One: the view below – the same street where Matt Dillon was shot in the movie Tex – was one of his last. Those of us left behind by my uncle agree on a few concrete things. I was visiting Don Pierstorff, a retiree who worked as a teaching assistant with Uncle Ronnie at USC.ĭon Pierstorff in May 2016.
I arrived in Orange County in May with the sky overcast and jacarandas spilling purple flowers onto neighborhood streets. Last month, I flew to Los Angeles to find what other people who knew him better can still remember. That’s all I have: one memory of a man who was dead by the time I was seven. I’m not going to smoke in Munna’s house, too.” He laughed: “It’s bad enough I walk into your Munna’s house with this beard, kid. I asked him, “Uncle Ronnie, why aren’t you smoking?” I was only five years old, maybe six. In my sole memory of him, he was sitting in my grandmother’s den, but to my chagrin he wasn’t smoking. I remember him the way you might remember the way the sky was lit on a great day 20 years ago: brightly yet faintly. In the world of my childhood – spent on a Pentecostal compound in Oklahoma – my uncle Ronnie was a hothouse flower: the way he laughed the way he smiled through his beard his professorial cardigan his glasses his pipe.