The linoleum is cool under my feet. The same pattern as the old linoleum. The countertops the same Formica green. The white cupboards. The same early American drawer pulls. The wallpaper with rows of yellow roses. But this kitchen is the mausoleum of the old kitchen. Not even a ghost of live food. Feels like you’re standing in a large hallway that happens to have a refrigerator and a stove and a sink in it. Everything so clean, so antiseptic the way she’d have kept it. My father takes care that everything stays exactly the way she’d have kept it – the kitchen table with the grapes and apples and pears oilcloth tablecloth, the salt and pepper shakers that look like milk cans in the center of the table, the lamp you can pull down so the bright light isn’t in your eyes, the green wall telephone, the fancy pen with the feather on it on the built-in table under the green wall phone. On the wall next to the phone, the faux-weathered wood sign that says: Vee get too soon alt and too late schmardt.
That day when I walk into the bathroom, there they are, the set of forest green bath towels and hand towels and washrags one Christmas I bought my mother at Bloomingdales monogrammed J&M. The set of towels she only hangs out for company. That is, for me. The bath towels hang perfectly lined on the rack above the bathtub. The hand towels hanging perfectly lined next to the sink. The forest green washrags with the monogrammed J&M folded over each towel. The forest green toilet seat cover, the green rug on the floor around the toilet.
For a moment, I wonder if he’s hung the towels out there for me. But he’s had a stroke. He is almost dead. Maybe already dead. How could he possibly think to hang the Forest Green Monogrammed Bloomingdale Towels out. Maybe since she’d died, my mother was the company he’d put the towels out for.
Probably it was my sister. Above the toilet is a blue and white ceramic mother duck with three blue and white little ducks swimming behind. They’re all swimming with their beaks lined up with their mother’s in a straight line – then there’s the odd duck, the black duck with his bill tipped down. Always been an odd duck.
In their Dusty Rose bedroom on the same carpet but different, mother’s worn blue fuzzy slippers next to her side of the bed, side by side exactly, her rosary with the beads that glow in the dark on the bedpost. Her folded jeans on the chair. The blue cotton blouse. On the wall, the paintings of The Immaculate Heart of Mary, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the woven palm fronds from Palm Sunday stuck into each frame. The round mirror of my mother’s vanity. The infant I was from my crib who stared into that mirror. Inside that mirror, the bedroom reflected, somehow in there is the most terrifying of all.
The last time I’d seen my mother was when I’d visited in 1988. I was studying at Columbia and working at Café Un Deux Trois. One evening, after supper and apple pie and ice cream, my mother and I sat on the brown davenport and drank coffee and smoked cigarettes. She’d fluffed up her hair and wore her Orange Exotica lipstick. My father sat at the kitchen table, his back to us, the lamp pulled down, that bright light onto his big hairy hand, onto the purple grapes and the red apples and the yellow pears on the oilcloth tablecloth, onto the pages of the Treasure Valley News, my father a looming torpor of silence, stirring his tea with three teaspoons of sugar with his teaspoon – while I was with her in the living room, her hero. Full of romantic stories of famous people and faraway places. Frank Sinatra ordering a Manhattan, Ingrid Bergman’s daughter spilling ketchup on her blouse. When I tell my mother that Tony Bennett’s toupée looks like a rug on his head, she laughs ’til her gums show.
The next morning is the morning I have to leave. In the kitchen, I’ve just shook hands with my father and am hugging my sister, when over her shoulder I see my mother. She’s in the hallway motioning with her finger for me to come with her.
In the bathroom, mother locks the door behind us. Surrounded by the Forest Green Monogrammed Bloomingdale J&M towels, the black ceramic odd black duck, my mother puts her hand around my arm, her slick palm, and squeezes. Her almond-shaped hazel eyes.
“Ben,” she says, “you have to take me with you. Take me out of here. This man I live with doesn’t look at me or talk to me or take me out. He never thanks me. All I do is cook and clean. That’s all that’s left. There’s nothing bright or special. Nothing new. I’m going to die here in this damn house someday while I’m mashing his spuds and I don’t want to die that way, so you got to take me with you.”
