Chapter Thirty-Five.

     So. This is the penultimate chapter of Making Sh*t Up: An Improvised Life. "Penultimate" is a very fancy word for "second-to-last," and I'm only using it here because I've never had cause to use that word in my entire life before today. And since it's the second-to-last chapter of a book about my life (so far, anyway), it's about damn time to give some credit where credit is due. This chapter is dedicated to the man who -  in his own tragic, insane, fucked-up way - made me, in large part, the man I am today.

     This one's for John Larry Brantley:

Chapter Thirty-Five

Thanks, Dad. For real.

  

 Since we’re nearing the end of my twisted tale (TV nerd alert: the third episode of Wishbone to ever air was titled “Twisted Tail,” our take on Oliver Twist), I suppose it’s only fitting that I give props to another family member, who I have painted in these pages in a less than flattering light. In fact, earlier in this book I called my dead father an asshole. I stand by that statement. Some folks miss their shot at redemption, either because they never see their chance when it comes, or they check out of this life too soon. I don’t think my father put a bullet in his mouth solely to fuck the rest of my mom’s life (though, based on his last words to her, that clearly was a part of it). The simple truth is that John Larry Brantley was psychologically unhinged at the end of his short and tragic life. He suffered from a severe mental illness at a time (1980) and in a place (small-town Texas) where that kind of shit never even got mentioned, let alone talked about in the open. The legacy he left my sister and me was one of sadness, anger and confusion. But I do have to give him credit for one good thing.

     My dad was a reader of the voracious variety. He was the kind of man who never went anywhere without a book, usually a very dog-eared paperback, sticking out of his back pocket. If dad was in the bathroom longer than five minutes, it was a good bet that he’d long since finished his business, and was simply trying finish a chapter. There were literally stacks of books piled up in his bedroom, his bathroom (which he referred to as “The Library”), underneath the end tables next to the sofa. Oddly enough, I can’t remember any house or apartment we ever lived in having actual bookshelves. The books I remember the most were these serialized action novels by author Don Pendleton, about a character named Mack Bolan, aka The Executioner. Mack Bolan made John Rambo look like a mincing little pussy. Bolan fought the entire Mafia, and kicked its ass. Then he took on global terrorists, and kicked their asses. He hand picked two counter-terrorist teams (which each got their own spinoff series), Able Team and Phoenix Force, and all those guys did was fly around the world and punch evil dudes in the nuts, before utterly destroying them with their superior military tactics and firepower.

     They were pulp novels, to be sure, mostly devoid of anything approaching literary merit. The point is, I saw my dad reading a lot. When you’re a little kid, no matter how many times you’ve been emotionally scarred by your old man, you still look up to him. You tend to believe that whatever he is doing, is a good thing for you to do, also. If I’d seen my old man smoking cigarettes, I likely would have swiped a few when he wasn’t looking, and given it a shot. If I’d seen him shooting craps or throwing back Scotch, I probably would have given those things a try years earlier than I actually did. Dad does it; it must be a good thing to do. But what I saw my dad do most of the time – when he wasn’t watching television, or going off for long walks by himself – was read. Everywhere.

     So I started reading Dad’s books. And I started looking for books on my own. I read the Encyclopedia Brown series, the Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators series, and everything by Arthur Conan Doyle. Then I stumbled on a book called The Hobbit, and that changed everything. Tolkien fired my imagination as nobody else had before, not even Stan Lee and his universe of Marvel Comics superheroes. In fact, there comes to my mind, finally, here near the end, one good memory between my dad and me. I think I was nine or ten when I first started reading The Hobbit. It was during the summer, I remember because I would spend hours and hours with my nose buried in those pages of Middle Earth. My dad must have seen something in that obsessive reading that he recognized in himself, because one evening, as we were eating dinner in front of the television, I was reading instead of watching The Carol Burnett Show – and everybody in the house knew that I adored Carol Burnett. (Red headed women that can make me laugh are still sexy as hell to me.)

     “Whatcha readin’, Bub?” I can still remember him asking.

     “A book called The Hobbit,” I answered.

     “What’s it about?”

     “It’s about a place called Middle Earth, and this guy named Bilbo, well, he’s not really a guy, he’s a hobbit, like a midget, but he’s friends with a wizard, and he has to travel to a place called Lonely Mountain and steal something from a dragon.”

