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Overview
In this psychologically gripping memoir, Blake Allmendinger returns to his childhood home after a forty-year absence. His homecoming to the struggling farming community of Rocky Ford, Colorado, formerly known as the Melon Capital of the World, forces the author to confront his own sad and disturbing history, one that parallels his hometown’s decline.
Allmendinger’s family was dominated by his emotionally and mentally unstable mother, who became depressed while living in Rocky Ford as a young woman. For the rest of her life she abused the members of her family, creating tensions that remained unresolved until the end of the author’s visit, when his mother died suddenly, a family member committed suicide, and a secret diary was discovered.
The Melon Capital of the World is a remarkable blend of personal narrative, memoir, and Allmendinger’s interviews with people who knew his mother and her family. His story is a gritty but compassionate, and at times humorous, portrait of a family trying to survive in the rapidly disappearing rural American West.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780803255401 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | UNP - Bison Books |
| Publication date: | 02/01/2015 |
| Pages: | 152 |
| Sales rank: | 1,155,076 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.30(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Blake Allmendinger is a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Imagining the African American West (Nebraska, 2005) and other books. His work on western writers and literature has been featured in the Los Angeles Times.
Read an Excerpt
The Melon Capital of the World
A Memoir
By Blake Allmendinger
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Board of Regents of the University of NebraskaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-5665-1
CHAPTER 1
The Melon Capital of the World
My mother entered a beauty pageant when she was a sophomore in college. Knowing the winner would be chosen by members of the audience, she invited my father and his fraternity buddies. They stopped at a bar on the night of the contest, and when they arrived at Mom's sorority, the winner had already been crowned.
Mom lost by a single vote.
The woman who beat her advanced in the competition and defeated other campus sorority queens for the title of Miss Colorado A&M. She lost the Miss Colorado pageant to a rival from another state university.
The winner, Marilyn Van Derbur, was ultimately awarded the national crown.
For the rest of her life Mom blamed Dad for spoiling her chance to become Miss America.
Later in her autobiography Van Derbur admitted her father had molested her. A reporter announced the news on TV. My mother picked up the clicker and said with satisfaction as the screen faded to black, "Everything evens out in the end."
Mom's dream of stardom was thwarted by circumstances beyond her control. Her only consolation was taking pleasure in the misfortunes of others. My mother was raised in a farming community on the plains of southeastern Colorado. She was president of her 4-H club, a trick rider, the lead twirler with the marching band, valedictorian of her high school class, and the youngest contestant ever to win the title of Miss Rocky Ford.
Mom turned down the opportunity to go to Cornell University when her father was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. She enrolled at Colorado A&M and came home on weekends to help nurse her father until he died. My grandfather expressed concerns about the family's finances in a letter he wrote to my mother. "Dear Rosie How are you I am Sick a Bed.... Car Business Pretty Slow can't Make any Money any more guess I will Take Old Age Pension and Retire," he joked. He advised Mom to avoid romantic entanglements. "Be Careful about those Steady Boy Friends they are Dangerous." My grandfather drew a box around the final word. He asked my mother in another letter, "How is that Old Buck Friend of yours you know you want to watch your step those Boys Get you In Trouble the majority of them Don't have a heart So Be Cautious good Luck Your Pop." The boyfriend wasn't my father. "Your Letter sounds good about Tom But as you know a Touch of Love makes you go Blind use your eyes in the Back of your Head as well as your front ones I Hope He is as you think he is But Be Careful I am not saying Don't But Just Be Careful."
