This story was originally Published May 2021 for my undergraduate capstone project.
My dad said his kidnapping started six years prior in Nashville, Tennessee, at a suburban home that he lived in with his father, mother, and little brother two years younger. My dad, Mick, was six years old and it was the year 1969. I can recall that my dad was born in New York City and lived there for the first few years of his life, but I never knew of this time of him living in Nashville. His father, Aubrey, was a country music producer and had married an exotic-looking, young model in which they shared two boys. It makes sense that they moved to Nashville considering Aubrey’s music career was taking off and there was more opportunity there.
I never knew my grandfather personally. He died when I was 10, and I grew up with this image of a crazy, blind, old man in a wheelchair, holding a shotgun, surrounded by untamed pit bulls in his barricaded apartment, watching Fox News all hours of the day. As it turns out, that’s exactly what he was doing. There are only three other distinct things I can recall about my grandfather. One, he mailed a singing, robotic fish as a present to my brother and me when we were little kids. The second is that he owned the window Lee Harvey Oswald shot JFK out of. The third is that my grandfather’s father, Aubrey senior, was a poor man, specifically a house painter, who had many sons and daughters. Aubrey senior later remarried and had the same number of sons and daughters, in the exact order of his previous family, and named them all the exact names of his previous kids. You can’t make this stuff up. I knew my grandmother but wasn’t very close to her. She had a strained relationship with my dad, and I assumed she was a little ‘off-her-rocker’ too. I believe she adored me as any grandmother would. Even when she began to lose parts of her memory and stopped remembering people in her life, she recognized my face instantly. I was a teenager at that point, and I hadn’t seen her since I was a child. She passed away a couple of years ago.
Back at the Nashville home in 1969, my dad’s mother asked her sons to ride with her to the grocery store for a barbecue that night. While his father prepped the grill, they drove into town. My dad watched the grocery store pass by out his window. Instead of picking up hotdog buns, they drove to the airport, and the three of them boarded a plane back to New York City. My dad, his younger brother, and his mom moved into an apartment with his grandmother immediately upon arrival. It was only in recent years my dad found out that his mother had destroyed the Nashville house in a raging fit and was terrified of what her husband would do, so they left.
I stopped my dad in the middle of him telling the story. Already I’m overwhelmed with questions and curiosity about something I had never heard him mention once before in my life. I was already given a modest insight as to what my father’s home life was like as a child and that alone was a bit chaotic. And that was just one day. The way my dad sat there, hands folded, relaxed face; this was nothing compared to what he was going to tell me. I was almost stuttering trying to get out eight different questions at once. Alas, I controlled my running thoughts and decided to let my dad tell the story the way he should. I decided to save my questions for the end. After all, this is what I wanted to know.
This whole conversation was sparked by an event that happened the night before. It all came up during the late after dinner hours while my mom and dad were sitting in the living room drinking. They were listening to music that was echoing from the dining room. I sat down with them and simply observed their conversation since they were already deep in it. My mom was explaining with fervor how she wished her parents were still around so she could ask them about things. Anything. How to do something they did, or to remember a story she forgot, or even for her to simply learn more about something in their life that she never thought to ask when they were alive. In my mom’s ardent way, it was devastating.
My dad, the polar opposite of my mom, agreed with her, but with the sentiment in his eyes and the roar in his voice rather than with his body. My dad, who is very timid in nature, shook his head in shame, wishing he could ask his deceased parents questions too. I chimed into the conversation, sheepishly breaking my silence, “Why didn’t you ask them more about themselves when they were alive?” It seemed like an obvious question to ask if they were so curious about their parent’s knowledge. They pondered my question individually, leaving the room completely silent for longer than a moment.
“I guess you don’t think to ask,” my dad replied softly, with the ice raddling around in the glass of scotch in his hand.
At that moment, it hit me. I never think to ask my own parents about their life- at least nothing specific. These people know everything about my own life because they’ve been there for most of it, but I only know about their lives before me from stories here and there. My dad was away a lot when I was a kid, so I lived with my mom and saw her every day. I know so much more about her life before me compared to what I know of my dad. No competition there. My mom has a very outgoing personality, a social butterfly, as they say. She doesn’t have a shy bone in her body and is always quick to make new friends with strangers. My mom talked a lot about her life to me growing up. I feel like I could recite her entire life from birth with impeccable detail. Or at least in my mind, I think so.
