Questions for Patrick Murfin from the Family

The Old Man at daughter Maureen Rotter's first wedding aniversary picnick this spring,

Note:  My youngest daughter Maureen Rotter was recently inspired to collect and preserve some family history for posterity.  She collected questions from her two older sisters and her three nephews and one niece for my wife Kathy Brady-Murfin and me and whipped up a tailor made questionnaire for each of us.  This is mine with my responses.  Challenging, thought provoking stuff.  It may be mildly interesting to the casual reader and morbidly curious.

Maureen and I in a more than slightly creepy old timey photograph taken on a long ago trip the Wiscocin Dells.

What was it like moving from the West to the Midwest? Did anything surprise you?

I didn’t know quite what to expect. On one hand I liked Cheyenne.  It was all I knew.  On the other I knew my Dad had resisted moving us to the big, bad city for years but finally could not take the long absences from home—almost half of the year—which stoked my Mom’s resentments and rages.  I thought I might be moving into a world of towering apartment buildings and gangsters.  I was quite surprised to find that Skokie, an older suburb, felt more like a small town with its own nice little downtown and that we lived in small brick ranch style home not that different than the one in Cheyenne, but on a much smaller lot.  Niles West was four or five times bigger than Cheyenne East high, so that in itself was an adjustment.  So was finding myself in a school that was maybe 75% Jewish and where most of the Gentile kids were considered “Greasers”—a term we used for Mexicans in Cheyenne but discovered meant the kids we called Hoods out west.  The Jewish kids were mostly the Collegiate—nice clothes, polite, and with assumed bright futures.  Back in Cheyenne as a clumsy, not-athletic, pudgy, bookish kid, I was an outcast and near pariah with virtually no friends.  But that bookishness and even my nerdy social awkwardness seemed to be a more comfortable fit in the new school.  There were plenty of others with similar interests.  If I didn’t get welcomed into the highest social cliques, I found plenty of friends among the theater geeks, would-be writers, and political activists.  They accepted the odd Goy in the cowboy hat, perhaps as an exotic.  For the first time I felt I had a real life of my own.  So on the whole, the move was probably a life saver for me.

Is there anything in your life that you would change, if you could?

Tough question.  There are many forks in the road and infinite possibilities for choosing different ones.  On the whole, I wouldn’t change a whole lot.  Good, bad, even disastrous decisions created who I am, the only me I know.  Maybe I should have had more confidence, taken some more risks, especially in pursuing my writing.  I passed opportunities to work on Chicago daily papers after the Seed simply because I was ashamed of my horrible spelling and afraid that I would be eaten alive by an old time hard boiled copy editor.  Similarly, I sent few of my short stories out, even those that got high praise at Columbia College, for fear of rejection.  Perhaps I could have built a career and not just a succession of jobs.  But perhaps not….

W. M. Murfin and Ruby Irene Murfin with the twins circa 1952.  I'm the one on the left, Timothy--Peter in later life--on the right.

What 3 adjectives would you use to describe your mother?  What 3 for your father?

Mom—damaged, lonely, resentful.  Dad—integrity, stoic, aloof.

Your brother died while he was still fairly young, what do you think he would be like or be up to if was alive today?

We were not all that young.  He was 55 when he died.  He was trying to get his life together but he had not only burned most of his bridges, he had blown them to bits.  Although he may have stopped drinking and pill popping, he still had wide swings between religious ecstasy, black depression, and self-loathing.  I think he was by then incapable of either happiness or building lasting and meaningful relationships.  He probably would have relapsed, dried out, and repeated the cycle until a similar end.

Your father was a military man – if it weren’t for the Vietnam War, would you have ever joined the military?

Although he enlisted in the Army for World War II, I don’t think he considered himself a military man.  It was something he needed to do given the times.  And it may have been an escape following the death in infancy of his only natural child months before.  But I grew up surrounded by not only him but all of my uncles and almost every adult male I knew were veterans.  Every home I visited had framed pictures of young men in uniform.  That and a steady diet of old John Wayne war flicks on the after-school TV movie made me want to join the service.  As a young child had played a recurring back yard game where I was the hero of the United States Playground Marines or of the Rough Riders.  In high school I joined the Civil Air Patrol pretty much just for the uniform and to get my picture taken in it.  I seriously considered an Air Force career and seeking a Congressional appointment to the Air Force Academy.  The Vietnam War changed all of that.