Mom took her father's advice. She dated Dad after she broke up with Tom but seemed reluctant to commit to another relationship. My mother had a hope chest filled with letters, 4-H journals, livestock ribbons, a pair of faded ballet slippers, and newspaper clippings. In one letter my father drew a picture of a sad face. "Did you break your date last night? It sure would be nice if I could see you sometime." He later sent her a card that read, "I Love You Terribly ... But I'll Improve With Practice." Dad wrote on the back: "I wish you were here so I could be near you. You have no idea what kind of hell it is when you leave." The message on the next card read, "Women are no damn good!" Dad referred to Mom as "Rosita." He wrote: "I just received your phone call. Woman why do you lead me such a merry chase?" He printed on another card in capital letters: "HOW ARE YOU? YOU GREAT BIG HUNK OF A WOMAN. HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY." My father confessed: "I don't have much to say. Seems like this weekend was fairly mixed up. Guess I'll sit in my little confused corner and cry." There was an invitation in the hope chest announcing commencement exercises for the class of 1958. A note was enclosed in the envelope. "Dear Rose Mary, Please come to my graduation. I want you to be there to pin on my bars. I hope you will understand this, and try to attend."
My mother seemed to be sending my father mixed signals. She may have been in love, but she was more interested in pursuing her education. Mom became pregnant after the beauty pageant and realized her father was right when he said boyfriends were dangerous. She dropped out of college to marry the man who had already sabotaged her dream to become the next Miss America.
Mom majored in home economics. She planned to move to Paris and become a fashion designer after getting her college degree. Grandma Ethel offered to pay for a backstreet abortion, but Mom decided to have me, even though it meant giving up her fashion career. "That's how much I love you," she said. "I could have had you aborted. But I didn't."
My mother equated love with self-martyrdom. She compared herself to Grandma Ethel, a scrappy fighter who had survived the Depression and who single-handedly ran the car business while raising two children after my grandfather died. Mom admired my grandmother's willingness to pay for an abortion and claimed I didn't appreciate the similar sacrifices she made on my behalf. One day she complained about having to cook my meals and pay for my piano lessons. "Name one thing you've done for me in return." When I hesitated, she said, "Take your time." I heard an imaginary clock tick as the music from Jeopardy! played in my head.
I felt responsible for my mother's unhappiness. Every day Dad went to Beman Motors and Son, where he sold cars for Grandma Ethel, while Mom stayed home raising the children she never wanted. Life had dealt my mother a lousy hand. She was stuck with a family and in-laws she couldn't discard. Dad's parents were farmers who lived near Wiley, Colorado. Mom treated them as if they were members of a lower class. They seldom visited our house in Rocky Ford, but when they did, my grandfather would signal he was ready to leave by putting on his hat and waiting by the door. He would whistle a polite tune until my grandmother took the hint.
My mother reserved her greatest scorn for my father's sister, Aunt Sherri. My aunt married a man after high school and moved to a trailer court, where she quickly became pregnant with the first of several children. Mom disliked Sherri because she reminded her of the mistakes she had made in her own life. She wouldn't let Dad pay for chemotherapy when my aunt got breast cancer, so he gave Uncle Kenny money to go to Mexico and purchase Laetrile, a drug that hadn't been approved by the FDA. My uncle confirmed my mother's bleak assessment of her in-laws when he took the funds and ran off with his girlfriend.
Mom opened a ballet academy after Cindi and I started school, then a modeling studio, both of which failed. She served as the state director for a national sewing contest sponsored by the sheep industry entitled "Make It with Wool!" My mother also designed women's clothes and accessories made out of fox fur, raccoon skins, and other semi-exotic animal pelts. The company went bankrupt in less than a year. Her only success occurred when she entered a hat contest organized by the Rocky Ford Ladies' Auxiliary Guild. The other contestants modeled their most elegant apparel. My mother took a different approach. She purchased a battered felt hat at a secondhand store, wired stuffed birds to the top, and squirted glue on the brim to make it look as if the birds had pooped on her head. She attached a sign to the hat that read, "For Some People They Sing!"
Mom won first prize for originality.
My mother had returned to her hometown at the age of nineteen, pregnant and without a college degree. In public she played the cockeyed fatalist who laughed in the face of adversity. She expressed her frustration at home by verbally abusing her husband and children, cursing the town that had served as a stage for her earlier triumphs but that was now a virtual prison.