     “Is it any good?”

     “Yeah. It’s really good.”

     “Hmm. Maybe I’ll read it when you’re finished,” he said.

      And he did. And then he burned straight through the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, and then – so help me God – he even read The Silmarillion, which even a lot of hardcore Tolkien fans are afraid to tackle, because it’s basically the Scriptures of Middle Earth. It was the first – and last – time in my life that my father tried something because I said that I liked it. For one all-too-brief moment we shared a connection – even if it only existed in a mythical land created by the mind of a brilliant English author. But it’s also why I’m a Tolkien fan to this day.

     The one habit that has contributed to my imagination more than any other – the fuel that has fired my Making Shit Up Engine – has been a lifelong love of reading. And I owe that to John Larry Brantley. So I say, without irony, or cynicism, or any other kind of –ism: Thanks, Dad.

John Larry Brantley.

Chapter Thirteen.

     What a fucking month. Three of my musical heroes are in the ground. I'm working my ass off and still can't see how I'm going to make it to February. I've had the hoodie on for most of the last ten days. With the hood up. In the house. (If you don't understand that reference, jump to HERE. It'll make a lot more sense.) I started a Go Fund Me account to see if people actually like my writing enough to financially contribute to it, and got nothing. (Not true. My girlfriend made the one and only contribution, which technically does count, but also might not count, since I sleep with her. Which does not make me a gigolo, because she contributed financially to my writing - not my penis.)

     The vindictive little boy in me just wants to shut the whole fucking thing down. Take my unappreciated marbles and go home. Except I can't. As bad as shit gets, as underwhelming as response may be, I made a decision to put my words in this space. Keeping my promises has never been my greatest ability. Truth to tell, I have a pretty poor history of that.  So I desperately need at least one instance in my life where I stick to my guns, and this is that.

     And so here is the next chapter of my memoir, Making Sh*t Up: An Improvised Life. Promise. Fucking. Kept.

     Chapter Thirteen

   Spear Hunting on a Budget

In my head, it was totally going to be like this. 

   

 When you’re poor, you do things as a family that other families don’t do. One Sunday my dad was up earlier than usual, doing something very industrious-sounding on the carport. I walked out there to see him sawing an old broomstick in half. Next he made a notch in one end of each of the halves. He then took a long steel nail, and placed it head-side into the notch, leaving the pointed end of the nail exposed. The finished product looked just like a short spear, which I thought was very cool. Holy shit. Was Dad about to take me hunting WITH SPEARS?  Turns out the answer was yes, but not the kind of hunting I’d envisioned.

     Dad piled us all into the Impala, including my mom and little sister (she couldn’t have been more than six, making me around ten), so I knew right away this wasn’t going to be any kind of father/son spear-hunting expedition. We drove out of our neighborhood at Artesian Lakes (the neighborhood with the lake that wasn’t really a lake), and onto FM 2854, also called Old Montgomery Road, a long stretch of two-lane blacktop that connected Conroe to Montgomery, Texas. We’d been driving down this road for about ten minutes when Dad slowed the car, and pulled off onto the shoulder. He ordered everybody out, and that’s when he announced what our family outing was going to be: a treasure hunt for old bottles and cans by the side of the road.

     Dad explained that there was a place we could take bottles and cans to that would give us money in return for them. And that people were always throwing their empty soda and beer cans out of their car windows, so finding them on a much-used stretch of road like this would be easy. Then he opened the trunk and withdrew one of his newly built spears. He looked around for a moment, located an old Dr. Pepper can, and neatly speared it, placing it in a heavy-duty garbage bag he’d tied on to his belt loop. He gave each of us a garbage bag, then pulled the other spear out of the trunk – and handed it to Mom. When I asked where my spear was (I didn’t ask about my sister’s; she was just a kid), Dad informed me that Larenda and I didn’t need spears, as we were much closer to the ground. When I asked him if he at least brought gloves for us to wear, he began to look cross. So I shut up and started looking for bottles and cans.