In Old Town circa 1970.  Grappling with the Draft, anti-war activist, baby Wobbly, writing student at Columbia College.  I wanted to write the Great American Novel.

What was your father’s reaction to you refusing the draft?

My father was surprisingly supportive once he understood that it was a matter of conscience despite being personally a conservative Republican.  But being true to your convictions was important to him.  He really believed the old Davy Crocket motto that I grew up with as a kid:  “Be sure your right, then go ahead.”  Mom was actually, although quietly, a liberal Democrat.  But her fear that I would bring shame upon the family completely trumped her politics.  She was also emotionally unstable and in fragile health.  Dad and I had to conspire together to keep Mom from finding out that I was convicted of Draft Refusal and in prison.

Do you believe in soulmates?

As a romantic kid I certainly did.  But now I don’t believe that there is just one person out of millions that you are destined for or compatible with.  Any of us are limited by those who life throws in our path.  A soul mate in India would be as useless as ice skates in Hell.  Many relationships are possible.  The best and most enduring ones take mutual work and effort over a long time, not magic fairy dust.

What is something you think the family would be surprised to hear about you/your life?

I have been fairly free about telling my stories.  Not everyone has listened, and few have read the several memoir pieces I have written, some of them embarrassingly honest about my manifest failures and deficiencies.  I don’t think anyone would be terribly surprised if they have paid any attention.

A house full of women indeed.  Christmas circa 1988 with Carolynn Larsen, Kathy Brady Murfin, Maureen, and Heather Laren.

What was it like living in a house full of women for so long?

It’s been so long, I can’t remember any other way.  Mostly it is humbling.

What do you miss about your childhood?

The physical bigness and beauty of Wyoming.  And the total freedom we seemed to have there and then.  I could leave the house after breakfast and as long as I came home when the dinner bell on the porch rang about 5:30 I could roam all over Cheyenne at will from the time I was in the second or third grade.  No one even took notice whether I left the house with my back pockets stuffed with paperback books to read while lolling on a willow tree branch overlooking a pond in Holiday Park or if I toted by .22 rifle and had a couple boxes of shells to go plink cans and bottle at a ranch junk yard.  I did both with pleasure.

What’s the best concert you’ve ever been to?

Hard to say but here are some candidates—Barbara Streisand at Soldier Field when I was in high school, The Mothers of Invention and Canned Heat at the Electric Playground while on acid, Bob Dylan at the International Amphitheatre  in the late ‘70’s,  the first time I heard Utah Philips at the old Quiet Knight on Wells Street, Steve Goodman playing for us cons at Sandstone Prison.

Was there ever a career you wanted to pursue as a kid/teenager that you didn’t?

Influenced by my hero Theodore Roosevelt—fat bookish kid with glasses makes good—as a pre-teen and later as a young adolescent in the Kennedy years I told people I would be President of the United States.  They told me fat chance.  In high school and college I wanted to write the Great American Novel.

What passions did you have as a kid/teenager?

From a very young age, reading—an escape to anywhere.  As an older teen writing, theater, and eventually activism.

The Old Man and his grandchildren, 2011--Caiti Pearon, Joe Gibson, Nick Bailey, Randy Larson.

If you could give advice to your grandkids for their future, what would it be?

Fall down.  Get up.  Repeat.   And dare a little.

What do you think the grandkids will be like as older adults?

Themselves.

Over the years how have you seen each of the kids and grandkids change?

Almost all of you have had demons and almost all of you have come to grips with them even if they are never wholly tamed.  You are fine human beings who make me proud and humble.   

What do you want your legacy to be?

That I stood up, spoke out, and tried not to be too much of dick.  How well I succeed will depend on how well any scar tissue I have inflicted on all of you, however unintentionally, heals.

Ten Years Gone—Elegies for My Brother

Tim's Senior high school photo doubled as an 8x10 glossy to promote himself as a teenage party DJ.

I was on Google today (Wednesday as I type) trying to find a citation to a long forgotten article I had had written when it popped up, smacking me right between the eyes:

Timothy Peter Murfin, 54, formerly of Chicago, IL and Portland, OR, died in Cincinnati, OH on Feb. 14. Born in Twin Bridges, MT on March 17, 1949 to Willard M. Murfin and Ruby Irene, nee Mills, Murfin, who have both preceded him in death. Survived by children Ira Samuel Murfin of Chicago and Shani Colleen Menz-Murfin of New York City; brother Patrick Murfin (Kathy) of Crystal Lake, IL; stepmother Rae Murfin of Alberton, MT; former spouse Arlene (Packer) Brennan (Michael) of Chicago; former longtime companions Luanne Menz of Georgia and Normandie Nunez of Portland, OR; and three nieces. Memorial service is pending in Chicago.

