Thirty Rooms to Hide In: Insanity, Addiction, and Rock 'n' Roll in the Shadow of the Mayo Clinic

Thirty Rooms to Hide In: Insanity, Addiction, and Rock 'n' Roll in the Shadow of the Mayo Clinic

Language: English

Pages: 320

ISBN: 081667955X

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Author Luke Longstreet Sullivan has a simple way of describing his new memoir: “It’s like The Shining . . . only funnier.” And as this astonishing account reveals, the comment is accurate. Thirty Rooms to Hide In tells the story of Sullivan’s father and his descent from being one of the world’s top orthopedic surgeons at the Mayo Clinic to a man who is increasingly abusive, alcoholic, and insane, ultimately dying alone on the floor of a Georgia motel. For his wife and six sons, the years prior to his death were years of turmoil, anger, and family dysfunction; but somehow, they were also a time of real happiness for Sullivan and his five brothers, full of dark humor and much laughter.

Through the 1950s and 1960s, the six brothers had a wildly fun and thoroughly dysfunctional childhood living in a forbidding thirty-room mansion, known as the Millstone, on the outskirts of Rochester, Minnesota. The many rooms of the immense home, as well as their mother’s loving protection, allowed the Sullivan brothers to grow up as normal, mischievous boys. Against a backdrop of the times—the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, fallout shelters, JFK’s assassination, and the Beatles—the cracks in their home life and their father’s psyche continue to widen. When their mother decides to leave the Millstone and move the family across town, the Sullivan boys are able to find solace in each other and in rock ’n’ roll.

As Thirty Rooms to Hide In follows the story of the Sullivan family—at times grim, at others poignant—there is a wonderful, dark humor that lifts the narrative. Tragic, funny, and powerfully evocative of the 1950s and 1960s, Thirty Rooms to Hide In is a tale of public success and private dysfunction, personal and familial resilience, and the strange power of humor to give refuge when it is needed most, even if it can’t always provide the answers.

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My father’s collection of photographic slides. As we talk, I begin to take them out and one by one arrange them in chronological order on the floor; this pile, 1950; that pile, ’51. When I finish organizing, there on the carpeting of my mother’s study we see a graph; a mathematical goodbye letter Dad left for us to read 40 years after his death. 1950 is a tall column of Kodak moments, a foot high. The stacks for ‘51 through ’54, not as tall. ‘55 through ’58, smaller still. Until the.

Like a bolt of lightning that’s … sort of straight, like a ray, that comes down from this one star. The good thing though is that it only happens about once every million years.” The trick to achieving pencil-snapping horror in a fifth-grader was to raise the threat level, lower it ever so slightly, … and then strike without mercy. The timing must be perfect; his was. Seconds after assuring me that people were turned into bacon only once every million years, he said, “Oh, Jesus, that’s the.

45-foot drop onto a stone patio, which a little math (V^2 = 64 x S) reveals would’ve had him moving at about 95 miles per hour when he hit. To make the game more interesting, Jeff would jump off backwards, fall a couple of feet, and arrest his descent by catching the railing with his upper arms. (That all six of us survived to adulthood is a statistical anomaly that should astound both my mother and insurance actuaries.) Scariest of all was climbing the 30-story water tower, the one up the.

Curious. Even in the unlikely event he was taking a measured dose of 10 pills a day, why were both bottles empty and on the dresser? Did he dispense pills first from one bottle then move on to the next? If so, would he really have packed an empty bottle back in Norfolk and taken it on to Augusta? Now that I had read the police report, I wondered how the medical examiner could conclude the culprit was “pneumonia involving the left lung.” How could any rational person walk into Room 50, look.

Throws him on the truck with the rest of his stuff. We were just screwing around. Screwing around to the very end. As I leave, I stop at the stone gateposts at the end of the driveway. Turning to take a last look at the old house, I think of the many places I’ve searched to find the original memories of my childhood –the photographs and films, the letters and diaries. But the living memories are right here, on these grounds, stored right where they happened, each one buried like Caesar in.

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