Mom announced after my grandmother died that she was "all alone in the world." I reminded her she had a brother, and she glared at me as if to imply Uncle Phil didn't count. Her older brother was anointed heir to the car business, which had been rechristened Beman Motors and Son after his birth. My mother had tried to earn her parents' approval by getting good grades and winning a series of beauty pageants, tap dancing contests, and rodeos. But Uncle Phil, the future head of the family, had been allowed to shirk his responsibilities and indulge his personal whims.
My uncle looked like the 1950s singing sensation Pat Boone. He stressed the coincidence by wearing the initials PB on his monogrammed shirts. His good looks, combined with his reputation as a bad boy, made him irresistible to the opposite sex. He impregnated a local girl, who was paid to leave town. He also dated Peggy Fleming, whom he met in Colorado Springs at an ice-skating rink. Finally, he wed my aunt, a former Miss Rodeo America (née Miss Rodeo Oregon), Rocky Ford's only celebrity.
Uncle Phil had an affair with his secretary after getting married. When Grandma Ethel died, he withdrew the profits from the business and absconded to Florida, accompanied by his son, Mike, and his mistress, Louise. Mom was forced to pay the family's debts by selling the business and a small apartment building she had inherited. She used the remaining money to purchase a ranch near Colorado Springs, where we moved in 1971.
My mother continued to resent my father, my sister, and me as well as her parents. Grandma Ethel had favored my uncle, while my grandfather's illness had prevented Mom from attending an Ivy League school. She became increasingly discontented after we moved to the ranch. She contradicted the orders my father gave the foreman and insisted on breaking a stud horse that everyone else considered too dangerous to ride. My mother was determined to prove she was still an expert equestrian. Instead of escaping from Rocky Ford, she was competing with ghosts from her past.
Eventually, I realized my mother was a manic-depressive. Dad dealt with the problem by drinking. Every evening after work he mixed himself a bourbon and coke. He refilled his glass at regular intervals until it was time for bed. My father only lost his temper once. He hit my mother and left the house in a rage. He returned the next day, and the incident was never referred to again.
Mom surprised me one day by confessing she and Dad hadn't had sex since my sister was born. I hated it when she shared the details of her personal life with Cindi and me. She made us stand in the hallway when she went to the bathroom and talked to us through a crack in the door. Once I thought, "This woman has no boundaries." After she and Dad had an argument, Mom said to me, "Remember when you promised to buy me a mink coat and take me dancing?" I pretended not to know what she was talking about. I didn't like to think of myself as a romantic substitute for my father.
My mother complained about her nonexistent sex life. "Do you know what it's like laying next to a man night after night? Never once—"
"Mom!" I resisted the temptation to cover my ears. "Maybe you should talk to a therapist."
My mother acted as if I had slapped her in the face. "I don't believe in discussing our problems outside the family," she said.
We had gone to a counselor once before. Mom departed the office in tears when my father, my sister, and I accused her of making our lives a living hell. She frequently threatened to get a divorce. But it was Dad who finally left after twenty-five years of abuse. My parents had a troubled relationship. But the longevity of their marriage suggested that for every dominant spouse there was a complementary subordinate spouse. My father was a void, and my mother was nature's way of filling that void.
I realized I had taken Dad for granted. For years he had reacted to Mom's outbursts by withdrawing behind an invisible barrier. If my mother had no boundaries, my father had plenty of them. He was the most self-contained person I knew.
I envied Dad for quitting his marriage. It wasn't as easy for a son to divorce his mother. One year I made mom a Mother's Day card. I printed the words "I love you" on a pink piece of construction paper and wrote a poem to go with it:
Roses are red.
Violets are blue.
Sugar is sweet,
And so are you.
If you love me,
As I love you,
No knife can cut
Our love in two.
Now my father was gone. His love had been cut by something stronger than a knife.
