Folsom or Ia Drang

My dad lost the middle and ring finger of his right hand supposedly when he was nine years old. The story, as he would always tell it, began with an axe…. It was in the fall of 1953, in the wealthy, Bay-Area village of Millbrae. Dad was holding down the ends of a crooked log in order to stabilize it while his older stepbrother Jim—with an axe—hacked away at its center. Everything was going well until Jim (for some reason) said to my dad, “Move your hand.” “Why?” My dad asked. “I’m just trying to help you.” “I don’t need your help.” “You won’t be able to chop it in half unless I hold it down.” “Move your fucking hand, Jon.” “Fuck you—just keep chopping.” So Jim brought down the axe. A millisecond later, Dad saw something small and thin like a stick falling from above his head, and he instinctively held out his hand to catch it. When it landed in his palm, he gazed at it for a second—and then realized what it was. An hour later, he was at Saint Francis in San Francisco, where a surgeon—without administering even a local anesthetic—sewed shut the ragged, tattered stumps on his left hand. Whenever Dad told this story, he would mention the chocolate-flavored morphine and how sick it made him. But the part of the story that I loved the most was its gruesome dénouement: Three days after Dad had returned home from the hospital, his ten-year-old girlfriend (who was one year older than him) showed up at his front door, eager to see him. Before she rang the doorbell, however, she noticed a strange, white object lying several feet away in the tiny flower garden to her right. Out of curiosity, she picked it up—but she had to wait several seconds before her innocent mind realized what it was. And when it did realize, she wailed like the little girl she was and ran away, sobbing in horror. Dad would always tell that part of the story—that shocking anagnorisis—with a slow, somber voice. Apparently, the girl—whom he loved perhaps too deeply, since he never knew his real mother—refused to speak to him ever again, and her silence traumatized him a thousand times more than his stepbrother’s axe on that fateful autumn day in the village of Millbrae…. ?Today, I wonder how true Dad’s story actually was. In the early 60’s, Dad became a member of the Mexican Mafia, so perhaps he lost his fingers while doing something a little less innocent than holding a log in position—something he could not share with me, his son, without making me ashamed of him, or without seriously sabotaging my moral development. Whatever the truth may be, there was definitely a positive side to having only eight fingers: When Dad’s draft came up in ’62, his lack of digits caused him to be rejected by the Armed Forces. (And what if, instead of going to Folsom, Dad had gone to Ia Drang?) Another blessing: In the 80’s Dad learned how to play the Classical guitar backwards so that he could have all five fingers on his right hand forming the chords while the three fingers on his left hand plucked the strings. I can still hear him to this day playing the Romance d’Amour over and over in his study after putting me to bed—over and over as I listened in the darkness—over and over … until it was perfect.