Remembering the life of a beautiful scoundrel

My mother called me last week to tell me my Uncle Eddie from New

York had died. He had smoked for more than 50 years, quitting only

when he started having trouble breathing. He went to a doctor, who

told him he had cancer in both lungs and about a month to live. A

month later, my mother received a phone call telling her that the

youngest of her brothers was dead.

Mom reacted to the news in a way I had not seen before -- she

became suddenly convinced her brother’s death meant that her number

was up next. She fretted and wept and talked in mournful, desperate

tones. I tried to convince her that she was being unreasonable. She

had stopped smoking many years ago, hardly ever drank and was years

younger than Eddie. But I couldn’t steer her off the notion that the

Grim Reaper was right outside her door.

“Oh, I’m next, Davey, I know it!” she cried. “It’s just a matter

of time for me!”

My mother then told me that Uncle Eddie had abused drugs for

decades, that hard substances such as heroin and cocaine had cut his

life short.

“Well, he was 70 years old, Mom,” I reasoned. “That’s almost the

life expectancy. It sounds like he lived a pretty full life.”

“Yes, I suppose,” she sighed. My mother had to admit that, despite

the hard living, my uncle outlasted a lot of relatives who had led

far more respectable lifestyles. My Uncle Freddie, for instance, was

a clean-living family man widely regarded as a saint, but he died of

a kidney disease before middle age.

Mom still sounded really down, so I drove to Huntington Park over

the weekend to get her out of the house and away from the creaky

photos and images of saints on her walls. On the way to the theater,

I asked her what Eddie had done for a living. She smiled and

shrugged.

“You’d have a hard time figuring that one out,” she said. “Your

uncle was one of those people who ...” She struggled for the right

words. “ ... always seemed rich without any money. He liked the finer

things in life; he always dressed in nice clothes and looked like a

big shot, but he wouldn’t have a dime in his pocket.”

I had already known my uncle was a bit of a scoundrel, but to my

mother he was a complex and beautiful scoundrel, and she wanted me to

understand that. She told me how devilishly handsome he was in his

youth, how devastatingly charming. Women adored him; he drew them in

like a magnet, drove them crazy with his rakish ways.

When I was 10, Uncle Eddie came out to California to try to find a

job, and he stayed with us for awhile. His wife was back in New York,

waiting for him to send word that he was either coming home or

arranging for her transportation here. During the month he was in

Huntington Park, he had affairs with a woman who lived on the next

block, a couple of women down the street, and an aunt on my father’s

side who lived the next town over. His dallying with the woman on the

next block almost proved the end of him. Her husband came home early

from work one day and chased him out of the house and down the street

with a gun.

According to my mother, she was doing housework when she saw my

uncle running up the walkway in his underwear, shouting “Dolores!

Open the door! Dolores!”

That night, my mother suggested to Uncle Eddie that he start

thinking about going home.

I asked my mother if she knew when he had started abusing drugs,

and she shook her head. He started sometime while he was a teenager,

was all she knew. Then, suddenly, Mom’s voice became sad.

“Eddie had a girlfriend when he was 19. Her name was Norma. She

was Indian, Native American. Not very pretty, but a kind, sweet girl.

Oh, Davey, she was the sweetest girl in the world.”

Eddie would dote on Norma like a queen, Mom said. She was

everything to him. But they were hooked on heroin, Mom said. They

used to shoot up together.

“Mom, why do you speak so highly of this woman when she used to do

drugs with your brother?”

“You just had to know her, Davey,” she said. “She was just very

kind, very gentle. She never said a mean thing about anyone. She was

suffering, the poor thing.”

It was then that I started to understand why my mother has always

carried a soft spot in her heart for addicts. She’ll hear that

someone we know has started using drugs, and she’ll shake her head

sadly and say that he or she is suffering and in need of help, like a

small animal caught in barbed wire.

Norma was a very sad woman, Mom said. It was as if she looked at

the world and it broke her heart. And she was never sadder than when

Eddie was in jail on some drug charge, which was often. One day,

Eddie got out of jail and came home to find that Norma had hanged

herself.

“He never got over that,” Mom said, shaking her head. “She was it,

his great love. He was always different after that.”

The years passed, and Uncle Eddie did his drugs and womanized and

floated through life. Finally he was arrested on something big -- not

some minor possession charge, but something enough to put him away

for years. He got out years later and was promptly arrested again.

This time the judge gave him a choice: jail or rehabilitation. He

chose rehab.

Perhaps it was the years behind bars that did it for him, or

perhaps he was just tired, but except for the cigarettes, he stayed

clean the remaining 20 years of his life.

Before he died, he spoke with my mother over the phone. They

talked for hours about his life and how he had come to see his place

in the world. Of that conversation, my mother would tell me only two

things. One was that Eddie had in the end become a huge fan of

Rudolph Giuliani, praising him as the only mayor who cared about New

York City. And the other was that the phone call was going to cost

her a fortune.

“I don’t even want to look at that bill,” she said.

Mom told me that Uncle Eddie died surrounded by loved ones, his

weeping wife holding his hand, his children praying by his side. This

was a great comfort to my mother, the knowledge that after having

lived so long a failure and a fool, her beautiful scoundrel had died

a success.

* DAVID SILVA is the News-Press city editor. His column runs on

Wednesdays. Reach him at 637-3231, or by e-mail at

david.silva@latimes.com.