Tampa part 2

Richard returned to Tampa in May of 1948. There is a telling photo of Nene, Grace Prettyman, and Richard standing somewhere between Moran and the airport in Kansas City. All of them looking stoical while Richard wonders whether or not Lillian and Al really want him back. The flight back was delayed in St. Louis where Richard was placed in the hands of two Stewardesses who took him back with them to their quarters. They made him dinner and then all went to bed. In the morning, thinking him cute they merrily redressed  into their flying outfits and took him back to his seat on the plane. Being with the Stewardesses reminded him of when he would sit in the bathroom with Lillian while she was preparing for a date, back in LA, She'd be dressed in her bra, stockings and slip, applying lipstick and perfume and curling her hair, all the while smoking cigarettes and flicking their butts  into the bowl. After she left the room, Richard would aim his piss at the filterless butts and blow them into smithereens like a gunner attacking a zero. He felt he could almost cry for his mother.

Lillian was so glad to see him but a little worried too.  He thought she thought he might be mad at her for sending him away, but maybe it was something else. Before leaving Tamps for Moran, the family had moved so many times that Richard had gone to three different schools. Home was now a store front next door to a Cuban Grocery. Richard went back to Robert E. Lee School, a racially segregated elementary school. The Cubans next door were not recent immigrants and the two families got along well. They had a few children for Richard to play with when they weren't working at the store. But the grocery brought rats to their side of the building and one night Al killed one and marveled almost gleefully at the size of it while Lillian shuddered. There were a couple of floors of apartments above the store fronts and a WWII one armed veteran lived in one of them. He used to come home from his job at the local newspaper and toss around 20 cents of change on the ground and watch all the kids scramble for it. Maybe it reminded him of tossing coins to natives out in the water off a ship in the Pacific during the war. At any rate he was a fixture until one afternoon when Richard came home from school and found the building surrounded with cops, keeping everyone at least 40 ft. away. The scene reeked of natural gas. Richard found out that evening that the vet had gassed himself to death.

These memories, of rats and suicides, reflected Richard's melancholy at the time. He really felt an outcast around Al. And his mother's depression also affected him badly. To Al's dubious credit, he really thought only of his own concerns and probably saw Richard as just some gloomy kid. He probably never actively wanted Richard out of the way. But Richard was a pleaser, and he could never please Al which made him feel that Al disliked him.