     Time moves maddeningly slow for children, particularly when they are engaged in an activity they’d really rather not be doing. I tried to make some shit up in my head; I was a treasure hunter. I was the last man on Earth, looking for anything I could use to survive. I was Iron Eyes Cody, the Native American from those “Keep America Beautiful” ads, who had finally stopped crying, got down off his horse, and started cleaning up the country. But I kept getting pulled out of my imagination by the cars that were flying past us on this farm-to-market road. They seemed awfully close, and they seemed to be going awfully fast. I kept looking for Larenda, hoping my baby sister wasn’t straying too close to the road. Mom and Dad were engrossed in the task, and Dad seemed to get angrier as the day wore on. And wear it did.

     A couple of memories stick out from that day. I remember spotting a Miller Lite beer can. I scooped it up, except I grabbed it upside-down, and realized too late that it was still half-full. Rancid beer came pouring out of the mouth of the can and on to my jeans, and it smelled like the devil’s own piss. (It might also be why I do not drink Lite beer to this day.)

     Later in the afternoon, when all four of us were covered in dirt, grime, and the remnants of many bottles and cans, a car slowed near us, pulled over and stopped. The man behind the wheel I recognized as one of the deacons at Mount Calvary Baptist Church. I didn’t know what a deacon was, but I did know that I didn’t like this man very much, because he always seemed to be smiling in a way that suggested he was better than you.  I was close enough to hear part of their exchange.

     Him: “Hello, John. We missed y’all in service this morning. What’re you and your family doin’ out by the side of the road on a day like today?”

     Dad (chagrined): “Just, uh, you know…collecting some bottles and cans for recycling.”

     Him: “Is that right? Well…bless your heart.” And he was smiling that smile, which nowadays I would classify as a shit-eating grin. They exchanged a couple more words and the man drove off, and I could see Dad seething with a barely controlled rage. I was old enough to understand that he was mortally embarrassed. I was also old enough to know that we would be the likely targets of his anger.

     Just at that moment, from what seemed like very far away, we heard a scream. Dad and I both looked back the way we had come to see my little sister, maybe fifty yards away, jumping around and dancing like she had ants in her pants. Which, in fact, she did. Larenda, in her earnest efforts to please, had been dutifully picking up roadside garbage all day. Like the rest of us, she was filthy, sunburned, and tired. But she had evidently found a treasure: a shiny new Coke can that was partially buried in a mound of dirt. She was too young to identify the mound for what it actually was: a fire ant hill. When she successfully pried the can loose from the ground, the little fuckers attacked en masse. Mom reached her first, and as Dad and I arrived Mom was literally stripping my sister down to her underwear on the side of the road.

     Add to this indignity the fact that we had been walking away from the car all day in our search for “treasure.” Dad had, once or twice, gone back to the Impala and driven it along the shoulder to where we were. But at some point he had stopped bringing the car up to us. While Mom was slapping fire ants off my little sister’s skin, I looked back over my shoulder – and realized I couldn’t even see the car. There was no way Larenda could walk that far, so Dad – utterly raging silent by this time – started the trek back to the Impala. I have no idea how long it took him to retrieve the car and pick us up, but it seemed a very long time. And all that time cars were passing us on the road, and slowing, and staring at two dirty little kids, and their dirty mom. And the littlest kid was wailing like a banshee, and the oldest kid was zealously guarding four giant bags of trash – our treasure from a Sunday Family Outing.

     Next Week, Chapter Fourteen: Cancer, Leprosy, Honesty, Sympathy, and Skipping School.

     Make A Contribution To The Book By Clicking HERE.
   

   

Chapter Nine.

     Well, here we are again. Time for another chapter of my memoir Making Sh*t Up: An Improvised Life. This is most definitely not the feel-good, holiday chapter. (I'm actually pretty sure there is no holiday chapter in my book. There is a chapter about the time I accidentally creeped out an elderly movie star; you'll just have to wait for it.) Anyway, I have placed it here for your entertainment and/or edification. If you'd like to make a contribution to the continued existence of this space, and this book (and it's author), you can do that right here. And away we go...

Chapter Nine

Dad Before The End

One of the last surviving photographs of John Larry Brantley. Or, Dad.

  

  Earlier in this book, I made a rather harsh statement. I said that my dad was an asshole. (Note: if you think I’m about to retract that statement and get all redeemy and forgivey, you might want to skip this next bit. Later on I’m going to talk about how I was once convinced that a rabid beast was loose in my house. Skip to that, it’s funny.) (Additional note: I am well aware that “redeemy” and ‘forgivey” are not actual words. Except they are now, because I just wrote them. If you Spelling Nazis don’t like it, suck it.) Here’s the thing: I’d like to be able to trot out some platitudes and shit like, He did the best he could, or He loved us in his own way. But judged against the other dads I knew from childhood, even the bad ones, it was as though my father’s sole objective in being a father was to aggressively put forth as little effort as possible into raising his kids.

