The shallow end of my gene pool

It's been a while since I treated you all to a dip in my family's gene pool so here's a post about one of the black sheep in my family.

That handsome dude is my late Uncle Curtiss. I'm guessing that photo was taken some time in the mid 1950's, which would have been just before my parents got married and right about the time Curt started his criminal career.

Remember those cheesy films from the '50's about juvenile delinquents? If you do then you'll remember there was always a character who drank, smoked, and stole cars for joy rides. Well that character was my Uncle Curt. His first brushes with the law, or so I was told anyway, began with him stealing cars. He'd boost the cars and drive the shit out of them and then wreck or sell them. He was pretty good at it but the cops always caught up to him. He was in and out of the Michigan prison system quite a bit in the late '50's and early '60's. He was more in prison than he was out of it and as a result of his life of crime I never knew him when I lived in Michigan. I only heard stories about him.

People on my Dad's side of the family would always tell me what a great guy he was, and then they'd always follow it up with, "If he'd only straighten up and stop stealing and drinking so much." The folks on my Mom's side never talked about him much.

Upon getting released from one prison stay in Michigan Curt decided he'd had enough of the Wolverine state and he hightailed it to California, I'm pretty sure that was in the late 1960's. He went out there and he tried to go straight. He met and married a woman named Beverly and he had a couple of kids with her. He worked a series of dead end jobs and he took up painting after my Dad taught him the basics of it. Curt developed his own unique painting style and I remember being given some smaller paintings he had done, they subsequently ended up in the hands of my late sister and she lost or gave them away. Unfortunately for Curt's family, he also developed a taste for stealing checkbooks and forging checks. He also developed a taste for heroin as well.

Johnny Law caught up with him in sunny California and Curt was put away on forgery, theft, and drug charges. He spent most of the '70's in one California prison or another. During his time in the joint he met Merle Haggard and Charles Manson. Sometime around 1978 he got lucky and got out on parole. He was able to stay out long enough to convince my Dad to come out to live with him and his family, my Dad was going through one of the worst mental illness episodes of his life during that time. Not too long after going out to Cali, my Dad decided that life in the sun was not for him and he moved back to Ypsilanti, Michigan. And after moving back there it was not too long after that that he decided that life in general was not for him and he took his own life. For some reason he had listed Curt as his next of kin, instead of his half sister, my crazy aunt, and it was Curt they notified when they found Dad's body. It was also Curt who called us in Virginia to tell us that Dad was dead. I answered the phone when he called and he told me that my father had committed suicide. Imagine that, the first time I ever speak with the guy and he just flat out tells me my Dad offed himself. He didn't mince words or beat around the bush when he told me either. I remember thinking as I hung up the phone after that our first conversation, "Holy shit, Uncle Curt is an asshole." Then the phone rang a few minutes later and someone said it was Uncle Curt again and he wanted to speak to me. The first words out of his mouth were, "Jeez, I bet you think I'm an asshole for the way I told you about your father's death, don't you?" I told him I did and then I hung up on him. That was 1979.

Soon after that Curt got busted again for forgery. This time he took his forgery to new heights, he was forging checks, cashing them, and bankrolling other criminal ventures with the ill gotten cash. They pretty much threw the book at him this time. He served about 7 or 8 years in San Quentin for his last crime spree.

I had pretty much wrote him off for good after speaking to him those two times and I didn't think twice about it, until one day in the late '80's that is. I was living with my crazy aunt and working some dead end job and hating life in general when one day a huge Cadillac with California plates pulled into the drive way. Out stepped this balding dude who looked a little like my dad and he had a woman with him. They walked up to the porch and my crazy aunt ran out and started screaming how glad she was to see her baby brother. So there he was in the flesh, my Uncle Curt. My aunt immediately insisted they stay with her in her tiny house until they got on their feet job and money wise.

I couldn't help myself, I warmed up to Curt right away. He was funny, subversive, and fun loving. He filled in some of his back story for me during that first month he and Mary stayed there. He told me that the state of California decided that since he wasn't a violent felon and that since he had served the majority of his last sentence he could go free. Upon his release he met Mary and they hit it off. I'm not sure if Mary was born with lady parts but I'm pretty sure she had at least some of them when she and Curt hooked up. They got into heroin upon hooking up but Curt decided that he didn't want to die in prison so they decided to try to kick their habit on a cross country trip that would culminate in him meeting back up with his family. Curt still smoked pot, and so did I back then, so we shared that and we'd both take a drink of hard liquor from time to time, him way more then me. We spent the next few weeks getting high, getting to know one another, and shooting pool.

But my aunt's crazy soon kicked in and she got pissed at Curt's woman for some reason or another and she booted them out. They moved into a trailer about 30 miles from my aunt's place and I hung out with them quite a bit. Mary got a job and Curt coached her on how to get hurt on that job so she could collect a settlement, which she did in short order. He also found a job and he managed to hurt himself on it and he also collected a settlement so they both were soon off work with their bills paid. I liked hanging out with him because he made me laugh and I could talk about anything with him but I could increasingly not stand Mary. She drove me batty and I hated being around her, so I hung out with them less and less.

Around the fall of 1988 I decided that I had had enough of living around my crazy aunt and my fun loving but criminal uncle and I chucked it all moved to Roanoke, VA. While I lived up there Curt and Mary decided they had had enough of Tennessee and they up and moved to Indiana to be around her family. Curt had a heart attack soon after moving there. He and I spoke a few times after his heart attack on the phone but never for very long because Curt was so depressed over his health. Not too long after his heart attck he was diagnosed with some kind of cancer and he passed away rather quickly after being diagnosed.

I'm glad I got to know Curt towards the end of his life rather than at the start of mine. We related to each other more like friends than we did uncle and nephew. True, he was a criminal most of his life but his crimes were not violent ones and he paid his debt to society for most all of them. He was the black sheep of his family and my mentally ill Dad was the lost lamb, but without both of them I wouldn't be who I am today.

Curt is survived by a son and a daughter, who I have never met, and by his first wife Beverly, who I also never met, and by Mary, his common law wife who is still living somehwere in Indiana.