My dad, on the other hand, is still mysterious to me. He’s the kind of person who doesn’t speak unless spoken to, but when you ask, has a lot to say. He is tall, has dark hair, wears modern, black, square-frame glasses. He wears simple but often dark articles of clothing and has thick, silver rings on each hand. My dad lives in Los Angeles and just so happens to work in the movie industry. Not everyone that lives in Los Angeles works in the movie industry. I love the irony of that because he doesn’t quite fit the mold of a ‘Hollywood type.’ He has quite the opposite personality of those sort of people. He is very reserved yet stands tall with impeccable posture. I think people are often intimidated by him at first glance. He doesn’t open up and show his friendly side until provoked by someone first. Same as me. First daughter syndrome, I guess.
But every time I hear something in one of his stories about his past, I truly have to stop and ask, “Is that really true?” Another thing about my dad, he never lies. With research and evidence from other people, the stories are always amazingly true. I now realize I have been a hypocrite: I had the exact fault I questioned my parents on and never asked my dad things about his own life.
The next day I sought out to do just that. This seemed timely, considering we’re still all working from home amidst the pandemic and have time to kill in each passing day. Oh, and also the fact that I wanted to show my dad I actually listened to him and will not make the same mistake him and my mom did. And most importantly, as I am about to begin my writing career as a bright-eyed, early twenty-something, I feel it’s appropriate to document my family’s life as much as I can. Someone in the family ought to.
I approached my dad while he read the newspaper and immediately asked about his childhood. He looked bewildered, as if I had asked him to solve a calculus problem. I figured out shortly after that there was just so much to tell, and he didn’t know where to begin. I knew I needed to narrow the question down. My brain was storming with so many ideas. One specific timeline came to me that almost doesn’t seem real: the time my dad and brother were kidnapped and traveled with an American carnival in the 1970s. That is about the extent of it that I knew. My dad, without hesitation, agreed to tell me in full detail.
We dressed warmly before sitting out on the patio because we knew it was going to be a long conversation. I sat down in the faux-wood woven chair across from my dad who sat down in an identical one. His salt and peppered grey hair blew gently in the wind as he crossed his legs and laid his woven fingers on top of his knee. He sat very still, just thinking. I let him ponder at his own pace because I know he likes to think before he speaks, and I couldn’t begin to imagine where he knew to begin. That’s when he told me it all began in Nashville, 6 years prior to the kidnapping itself. This leads me to where we left off.
My dad loved living in New York City again. He spent the majority of his time living with his grandmother because his mother was working all hours of the day and into the night. Even his father eventually moved out there and lived in an apartment nearby. My dad’s father would often sneak into his estranged wife’s apartment and snoop around. He would seek out her diary, open her mail, and look for evidence of infidelity to show his sons. At the time my dad’s father was manipulating his sons into thinking their mother was a dangerous person. A tramp. A no-good mother.
The greatest part about listening to a story is hearing information that you don’t know where it fits into the story. Eventually, it all comes back around and plays a part in the plot. That is something I came to realize while listening to my dad. It was also within this conversation I had my own dialogue going on in my head. I aspire to tell stories the way he does. You learn so much from listening and paying attention to details. All of this allows you to analyze what makes a story fantastic, but it is a great skill to tell a good story. I observed the way my dad delivered his story at the moment. All I know is, my dad would be fantastic at playing cards. He had a poker face and you never knew what he really knew. It’s hard to read his eyes. Maybe that’s the talent within telling a story itself - you can’t read ahead so you decide to devote your complete attention to waiting to hear where the story leads and ends.
My dad continued and said that his father eventually left New York and moved back to Nashville to work at the music producing company again. A couple of years later, my dad was twelve years old and was more than halfway through the sixth grade. It was what seemed like an ordinary day, but out of the blue, his father showed up unexpectedly and stood in the doorway of my dad’s classroom with deep eyes and anticipation. His father pulled him and his brother out of school that day and was eager to see his boys. My dad was told by his father that he was rescuing them from their mother. He told them that the three of them were running away together and that they couldn’t tell anyone. There wasn’t even time to say goodbye to their friends, their grandmother, or even their own mother. My dad's father, Aubrey, demanded that his sons let him into their mother's apartment while she was work, and so, in the dead of night, they packed their things and fled to upstate New York in a station wagon. Except for the dead of night was a bright sunny day, and amazingly no one saw them leave.
The year was now 1975. My dad and his brother were 12 and 10 and didn’t think to question their parent, whom they trusted. My dad speculated many things in his head about what was happening. Why would his father leave his job at the height of his career? As an adult myself, I can only suspect Aubrey was running away from something sketchy back in Nashville. Maybe a business deal went wrong? My dad found a secret compartment with stacks of cash hidden away in the station wagon’s spare tire compartment. They spent the entire summer driving around the country trying to hide. My dad said he missed his grandmother and his school friends.