     If some dads did things to “toughen their kids up,” my dad translated that into “crush your children’s spirits.” I remember once when I was nine or ten, I’d gone to the little store in our neighborhood and bought something, and as part of my change I was given a crisp, brand new dollar bill. I’d handled plenty of money, but this was the first pristine dollar I’d ever seen. It had been printed that year, and looked as if nobody had ever touched it. For whatever reason, I was fascinated with it.

     I brought it home and showed it to my dad. I wanted him to see how clean and new it was. He snatched it out of my hand, wadded it up, and handed it back to me in a ball. Swear to God. I was so stunned by this that I just stood there, hand outstretched, looking at what used to be an unmarred dollar bill, that my dad had just fucked up in front of me on purpose. And then I started to cry. I remember asking, through racking sobs, “Why did you do that?” And his response was, “What’s the problem? It’s still a DOLLAR.” I never showed him anything after that.

     Still think I’m being too harsh? Okay, let’s take a quick, unscientific poll: how many of you ever had your dad abandon your family by trying to fake his own death? Anyone? Anyone at all? I’m totally not making this shit up. This happened when I was around six or seven, and we were out at Aunt Lillian’s ranch for the weekend. My dad decided to go fishing all by his lonesome, so he took the ranch truck and the little aluminum boat, and off he went. When he didn’t come back by dinner, nobody thought much of it. When he didn’t come back by morning, we all decided to go look for him.

     I remember this episode less for the drama surrounding my dad’s disappearance, and more for the fact that this was the time I had a close encounter with a cactus. By the time somebody in my family had figured out my dad was missing and had raised the alarm, I was driven out to the scene by the river where cop cars and an ambulance and a freaking dive team were all in the process of trying to locate my dad’s corpse. I was more fascinated than scared and, as everybody kept assuring me that everything was going to be alright, I decided to poke around the countryside. Remember when I mentioned earlier that I wasn’t the most physically coordinated child that ever shot out of the chute? I was up on a rise overlooking the river where all the activity was taking place. I took a step, and a root from a mesquite tree snagged my toe, causing me, in the words of my Mee Maw, to go “ass over tea kettle” down the hill, picking up a goodly amount of speed along the way. Fortunately (sarcasm alert), my fall was broken by a beautiful and bountiful patch of prickly pear cactus at the bottom of the hill. I mean I landed right smack dab in the middle of that shit. When I started screaming, it took the adults more than a few minutes to figure out how to even get to me without getting their own selves fucked up.

     I think I made the ambulance guys happy, because they finally had something to do. And what they had to do was spend the next hour or so removing cactus needles from every single part of my body. A lot of the little bastards had snapped off underneath my clothing and were embedded in my skin, so the heroic men of the Marble Falls Volunteer Fire Station stripped me down to my tightie-whities, got out the tweezers and the iodine, and went to work. It was as humiliating as it sounds. I have no memory of my cute girl cousins being on the scene, but I may simply have blocked that out. And at the end of it, I was told that my father was missing, and presumed dead. (Note: much later in life I was reunited with the prickly pear cactus, after I discovered that it goes really great in a margarita. But that’s the only time we ever hang out.)

     A few days later I went with my Paw Paw to the sheriff’s office to collect my father’s belongings that had been removed at the scene. The only things I remember collecting were my father’s boots and a couple of fishing poles. There may have been some other items, but that’s what sticks out for me. I also remember that my Paw Paw (this is my mother’s father) seemed really pissed off, which I thought was strange, because I was really sad, and I thought that’s what you’re supposed to be when you lose a loved one, especially your dad. Had it somehow inconvenienced my Paw Paw that Dad had drowned? Was it cutting into his TV time? Did my dad die owing Paw Paw money?

