Steve Dimick — Law 'n' Stuff

Dwain

I built the Rock of Ages, it was in the Year of One
And that’s about the biggest thing that man has ever done.

The Bragging Song, Traditional

1947 – 1972

There was another man in my early life, a man much more intelligent than even he knew (certainly preferable to the converse), who had little formal education, but never ceased exploring and educating himself and asking questions and challenging authority and occasionally taking the time to try to teach me to do the same thing.

His name was also Dwain Lee Dimick, Sr., and he was also my father.

I remember surprisingly little of life before I was nine.  Mildred was always surprised at how little I remembered.  I suppose I either blocked most of it out or, off in my own fantasy world, wasn’t paying any attention in the first place.  I remember selected scenes like movie clips I occasionally play.  On balance there are probably more pleasant memories than unpleasant.

*

While Mildred didn’t always have money for groceries, or even a dime to give to Dwain Lee for school lunch, Dwain always had money for toys.  We had the first television in the neighborhood, the set itself almost as big (in my memory) as today’s giant-screen TVs, but with a round screen not more than eight or ten inches in diameter.  From the time it arrived, Sunday evenings belonged to Dwain’s friends and Milton Berle.

But televisions were temperamental, tubes were fragile and wiring could overheat and short out.  As TVs became more common, so did the need for television repairmen, who were few, overworked and evidently fairly expensive.  Dwain ordered a home-study course courtesy of the G.I. Bill and taught himself electronics.  The oversized garage on 22d Street was transformed from auto repair to television and radio repair, not on any large scale, but for friends, neighbors and friends of friends.

I assume he did it to earn extra (non-reportable) money on the side.  I would be surprised if he earned much more money than it took to purchase the testing equipment and supplies before becoming bored and moving on to something else, but to me, that’s not the point.  He could do it; he did it, and he did it by himself.

Dwain and toy

I think he moved back to cars for a while after the television phase, converting the fuel system to make the family Chevrolet run on butane rather than gasoline.  Maybe butane was cheaper, but all I remember it accomplishing was diminishing the trunk space by about 75 percent to make room for the butane tank.  Oh, well.  We never went anywhere but Guthrie or Stillwater, anyway, and the frosty butane tank was handy for keeping the groceries cold.

(We always drove Chevrolets.  In the quiet, prosperous post-war years, when there really was a car in every garage – except those garages filled with dismantled radios and televisions – there were several makes of automobiles (all American makes, of course), but only two types of ordinary guys: the ordinary guy who drove a Chevrolet (“Chivolay” it was and “Chivolay” it remained even in national advertising  until at least the 1980s, showing the brand’s strong identification with the heartland: “Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chivolay”) – and the ordinary guy who drove a Ford.

(The Chevy folks thought the Ford folks were simply a little slow.  Buy a Ford and a Chevrolet on the same day for the same price, and two years later the used Ford would be worth half as much as the used Chevy.  “And then dayum!  That fool went out and bought hisself another Ford!”

(The Ford folks didn’t care.  They had a love affair. And, hell, you didn’t trade in your Ford every two or three years, anyway.  You could keep that ol’ car a-runnin’ with balin’ wire, electrical tape and bubble gum long after that dern Chevy had gone to the junkyard.)

Then it was motorcycles, including a huge Indian.  At five, I didn’t understand the allure of the Indian.  I was probably fifty-five before I read a feature article about the Indian being revived and what a cult bike it had always been.  But it certainly impressed the neighbors and my uncles.

Guns: collecting, buying, selling, trading.  Fishing: different rods, different reels, different lures, the best places to go for black bass, the best times of day to fish.  Taught himself (and later me) to use a fly rod, a talent which looks deceptively simple, and was damned good at it.

The most fun was when he decided to turn our tiny basement into a full-sized basement.  It had a concrete-block wall on three sides, and bare dirt on the fourth, and the original portion of the basement was only about a third the size of the footprint of the house.  In came section after section of conveyor belt and a large portable engine to pull the contraption.  Unfortunately, the basement only had a couple of narrow windows to the outside and a standard-sized door to the inside of the house, so there was no getting a backhoe down there.  Had there been, Dwain would have bought one.

