Santa Fe, snow yesterday, today sunshine, tonight clouds, just like a woman.
RAN INTO TONY ABEYTA, WANTS TO GO SOLO JOURNEY, WAITING FOR THE UNIVERSE TO TELL HIM WHERE, I SHOUTED BACK, ME TOO.
Author: LouLou
I am a creative Nonfiction author, lifestyle columnist, and mob historian. Personally a free-style chef, historic preservationist, trailblazer, swimmer, and manic Rolling Stones listener.
Since 1997 I have renovated historic homes and converted them into vacation rentals.
THE COLOR RED IS THE COLOR BLUE
I have to turn the clock back to 1996, to the days of peeling back the first layer of family history. I was sitting at a dining room table in a casita in Taos, NM. It was winter, the first time I’d lived in snow outside a few teenage weekends in Arrowhead. Snow silence that sucks up every imaginable sound, and the absence of any neighbors, I was the only resident in the compound, left me to unravel a secret life, the one my father guarded with irreproachable tenacity.
The first layer came off from the Immigration and Naturalization (INS) files on Allen smiley, birth name Aaron Smehoff, tagged “Armed and Dangerous.”
Allen married, Irene on January 16, 1926, (my father’s nineteenth birthday), in San Francisco. On July 18, 1926 Allen was arrested for robbery in a drug store on Geary Street with another unidentified boy who fled the scene. On September 17, 1926, Allen was convicted of first degree robbery and confined to Preston Reformatory for boys in Ione, California. On November 23, 1926 Irene, who remained in Oakland, gave birth to a baby girl, named Loretta. Allen was released from Preston Reformatory in December of 1927. He returned to Oakland to reunite with his wife and child; but they had vanished. This is what the INS gathered from Dad in an INS hearing. I read from the court transcripts of that hearing, about 300 pages of interrogation and the answers’ in my Dad’s own voice.
The snow sedated the choppy feeling in my stomach, the jaggedness of suddenly discovering, why my father was wired with anxiety. His whole life was occupy Allen Smiley; arrest him, convict him, send him to Russia, and never pull the tap from his apartment, or the FBI guys from his tail.
When I ordered all those government files I had no idea that the government probed into personal lives as much as criminal activities. They recorded all the household conversations, arguments with my mother, his betting on the phone, his visitors, discussions with his housekeeper about the ashtrays, and his hatred for the government, “I wish somebody would drop a bomb, just to get rid of some of these guys.”
What would I say to this daughter now in her eighties, about the father she never knew?
It was a one of a kind experience, to pick up the phone and speak with Chris, the granddaughter, who discovered me from my columns. She went looking for the other Smiley daughter, and confronted her own family secret. The tension cross-circuited our conversation, both of us heaving with questions, anxious for an answer to the family puzzle, the answers we could not wait to get, that I cannot share, even though the names are changed, I do honor the right to privacy.
I paced the room moving unconsciously from one place to another, reaching for my father’s voice to soothe her, rewrite history in between dusk and making dinner. Then the unveiling of the tragedy; the loss and the family shame, surrounding a marriage to a gangster, a father whom they never got to know, as I did. In the passing of an hour or less, my voice resonated the stories of her grandfather; his health and humor, his disciplinary regulations, and his life long battle to remain anonymous, in the public eye of organized crime.
Chris asked if I wanted to speak with Loretta, my half-sister, and I said of course I would. She set up a phone call for the following Sunday,
with a forewarning that her grandmother did not encourage the communication, or the research, she was beyond asking for a resurgence of truth or pain. How does one retrace seventy or eighty years of believing the color red may be the color blue or least a bluish tint. Loretta was not proud of what she read about Allen Smiley.
with a forewarning that her grandmother did not encourage the communication, or the research, she was beyond asking for a resurgence of truth or pain. How does one retrace seventy or eighty years of believing the color red may be the color blue or least a bluish tint. Loretta was not proud of what she read about Allen Smiley.
In the days before the arranged phone call I sifted through my internal index of Dad’s history, and what might console her. I could tell her about the time, he sat me down in the living room, to discuss sex with a gentle sternness;
“ Once you get pregnant your whole life changes, and you’re not even close to being ready for that. It happened to a gal I loved, when I was a young man.”
Was that Loretta’s mother he was speaking about? When this young love of his said she was pregnant, he tried to persuade her against it, because he wasn’t “properly financed.” So I asked him what happened.
“We’re not talking about my life; I’m trying to get you to understand the consequences of sex. You see God made the act beautiful so we would procreate, and if you ignore the consequences, you’re not fulfilling God’s wishes.”
I waited by the phone until it was time to accept that the call wasn’t coming. During that time of waiting, I tried to walk in Loretta’s shoes. I only had to take a few steps to comprehend the combustion of emotions she’d face by having a Sunday evening chat with me.
I made the choice to be public, to be viewed by strangers all over the world, and to receive their rage as well as their rewards.
