Theo: The Ultimate Autocrat

Grandpa Theo loved going downtown on the bus and often took me along. It was great. He was so smooth, so chill, so at ease. We would just stroll, looking at things and people, buying very little outside of treats at department store candy counters. He loved just standing there, head craned upward, looking at the tall buildings.

Very different from going downtown with Mutchie, it was.

Theo was billed as my grandfather, but I'm nowhere near sure who he was and that's not likely to change. At ages 4-7, nobody delighted me more, and the feeling was mutual.

Yes, he was a kook, too.

In a telling example of the autocratic, tone deaf audacity in which these people are marinated, he sometimes went way too far.

So. Not. Cool.
My home then was on a corner lot with a bus stop. One nice day as I played in the yard, the bus pulled up and out popped Grandpa's head from an open window. He motioned to board the bus, but I stopped cold and pointed at my house. He waved that off, said it's OK, and off we went for another nice day in the city's grimy, degenerate-packed center.

We returned many hours later to a tizzy over my vanishment, police about to be called.

Mom was frantic with worry. Dad, livid, but not really allowed to confront Mom's family, put his hand on my head for a moment, relieved his little boy wasn't being savagely (or, tenderly, for that matter) raped in a wooded area, and went inside to braise in his anger.

Mom went off on Grandpa something fierce, but he laughingly and repeatedly waved her off, pretty much tellin' her to blow it out her ass. Never had I seen such a passionate complaint be treated so dismissively, an image that stuck with me forever.

It was all in Greek, too, making it all the more striking. No, I couldn't understand most of it, but I damn well knew what they were saying.

Sucker!
Once very wealthy and powerful, he had been smuggled out of black ops in submarines and limped on a lower leg mangled by gunshot wounds from an assassination attempt.

After becoming privy to a seaborne attempt to kill him, he traded his luxury stateroom with that of a lower deck peasant who resembled him, resulting in the poor sod being mistakenly killed. He found that hilarious.

Massive Bummers
Sadly, just as I was reaching the age to where I could really tell my ass from a hole in the ground, he lost that same ability and suffered a years-long dementia-ridden decline that would run Mom ragged, deliver a crushing blow to her waning esteem for this nation, and break my heart.

The many times we visited him at the Convalescent Center on Gaston remains among my worst memories. I was glad to see the building torn down many years later.

The one time he returned home for a visit about a year before he died went to shit, rather literally, within minutes, making Mom freak out and pretty much bringing about the premature end of my childhood, a process that began when The Golden Psycho John took 6-year-old me to see The Exorcist.

Grandpa died when I was 11 in what turned out to be untimely fashion that cost poor Dad terribly.

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