Shovel and pick and sweat loaded yards and yards of dirt up the conveyor belt and into the back yard, where it had to be shoveled again into the pickup to be hauled off to a landfill.  Naturally, it wasn’t long before he became bored with this project and moved on to another.

But with something of the child left in him, he took a ten-foot section of conveyor belt (without the belt – just the rollers), attached one end to a welded ladder about four feet tall and invented the world’s greatest slide.  We would take a piece of cardboard or plywood, place it on the rollers at the top, sit down and head for the ground faster than any playground slide ever.

As Dwain had been with his new television, I was the hero of the neighborhood kids with my new slide.  In time, I learned to stand on a piece of plywood, balancing myself all the way to the bottom, much like surfing.

*

And music.  On a whim, he traded some old boy at work a pistol for a violin, and only afterward realized he would have to teach himself to play.  He did.

Guitars, a steel guitar and a mandolin all passed through the house and as soon as he learned each one, he would trade it off for a different instrument.

Hat, tinted glasses, pencil-thin mustache

In the second grade, I decided I wanted to take piano lessons.  Dwain was delighted.  It was an excuse to buy a piano.  Never mind that you could rent one for five dollars a month.   While the piano teacher, Mrs. Short, who was about three feet tall and at least 100 years old, was still struggling to teach me about “Every Good Boy Does Fine” and “All Cows Eat Grass,” Dwain skipped the reading part altogether and started playing Fats Waller by ear.

In his 40’s he was living in a two-room house on about an acre of ground in the poorest part of Midwest City, some two miles from our house.  I saw him a few times a year, usually by riding my bicycle to his house.  He decided to buy a saddle horse.  And then another one.  And then another one.  Each one, of course, had to have its own set of tack and who knows where this money came from, since he was constantly complaining about the $50 per month he had to pay in child support for each of his sons.

Then came the library of books on breaking horses, training horses, jumping horses, cutting horses, gaited horses, shoeing horses, horse anatomy, horse diseases, veterinary treatment for horses.

(On one of the few occasions he was in a generous enough mood to let me take one of the horses out, I rode over to visit an adult friend who had two pre-teen daughters.  The horse was a retired cutting horse who, although a bit sway-backed and a bit arthritic, could still do a 180-degree turn on a dime at the touch of the reins on her neck, and could leave an unsuspecting rider still going in a straight line, sans horse.

(A few weeks later, I was back at my friend’s house and his oldest daughter asked me, “Steve, is that horse really 21?”  I didn’t know where this conversation was going, so I answered carefully, “No, I don’t think she’s quite that old.”  “Well, Daddy said she’s old enough to vote.”)

I didn’t get to ride all that much, but I learned by watching and listening.  Boy, did Dwain like to talk.  He taught me how to saddle a horse, the proper way to tie a cinch, the uses of different kinds of bits and different kinds of shoes, how to approach a horse, what not to do around a horse, how to clean their feet, how to cool them off and groom them after riding, what do to if the horse had the heaves or the colic, what a “cribber” was, how to tell a horse from a mare by looking at their head, instead of underneath.

**

After I was maybe 12 or so, Rick and I had no more set visitation schedule.  We didn’t want to see him all that often.  So we were allowed to go when we wanted.  I would visit regularly for a while, he would turn ugly for no apparent reason, and I wouldn’t go back again for weeks or months.

During my visits, he seldom had any real time to give me; he was always working on one project or another.  But if he was in a good mood, he would allow me to tag along and would explain why he was doing each step: why the fence post had to be set this way, why he put old rugs down over the fresh concrete and wet them down while it cured, why you planted the new tomato plants so deep and why you didn’t do it that way with flowers.

Then, in his 50’s, it was airplanes.

“I should have known,” Gerri, his fourth wife said drily, “that if he got one airplane he would eventually have two.”  He started with a two-seater (no idea what kind – that’s outside my area of expertise, and I wasn’t keeping notes in those days) and then added a four-seater.