—Chicago Tribune

February 19, 2004

The gods of serendipity strike again.  I had not quite forgotten.  I brought it up a couple of weeks when someone at church asked about my upcoming birthday and about the twin brother she vaguely remembered hearing I had.  Then I let it slip below my active consciousness again.  Valentine’s Day came and went with other things on my mind—certainly not the first anniversary with a big fat zero in it.

I was working alone at Briargate School in Cary, Illinois where I was head building custodian.  It was a Saturday, but a basketball program used the gym from 8 am to 9 pm.  I had to be there and was little resentful of not spending Valentine’s Day with my wife.  I was shampooing hall carpets which were incrusted by tracked mud and salt from a winter’s worth of boots.  About 7 pm I got a call on my cell phone, a new-to-me gizmo that seldom went off.  It was from Kathy with the news that my brother was dead. 

It was a shock, but oddly not totally unexpected in that he had abused his body with alcohol and a virtual pharmacopeia of self-prescribed medication for many years.  I was stunned, but went through the motions until the last kid and the last chatty parent was finally locked out of the building.

Two or three days later I was in a car driven by Ira S. Murfin,  Peter’s—he preferred to be called Peter, the Biblical name he had adopted upon entering a religious order years before—son.  My middle daughter Heather Larsen was with us.  We were driving through the night to Cincinnati to make final arrangements and collect whatever was in his “estate”—the few personal belongings he had hauled with him to Ohio after his virtual exile from Oregon.  An odd conversation we had in that car—maybe more of a rambling monologue by me, would become the gist of the opening words of a memorial poem.  More about that later.

The two of us were adopted at birth by W.M. and Ruby Irene Murfin.  Despite being twins, we were not identical.  In fact in many ways we could not have been more different.  Tim was dark haired and so good looking as a child that women stopped my mother on the street to compliment her.  I was larger, blond, and from the beginning oafish.  In school I was simultaneously a loud know-it-all showing off all of the hours of reading I did while still managing to fail at math and spelling.  I had no friends and was a magnet for bullies.

Tim was not a star student or an athlete.  He none the less exuded a kind of charisma.  Other kids swirled around him, naturally following his interests.  From always being Roy Rogers in the neighborhood cowboy games, to being the 12 year old leader of Cheyenne’s sidewalk surfers, to being the first guy in town with a Beatle haircut and Nehru jacket—and naturally the prettiest girlfriend.

When we moved to Skokie and Niles West High School he and his willowy girlfriend were elected to Prom court.  He planned to be a radio disc jockey and got himself gigs hosting sock hops and basement parties with his portable record player and boxes of 45s. 

I was into newspaper, theater, and increasingly radical politics.  Tim got interested in religion and was soon a leader in Young Life, a denizen of church basement coffee houses, and talking about becoming a minister.  Always, a gaggle of kids followed him.

I went away to college at Shimer.  Tim stayed home, mostly to keep his adoring posse together.  He attended Kendal College, a two year school in Evanston.  I came home a long haired, dope smoking hippy and draft dodger.  It turns out he had discovered marijuana too and the use of hallucinogens as spiritual practice.

After I left Shimer and moved to Chicago, I lived with him a couple of times.  Each time he had a full house of roommates and acolytes.  I was the improvident brother he found room for in an unheated room off of an Old Town kitchen or the unfinished basement of a Rogers Park townhouse.  By then he had grown a patriarchal beard and seemed to be gathering his own hippy cult, which would literally gather at his feet as he smoked a fat one and waxed beatifically on arcane mysteries.

Tim married Arlene, a very nice young woman who worshiped him.  She followed him into an outfit called the Holy Order of Mans, which practiced some sort of mystical catholicism with a small c.  He took the name Peter—the Rock of the Church.  Together they were sent on mission to California.  A few years late Arlene returned to Chicago with their toddler son Ira.

Peter drifted out of the Order and pursued various spiritual paths with complete earnestness.  He lived in Portland and had a day job at an early big box hardware store.  But he yearned to be a saint.  He found folks who thought he might be.  Got into another relationship, had a daughter, Shani and lost that family to bouts of depression and heavy drinking and self-medication.