     I should have suspected that something was hinky when we didn’t have a funeral. At least, I don’t remember having a funeral. Or even a memorial service. What I do remember is that me and my mom and baby sister moved into a trailer home on my grandparent’s farm, and this was just fine with me. I loved the idea of living in a house with wheels. Not to mention living near a giant garden, where I would shortly learn how to use a machete. I was completely and utterly distracted by the endless possibilities of life on the farm. I also learned never to mention my dad in the company of my grandparents, as this was a recipe for stern looks and brooding, uncomfortable silence. I played, I imagined, and I got on with my life.

     Six weeks to the day that my father died, I was sitting in the toy box with my sister, watching television, when the phone rang. Mom answered it and immediately went pale and shaky. When she hung up the phone, she turned off the television and told us to come sit by her. “Kids… um, your father is coming home.”

     My sister, who was maybe three at the time, didn’t register this as an unusual thing at all to say about a dead man. I was a little quicker on the draw. “I thought you said Daddy was dead.”

     “Well, honey… not exactly.”

     “What’s ‘not exactly’ dead?”

     “Well…, he, um…, he’s just been gone for a while. And now he’s back.”

     That was terribly anti-climactic for my imagination, as for a brief second I had seriously entertained the thought that my family had super powers. Like coming back from the dead.

     Then my sister and I were told that Daddy was coming home real soon, and that we should be really happy about that, and not to ask him any pesky questions like, Where the fuck have you been for the last month and a half? Or anything like that. Ever. And two nights later my dad pulled into the driveway of the farm - on a brand new, black-as-night motorcycle. Any thoughts I had about asking him where he’d been flew right out of my head. He had a motorcycle! Plus the fact that I had a dad again! I remember being really happy, and my mom being really tense. And later, when we walked over to my grandparent’s house as a complete family again, it being really, really weird.

     To say my grandfather disliked my dad would be understatement bordering on criminality. It would be decades after both my dad and grandfather were dead before I uncovered the truth about this animosity, but we’re not there yet. We’re at the part where my dad comes riding back into our lives on a motorcycle, and my Paw Paw decided that he wanted to ride it. Paw Paw was one of those old-school cases who believed in the sanctity of never seeking advice, counsel, or education about anything before jumping right into it. Like how to ride a motorcycle. I’m not sure exactly how he talked my dad into the idea. Maybe Dad was just willing to do anything to get back in his father-in-law’s good graces (which even I could have told him was an exercise in futility if he’d ever asked me, which he didn’t), and thought letting Paw Paw take a brief joyride on the bike might smooth some of the edges.

     Dad tried in vain to give Paw Paw a brief tutorial on the physics of two-wheeled travel versus four, but my grandfather waved him off. When he very shakily took off down the driveway, motorcycle wobbling to and fro like a drunken sailor on shore leave, I had a thought that amounted to, This isn’t going to end well. Paw Paw was supposed to turn right on the farm-to-market road where his property began, drive the two miles down to the state highway, turn around, and come back. The whole trip should have taken less than ten minutes. After twenty minutes, my dad and I jumped in the Impala and went looking for him.

     We found him in the gravel driveway of the local Baptist church less than half a mile down the road. The bike was lying on its side, and my Paw Paw looked like he had been dragged behind the bike for that half a mile. His whole left side was bloody, and it was obvious from the condition of the white gravel in the church parking lot (crimson streaks) that he’d spilled the bike there. My dad was pissed about the bike (which really only had some cosmetic damage), and my Paw Paw was embarrassed, and he dealt with his embarrassment by getting pissed. Plus, he was pissed about my dad being pissed, and my dad could see this, which pissed him off even more. So, you know. It was a real bonding moment for the men of the family.

     Paw Paw was in no condition to drive, and I was seven, so Dad hopped on the bike to go back to the farm and get my mom and bring her back so she could drive the Impala with me and Paw Paw back home. We were sitting in the Impala with the doors open. Actually, I was standing up on the front bench seat next to Paw Paw, who was half in and half out of the passenger seat, and probably in a mild state of shock, now that I think about it. And then he said it was too hot and he reached over to the ignition column of the car and turned the key in order to start the engine and get the A/C going. Except the car was in gear and he was on the passenger side and couldn’t depress the clutch, so when he turned the key the entire car lurched forward, and I went ass-over-tea kettle (are we beginning to see a pattern here?) into the backseat, where my forehead connected with one of the solid steel and very sharp seatbelt buckles sticking straight up out of the bench. It wasn’t serious, but I am a dedicated bleeder, and so less than five minutes after my dad left and returned with my mom, he rolled up to discover both his father-in-law and his son bleeding all over the interior of the Impala. This naturally pissed him off, which Paw Paw could see, and that pissed him off, which caused Dad to…

     You get the point.

