Say Goodbye

by Lewis Shiner

  On a somewhat more positive note, VH-1 began to play “Don’t Make Promises.” As a direct result the album bubbled up to number 89 on Billboard’s Hot 100 for the week before Thanksgiving, then dropped off again, annihilated by new Christmas product from the Stones, Melissa Etheridge, and Smashing Pumpkins.

  The buzz, however brief, was enough for Melinda to land them an opening slot on the Spin Doctors’ tour that would start in January of 1996. And General agreed to a video for “Carry On,” to be shot right before the band joined the tour. In the meantime they finished the rest of their scheduled gigs, winding up at the Hurricane in Kansas City on Saturday, December 23.

  During Billboard Week, as the band called it, Laurie relented and put “Don’t Make Promises” back into the set as a duet with Mitch. Mitch’s voice was a sweet tenor, very different from Skip’s, yet the crowds responded with happy recognition to the opening lines and it seemed curmudgeonly to take that away from them.

  The crowd in Kansas City loved “Don’t Make Promises” and everything else the band did, brought them out for three encores, and swarmed over them after they left the stage. It seemed an auspicious way to leave things. After waffles the band drove out to see the Christmas lights at the Plaza, then dropped her at the airport, sweaty and exhausted, to wait for her predawn flight to San Antonio; they planned to catch a night’s sleep and head out to LA.

  “I’m going to miss you guys,” she said, hugging each of them. “Please drive carefully.”

  “No sweat, Crunch,” Mitch said. “See you in two weeks.”

  The big C

  Laurie’s mother met her at the airport and surprised her by taking her straight to Methodist Hospital. Laurie had cleaned up as best she could in the Kansas City airport but still felt like a refugee. “This isn’t what I had planned,” her mother told her. “But the doctors wanted to operate today and that seemed more important than making tamales. You must be exhausted.”

  “Is it cancer? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “He made me promise. He said I could call you as soon as he woke up afterwards. He didn’t know they were going to do it while you were actually here. Yes, they think it’s cancer. They’re supposed to take out part of his liver.”

  It had been a year since she’d seen either one of them, and if her mother seemed mysteriously transformed into someone older, plainer, and less gender specific, it was nothing compared to the changes in Grandpa Bill. He’d lost so much weight that previously hidden bones and musculature now pushed out against his papery skin. There was, in particular, a hard line around his jaw that she didn’t remember ever seeing before. He seemed distracted, as if he were listening to voices in another room, and Laurie realized that the science fiction metaphor had become literal, that he had been taken over by an alien being, a cancer, and that it was speaking to him in a language of pain.

  “Hello, sweetheart,” he said. “You weren’t supposed to see this.”

  She leaned across the hospital bed to hug him. “And you weren’t supposed to see me until I showered. Will I approve of your doctor?”

  “I dearly hope so.” When he talked, Laurie could see the raw gums where they’d made him surrender his upper plate. It was a final, casual insult that robbed him of his dignity when he needed it most.

  Nurses kept coming in and out of the room to take his blood, check his vitals, give him a pre-op shot. Laurie had been there less than half an hour when orderlies arrived to take him to the OR. Laurie and her mother walked him as far as the double doors and then, squeezing his hand one last time, they watched him go on without them.

  They sat in the surgical waiting room. Laurie, in a daze, tried to consider the possibility that she might not see him alive again. It didn’t seem credible.

  “I knew I couldn’t stop you from coming,” her mother said. “I would have if I could. I didn’t want you to see him like this. It would have been better to remember him the way he was.”

  “This isn’t going to change any of my memories, Mom. This is just the way things are.”

  “I don’t like the way things are.” Laurie’s mother shook her head. “Now I sound like you. When you were a little girl you would get something in your head and never let it go. I remember you used to ask me every summer why we couldn’t stay up all night and sleep all day. You would say, ‘why go to sleep when it’s finally getting nice outside?’ I would say, ‘That’s just the way things are,’ and that was never good enough for you. Now look at you. You finally got your way—up all night, every night. You look so tired.”