It wasn’t a year ago that I received an email from the most distant of childhood memories. The email came from Inga, our first Nanny. The last time she saw me I was six years old. She sent me photos of us in the backyard at Bel Air, photos of her watching over me on the swings. She told me by letter, that my father was so good to her, so generous, and she loved being a part of our family. “I had no idea he was involved in anything criminal, and even if he was, it wouldn’t have mattered because he was such a kind man.” The color red is also the color blue, and because of my Dad, I learned to accept the contradictions in all of us.
Our interior life is uncensored, unsuitable to guidance from our parents, our husbands and wives, our lovers; it is uniquely you, red and blue.
STEPPING OVER
SOME ILLUSIONS ARE HUMAN ,THESE ARE THE MOST DANGEROUS
for the one who is viewing,
the maker of the illusion,
transmutes as the situation demands.
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BETRAYAL
Does not afflict those who have not betrayed, they weep and scratch the surface of defeat, but the betrayer explodes.
EXPECTATIONS
Some of us get more in life than we expected, some get less, and some never stay in one place long enough to
enjoy the harvest.
PATHS TO DOORS
The signals were all there, but I kept going in the opposite direction, on the road away from the new door, because I’d gotten used to the door I had.
Today the road is closing, it’s going to be shut before too long, hardly long enough to pack it all up, the newly purchased furnishings, drapes, lighting, towels———-and going in the boxes, into storage. The fifth renovate, refurbish, and move play. Three acts-repeating themselves.
Where the new door will open is uncertain, more of these adventurous in livingness tests that I write about.
MEN & WOWEN WHO DON’T LOVE
MEN WHO TAKE ALL LIFE IN THE BODY OF A WOMAN- WILL NEVER KNOW THE WOMAN OR LOVE.
OBSERVATIONS
Illusions are what deafens , and reality
is too loud.
“THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS THE MAFIA”
Growing up the daughter of a gangster meant that I would remain a little girl forever. My father died when I was 29, but emotionally I was still a teenager.
Had I had known that I was seated next to one of the most powerful and influential men in the Mafia, Johnny Roselli, then I would have listened with sharpened ears, and repeated bits of explosive headline blood curdling stories to my girlfriends. That would have placed myself, my father, Johnny and my friends in jeopardy. An informant from the government may tag me on the way home from school, or tag one of my friends, or an enemy of the Boss, may pick me up from school and not bring me back. Everyone is suspect: an informant, or weak enough to become an informant, a loose lipped wise guy, a bragging connected businessman, a friend of a friend, a cousin of a brother, and a daughter of a gangster. We are all potential targets of this organization known as the Mafia, Mob, syndicate, Costa Nostra, or our thing. Growing up in this circle of gamblers, killers, fixers, enforcers, bookies was like growing up in a novel, it was a fictional tale all the way, until the end of my father’s life. There is a drop down board that appears every time I write about our family business that reads,
“ How dare you open my life to the world, what do you know? You know nothing little sweetheart, and that’s the way I planned it. “
“There’s no such thing as the Mafia! If you ever mention that word again, you’re leaving this house!” I melted down to the floor, and he was ominous as God standing over me. I would never mention the word again, I promised, and I would never believe in the Mafia.
RAKING WINTER FOR SPRING
I’m raking, a meditation for writing in your head, like ironing or baking, or lavender baths. The pavement on Palace Avenue is under jack hammers and a yellow tractor is parked in front of my driveway.
Eight men, in yellow jackets, are, digging out the curbside shoulder of a two-way road, so traffic is cumulating in front of me. The sun shines on the traffic control worker, his face is crusty with an untamed beard, and bushy eyebrows. He appears to be in his sixties, but he never takes off his sunglasses, so I don’t know for sure. A gentlemen walked by, as I was maneuvering into the driveway with groceries, an open pack of red skinned potato chips, on my lap. As I got out of the car, I turned around, and he spoke out,
“ Exciting isn’t it?” He said smiling.
“ What?”
“ All the activity on the street.”
I shook my head, like an older person who can’t believe you’d say something so
stupid, and marched in the house, repeating what he said, and after a few times, I had to stop myself- I am doing a lot of that, ridiculing, criticizing, mocking and imitating strangers.
The bird, that was born last year returned to her nest to lay her own eggs. Spring, is contracting up through the ground, melting the last remaining buttons of ice, and there is new life, all new, here inside my ground, my fertile ground for love, torment, adventure, challenge, relationships, achievement, conversation, travel, hiking, horses, ocean, it’s all there, I didn’t lose it like I thought I would. You can still call me LouLou, I’m not all adult yet.
OPPORTUNITIES
THEY COME, AND I AM NOT PREPARED FOR BUSINESS DECISIONS.
I’LL GO LOOK AT MY SPARROWS.
Passionate love is always an interlude, a gallop that ends in exhaustion.
SOMEONE WHO CANNOT LOVE IS A THIEF, AND STEALS FROM THOSE WHO CAN. AS LONG AS THE TRUTH IS NOT BROKEN, AND WHEN IT IS,
SHATTERED, THE THIEF RUNS IN COWARDLY STRIDES. YOU MUST REMEMBER THE BEST OF YOU, THAT ONE SUMMER, WHEN YOU WERE UNSPOILED, AND GALLOP AGAIN.
ADVENTURERS IN LIVINGNESS 