My dad paused and chuckled. He looked as if he was remembering something. “What?” I asked as I smiled at his grin. I became very aware of the feeling of me smiling and noticed I must have been frowning because smiling now felt almost foreign.
“I still remember all my childhood friends. And how I never got to say goodbye. But as an adult, I can hardly remember any of my co-workers’ names,” he said. My smile dropped subtly. What a shame, I thought. It’s the meaningful relationships we remember the most in our lives, no matter how big or small.
My dad interrupted that thought by continuing with his story. They circled back to upstate New York where Aubrey bought an old New York Times paper delivery truck. They painted the beaten-up truck and decided to join a traveling carnival- specifically the “Dell and Travers” carnival. Their ticket in? (No pun intended) They bought a classic carney game called the “High Striker,” where you show off your ‘manly’ strength to your female date and hope to hear the bell at the top ring in one swift whack, thus winning her heart. The carnival let them join immediately. It’s probably because the carneys were lacking carnival games, I suspect. Or maybe the mysterious stacks of cash my dad found in the back of the station wagon helped. Either way, this became their life seven days a week, all year long.
I asked my dad the obvious, “Why would your father do this? Join the carnival, I mean?” My dad smirked. “My dad was the biggest hustler and con-artist there was... except Donald Trump.” First off, Aubrey didn’t want to be caught for kidnapping or by anyone else potentially looking for him. And he would do any kind of job there was for money, especially money you can make fast. He knew the best way to make fast money is from scamming people with cheap thrills.
My dad had come to the part of the story which I had been waiting for: My dad’s time living in an actual carnival. They started off by making money with the “high striker.” My dad: 12 years old, shirtless with an apron around his waist and wads of cash in the apron pockets. They soon made enough to buy other carney games, and my dad, his brother, and his father were working their carney games individually. Once a week they would shower under a hose outside their mocked-up NYT delivery truck. They would load up the games and the entire carnival would head Southwest to the warmer parts of the country as the cooler seasons rolled in from the North and East. My dad and brother were just about the only kids living and working in the carnival. They ate carnival food every single day. No exaggeration. That’s cotton candy for breakfast, corndogs for lunch, and popcorn and funnel cakes for dinner. I gave my dad a questionable look when he told me this, more so as to why he got to eat carnival food as a kid and I couldn’t have ice cream before dinner. They sat and ate with all the carneys at one big table too. My dad sat next to and across from people like the acclaimed “world’s smallest man,” “world’s fattest man,” the “tattooed woman,” and other people claimed as “freaks” for the show's various attractions. One big happy family.
In my mind I pictured all these anomalous people - foreign gypsies, and cut off sleeve, tobacco-chewing carney’s - and then there is my dad, his brother and their father: a white, middle-class American family. I wondered how they fit in and found their place amongst the crowd. As my dad describes it, Aubrey would stand out in his own way. He was very charming and eccentric when he wanted to be. I interpreted it as meaning he was a manipulator. Women liked his distinct look. A lot of women. For one, he looked like a movie star and could easily have very well been one. He wore long, steel-toed cowboy boots and tailored pants. He always had a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.
Even if he had a recognizable look to him, the carnival was a great place where no one would suspect to look for missing children. He would make sure the carnival would accept them and they would contribute for as long as they wanted to. Aubrey was an intimidating man as well. There wasn’t a single man who would be willing to mess with him. My dad and his little brother approached the carnival’s tattoo artist and asked for a tattoo each one day. The artist told the boys harshly to get out and to never get near him again as he peered frantically both ways.
My dad knows now that Aubrey had ‘a talking to’ with everyone in that establishment. No one wanted to mess with those boys or even have those two involved in anything near them because they were Aubrey’s sons.
I began to commiserate with my dad while hearing about his lack of normalcy living at the carnival. But he looked back on it fondly. His eyes glimmered and he grinned at the memories. I suppose it was like an adventure mixed with play and pretending to be an adult all wrapped in one. My dad and his brother could ride as many rides as they wanted for free and were always making friends with kids from all over the country who would attend the carnival. Kids eating pink carnival cotton candy for breakfast, riding on rides for free, not having to go school, wait... that is every kid’s dream. But behind every façade of a kids’ fantasy dream world, a corrupted adult is running the show.