This is the mother whose insane rages, as a child, my sister Margaret protected me from. This is the mother of the weekly enema. Warm salty water, the rubber hose. Even my insides weren’t mine. This is the mother, and I her male child. My cock, the first cock she was ever in charge of, her rigorous Catholic-in-celibacy training, my God, my cock never had a chance. This is the mother. The woman who was my story, who I was for, however she wanted to see me, how I finally left her behind. That indelible story she told me, who I am, that I’m still trying to retell.
This mother, my mother.
And so I sit on the toilet, not on the closed forest green covered toilet lid, but on the toilet hole, as if I were going to shit, only with my pants on, holding the huge Catholic Virgin Tyrant Mother Mary, my little crooked mother in my arms. The way she weeps. My mother’s snot and tears rolling down my neck. How I’d spent my life trying to keep those tears away.
“Take me out of here,” she cries. “You’ve got to take me out of here.”
Three years later, the night before her funeral, Margaret and my father and I are sitting at the kitchen table. That dead silence of the second house. The fucking clock. The purple grapes, the red apples, the yellow pears of the oilcloth tablecloth. The salt and pepper shakers that look like milk cans. The lamp you can pull down, that bright light shining on Certificate of Death. Margaret lights another Virginia Slim. She is the ghost behind the cloud of smoke. My father has spread out his hand onto the oilcloth, over the purple grapes. His black hairy thick knuckles. He’s stopped crying. But just long enough to speak.
“Tomorrow at the funeral Mass,” my father says, “one of us has got to take the urn from the altar and lead the procession out to the internment spot.”
When my father knew my mother was dying, he left her bed in the hospital and drove home. He didn’t want to be with her at the moment of death because he was afraid that she’d shit herself.
Margaret takes another drag on her cigarette. No way she’s going to carry that urn. My father can’t carry the urn out because once she died he hasn’t been able to stop crying. Years of beating and berating his son not to cry, for three days straight the man cannot stop crying. The three or four years he survives without her, that’s really all he does. All he can do. My father cries.
The next morning, after the funeral Mass, the priest looks over at me. The Hierophant’s Nod. It is my sign. Like an altar boy who knows his way around the hardwood steps, the scarlet carpeting, the incense and the ringing gold bells, I get up, walk to the altar. The urn is copper and oval-shaped. I’m surprised I don’t think it’s tacky. My hand reaches out and grabs the urn, brings it in close to my chest. Puts the oval copper urn in there secure so the klutz don’t drop it.
I turn around and face the congregation. That’s when I hear it.
“Take me out of here, Ben,” my mother says. “You’ve got to take me out of here.”
IN MY MOTHER’S second house, on the pad with the fancy feathered pen on the built-in table below the green wall phone is a note in Margaret’s back-sloping loopy handwriting.
At St. Luke’s, Room 585. Hurry up.
The next three days, Margaret and I take turns with our father. His left side is paralyzed. He is conscious but he doesn’t speak. Doesn’t make a sound. Doesn’t move. He can’t eat. He can breathe and keep his right eye open. Every once in a while he moves his right hand, his index finger. As if he’s pointing at something.
That first day I walk into the room, his bed surrounded by monitor screens that blip, tubes everywhere, my father is just a head, a huge head with a huge nose under an oxygen mask, and huge ears. That huge scary
body of his, now only long skinny bones under the sheet.
Margaret can’t stop talking. Her little girl voice. She calls him daddy. A running commentary. Lookit here, daddy, your long-lost son has just walked into the room. Isn’t it great to see Benny again? The only time she shuts up is when she goes to smoke. Thank God she smokes a lot.
On my second day, there’s something about his right eye. Something come to life in there. He recognizes both of us. I don’t know how we know this, but both Sis and I know. It’s that one dark eye, how it follows us when we move.
Daddy, Daddy, Can you hear us?