  Laurie’s eyes fluttered shut and she willed them open again. “I am tired.”

  “I remember your senior year in high school. Up all night fooling with the guitar, the teachers sending notes home because you were falling asleep in class.”

  It seemed to Laurie that her mother was not criticizing, but simply come unstuck in time, floating away from an unacceptable present. She managed to avoid it for two and a half hours, asking Laurie if she remembered a former neighbor or a trip to the zoo when she was still in a stroller, never once mentioning Grandpa Bill or Laurie’s father.

  When the doctor came in, he looked so hesitant that Laurie’s heart stopped. She felt the edge of a darkness so black that it did not seem survivable. “He’s doing fine,” the doctor said, though his troubled look didn’t go away. He pulled up a chair and said, “I don’t know what to tell you. We couldn’t find any cancer in his liver. The spot is there on the X-rays, but there’s no sign of anything on the liver itself. I lifted it up and checked the anterior side, but there’s simply nothing there.”

  “That’s good,” Laurie said. “Isn’t it?”

  “It might be, except that the blood work and all the other signs indicate the presence of cancer. If it’s not in his liver, it could be anywhere. It could be systemic. We just don’t know.”

  “What are you saying?” Laurie’s mother asked.

  The doctor sighed. “My opinion…my opinion is, the cancer has spread throughout his system. I had hoped that the cancer was localized in the liver, based on that X-ray, and that we could get enough of it out to prolong his life.”

  “How long?” Laurie asked. “How long does he have?”

  “You have to remember that I may be wrong. I don’t think so, but he may have a number of years yet.”

  “And if you’re right?”

  “My guess would be weeks. I would be surprised if it were much more than three months.” Then, almost as an afterthought, “I’m sorry.”

  He sat, as if waiting to see how bad the reaction was going to be. When no one started screaming, he smiled uncomfortably and walked away.

  They kept Grandpa Bill in the hospital for five days, and when they let him go home, Laurie moved into the spare bedroom of his house. When he felt strong enough to sit up, they played canasta, a game he’d taught her twenty years before, and the rest of the day they watched wildlife shows on cable. At night she would rent vintage gangster movies, from the 1932 Scarface to The Godfather, and when his eyes hurt she would read to him. For all his sophistication, he was a Texan in his heart, so she read from J. Frank Dobie’s Apache Gold and Yaqui Silver, his favorite.

  She didn’t tell any of her friends she was in San Antonio, and on New Year’s Eve she and her mother and Grandpa Bill watched a swing band special on public TV and then listened to some of his 78s: Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, and his all-time favorite, Louis Armstrong. At midnight they sang along to Lombardo’s version of “Auld Lange Syne,” scratches and all.

  On Monday, January 8, he was scheduled to move into a nursing home where he could get full-time care. Laurie’s mother couldn’t afford to quit her job to take care of him, not to mention the fact that she didn’t have the training. “Medicare pays for the nursing home,” Grandpa Bill said, “so I’m going. And that’s that.”

  On that same Monday, Laurie was scheduled to start shooting the “Carry On” video in Los Angeles.

  “We have to make a
deal,” she told him the Sunday before, as she waited for her mother to come take her to the airport. “You don’t keep any more secrets from me. When I call, you tell me everything you know about how you are, or I’m not leaving town.”

  “I don’t suppose I have to point out that this is blackmail. You could go up the river for this.”

  “Are you the one going to drop a dime on me, tough guy? I don’t think so. So swear on the family honor you’ll clue me in.”

  He held up an unsteady right hand and said, “I so affirm.”

  On the flight to LA, she tried to read lines of words that refused to queue up properly. It occurred to her that for the first time in her life she would close her eyes if someone offered to show her the future. Time was a funnel, narrowing around her, one lost opportunity bringing on another.