After nearly two years of traveling with the carnival, things started slipping apart. Aubrey had purchased about ten mini motorcycles before he pitched the idea of setting up a miniature racetrack. For reasonable liability issues, they couldn’t allow that at the carnival. Now they had a truck full of miniature motorcycles with nowhere to go and had lost a lot of money on that one rash decision. Speaking of money, there wasn’t much of it left. The boys would shower once a week under a hose outside their truck to save water. The carnival life was looking bleak the older the boys grew, and their father could see that.
Another unplanned flee was on its way. They packed up their belongings in the dead of night (actually this time) and made their way to Houston, Texas. My dad doesn’t know why they left. I suspected Aubrey made a bad deal with someone or he thought someone was looking for them. My dad thinks his father was worried about them missing out on so much school and having a lack of education. Aubrey eventually sought a way to enroll them back into school without being recorded in the school’s records and possibly be found. Sometimes along the way of their new road trip, Aubrey would let his sons use a payphone on the side of the highway to call up their mother. They only used a pay phone so they couldn’t be tracked. My father said his mother and grandmother tried to bribe them to come home.
“Want to know how my grandmother bribed us?” My dad asked holding back a smile.
“How?” I replied.
“She peeled grapes for us.” He smiled showing his white teeth, holding back his laughter. I laughed at that absurdity. My dad mimicked an old lady’s voice while holding his hand in the universal hand-phone position, “Come home, Mickey. Don’t you miss your peeled grapes?” He was hunched over doing his best impression of his late grandmother.
My dad was quiet for a moment after he told me this. A rather silly moment to a serious one. I observed him, wondering what was stirring up inside behind those eyes. He looked down towards the pavement, deep in thought. He stroked his goatee lightly between two fingers. His forehead had deeper lines than before. I didn’t ask what he was thinking and allowed him to contemplate. He looked up at me and said, “I never knew why they tried to bribe us. It’s not our fault we left.” I knew that, but I don’t think his grandmother or mother ever knew that or would ever believe them. I can’t understand why a parent would believe that their children would be the ones responsible for being kidnapped. This left one crucial remaining question. “How did you escape?” I asked in all seriousness.
My dad said the only way this adventure came to end was because his father became sick. I wanted to know how he became sick, but that wasn’t a short story either. After fleeing the carnival in Houston, the three of them settled in a trailer park. Aubrey put the boys through charter school to catch up to the grades they were supposed to be in after missing two years of education. However, ‘catching up’ really just meant paying off the headmaster. Eventually, the boys were enrolled in a poorly funded public school filled with minority children. My dad and his brother were senselessly bullied for being some of the only white kids in the school. They couldn't understand it because back in New York, they were also the only white kids in their neighborhood, and that was normal to them and their friends back home.
One day my dad came home from school with a swollen face decorated in every color of the rainbow and explained to his father what happened. Aubrey took his boys out into the yard and said, “I’m goanna teach ya how to fight.” And that’s exactly what they learned. His father took my dad’s hand and rolled it into a fist, showing him how to protect his thumb from the impact of a punch. The next day, the same bully approached my dad in gym class and began mocking him as usual. My dad formed a fist the way his father had taught him earlier and knocked the kid onto the ground, out cold. No one messed with my dad or his brother from that day forward.
I was frowning as my dad told me this. My dad is a Buddhist now and has never commended violence. To think this is just a fragment of my dad’s childhood, and here sitting in front of me was a timid and wise man.
“Okay, but how does all this get to your dad getting sick?” I asked. My dad held his hand out, giving a little bow. In translation, he was telling me not to get ahead of myself.
Since my dad was the new tough kid in school, he attracted some friends of a similar status. These boys were named Kyle and Kelly. Kelly, the younger brother, was small in stature but had an attitude of a pit bull. My dad describes him to be a future head-mafia type. He had a big, older brother named Kyle, who was a little slow, so Kelly protected him. Kyle was all riled up and ready to knock any kids’ teeth in who looked at him the wrong way.
“Those boy’s mother began hanging around my dad’s trailer home a lot.” He said. And one day, Aubrey became very ill. My dad and his brother were left to take care of Aubrey, who had become bedridden. His skin had turned yellow in color. His eyes were a deep yellow as well - a frightening sight. Aubrey could no longer take care of himself and probably assumed he had reached the end of his life as his condition worsened every day. Whatever the illness he was suffering from, those other boys’ mother had contracted it too.