That night, Margaret goes home to get some sleep. It’s the first time I’m alone with him. I try but can’t remember the last time my father and I were alone. How I stare at him. Long, long, and long. His eye stares back. Never blinks. It feels like a staredown, but I’m not sure that’s true. I think maybe that’s just how his eye is now. But the gaze between us, whatever the medical condition, has the same feel it’s always had. The way that eye looks at me. The challenge to look back.
I pull my chair up to the bed and don’t ever stop looking back.
Late that night, I’ve fallen asleep, my head on the mattress. In my dream Hank is touching my head, or is it Tony? When I wake up it’s my father’s index finger that’s touching me. I don’t move. Just let my head lie there on the soft mattress, my father’s finger a gentle scratch at the back of my head, in my hair. How his touch goes to every part of me. It’s only at that moment, while my father is touching me, that I know fully what it’s been like not to be touched by him.
A man shut out from the world of men. Full of confusion and misery. And something else. I know it with all my heart and soul. For a son your father is the one. One day, you’re in diapers, in the afternoon, in the morning, just before you go to sleep, by a river bank, in your nursery with the blue sailboats, strapped in the carseat, out in the raw dark brown earth of the sugar beet field, when your father hands you back to your mother, there’s a moment he beholds you. The way he touches you he believes you into his world. He gives you back to your mother but now you’re his.
Most fathers don’t know this touch or even when they give it. But still they give it. If your father doesn’t give you his touch, doesn’t claim you, it’s because he himself is lost, or dead, or not there, or too drunk or stoned, or the mother is too strong, or the father somehow decides against you.
But really, all I know for sure late that night in St. Luke’s Hospital, Room 585, my head on the soft mattress, about sons and fathers, is what is true for me. My father’s touch gives me presence in my body in a way I’ve only always wished for.
When I turn my head around, my father’s eye is right there, just beyond his finger that keeps moving up and down across my eye and nose. I pull my head back. In that moment I’m sure I’ve found the clue, discovered the secret. It’s the deathbed scene and finally my father’s given in.
I stand up, lean my arms against the bed and lower my head down. I don’t know what I’m going to do. Rest my cheek against his cheek. Maybe kiss his forehead. Lay my head on his shoulder. Touch my forehead to his forehead. Whatever it is, I will show my forgiveness to him for all the broken years.
My head lowers down closer in. Out the corner of my eye, I see his finger’s still moving. I have the thought that maybe this is a mistake and his finger is just moving like it’s always been moving and in my sleep I rolled my head over and my head just happened to be there where his finger was and that’s the only reason that he was touching me.
My chest low, almost touching his chest, close in to my father’s face, we’re eye to eye, only a breath apart, and his other eye opens. One eye, so much less than half of both his eyes. Together my father’s black eyes are the full force.
It’s only then I realize. He thinks I’m going to kiss him on the lips.
His homo son.
My father, who hasn’t moved or spoken or shown any signs of life besides breathing and his one damn open eye, now two eyes, and his fucking index finger, now gathers all his strength and stretches his neck away, turns his face up, his lips away from mine, and yells some kind of animal grunt.
I pull his face back around, pull his oxygen mask off. Hold him by his huge ears. Make him look at me.
Dark, almost black, bloodshot, in that moment, I am beheld all right. Those critical fucking eyes. Full of hate and fear. The fucked slant of dark sun that was my nourishment. So this is the gaze that made me. How I’d stretched my body spindled and crooked for light. In his gaze, as I was ruined, I was ruined in every corner of the world.
If I were a better man, hell if I were any kind of man at all, I’d thank him. Like Johnny Cash thanking his father for naming him Sue.
But nowhere in my body is there a thank you.
Man to man, front to front, face to face, eye to eye with him.
My father is my enemy.
And I fucking hate his fucking guts.
15.
Misery
MAY 13, 1996. OVER THE YEARS I THOUGHT I KNEW THE depths of it. But I had no idea. My whole body goes down. And I don’t know what the fuck. An alarm inside. A special alarm. The one that only goes off when the body knows it’s about to die.
May 13th no different from most mornings. I wake up at eight-thirty. Make coffee in my French press, make toast. The coffee is a good blend I bought at Nature’s. The toast is whole wheat and organic and the butter is unsalted organic and the orange marmalade is homemade, no preservatives.
