Jennifer Levin I For The New Mexican
Done with tombstone Justin St. Germain’s mournful memoir
William B. Bledsoe
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n Oct. 26, 1881, the most famous gunfight in the American West took place at the O.K. Corral, in Tombstone, Arizona. The 30-second battle between the Earp brothers, the Clanton brothers, the McLaury brothers, Billy Claibourne, and Doc Holliday has sustained the booming frontier town turned impoverished rural outpost ever since. “The only thing that keeps Tombstone alive is tourism based on one event,” said Justin St. Germain, who grew up there. “The actual gunfight wasn’t the good guys versus the bad guys. It was two groups of pretty bad people fighting. It was an arbitrary violent event, and when you celebrate it that much, with daily reenactments, it just seeps into people’s consciousness. The town’s official seal is two six-guns, crossed. The official motto is ‘The town too tough to die.’ There is so much ridiculous machismo embedded into that place.” St. Germain, currently the Joseph M. Russo Professor of Creative Writing at the University of New Mexico, is the author of Son of a Gun: A Memoir, published this month by Random House, which he reads from on Thursday, Aug. 29, at Collected Works Bookstore. It is his first book. St. Germain, who is in his early 30s, was a graduate student in creative writing at Stanford University when he decided to embark on a memoir about the murder of his mother, Deborah St. Germain. On Sept. 20, 2001, she was shot by her fifth husband, Duane Raymont Hudson, a former police officer. Hudson was found three months later in a New Mexico state park, dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Woven into the memoir is the history and legacy of Tombstone and the sense of futility that permeates the town. “At Stanford I was writing a lot of short stories about Tombstone and growing increasingly frustrated. The things that preoccupied me about what happened to my mother were creeping into the stories where they didn’t belong and often kind of ruining them,” he recalled. “A professor of mine said that there was some true story that was trying to come Justin St. Germain out. His advice was that I was going to have to write it or I would keep circling it indefinitely.” The book’s first section recounts the time around the murder — what happened right afterward and what St. Germain knew about his mother and Hudson’s life at that point. St. Germain was in college in Tucson and living with his older brother, Josh, when Hudson killed their mother. The couple had been living off the grid in a mobile home in a rural area near Tombstone. Though Justin and Josh were wary of this choice, they weren’t afraid of the way Hudson treated their mom — not the way they had feared some of their previous stepfathers. In the book’s second section, St. Germain returns to Arizona to find answers, not in an attempt at sleuthing or even investigative journalism but to satisfy his own curiosity about the specifics of the crime and to look at how his mother’s life ended the way it did. He begins with the family’s move to Tombstone from Pennsylvania when St. Germain was 6. He talks to the original investigating officer, gets the police report, drives around the state to visit relatives and family friends, and meets up with some of his former stepfathers in an attempt to understand his mother as an adult embroiled in one terrible relationship after another.
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PASATIEMPO I August 23 -29, 2013
“Given the circumstances she was put in, she was a really remarkable mother. That idea is made more complex because despite the fact that she loved us a lot, she put us in a lot of scenarios with terrible men. I was never physically abused — none of my stepdads ever laid a hand on me — but when you see them abusing your mother — well you just hope that she would get herself out of that situation.” One of the more violent men, called Max in the book (St. Germain changed his name for legal reasons) “made our entire household awful for years. It just kept going on. My brother and I just hated him.” One of the oddest passages features Brian, the man with whom the St. Germains moved to Tombstone. He meets Justin at a gem show and promptly launches into conspiracy theories around his Deborah’s murder, claiming to have sources inside the CIA. He has a copy of the police report and other information, having gone on his own fact-finding mission years earlier, but he won’t give St. Germain the file until he listens to a sales pitch. “I was eight or nine when he and my mother broke up, and I don’t remember him being a great father figure, but he wasn’t so bad. Our meeting was bizarre, because the entire premise in his eyes was to try to sell me on what he insisted wasn’t a pyramid scheme. I didn’t even know what to make of a lot of what he said. Does he really have CIA contacts? I don’t know. He was a defense contractor in the past, so I guess it’s possible. We kept bouncing back and forth between memories and him trying to sell me. Mixed in with everything he said that night was some really heartfelt and genuine sadness about what had happened to my mother.” St. Germain’s mother was murdered just days after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and St. Germain had become inured to the conspiracy theories floated at the time. Likewise, Brian’s talk of the CIA involvement in his mother’s murder didn’t ring true for him. Some people, including his grandmother, thought terrorists might be behind the crime. “I understand the reason they do that. People don’t want to accept how simple it can really be for someone to kill somebody else, how little it really takes,” he said. Hudson’s true nature — as revealed by his actions as well as by the suicide note found near his body — was a surprise to St. Germain. The questions that his discoveries about Hudson and his reconnections with his other stepfathers prompt for him furnish some of the most affecting parts of the memoir. “I know the statistics on domestic violence. If you’ve been exposed to it your whole life, you are astronomically more likely to engage in it yourself. I’ve never expressed anger physically, but it’s a huge fear. I don’t want to become the thing I hate the most. There’s this certain kind of masculinity that is kind of tyrannical. You have these ideas embedded in you about what it means to be a man, but you can still choose what kind of man you’re going to be. I go to therapy, and writing the book helped me a lot in terms of containing some of the emotions around my mother’s murder. The emotions aren’t gone, and they never will be, but they used to feel like they were seeping into everything.” Now that the memoir is published, St. Germain is getting good reviews and doing readings. He has gone back to Tucson, but doesn’t plan to read in Tombstone or even visit there again. “Everything there is such an intense reminder of what happened,” he said. “And the thing is — and I’m sure there’s some complex socioeconomic explanation for this — everyone from my generation that I grew up with is gone. I feel like a tourist when I’m there. It’s changed, and it feels hollowed out. My brother lives 20 miles away, and he never goes back either.” ◀
details ▼ Reading & signing by Justin St. Germain, author of Son of a Gun: A Memoir ▼ 6 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 29 ▼ Collected Works Bookstore, 202 Galisteo St., 988-4226