“Well, I’m not going to force you to do anything, of course,” he said, and I answered, “okay,” too quickly.
“Anytime you want to hang out, it’s cool,” he said, and there was that awkward thing again, that slight fake swagger in the body, as though I might come over sometime and he would beat me at basketball with his bathrobe and four-pronged cane. Maybe we would sing some songs. Maybe we would start a band.
WHEN I SAW HIM AGAIN SIXTEEN MONTHS LATER HE’D GAINED TWO hundred pounds, not so fat as he would eventually become, but close and shockingly, as no one had mentioned it to me. Maybe no one knew. The house was messy but not bad, it was not a Hoarders situation, yet. Later I would find out that Derek, the kid who shopped for him, would often pick up and vacuum if there was nothing interesting on the television. It was early on a Monday when I showed up, so early that the buses weren’t running regularly and I wound up walking all the way from downtown. He’d sent me a key to the house on a keychain with a Lucite heart with the word “hottie” embedded in it, and that was sad in a way that my own heart could not digest. It remained there, jammed into the esophagus of my heart the way that angel food cake once became lodged in my actual esophagus, the time I took another bite while still choking because I couldn’t see wasting good cake. It was still dark. I remember walking down his street and knowing his place—not recalling for sure the house number—by the ghostly blue TV light washing through his living room window. All the other windows on the street were dark, encapsulating the lives of hardworking people sleeping the few hours until it was time to wake, drink coffee, exercise, and ride the subway. Pops and the TV would still be there the whole time, camouflaged by the day like a porch light. The cat-box smell had been replaced by something unidentifiable, something acrid and chemical. It reminded me of the uncomfortable smell I sometimes got off of old people like Grandma Rose, the smell of ointments and general unrest, the exhaust of a fevered system exiting though the pores. I got to the top of the stairs and said, “Pops?”
There were two doors to my left, one opened and one closed. I was on my way to the closed one when I heard my name in stage whisper, guttural and pained, and I went into the television light.
There was an old mattress pulled to the middle of the room, and that’s where my father lay, as though beached. He was wearing a giant Giants t-shirt and boxers. His feet were bare and pigeoned out to the sides like flippers, the heels cracked, the toenails yellow and thick and crumbling like plaster. All of the furniture I’d remembered, the plastic covered couch and the entertainment center and easy chairs, was gone, and what remained was the TV. The mattress was a new addition. Why hadn’t he just gotten a TV in his bedroom? I felt oddly wounded by this setup, by the way that he lived. It hurt my feelings. He kept his eyes on the TV.
“What is this?” I said.
“It’s nice to see you.”
“You aren’t looking at me.”
“Yes, but it’s still nice to be in your company.”
“Where is all the furniture?”
“I sold it.”
Emergency was on the TV, on one of the retro channels. An attractive doctor was working on a patient and talking and not wearing a mask. Maybe he was smoking or maybe I was just projecting because I really wanted to smoke. I dropped my backpack and Pops told me to hush and I asked why and he nudged his giant head in the direction of the closed door down the hall. He had a full beard and mustache now, really scraggly like a castaway’s, like a castaway drifting away on a big mattress.
“You got a guy here?” I asked.
“So to speak.” He looked at me straight for the first time since I’d walked into the room. It felt weird to be angry and even weirder that he was somehow receptive to this anger, that he seemed to have expected it. “It’s just a friend. I need more help than I used to, believe it or don’t. I have a friend who helps me, brings me groceries, you know. Et cetera.”
“Et cetera.”
“No, not like that, obviously. Just a kind stranger who helps me out.” He had become, in his sadness and morbid obesity, a Tennessee Williams character.
He’d met Derek before he’d gotten really heavy, at the supermarket or something. Maybe a bar. I couldn’t imagine the process of that, of meeting the person who will eventually buy your groceries when you’re too fat to buy your own. Would it be easier if it were a stranger? And how did you gain that much weight anyway? Did you try? Did you look at your life one day and just feel like, fuck it, I’m eating?
