Juana Talks About Benny
Stephen Mosher
Several years ago I told Mama that I was interested in documenting the family history, probably in book form, and would she help me, please, with some of the details about her years living with Marjorie and Ben, about her childhood, about her teenage years. Every now and then I would get an email from her about the family. Mama wasn’t a writer, but she told it like it is.
I saved those emails.
This is Juana, talking about her father, Benny. (I have redacted the name of my Mother’s sister.)
About My Father
When papa first moved to America he was living in Chicago and going with a gangster's girl. When the gangster found out about it, he had his henchmen go after papa. The rest of his life he had scars on his legs, on his thighs, where they had shoved ice pics into him. They also cut the skin between his fingers, and when the hospital sewed them up, they did it wrong and he could never open his fingers all the way.
When he moved to Los Angeles and met grandmother, he asked her out. At one point, he asked her to go to a dance with him. She said no and, when he arrived at the dance and saw her there with friends, he grew angry and went to the men's room, pulled the urinals off of the walls and threw them onto the dance floor, flooding the place.
In the 40s they lived in a house on Madison Avenue in L.A. Grandmother built an apartment in the basement. They had a three-car garage but only two spots were being used, so he put in chicken coops. The rooster got away one day and ran out to the alley behind the row of houses. Papa had to chase the rooster and crawl under houses to try to get it back. By the time he caught the creature, he was so angry that he took the animal by its feet and beat its head against the wall, calling it a son of a bitch the whole time. Naturally, the family had chicken for dinner that night.
At one point, papa was in L.A. and called the farm in Reedley. Grandmother did not answer the phone, and so he assumed that she was screwing around. He drove from L.A. to Reedley, pistol whipped grandmother, and then drove back to L.A. Grandmother called me in Stockton and told me she was hurt. We only had one car so daddy put me on the bus and when I got to Reedley and saw how badly hurt grandmother was, I called papa in L.A. and told him "It takes four and a half hours to get here. Be here in two or I'll have you killed, ‘cause I know the people to go to. Or I'll kill you myself." When he got there, I told him he would get divorced from grandmother and move out, or he would never see me or his grandchildren again.
Papa beat mama but he never laid a hand on (Redacted). He had a terrible temper. My whole life I was pulling him off something. One time he got mad and burned all of grandmother's clothing, and then he stomped her jewelry into the floor.
We didn't have a piece of furniture that didn't have a bullet hole in it.
