This Picture of You
Finding an unexpected glimpse of my late grandmother
The moon oozes a yellow haze, darkness fills the sky, and a few children dressed as monsters run through the street. It’s after 10 p.m. on Halloween 2014. I’m driving through the Las Vegas Country Club at 12 mph, on my way out after failing to score the same bucket of candy I’ve been collecting every year since 1990. If you’re wondering, I’m 26.
It’s weird being here. This is the first trick-or-treat since the death of my grandmother, who lived in here; this is the last year I’ll be able to pass through the iron entry gates under her name, Suzette Whitmore, before she’s erased from the records.
She was born in Algeria in 1926 and ended up here after meeting my grandfather during WWII. She was married with three kids to a very stereotypical Western cowboy named Sidney — who turned out to be a stereotypical gay Western cowboy instead. Divorced, in the mid-1970s she worked as a cocktail waitress before starting a cigarette concession business at the MGM, Desert Inn, and Bally’s, which lasted 20 years.
My grandmother and I were always somewhat estranged; her love came in short waves. She valued appearances and was a socialite in the heyday of Vegas — I could only imagine the stories she never shared.
Every Halloween, my cousins and I would begin by saying “Hello” to my grandmother, then comb the streets for candy. Our yearly ritual meant closing out the night at a house at the end of the block, where we’d follow the white roses up to the front steps, and find a bucket of candy that was always left untouched by the other kids. We could help ourselves. Even after I passed the acceptable age of trick-or-treating, I drove to the neighborhood each year to check the candy bucket, hoping to keep the tradition alive.
This year, no bucket. I realize my grandmother probably wasn’t the only resident to die recently. I head for home.
A few houses from the exit gates, I see a clear bag full of 4-by-6-inch photos someone had thrown out with a slew of trash. Stopping, I toss the bag into my car, along with a box of magazines, and an 8-track player. For the second time tonight, I understand that someone — a man named Jerry, according to the social security information I found next to some spoiled cheese — had died.
Some time passes. I decide to clean out the garage, where I had stowed the dead man’s trash. Digging through the items, I come across 40 or so Polaroids that Jerry must have taken. I hand a stack of them to my mom, who’s nearby hunting scorpions. Some of the images looked like a holiday party, others had “rodeo” written on the back; some were dated from the 1980s, others looked like a different time altogether. Strange, seeing the faces of people I don’t know, lives that were lived and now are gone, and wondering what comes after this, living forever or pure nothingness.
But not as strange as my mother passing me an image and saying, “Hey, it’s Suzette” and looking down at a picture I found in a dead man’s trash to see my grandmother. It’s not the most flattering image, one she would probably hate that I let be published, but at this moment I feel more connected to her then I did when she was alive. Here she was during one of so many nights or stories she would never share — proof my grandmother was more than just the person I barely knew.
