Uncle Walt

Every family has an Uncle Walt.

The black sheep.  The troublemaker.  The one relative that the other adults in the family hate and the kids absolutely adore. 

The adults hate the black sheep because they’re shiftless layabouts that don’t have steady work, haven’t settled down and started a family and/or are secretly jealous because they live the kind of free, joie de vivre life that they wished they could live.  The kids love them because they were adults that understood kids, would always have a smile and a joke, or visit with an armload of exotic trinkets and tall tales of faraway lands.

I’ve only met my Uncle Walt a couple of times in my life and it was when he was in his late 70s and early 90s respectively, so I didn’t get to see much of the mischief-maker that I heard so much about, although he was still sharp as a tack.  My mom swears we are both identical.  I’m not so sure, but I can see what she was getting at.  We both share a love of (harmless) practical jokes, dry wit and a penchant for sometimes making waves in the somewhat stuffier, more professional enclaves of society.

He was born in England around 1910 and spent much of his years as a young man travelling extensively throughout Europe and North Africa.  He mostly worked odd jobs, and came home when he ran out of money and work.  He rented an upstairs flat from my great-grandmother (who was Uncle Walt’s polar opposite; stern, reproachful, pragmatic and practical… stereotypically Scottish) when he wasn’t wandering and drove her insane with his shenanigans (although she never threw him out… I think deep down she loved his zaniness).  Once he came home with a pet monkey that he trained to steal food out of the kitchen and haul it back upstairs for him.  Everyone in the family swore that my great grandma was going to kill that monkey (Charlie the monkey was his name) sooner or later – and Charlie did disappear one day, never to return… but nobody really suspected her of killing him.

Uncle Walt was a notorious rake.  He was almost always penniless, but he was always dressed to the nines and had a thin pencil moustache that he sported until the day he died.  He was always entertaining young women, picking them up in pubs and music halls, taking them out dancing or to burlesque shows.  My great grandma forbade Uncle Walt having women in his room but he found ways around her which no one could ever figure out short of having them scale the side of the house and come in through his second storey window.  My Uncle Walt must’ve been charming as all hell to convince his dates to do that, because enough of them did, and he was often caught when their ‘passions’ would wake up great grandma or Charlie would get riled up and startle them into either screaming and/or stomping furiously out of the house.  Uncle Walt told me this the first time I was visiting when I was 13 (‘fucking’ was subbed for the more ambiguous ‘necking’) and he would laugh until his face was red. ‘I felt bad,’ he said to me, ‘But you’ve got to see the humour in it, lad!’

In the late 40s, my great grandma passed away and Uncle Walt traveled again, returning now and again to see the family, regale the kids (my mom now one of them) with tales of his travels, have a few home-cooked meals, borrow a few pounds and be off again.  The adults would grumble about how Uncle Walt should get a ‘proper job’, settle down and stop acting like a damn kid while the kids would swarm him and beg him to play and tell stories and continue to be the Coolest Uncle Alive.  He took the upstairs flat again, the house now belonging to his brother and his wife.  They were the first house on the block to own a television and one night, while the whole block was over watching a scary movie on television, Uncle Walt burst through the front door, with his overcoat over his head, moaning that ‘he was going to get the children!’.  About 15 kids (and most of the adults) started shrieking bloody murder, while his sister-in-law chased him six blocks down the street (with his overcoat still over his head, from the stories I heard) vowing that she was going to chuck his things into the street and he would never be welcome back – if she didn’t catch him and kill him first.  Flowers and chocolate and a John Belushi-esque smile (and a sincere apology) smoothed things over.

Uncle Walt disappeared again not too long after that, and then returned a couple of years later.  He was in his late-forties by then and starting to slow down a bit.  And the proof was that he was now married.

That shocked just about anyone who knew Walt, but not only that, his new wife was twenty-five years younger than him.  And not only that, his new wife was black.  In the 1950s.

It took a lot of courage for both of them to be together.  Her more especially, of course, because she moved to a city where she didn’t know anyone, plus she was a racial minority in an era of more open and derisive racism, plus she was married to a white man.  Aunt Irma has a yard of guts.  Uncle Walt lost a lost of friends because of his wife, but I’m proud to say that our family stood by them both.  And Walt did settle down.  Took a proper job.  Bought a house and never wandered after that.  And they were married for 43 years until Uncle Walt died in 2002.

I remember when I visited when I was 13 years old, and marveling at Uncle Walt and his stories, his humour and him in general.  He radiated a charm that only a certain exclusive tiny percentage of people have – a charm that binds nearly everyone that he talks to and holds them, until he chooses to let them go.  Aunt Irma would just shake her head in mock annoyance as he told me about his travels in Africa and his exploits on the continent, but I sat in rapt attention as he told me story after obviously exaggerated story.  I remember looking up and seeing my mom and my uncle Fred straining to listen to his stories as well.

But there was one thing that stuck with me more than anything else about Uncle Walt.  We were in a restaurant having lunch.  Walt was still impeccably dressed, if a little outdated.  His favourite suit was a deep devil-red suit with a matching bow-tie.  No one except Uncle Walt would get away with wearing it, and yet he wore that suit like with it on, he was the most handsome man in town.  And people believed it too.

Anyway, we were eating, and as a young man of 13, I had started noticing girls, but was incredibly shy and tongue-tied around them.  Our waitress in particular was an achingly, ridiculously beautiful woman of about 19 or 20, and I found myself so paralyzed with shyness I couldn’t even look her in the eye, let alone talk to her or order off the menu. 

Everyone else kind of laughed, but Walt leaned over and whispered to me:  ‘Lad, there’s no need to be so shy… women are people just like you’

And then Uncle Walt proceeded to flirt with our young waitress.  Not in a skuzzy, dirty old man kind of way, but in a roguish gentlemanly manner of someone who could still talk a bird down from the trees, but only because it pleased him to do so now and again.  And within about 10 minutes he had her giggling and smiling and blushing… and not in a patronizing way (unless she was reeeeally good, and in the waitressing business, that’s a possibility, but she was hanging around our table longer than she should have – other patrons were shooting her daggers) but in a genuine way that she was pleased and honoured that someone was paying her this kind of attention.  Walt gave me a wink as if to say See?  If an 80 year old fart can do it, so can you!  I was stunned.  Still stunned, to be honest.

Well, my mom thought I was the spitting image of my Uncle Walt.  We certainly share a few traits.  We’re both have mischievous streaks, perhaps a tad immature, a little on the shiftless side.  We both like roaming, although with the boys I don’t ramble anymore… not until they’re older anyway.  And in some ways we are polar opposites.  He was a ladies’ man.  I, while handsome enough, am not.  I do okay for myself, but I’ve never been one to play the talk-seduction-bedroom-so long game, even though at times in my life it has had its appeal.  I’m not dapper by any stretch of the imagination, but I do have a laid-back working-class chic sense of style.  And while I’m an extrovert in a group of people I know, I am the exact opposite in situations where I don’t know anyone.  I got a piece of him, but there are times I kind of wish I had more.

The point is that Walt, like all black sheep, couldn’t give a toss what others thought of them.  They lived life on their own terms, with their own goals and wants: not the goals and wants the mores of respectable society tell us we should want, but as shallow as he could be sometimes, Walt was true to himself.  And that was what drove everyone so crazy about him, good and bad.

And in that way, I’m most like my Uncle Walt.