I’m sitting at the kitchen table, reading a New Yorker. It’s just after I finish the first cup of coffee and one of the pieces of toast.
That moment. If you’re diabetic or hypoglycemic and you have a sugar crash, it’s something like that. Or a grand mal seizure even. Imagine the worst feeling ever and then imagine that worst feeling won’t ever go away. Fight or flight that hits you so fast all your systems shut down.
And all I’m doing is sitting at my breakfast table.
I make it out my door, somehow walk the two blocks to the Pioneer Cemetery, lie down on my spot close to Tony Escobar. Figure I’m dying, so I might as well die right there so all they have to do is roll me over then dig the hole.
Lying on the earth is the only thing that helps. But it starts to rain and the rain is good but pretty soon I’m shivering. If I could run, I’d run. I throw up and think I’ll feel better after I throw up, but I don’t. My pituitary gland, or whatever gland it is, is still pumping out stress hormones. I say that to myself: your pituitary gland is still pumping out stress hormones, but saying that only makes me think of my father’s only joke: You know how to make a whore moan? As if he’d know.
I need to eat. What I need is protein, but I’m trying to be a vegetarian, but what I need most is protein. Meat protein, not that wimp-ass protein you get from soy drinks or tofu. What I need is to quit eating wheat. I’m fucking allergic to wheat, but I have no clue about wheat. What I need to do is quit drinking coffee and eating sugar. I’m exhausted from battling this virus and from being afraid. What I need most is rest. What I need most is to get my ass to the hospital.
But I have no insurance. And I’ve never once been to the hospital. Only to visit my friends who have died in the hospital have I gone to the hospital. Just walking in the hospital doors, how I was going to pay for it, fuck.
There is no one to call. The only person I can talk to is Tony and he’s dead and I can’t walk that far anymore. I call Hank but always get his machine. I never leave a message. Ephraim is in Bermuda. My students, of course, any one of them would come to help me. But I can’t ask help from them. I’m their teacher. And teachers don’t call up and say what the fuck is happening to me.
I don’t know how I get through that day. My body isn’t even mine to move. Just lying there on my spot, if I move my head, the world swirls around and even bounces. Things up close are far away and vice-versa. I can’t find my regular breath. It’s raining hard and I’m lying in a puddle. When B
ig Ben finally decides to move, it seems like hours it takes to stand up. Then standing up is its own horror. Each step is one step and one step is all I can imagine making.
The next morning I can walk and I can breathe. I get on my scales and I weigh one hundred eighty-three. Usually my weight is around one ninety-six. The next couple days I order in pizzas, Indian food, Mexican food. Watch bizarre daytime television. Eat all the shit I shouldn’t be eating. But I can’t eat anyway.
The day of class, I’m barely holding it together. In fact, I don’t hold it together. I start talking about how weird I feel and pretty soon I’m crying. The teacher puts his head down on the table and cries.
Ruth Dearden leans across and puts her hand on my head. Her hand feels cool and I want her to keep her hand on my head, but I’m the teacher and I’m in front of class.
Things in the world are just things. Your house, your table, your notebook, your computer, your bed, your toothbrush. Your clothes, your shoes, your socks, your car. Food. They have a life of their own unconnected to you. It’s as if you’re already dead and the world does not recognize you. And something even more. Because the things in the world don’t recognize you, because your world isn’t your world anymore, is just the world, instead of the familiar connection, you feel the empty place where you used to be connected, and without that connection, the way you’re floating, things appear to you as having an energy barrier around them. And the energy of that barrier is a whole new weird deep anxiety.
My astrologist tells me the tough time I’m going through will end in December.
So Big Ben figures I just have to wait it out. Seven months.
That’s German Catholic for you.
I make it through the next seven months that way. I mean Little Ben does.
Two hundred and one days. Every day.
Four thousand eight hundred and twenty-four hours.
Two hundred eighty nine thousand four hundred and forty minutes.
Seventeen million three hundred sixty-six thousand and four hundred seconds.
I Loved You More Page 27