“Are you eating yourself to death?” I asked. I was chewing gum, I think, and I think that because my jaw hurt the whole next day, so I was either angrily chewing or angrily clenching my way through that conversation. The memory of waking the next day and massaging both sides of my jaw to loosen them is so vivid, whenever someone mentions jaw pain I think of fat people and night, of standing in a room over a mattress and waiting for someone’s heart to stop.
“I’m fine,” said Pops. There was a cough from the other room and he dropped his voice another octave, “I’m sure this must be shocking to you.”
“I wish you’d mentioned it.”
“And how do you assume I could’ve done that? In between asking about your other father’s happy new life and your school work?”
“I quit school,” I said, and it hurt him more than I wanted or expected it to. He was so large, slumped there. He seemed immobile yet indestructible, like a tank on its side.
“Well, that’s a shame,” he said finally. “You had a lot of potential.”
“I’ve never had any potential,” I said.
“Well, you’re a kid.”
“So, what now? Stripping college? Burger King?”
“Beats me,” said Pops, a fat man in boxer shorts disappointed in his daughter.
The next day I got some of the story from Derek, who was thin and jittery and who had green darting eyes that reminded me of marbles clacking from one hand to the other. We spoke in the small kitchen as Pops slept in front of an infomercial about an amazing wallet. Derek and I sat at a faux wood table on wheeled fabric chairs and drank instant coffee that tasted faintly of mold and salt, strange, seawatery flavors on the tongue. He kept apologizing for the coffee and telling me that he generally got his coffee out. And did I want to go out? Get a coffee on Castro? I said no thank you a lot. And it’s okay. The sink was filled with batter-covered bowls and spoons. A big school-bus-colored Bundt pan with burned-on drips of cake. Derek waved his hand in the general direction of the sink.
“Oh, Chad loves his Bundt cake. Lemon. Every night. I told him, ‘buy me a dishwasher or lose me forever!’ I’m not one for sweets, myself, but to each his own. I guess I could use PAM or whatever, but the chemicals make me so uncomfortable, not to mention the aerosol. You need to think about what you’re doing to the planet. Even making a Bundt cake, you know the whole butterfly thing. I’m sorry the coffee is so gray. I usually get mine out.”
“Where did you meet my father?”
“Oh. God. At a bar, The Mint. The Mint because it’s near the old mint.”
“I’ve seen it.”
“New Year’s Eve,” he said, sighing, dragging the words out. “New Year’s Eve.”
“When?”
“Couple of years. Before …” here he patted the air a few inches from his torso, sculpting himself with imaginary fat.
“Was that his resolution?”
“Ha, no. But that’s interesting. Maybe I just never thought about it that way. He told me about his situation, the year he’d had. He was still limping then.”
“Was this before or after the settlement?”
Derek dropped his eyes. He scratched the back of his neck a little. “Um, probably before. Maybe a little after. I’m bad with dates.”
“Yeah.”
“But it wasn’t a factor.”
“No.”
Derek explained to me that he didn’t want to talk about sex and I told him that I didn’t really need to hear about it, either. He
was sleeping in the twin bed I grew up with and staying in the guest room that should have been mine, had I ever visited. I asked him what he did for a living and he grimaced and said, “problem solver,” without irony.
“I find lost things,” he said. I don’t think he was high as I was talking to him but he may have been coming down from something. That’s how he seemed, to be sliding down a wall in slow motion and then picking up speed.
“I like your father,” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
“And, oh he loves you so much,” said Derek, and it was so surreal, my Dad’s pusher telling me this, his bringer of Twinkies, his Twix supply man. I nodded and looked away.
“It’s not a bad job. I don’t work a lot. It just involves a few trips to the store or whatever a day. Some special trips, like for special cravings. Donuts, KFC, whatever. One time we were watching the big hot dog eating competition on the Fourth of July, you know that one? With all the skinny Asians pushing hot dogs down their throats? Well, after that he wanted hot dogs, actually corn dogs, so I drove all the way out to the beach to get those amazing ones they sell from the cart …”
“Pronto Pups,” I said.
“Yes! Like father like daughter, I guess.”