     Here, then, is the sordid and somewhat ridiculous story of what really went down when my dad “drowned.” It’s also a reminder that, if there is a planet in the universe where common sense grows on trees, my people live farthest from that planet.

     The cops knew right away that my dad had not drowned. In fact he left so many obvious clues that he had simply abandoned the family, he might just as well have hung a banner that said Fuck Off, Y’all. I’m Out!  In the first place, the spot in the river where he’d deliberately capsized the boat was so shallow that he would have had to stand on his head – for a long time – in order to drown. Clue #2: everything that should have been in a boat loaded for fishing (rods and reels, tackle box, bait, nets, etc.) was all still neatly arranged in the back of the truck. Evidently he was in such a hurry to get away from us, he couldn’t be bothered to correctly stage the scene. Or he was just lazy. Probably both.  But the loudest clue was the boots. Remember, the boots my Paw Paw and I collected from the sheriff’s office? Why in the hell would a man pull off his footwear to go fishing in a boat? Answer: he didn’t want to leave footprints after he capsized the boat and waded across the river to the other side, where he walked up the bank to a trail that led to a dirt road, that eventually led to a county road, where he hitchhiked his way out of the state, and out of our lives. Except that my father was a big man, well over 6’6” and pushing 280 pounds, so even barefoot he left a trail that a near-sighted drunk with no sense of direction could follow. Apparently the blood hounds that the search team used had no problem picking up his scent, and following it all the way to the point where he got in a car.

     Based on the obvious and embarrassing evidence that my father was a) probably still alive, and b) a terrible death-faker, the county would not issue a death certificate, which meant my mom could not cash in my father’s life insurance policy. So in addition to remaining poor, she was now completely humiliated. As it happened, Dad walked and hitchhiked his way to Dallas, where he met up with a very shady friend in the private investigations business, who knew a guy who made counterfeit documents, and got himself a phony Social Security card. He used this to pinball between Colorado, Oklahoma and Texas, taking odd jobs that included valet parking attendant, and bouncer. Eventually he got tired of trying to hide the fact that he had abandoned his family from everyone he met, and so decided to come back to us – on the condition that we never ask him about where he’d been, or what he’d been up to. Which, to a seven year-old boy, seemed fair, I guess.

     Now I could stop right there, and you could understand why my grandfather hated my dad as much as he did. (Actually, this was the second time my dad had walked away from his family, but that first time was only for a week. But that’s another story.) You could totally look at that and understand why Paw Paw absolutely detested my dad. But my grandfather’s hatred stemmed less from what Dad did to his family (and especially to Paw Paw’s daughter, my mom), and more for what he did to my grandfather’s pride.

     See, when the cops came back to the family and basically told them that my dad had split the scene, my grandfather adamantly refused to believe them. Because my father had pulled that shit once before, and had gotten himself a world-class ass chewing from my grandfather, after he lit out for Mardi Gras with a waitress for a week. (Oh, and did I mention that this was right after my mother had gotten home from back surgery, which was way more dangerous and painful then than it is today? Swear to God. He brought Mom home from the hospital on a Friday afternoon, then he and the waitress took off for New Orleans. For a week.)

     So Paw Paw and his Irish pride were certain – dead certain – that my dad would never ever pull that shit again. He was so certain, that after the dive team and the searchers left the riverbank, Paw Paw went back up to the ranch, got a cot, a lantern, some food and water, and went back down to the site of the “drowning,” and stayed there. For three days. He would walk up and down the riverbank, looking for my dad’s body, looking for clues he was sure the sheriffs had missed. He was so certain he’d put the fear of God into my dad and that he would never leave the family again, that the old man kept a three-day vigil during a hot and sticky Texas summer, on a river bank teeming with mosquitoes and scorpions and snakes. At the end of the third day, dehydrated, exhausted, and covered in bug bites, he packed it in - only to have his wayward son-in-law coming rolling back into town six weeks later, on a shiny new motorcycle.

         Oh Yeah. There was hatred there.

     Next Week, Chapter Ten: Smelling Angela Lansbury

Make a contribution to the book by clicking HERE