Dad

We got good mileage on that Chevy, too. But this Lincoln’s going to put me down an extra thirty bucks in gas. At least we’ll be comfortable; it’s no joke beating a car three thousand miles across the whole damned country in eight days, and I’m getting too old for this kind of thing.

The part I’ve been dreading comes after we pull out with the Lincoln. We need to pick up our bags and say goodbye to Mom. Billy’s jumpy too. We know it won’t be easy; nothing’s easy with Mom; but considering all that’s happened this is going to be especially hard.

We ease our giant floating dark red boat up Colby Lane. A car like this isn’t designed to move around narrow, old-fashioned residential streets. Dad bought the lot here for twenty-six hundred dollars about twenty-five years ago. He built the house himself at a total cost under six thousand bucks; it must be worth over eighty thousand today.

We park on the driveway and go inside. Mom’s dressed to kill, looking damned good for someone who’s had two heart attacks in the past five months. Still, she’s weepy around the eyes, pale; walking with her new peculiar shuffle. It’s as if she has a load in her pants and is balancing a book on her head.

She starts straight off crying, asking what she’s going to do when I leave; insisting she’ll be all alone, because, according to her, Joan, my sister, doesn’t care if she lives or dies.

I’ve been listening to Mom complaining all my life, especially during the last months. I keep thinking I’ll get immune to it; I should be thoroughly inoculated after fifty years, but sometimes it still hurts. Sometimes I really listen and sometimes I can’t take it anymore. This time I’m only numb.

I wait until she slows down. I tell her again how some things must be. I need to go home. It’s been too long since I’ve seen Vron and Jacky. I can’t spend the rest of my life taking care of her and Dad. She knows all this, we’ve been over it enough.

Billy stands in the background listening. He starts turning television channels, looking for something, anything. I can’t blame him. Mom keeps at it. I’m nodding my head as I work our bags to the car. She’s also pushing a child’s lunch box filled with pills on us. It’s her way of showing love, taking care, making us feel dependent.

But we do finally get away.

The next part’s even tougher. We cruise up Colby to the convalescent home where Dad is. The home is only a block from my parents’ house. We chose it so Mom could be near. We experimented with another place but settled on this one. It has its limitations but Mom can walk here when she wants. It probably isn’t good for Dad but nobody can deny her this.

We park around the corner and go in. The smell is something I’ll never get used to. It’s a combination of the smells in a men’s room and an animal shelter. When I was sixteen, I worked for a small-animal vet. I’d come in mornings and hose down the cages, wash out all the dog and cat crap from the night before. This is a combination of those smells, plus the smell of general decrepitude.

I never knew what the word decrepitude or corruption really meant. As kids, we used to say piss, shit and corruption. Now I know. Corruption is when something is being corrupted; rotted by bacteria. These poor, old people here are being corrupted, rotted, decayed. The result is decrepitude, being wasted, worn out, used up.

Smells like this are hard to cover. All the carbolic acid, strong soap and aerosol in the world won’t do it. This is the smell of death, the going back to earth none of us can avoid.

A German-born brother and sister run the home. People couldn’t be kinder. Of course, they’re doing it for money, lots of money. The cheapest you can have a shared double is twenty-five bucks a day. But I wouldn’t do it, night and day, day in and day out. I couldn’t.

They tell me Dad’s still in the same room but they don’t think he’ll know us; he’s under sedation. I’ve accepted this; sedation is the best thing for him now, anything to make it easy. There don’t seem to be any real, practical, permanent answers. There’s no room for him in this world anymore. I know something about old age now. You’re old when most people would rather have you dead.

We walk along the hallway looking into rooms. We peek in at thin, worn shells of human beings; people with oxygen tubes on their noses and catheters coming out from under bathrobes. They’re propped up in bed or sitting in wheelchairs. It’s only afternoon, but they’re all dressed in bed clothes. Some are hunched over, listening to radios or staring at television sets; mouths open, mostly toothless. As we go by, some look out, latch on to us with their eyes, like prisoners peering from cells. I feel guiltily healthy, young, with an unending future. How must Billy, beside me, feel at nineteen?

Dad’s on the men’s side; so stupid to carry that farce to this point in life. He’s in a gigantesque kind of crib. He’s lying in the darkened room with the drapes drawn. His eyes are open, fixed on the ceiling.

There’s a roommate. The man is deaf and smiles at us. They chose him on purpose because sometimes Dad screams out in the night.

All together, Dad’s been in this place two weeks. He came out of the hospital again a week ago. He’d begun dehydrating.

I look down. He’s somehow dead already; yellowish skin but not a wrinkle. He’d lost so much weight, then gained some of it back; now he’s skeleton thin again.

We lean close over him. I say hello. He hears and turns his eyes but there’s no recognition. He stares at our eyes just as a baby or a dog does, not expecting anything, only seeming fascinated in a passive sense by the eye itself. He’s gripping and ungripping, twisting the blankets and sheets the way he does most times now. It’s a constant tight turning; nervous movements. Sometimes he’ll grit his teeth and bear down, pushing one side against the other, trying to make it all hold together. But right now he isn’t too active, only twittering with his fingers, maybe proving to himself there are still things; that he’s still here and alive. He looks past me and speaks through quivering lips.

‘I have to take a piss.’

This is so unlike Dad. He never used those words. It’s hard seeing Dad in this condition, saying ‘piss’ in front of Billy. If he knew what he was doing, it’d never happen; he wouldn’t even say that to me.