He cleaned himself up in AA and characteristically became a star.  Soon he was speaking all over Oregon and northern California and re-inventing himself as a spiritually based addiction councilor.  He was making big plans and chasing various gurus and guides looking more for tips on how to become one of them than for enlightenment.  Or so it seemed to me from my great distance in Chicago when he would phone with plans.

Eventually he became a substance abuse specialist with the county department of probation.  He entered another relationship with an adoring older woman with a teen age daughter.  But the depression never went away and he fell off the wagon in secret repeatedly.  Each episode became more intense.  It became harder to hide.

In all of those years I saw Peter only three times.  We came to Missouri where he was asked as an ordained priest by my father to conduct my mother’s funeral.  He did so with grace, although his relationship with my father was strained.  It would become an obsession which he would pour out to me in drunken middle-of-the-night telephone calls. 

In the summer of 1983 just after Kathy and my daughter Maureen was born, Peter stayed with us for a week.  It was also his first visit with his ex-wife and son.  He showed up trim, tanned, and handsome.  His black beard was neatly trimmed, his hair barbered to a fare-thee-well, his clothes West Coast casual sharp.  I was still a scraggly post-hippy in thrift shop clothes and a cowboy hat.  I had the family reputation, well earned, as a heavy drinker.  I did nothing to hide it. Peter was supposedly sober.  But Kathy walked in on him pulling from the fifth of whiskey he had hidden in is bag.  It turned out he was killing a bottle a day or more but never actually seemed drunk. 

The last time I saw him alive was after we had moved to Crystal Lake.  He was back for another visit to Ira and spent most of his time in Chicago, but came up for a couple of days with us.  By this time he was in rougher shape.  He ambled over to St. Thomas Church across the street where Kathy was an active parishioner and RE volunteer, to ask the Priest for permission to say a private mass at their alter.  He explained that he was also “an ordained Priest in the Higher Order of Melchizedek” and required to say mass daily.  He was upset that he was turned down, saying that some priest pal in Portland had let him use his church.  He made Kathy and the girls uncomfortable.

Back in Portland his life slowly unraveled.  The relapses became more frequent, the depression blacker.  He wrecked cars, lost his job.  Normandie stood by him as long as she could, support him in the later years.  But in the end he wrecked that, too.  He exiled himself to a closet of a room in Eugene where some former acolytes tried to help him.  He burned through that, too. 

He was virtually homeless and on the run from the law for failure to pay fines for his traffic accidents.  David Sellers, an old friend who he had met hanging out at WLS radio studios while he was in high school and who had lived with us in that Old Town apartment, offered him a bed in suburban Cincinnati.  He was reportedly trying to get himself together and was apparently sober.  He had settled into regular Catholic worship, but he still received tons of mail from all of the cults and gurus he had associated himself with.  Although he couldn’t find work, he finally got qualified for Social Security Disability.  Just after accomplishing that he came home one day, sat down on his bed and died of a massive heart attack.

To our amazement, drugs were not directly involved, except that long abuse had generally wrecked his health.

Ira, Heather, and I arranged to have him cremated and gathered the boxes of his life time which were crammed in the closet and under the bed of his room.  Tons of mystical books, art work, beads, crystals, candles, vestments, journals in his meticulous calligraphy.  We packed the urn and the stuff and returned to Chicago.  The stuff mostly went into storage, Ira and I each keeping a few items.

We arranged for a Catholic funeral mass at an old Polish parish just west of the Loop.  The Mass was said by, a Milwaukee priest and brother of Arlene’s second husband Michael Brennan.  It was solemn and holy and in a lovely old chaplet.  Peter would have approved.  After the Mass folks got up to testify about him in one way or another.  When my turn came I read a suite of six elegies that I had been working on for weeks.  This is what I read:

Elegies for My Brother

Timothy Peter Murfin

March 17, 1949-February 14, 2004

I.

Hurtling down an Interstate on any black night,

say the route angling south southeast from Gary

for Indianapolis then slung around the racetrack

to Cincinnati, Queen City of the West,

you realize in an instant that this great gray marvel

was not constructed for the likes of us,

mere civilians on inconsequential errands

encapsulated in puny steel,

that it was wrought for Commerce,

for that endless caravan of behemoths

jeweled in red and yellow charging indefatigably

for endless rendezvous with profit,

and that our vagrant desires to come home or to escape,

to begin a new life or repeat by rote an established tedium,

to make love or to break tender hearts,

or on this one night in this one box loose amid that stream,

to unite the living with the dead,

seize an unworthy opportunity to tag along for the ride.