My dad and his brother flew back to New York City and showed up at their mother’s apartment in the East Village, only to find that she no longer lived there. They went to their grandmother’s apartment on the upper east side instead. Their grandmother was overwhelmed with relief that her grandsons had returned home safely. Their mother had moved out of their old apartment and bought herself a smaller apartment elsewhere, on the Eastside.
It had seemed as if the story was over. This was where this particular adventure had ended. But there are always other chapters in a person’s life with their own particular story and meaning. The Circus Escapades were just one of many that shaped my dad into who he is today.
I plan on hearing all those stories at one point. I closed my little black notebook and tucked my pencil away. I wrote down the key events and details so I wouldn’t forget. I would recommend approaching conversations like interviews. Perhaps you don’t have to go as far as jotting down everything in a notebook, because that is too formal and disconnects you from that person, but asking questions is key. I felt like I received a lot more than what I was prepared for, and I felt content. But looking into my dad’s eyes, eyes similar to my own, I saw that my attention should have been there the whole time and not on the notebook.
Later that night after dinner, my dad and I were loosely discussing the topic of life events and how they shape us. The conversation wasn’t over and won’t ever be. Now that I’m curious to learn about my parent’s lives, I will always be asking questions when an opportunity is presented. It was dim and only the dining room chandelier was lit. The music was low in the background and distant from my conscious thought. It was just noise filling the silence.
My dad wasn’t wearing his glasses this time, a detail I noticed because it felt like there wasn’t a barrier for our eye contact. We sat across from each other. As a 22-year-old who has been accepted to NYU for grad school this coming fall, my dad wanted to share a little bit about life in Manhattan when he was my age; Clubs to visit, people to have in your life, things to do, how to live, etc. My dad made it clear he was always on a mission to learn and grow, something I aspire to do as well. He also made a lot of mistakes in our life which I think makes him more humble. Making mistakes doesn’t have to be a bad thing, because we all do it. It’s just important we learn from them. I, for one, feel like I’m constantly prone to making mistakes; Like it was as if I came to earth to repeatedly make mistakes. At least I am determined to learn something from them too.
My dad was gazing up towards the ceiling, lost in thought. He was telling me about his young adult years and how he was always trying to understand life, or to put it in my words, as if he were trying to learn how to play the game of life with a loose set of rules.
“You were born when I was 35. I was just a kid, but I thought I was grown up and had it all figured out,” he said with his gaze still above my head, picturing it. I smiled watching him explain. He corrected himself, “Or at least I thought I did.” My smile eased, and I felt my eyebrows furrow.
“I thought before you had a kid that you have to understand life - or at least have the tools, the knowledge, and the wisdom prepared to teach and raise a kid...” his eyes glimmered in the dim light of the chandelier.
“...It may sound like a cliché... but it’s true... the moment you were born, all of that went out the window. All of it!” My dad finally took his gaze off the nether and looked at me. With tears filled far above the surface of his eyes, he continued, “... My life started the very moment you were born - the minute your head popped out.” I began to feel my throat tighten; I was holding back my own sudden wave of tears that hit me like a storm. I had never seen this side of him before. However, I have seen him cry watching a Mr. Rogers segment on CBS Sunday Morning. But other than that, this was a moment; A moment between a parent and child you don’t forget.
That night left me to think; Maybe parents don’t share much of their life growing up with their kids because their life only felt like it mattered once that child was born. Maybe that is just the case for my dad. All that is important is that if we were invested in our parents’ stories as they are with ours, maybe we ultimately learn more about them and can become even closer to them. I feel like I have only scratched the surface of my dad’s life stories, but it has led to a bond between my dad and I that I am eternally grateful for.
As I am growing up and getting older, I am now realizing a big part of my life story comes from my family before me. How my parents raised me came from their life experiences and the upbringing they each had themselves. And now, with DNA testing becoming a resource that many people are using to understand their ancestry, everyone wants to find out who they came from. Life stories matter. Documenting matters. Asking questions matters. I received more out of the curiosity of asking my dad about an event in his childhood than I could have ever imagined. I ultimately received a bond and deep connection with my dad, all from the spark of a conversation.
Dell and Travers Carnival circa 1970’s. Retrieved from; http://www.docsmidwaycookhouse.com/old-midway-photos/?locale=en_US&wppa-album=1&wppa-occur=1&wppa-photo=1355
Aubrey Mayhew circa mid-1960’s. HISTORY OF 411 ELM THE TEXAS SCHOOL BOOK DEPOSITORY AND THE SIXTH FLOOR MUSEUM AT DEALEY PLAZA. http://www.jfk.org/wp-content/uploads/History_of_411_Elm.pdf.