  Home

  Gabe and Dennis and Mitch and Chuck were waiting for her when she got off the plane, each holding a sign with a different misspelling of her name: Lorry Mouse, Larry Mass, Leary Moose, Lurid Mess. They all went to Jim’s house to eat pizza and get caught up.

  At first Laurie thought it was not such a good idea. For one thing, she kept expecting Skip to come walking out of the garage at any minute. Then there was Mitch. The band he’d known had hung out at the Waffle House; it was a different band than the one Jim had been in, the one that had lived in this kitchen. Eventually Jim said, “I really miss you guys, but you don’t have to tiptoe around. I made the right decision, I don’t want to go back on the road. It’s okay.”

  “It’s not that,” Laurie said. “We were afraid you’d want your keyboards back.”

  “As soon as I get over my guilt,” Jim said. “That’ll be any century now.”

  Laurie spent the night in Jim’s guest room, as she had so many times before, and the next morning she got to see all the new dinosaurs Sam had added to his collection in her absence.

  General had pushed for a performance video as the simplest, and therefore cheapest, solution, and had arranged for Club Lingerie for the shoot. The director, Les Michaels, was in his forties and resembled Ben Franklin, down to the hairline and the rimless glasses. Though Laurie had admired his clips for people like Sonic Youth and Angels of Epistemology, his actual work habits left her insecure, as he rolled tape without apparent purpose and included the band in so little of it. After the extras went home, at seven in the evening, he took each of the band members aside and, under the glare of a pinpoint spotlight, had each mouth the lyrics at half speed, with exaggerated expressions. Then he shot each of them sitting alone in a corner of the dressing room. He was confident of his vision and seemed to be enjoying himself, and Laurie only wished she could say the same.

  The big time

  They caught up with the Spin Doctors’ tour in New Orleans. The Doctors generally played only one or two shows a week, and Sid the Shark had put together some other dates to keep Laurie and Her Three Bad Mice occupied on the off days.

  Opening for a band like the Spin Doctors was a continuous tradeoff. Laurie had moved from small clubs to auditoriums and amphitheaters—the sheds, in the parlance of the trade—only to find the seats less than half full when she and the band came on. Most places didn’t even turn the lights completely down, so that the audience wouldn’t stumble on the way to pick up a T-shirt or buy an extra beer. She got reviewed, sometimes enthusiastically, never for more than a paragraph.

  After three weeks on tour, sales of Of The Same Name continued to drop. “I don’t understand,” Laurie said to Melinda from a pay phone at a Shell station at the Las Vegas city limits. “I thought the point of this was to sell records.”

  “I asked Ardrey. He thinks people are having trouble finding it.”

  “I still don’t understand. We’re distributed by Warner Communications.”

  “Look, this may be a little painful, okay? You’re not on the charts, you don’t have a video in rotation, so the people that order the records don’t know who you are. If a record store sells the one or two copies of your album that they might have in stock, they probably consider themselves lucky and don’t reorder. Some of the big chains have already returned you, and they’re not going to reorder unless you go through the roof.”

  Laurie put the phone down, not realizing she’d hung up on Melinda until the deed was done. She felt like Ron Tuggle, trying to breathe from an empty tank. What would Ron Tuggle do now? she asked herself. What would he do if he looked up and saw the only thing he’d ever wanted, the thing he’d worked for since junior high school, the thing that had been just within his reach, begin to cave in around him?

  Only that morning she’d been reading an article about children’s books that she’d discovered in a yellowed North Carolina newspaper in the rear of the van. What children wanted in a story, the article said, was to feel powerful and to be reassured that there was justice in the world. Adults, too, Laurie thought. Getting up in front of a big audience with a good band and a loud guitar was more power than she’d ever known, but it couldn’t make people give her record a chance.

  Nor, as it turned out, could it save her Grandpa Bill.

  She’d been calling her mother and Grandpa Bill on alternate days since she’d gone back on the road. On the fourth week of the tour, her mother confirmed what Laurie had already heard in Grandpa Bill’s voice: The cancer was back, this time in his brain, inoperable.

