi. He said he was not surprised, after how it went at the funeral. I said I felt awful. He said for me not to worry. Clerking for a United States District Judge was a great honor and opportunity. 

    I clerked for Judge Allgood for a year and a half. By agreement with the other two federal judges, he presided over all criminal prosecutions in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Alabama. 

    I watched really good criminal defense lawyers and federal prosecutors lock horns in trials and in Judge Allgood's chambers. I got a priceless legal education my fellow law students at Alabama could not possibly imagine.

    About a year into the clerkship, I woke up one morning and my bowel was locked. There was no warning sign. Medicine had no answer. I lost my confidence. I went to work for Golden Flake, which felt safer.

    My bowel did not like that, either. 

    My bowel hasn't liked anything since. 

SOME LITTLE KNOWN GOLDEN FLAKE HEIR HISTORY (not for the faint of heart)

 

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