Ground school, flight school, instrument flying, the mnemonic “May I Go Flying Today, Peter Rabbit, Sir?”  I heard it all.  Look at this: take this strip of paper and blow over the top.  See?  It’s the wind on top of the wing and the low-pressure area underneath the wing that gives the lift.  He was so eager to explain and to share.  I was so eager to fly.  I had always wanted to fly, but was having trouble enough paying for college, let alone a minimum of 40 hours of flying lessons, pre-solo, at 50 bucks a pop.  I ate it up.

However, like the horses, who always had an excuse for not being saddled up, the airplanes always seemed to have an excuse for not being flown – at least when I was around.  Gas was expensive.  100-hour maintenance was coming up.  He didn’t have time.  “You don’t come out here to see me?  You only come for me to take you flying?”

But still.  Credit him for doing it at all.

I went up with him two or three times in the two-seater, so he could show off his new skills.  Once, or maybe twice, in the four-seater.  Airplane fuel was expensive.  Today, I would pull out my wallet in mock disgust and say, “For Crissake, don’t be so goddamned cheap!  Here’s a hundred bucks for gas.  Let’s go flying.”  Then, all I could do was think Why don’t you sell the goddamned thing if you can’t afford to fly it?

**

In the late 1960s (Dwain’s 50’s) he also became a nutcase.

Perhaps that’s not wholly accurate.  Nutcase?  OK.  Age?  Maybe it started almost 20 years earlier.

When we lived on 22d Street, the neighbors behind us were Gertrude and George, sister and brother-in-law of Dwain’s fourth wife many years later.  George was a deputy sheriff for Oklahoma County who earned extra money on weekends by driving prisoners from the Oklahoma County Jail to the Oklahoma State Penitentiary at McAlester.  Good money, too.  The rules were that there had to be two deputies for each transport, for safety.  The transport was private automobile: George’s.  So two deputies sat up front and three handcuffed prisoners sat in back.

On many weekends, no sworn deputies were interested in the overtime, and George could deputize any respectable citizen to accompany him.  That’s where Dwain came in.  Pretty good money for pretty easy work.

But on one ill-fated trip, another car cut in front of the prisoner transport on the two-lane road, and George’s car swerved, went off an embankment and overturned.  With no seat-belts, some of the passengers were trapped in the car and some were ejected.

Dwain was stuck in the car until a stranger, dressed all in black, carefully pulled him out (he had several broken ribs), carried him to the slope of the embankment, gently took off his jacket, folded it for a pillow and made Dwain comfortable.  The stranger then left, without waiting to be thanked.

None of the other four passengers – neither George nor the three prisoners – saw any of this.  To a man, they swore there was no stranger.  It never happened.

The experience bothered Dwain so much that he went to church with Mildred for…oh, three or four weeks.  To this day, he swears by the stranger in black.

*

Years later, he began reading, and then collecting, all the printed works by and about Edgar Cayce, the mystic psychic who read minds, diagnosed and cured illnesses from thousands of miles away, connected daily with the Godhead, explained Atlantis and who could cure anything from heartburn, hangnails and halitosis to fits, farts and freckles.

Dwain had treatises explaining that the Earth was hollow, shaped like a donut, and that a superior species, the descendants of Atlantis, lived in the interior.  The “proof” was in Admiral Byrd’s journals of flying over the North Pole.  UFO’s in New Mexico?  He had the proof.  Where he got this stuff, I don’t know, but he had piles of self-published pamphlets on every mystical, mysterious or paranormal phenomenon imaginable.  No doubt he could have dug through the piles and come up with articles explaining the disappearance of Judge Crater and Jimmy Hoffa.

It’s a shame he never came to California to learn about the Lemurians, from the lost Pacific continent of Lemur, who live inside Mt. Shasta and who are occasionally seen by those brave enough to try to climb it.  I actually know one.  (One such brave soul, that is; I didn’t meet the Lemurian – he did.)