We pull a catch lowering the side rail to the bed, help Dad swing his legs out. I slip his robe over his shoulders; his slippers onto his feet. He’s wearing socks. He has no catheter yet. I’m hoping he can stay off one long as possible. He’s so privacy-conscious, a catheter makes him go downhill fast. Having nurses check and change it is degrading to him. When they do use one, it won’t be indwelling, only a condom you slip over the penis with a tube into a bag; at least it won’t hurt.

Billy and I lift Dad up and he grabs hold of us. His fingers, hands and arms, though shaking violently, are still strong. We help him slide across the gray asphalt-tile floor to the small bathroom. He’s moving one foot in front of the other, but only with enormous concentration. In the bathroom, he leans over the toilet with his hands against the wall. He’s not looking at us, only into the toilet. He spits into the bowl; but he can’t piss.

We stand there and nothing comes. Billy looks across at me. I flush the toilet thinking it might help but Dad only spits again. He never spit, I know of, or maybe he’s always spit in the toilet, a closet spitter. Actually, I never saw him even go to the toilet till these last months.

I figure we’d better maneuver him back to bed. But, when we try taking him away, he has a tight hold on the pipes over the toilet. He has such a tight grip his knuckles are white. I try unlocking them.

‘Come on, Dad. Let go of the pipe.’

He won’t. He won’t look at me either; he only bears down and grits his teeth. I try undoing his hand, opening one finger at a time, the way you do with a baby when it grabs your beard. Then, suddenly, he lets go and latches on to another pipe. This pipe’s the hot-water line; his hand must be burning but he holds on tight with manic fury. Billy’s pulling at his other hand.

‘Come on, Gramps; let go! Come on, let go now.’

I’m almost ready to give up, call for help, when we finally pry him loose. We turn him around. As soon as he’s turned away he seems to forget the pipes. We try working him through the doorway but he goes into his usual hang-up, checking molding, running his hand up and down as if it’s some new thing he’s never seen before. This is a man who built his own house from the ground up and has done carpentry work since childhood. These days, it’s almost impossible to move him past any doorjamb; but we manage.

We slide him to the bed, sit him down, take off his robe and slippers, then help him lie back. As usual, he’s afraid to put his head down. I cradle his head in my hand and lower him slowly onto the pillow. He’s deeply tense. He stares at the ceiling and his mouth starts moving, chattering, his lips opening and closing over his teeth, up and down with a quivering, uncontrolled movement.

Strangely, Dad still has all his teeth. Here he is, a seventy-three-year-old man and he has all his perfectly beautiful teeth, somewhat yellowed, long in the gum but not a filling. I’m already missing six, and Billy beside me has several teeth missing, three root canals, filled with gold and porcelain-covered. If anyone ever X-rayed Dad’s head and Billy’s, not seeing anything else, they’d think Dad was the young man.

He continues staring at the ceiling. I stroke his head, try to calm him. He holds my hand and squeezes it hard. He gives me a good squeeze as if he knows, and then squeezes again. I like to think of those squeezes as the last real message Dad gave me.

We go outside. I’m barely making it. For some stupid reason, I don’t want Billy to see me crying.

When we come out the door, who’s standing there leaning against a tree but Mom. She’s pale and breathing hard. We run over to her. She’s got that damned lunch box in her hand. We’d forgotten it.

She puts one of her digoxin pills under her tongue. She’s in a bad state, gray-white. She gasps out her story of how she’s worked her way up the street, stopping and popping pills so she can fight her way to us.

I can’t hold myself back.

‘Mother, it couldn’t be that important. It’s insane for you to run up here with a box of pills. You’ll kill yourself for nothing.’

But she had to come. She knew we were only up the street, here with Dad, and she wasn’t. She couldn’t stay away.

We help her into the car and drive home. I put her to bed, make her take a ten-milligram Valium. We go through the entire goodbye scene again.

I signal Billy to get in the car. I tell Mother, firmly as I can, I must go. I say goodbye, kiss her, turn around and leave. Joan has finally found somebody to come twice a week, and she herself will come twice more; still, I feel guilty into my very soul.

Our plan is to head straight toward Vegas, packing as much desert as possible behind us during the night. Summers, it’s damned hot out there even in an air-conditioned car.

We begin having trouble before we get near the desert. We’re twenty miles from San Bernardino when the voltage indicator starts flashing. The only thing is to turn back; we might make it to L.A. but that’s about all.

We pull into a garage I know on Pico Boulevard. The voltage regulator is shot, has to be replaced, a minimum hundred bucks, parts and labor. Damn!

I call AAA CON and tell them what’s happened. They tell me to call the owner, collect. I do that. After considerable shuffling around I get an OK. This means money out of pocket but we’ll get it back when we deliver. The garage says the car will be ready by morning. I get a few extra days’ travel time from Scarlietti, too.

We can’t go back to Mother’s. I don’t think I could sleep again in that back room, too many bad memories, bad nights. Marty, my daughter, lives near the garage so Billy and I hoof it over there.

Marty gives me two aspirins and puts me down in their bedroom. I can hear them, Marty, her husband Gary and Billy in the front room watching TV, a rerun of Mission Impossible.

I have a tremendous yen to cry. Twice I go into the bathroom, sit on the toilet, but the way Dad couldn’t piss, I can’t cry. I spread-eagle on the bed and it catches up with me; I’m gone.

Marty and Gary sleep on the floor and Billy sleeps on the couch. I have the only bed in the house all to myself. We sure have nice kids.