II.

Roy Rogers is dead.

The King of the Cowboys with his nickel plated, pearl handled revolvers

resplendent in pearl snap shirt and neckerchief

with a cockeyed and confident grin,

the hero of every summer morning adventure

with Dale Evans at his side

and Hopalong Cassidy on loan from the two reeler next door,

has fallen from Trigger,

Bullet noses his lifeless sprawl in the dust.

            [Here sing Happy Trails to You]

            Happy trails to you, until we meet again.

Happy trails to you, keep smiling’ on ‘till then.

Who cares about the clouds when we’re together?

Just sing a song and bring the sunny weather.

Happy trails to you, till we meet again.

Happy trails to you, ‘till we meet again.

III.

Youth bestows its virtues capriciously,

a dollop of beauty here, audacious valor there,

sweet innocence and brash confidence

doled out as if rationed by a miser,

many seeming to be passed over

and left with only churlish resentment,

bad skin and worse judgment.

But he stood beneath the fountain,

                                    let its waters bathe him in every gift

                                                a dark handsomeness,

                                                                         a dj’s soothing voice,

                                                                                    charm,

                                                                                                charisma,

so that he dazzled his way through life,

gathering around him tight circles

not just of friends, but followers

who dreamed his dreams.

The hippy guru of Sheridan Road,

they gathered as acolytes at his feet

as he sat with Old Testament patriarchal beard,

eyes blazing one moment,

the beatific smile of yoga saint the next,

in hallucinogenic communion.

And I, no account wastrel with dim prospects,

swung on the icy path of an asteroid

orbiting far, far from that blazing Sol.

IV.

One year, just before Christmas,

he wrote from somewhere on the West Coast.

This year, could I send him a blank book,

bound in leather, hand stitched,

virgin velum pages waiting for his pen?

I want, he wrote, to be a Saint

and no mere tablet or collegiate spiral notebook

would be worthy of the great and inspirational words

which he would meticulously enter

in that fine calligraphic print he assumed.

It struck me, even in my heathen ignorance,

that saints had no ambition but simply were.

But I hunted through the stationers until I found the perfect journal,

inscribing on its fly leaf my own haughty judgment—

            See Ecclesiastes, Chapter 1, Verse 2

                                  Vanity of vanities saith the Preacher,

                              All is vanity.

V.

He took his religion like he took the whiskey

that he stashed,

straight from the bottle,

no ice, no diluting soda.

He demanded the real thing,

raw and powerful,

burning the throat on the way down

but leaving a warm belly glow.

He may have wandered here and there

amid crystals and pyramids,

astrologers and New Age frou-frou,

but settled only where the mysteries

were deep and hard.

For him no dallying among the ladies of

Saturday morning yoga and meditation,

no time for the plain/simple Buddhism

of the agnostic heart so embraced by

disappointed Western rationalists,

but the stern, demanding Tibetan school

with spinning prayer wheels,

real gods and real demons,

The Book of the Dead.

And no Vatican II Catholicism for him,

no priests in sweaters named Father Phil,

no guitar masses and suburban congregations in Ban Lon,

no cheap and easy grace,

only the penitent's worn out knees,

the endless rosaries endlessly repeated,

icons,

medals,

                                    Holy Water,

the prophetic apparitions of Mary,

the stigmata of Padre Pio 

in which, if he could,

he would dip his handkerchief

to press to his lips to kiss.

VI.

Something inside of him was broken.

He knew it and spent a questing life

trying to find it,

trying to fix it.

Was it some trauma of childhood,

inflicted by the fragile, damaged woman who raised us

or the god-like but distant father?

             

He often thought so, obsessed over each moment

of remembered agony and rejection,

taking the hard knocks of ordinary childhood

and building an edifice of unremitting pain,

unable to forget what he had constructed,

unable to forgive.

Or, now that Freud has been cast aside as Fraud,

was it just some accident of biochemistry,

a roll of the dice that elected him

by alchemy of genetic chance

to have neurons that misfire just so?

As a former Friend of Bill W

did he have to assume responsibility

and seize control of the disease himself,

or did the pickling years of hidden bottles,

the various stews of pharmaceuticals prescribed

and self-prescribed

finally overcome that mind?

       Was it all three?

       Does it matter?

He was broken and tried to repair himself as best he could

and in the process leaned how to balm the wounds

of other troubled souls,

but like the Physician, could not heal himself.