The foreman quit because he claimed he couldn't work for my mother. Mom neglected the chores and allowed the fences to sag, forcing the livestock to fend for themselves. She stopped cleaning the house and sat in her nightgown all day drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and playing computer solitaire. My mother bitched about my father during their marriage, but she seemed sad when he was gone. She became depressed when Cindi and I left home for college, yet she wasn't excited when we came back to visit. I spoke to my mother once on the phone about my plans for Christmas vacation. "I guess I'm going to have to pick you up at the airport," she sighed. I suggested I could take a taxi, and she responded by saying she didn't have any food in the house. I asked her if she wanted me to pay the taxi driver to stop at the store. She ignored me and complained about having to wash my sheets and make the bed.
Mom was trying to tell me something I didn't want to hear.
I recommended again that she see a therapist.
"I'm too old to change," she said.
Cindi was unsympathetic to our mother's plight. She told me she had been physically abused as a child. My sister described how our mother used to go into her room late at night, make her get out of bed, and pull down her underwear. Then she beat my sister with a leather quirt, whipping her where the marks wouldn't show.
Cindi saw the shocked expression on my face. "Don't you remember the time you talked back to Mom and she washed your mouth out with soap until you threw up in the sink?" I had no recollection of such an incident. But I had other memories, some comical, some not so funny. My mother often wandered around the house when she felt restless, humming the Engelbert Humperdinck song "Please Release Me (Let Me Go)." Once I saw her standing on the reducing machine with the vibrating strap placed around her fanny, reading The Manchurian Candidate. On another occasion she pressed the automatic switch in the car and rolled up the window while my arm hung outside. Mom was startled when I screamed. Then she laughed.
My mother used a quirt to herd livestock as a child. Later she hung it on a wall in our house to remind Cindi and me what would happen if we misbehaved. One day, feeling stressed, I stole a cigarette and a lighter from Mom's purse. Then I went to my room and locked the door. I lit the cigarette and placed it between my lips, choking as I inhaled the smoke. When I tossed the cigarette into a wastepaper basket, it burst into flames.
Years later I reminded my sister of this episode from our past. Cindi said: "If you burned down our house, where did we live after that? Were we homeless or what? Tell me. I'd like to know." Although they were logical questions, I was unable to answer them. My memory was like a story. It had a beginning, a middle, and an end. Asking what happened after I burned down our house was like asking what happened to Scarlett after the conclusion of Gone with the Wind.
I wondered why I had fabricated such a preposterous story. Maybe I wanted to destroy the prison where my mother held me captive.
Mom also felt trapped. She blamed Rocky Ford for all her problems. I remembered my hometown as a friendly farming community located in the heartland of rural America. It was a place where children played in the streets, where everyone knew each other and no one locked their doors at night. My mother made Rocky Ford sound like a wasteland filled with desperate inhabitants leading miserable lives.
Small towns were associated with an earlier era of our nation's history. For me they represented America's childhood, a seemingly idyllic, more innocent time. Americans romanticized the rural past in the same nostalgic way adults looked back on their youth. There was less crime in small towns, life was less hectic, and the majority of Americans believed in traditional values. But there was also a tendency to see such places as isolated, backward communities. As more people migrated to metropolitan areas, there came to be a growing perception that rural America had been left in the dust. Small towns were perceived to be economically languishing, populated by inhabitants who were provincial, conservative, suspicious of outsiders, and resistant to change.
I began to question whether my memories of Rocky Ford were accurate. I remembered taking refuge from the summer heat by swimming with friends at the pool. White children didn't go on Sunday, when Hispanic residents used the facility. It was rumored that if you swam with "Mexicans," your body would become covered with grease, causing the water to repel off your skin.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Melon Capital of the World by Blake Allmendinger. Copyright © 2015 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
1. The Melon Capital of the World
2. TJ Is a Wonderful Boy
3. I Met a Traveler from an Antique Land
4. Bad Day for a Black Brother
5. Remember Me
6. A Bump in the Road
7. The Diary