The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss by Dennis McKenna Read Free Book Online

Amelia saw through all this and managed to get under his skin on a regular basis.
    Though Terence would never admit it, I think eventually he came to respect Amelia as a worthy sparring partner. There is no doubt of Amelia’s affection for Terence; she was there for him at every important twist of his life, including the terrible summer of 1999, my brother’s last, a good part of which Amelia and I spent with him in Hawaii. Our beloved aunt, Sister Rose, the “old battle-ax” in Terence’s words, outlived him by three years. She died at age ninety in 2003 at her convent, surrounded by family and friends. There was more of Amelia in Terence than he would ever admit. She cut a wide swath, and, like Terence, there will never be another like her.
    I have different recollections of our father’s brothers, Ed and Austin. I remember Ed chiefly because he had a large family of eight kids. As a young man, he attended various colleges in Colorado and then went to engineering school in Oakland, where he lived near Lake Merritt in the same apartment building as my parents. Following school, he left to work on the construction of the Alaska Highway during the War. He’d been barred from the military, classified as 4-F because of a heart leakage. The Al-Can project, as Canadians called it, was considered essential for national defense, and so he served that way. He utterly ignored the advice of his doctors to take it easy in light of his heart condition; he loved hunting and fishing, played hard, worked at hard jobs like laying track, and drank like a fish. After the war, he ended up with a high-pressure job in Seattle as a sales manager for a belt and pulley company. According to a new coinage at the time, he was a “Type A” personality. He was very strict with his kids and always seemed to be simmering with barely suppressed anger. Or so I gathered on the few occasions when we spent any time with him or his family. Accordingly, I made no effort to get to know him, preferring to stay out of his way.
    As for Austin—Uncle Aut, as I call him—I became better acquainted with my father’s youngest brother later in life. Like his sister Amelia, Aut was smart and had a rebellious streak, but as a man he had more choices when it came to escaping the constraints of convention. Before the war, he started art school in San Francisco and became the bohemian of the family. He lived in a boardinghouse in Pacific Heights and earned his keep by helping the landlady with cooking and cleaning. Some of his roommates were fellow artists, others led different lives, but most were characters of one kind or another. Among his colorful housemates were at least two gay couples, his first encounter with gays—a real education for a small-town boy, and a step toward developing an unusual sense of tolerance that defines him to this day.
    For a short while there, around the start of the war, all three brothers lived in the Bay Area. Aut’s brief memoirs suggest they regularly got together on weekends and did their share of partying. Our parents and uncles were not prudes. Dinners and ballroom dancing were favorite pastimes during the swing era with its famous big band leaders and singers, from Tommy Dorsey and Guy Lombardo to Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. The McKennas clearly enjoyed their drinking, but they weren’t lushes. Had they been young adults thirty years later, I’m sure they would have been passing joints, dropping acid, and going to see the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane just as we did.
    Once the war began, Aut’s boardinghouse days came to an end. He moved to Berkeley and, like our father, worked for a while in the Kaiser shipyards. Having registered for duty shortly after Pearl Harbor, he was biding his time. Through a lucky break, he got a job at a mine back home, not far from Salida. It was another “essential” defense-related job, mining fluorspar, a mineral used in steel manufacturing. Meanwhile, he waited to be