  Say goodbye

  The Spin Doctors were extremely gracious about dropping Laurie from the tour, as was the rest of the band. She got on the first morning flight out of Minneapolis and took a cab from the San Antonio airport to the nursing home.

  It was a low brick building, built cheaply in the seventies. The front door opened onto a dim day room containing three desiccated plants and half a dozen people in wheelchairs. The dining room, straight ahead, smelled of boiled potatoes. Grandpa Bill was in the West wing, to her right, which had prompted him to make a feeble joke the week before about not having to die in the East.

  She passed an open door where a woman in a smock was making the bed. The door to the empty closet stood open and Laurie understood that someone had just died. Farther down the hall a woman screamed with a steady, demented rhythm. Laurie saw an orderly about her age standing in the shelter of a broom closet, dragging surreptitiously at a cigarette. “Can’t you do anything about her?” she asked.

  “What you want me to do?”

  “Can’t you quiet her down?”

  “She don’t get her drugs for another hour yet. A pillow over the face’d take care of her, but it ain’t in my job description.” He turned his back on Laurie to concentrate on his cigarette.

  Laurie stood for a long second, her right hand firmly holding the lower half of her face immobile, hating the idea that Grandpa Bill’s life might depend in any part on this callous, casually cruel man. It was helplessness that finally made her turn away and walk down the echoing hallway until she found Grandpa Bill’s room.

  He was drowsing when she walked in, so feverish he seemed to glow in the muted afternoon light. Laurie pulled a chair to his bedside and took the opportunity to run a brush through her hair. Another sleepless night, another hospital room. The screaming woman rasped at her nerves, and closing her eyes only made it worse.

  Grandpa Bill woke up with a start and Laurie saw the lack of recognition in his eyes. “It’s Laurie, Grandpa,” she said. He nodded, with no indication that the words held significance for him. She tried to read to him from something called Broken Eagle, a paperback western that had been on his desk, while his attention drifted either to the window or to her face, where he would stare intently, as if searching for something. Finally he freed his left hand, which she’d been holding, and used it to pull the book gently down.

  “Why are you doing that?” he asked.

  “Reading to you? I thought you’d like to hear my voice.”

  He shook his head. “We should talk.”

  She put the book on the desk. “Of course.” She waited for him to te
ll her what was on his mind, but he only continued to stare at her. “I love you, Grandpa Bill,” she said. “I don’t think I say that enough.”

  He shook his head again. “I have to ask you,” he said, and then he lay back on his stack of pillows.

  “Ask me what?”

  He sat up again and looked fixedly in her eyes. “What do you think my chances are?”

  She was too stunned to answer. Had no one actually told him he was dying? If not, did she have that right? Would that woman down the hall never shut up?

  He lay down again, the question either forgotten or no longer in need of an answer. His eyes closed and he began to snore gently. The woman’s screams abruptly stopped. Laurie propped her head on her hand and was asleep herself within seconds.

  She woke up an hour later as they brought in Grandpa Bill’s dinner. She realized she hadn’t eaten all day and remembered seeing a convenience store a block or so away. “I’ll be back in an hour or so, Grandpa,” she said. “Okay?”

  He waved her away, nodding, with a vagueness in his eyes that made her wonder if he yet knew who she was. She walked to the Stop N Go, which actually had a table inside, and ate a microwaved pizza and an ice cream sandwich. The sun was setting in a dingy sky, and a bitterly cold wind tossed the bare branches of the scrub oaks along the street. February was always the hardest month in Texas, the month that lured premature buds from the trees then froze them off in sudden ice storms. It was the month where romance turned to indifference and beloved pets ran away. If it had a full complement of days, instead of 28 or 29, Laurie thought no one would survive it at all.

  When she got back to the hospital Grandpa Bill was asleep again. At 8:00 Laurie called her mother to come pick her up, and a few minutes later a hard-looking nurse came in to take his vitals and give him his nightly meds. She was unable to wake him.