The boys in the bushes — Remembering father and uncle Philip

The last time I saw my Uncle Philip was about a week before my father died. He’d traveled from San Francisco to Bossier City to be there for his brother at the end. My father rallied a bit after he arrived; he sat up in his hospital bed and they chatted about the long-ago times in Gastonia. I heard stories I had heard before and stories I had never heard.

I learned about how, as boys, they’d lurked in the bushes with their monkey masks—which I imagined as pieces more elaborate and realistic than they could posssibly have been, like something John Chambers might have fashioned for Planet of the Apes—and jumped out to startle citizens who were minding their own business.

Apparently this went on for weeks, and they only stopped after one of their “victims” made a hyperbolic report to the police and a rumor began circulating about a roving criminal gang of gorillas. The newspapers picked it up, and an artist’s rendering of King Kong appeared on the front page.

They burned their masks in the basement incinerator.

I heard about how Philip, after he’d gotten out of the Navy, decided to stay in San Francisco. He was then in his middle 20s and decided he wanted to be married. So he made two lists— one of all the qualities he wanted in a wife and another ranking all the women he knew in order of how well they fit his idea of the ideal wife. He determined that he would then ask the first woman on the list to marry him and if she said no, he’d try No. 2. Rinse and repeat.

As it turned out, he got his top seed. The woman who became my Aunt Jean said yes on the condition that she could continue to live in southern California where she practiced law. He thought this was reasonable, so sometimes when I visited my uncle in San Francisco my Aunt Jean would be there, and sometimes she wouldn’t. She always seemed to be arriving or departing, in cabs and airplanes.

When they were together they seemed happy, though I was a child and I didn’t pay much attention to such things.

I heard once again that Ron McKuen, one of a number of celebrity clients and friends my uncle collected, had written his song “Jean,” featured in the 1969 film The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, for my aunt. (McKuen, who wasn’t much of a singer but put a lot of tender emotion into his version, sang it on the soundtrack and was nominated for a Best Original Song Oscar for it, but the better known version was a hit by Oliver; 50 years ago it was the No. 2 song in the country behind “Sugar, Sugar.”)

You might be skeptical about “Jean” having been written for my aunt (I am) but if somehow you are ever to put your hands on one of the calendars McKuen published in the ’60s, you can see that McKuen commemorated my aunt and uncle’s wedding anniversary.

One evening my uncle, my mother, my sisters and I went out to supper at a catfish restaurant on a northwest Louisiana lake. I remember him joking about how he was frightened of the bones but not so afraid as to order the filets, which cost an extra dollar.

I remember that last visit, especially how good he looked, with his mustache and his collarbrushing hair. Like Tom Selleck or the hockey player Derek Sanderson.

He stayed at my parents’ house for a few days; I saw him at the hospital and we talked a bit. But it wasn’t like when I was a little kid and used to go spend two or three weeks with him every summer. Maybe that was because of the stress inherent in the situation, the pale hospital smells, or just that we were both shy men.

I’d stopped going to San Francisco when I started spending my summers on ball fields and golf courses, and though my uncle knew about Willie Mays and Juan Marichal, his interests ran more to opera and business. He’d recently tried expanding his antique store/interior design concept, but his stores in Houston and San Diego closed. I thought he was preoccupied with those failures.

One day he came downtown to the newspaper and took me out to lunch, but if he had important or hard words to say he never got around to them. When it began to look like my father might continue on for weeks or months he decided to go home.

I think it was two days after my uncle left that my father died. I was not there that morning; I’d just arrived at the office after making the rounds of police stations and sheriffs’ offices. I don’t remember who called me, I just remember receiving the news. I wrote up a couple of briefs and told my editor that my father had died and that I had to leave.

It was a hot July. I went to the funeral in a blue serge suit. My girlfriend broke up with me. Life went on.

In November, Jean called and told my mother my Uncle Philip died from a frightening disease that had started killing gay men in San Francisco. He was 52 years old. They scattered his ashes in the bay.

I didn’t know, though somehow I always knew, and I still feel ashamed for my failure to understand how things were for him.

I think of him and my father often, brothers hiding in the bushes, with their conspiracies and paper masks. Whispering their secrets, common blood murmuring in their ears.