“It’s right down the street from my house.”
“Isn’t that funny? You may have even seen me, running by with my order. I like to be prompt. I don’t like to keep him waiting.”
“I didn’t see you,” I said.
“No. Well. It’s a friendship, what he and I have, at the heart of it. A friendship. We talk; he’s very deep. Sometimes he asks my input on what he should eat, like he’s just out of ideas. He’ll say, surprise me, Derek, and I’ll bring him Indian food or Caribbean. Once it was curried goat, and he loved it and couldn’t believe it. He was like, wow, all this time I could’ve been eating goats and I had no idea!”
“You’re killing him,” I said.
Derek covered his face with his hands and then dragged them back though his hair, which was blonde and gelled into hard points. He had silver rings on almost every finger, multiples. They clicked like castanets.
“No,” he said. “No.”
“What did he promise you?”
“Nothing. Just a place to stay, the protection of that. Can I say? Not having a roof over your head … it changes you. I’m a hustler, that’s what I always say. Two years ago if you’d driven past the park at this time you would have seen me and two Korean boys just standing there, waiting. You hustle, you have to. Your father takes good care of me.”
I could only stare at his mouth when he spoke, the sad plush animation of it, a small heart split wetly in two.
“What about when he dies?”
“He’s got me, he’s got me,” said Derek, too quickly, and then, almost venomously, “I’m sorry, do you think someone else deserves it? Your other father? His fucking whore? You, who can’t be bothered to answer a fucking email?”
In the other room Pops moaned low in sleep and it seemed to snap Derek back a bit. He tried to recover with his little gay Renfield act, his homosexual Pretty Woman spiel, but I’d seen him, and now I couldn’t stop seeing him.
“He loves me,” he said. “How often is it that you can make a person truly happy with the simplest things? Bundt cakes? French fries? Fried cheese? These things are not too much to ask. I’ve spent a lot of years disappointing a lot of people, and it ain’t fun, let me tell you. This is fun. And it’s easy. And what does he have to live for, anyway? What do any of us have to live for, anyway?”
“I don’t even know what to say,” I said. I stared at my gray coffee. There was a small hair in it, maybe an eyelash, spinning like a scythe.
“Can you understand the kindness in what I’m doing?” asked Derek. He looked like he wanted to touch my hand but he didn’t and I was glad for it. I noticed for the first time that he was wearing Dad’s old cancer walk shirt and it was very strange, a mild spark in the brain. It was like a Where’s Waldo or seeing a brand name in a movie, like, a split second of oh I recognize that, and then it was gone.
“I’m not doing a great job at understanding anything right now,” I said, and it was true. It felt like my mind was having trouble breathing. I wanted a cold drink and a nap.
Derek got up and stood at the sink and began fiddling with the dirty dishes. He picked at the dry drips of batter on the Bundt cake with his fingernails; his rings clanged hard off the metal, like warning shots.
“What you said about a New Year’s resolution was probably pretty apt,” he said, his back to me. He was the first person I ever saw wearing Tripp pants, those huge long comical black things with all the silver chains on them, weighing them down even more.
“That’s why I said it,” I said.
“Yeah. I don’t know. Even when I met him, before all of the weight there was a kind of fatalism to him. He just seemed like a person who didn’t have anything to lose. It was weeks before he mentioned you. I asked if he had kids the night we met, you know, because a lot of the older guys do, and I wasn’t really in that place, to be running around with all these little kids. I’m a kid myself; I’m too selfish. And he said no, he didn’t have any and he didn’t want any, and I was like, oh, okay, hello, soul mate. Then after the first hundred pounds or so he was like, yes, I have a daughter.
“But I found out you were older and lived with your other father and I was okay.”
“Okay.”
“It was around the time that I was starting to ask about the weight gain. I was being tactful, of course. I’m not one to judge people by the way that they look. Well, maybe at first, but not later. And he asked if I could move his mattress into the living room. And he didn’t want the other furniture. He didn’t want it. He wanted the room to move and grow so I sold it and he let me keep the money.”
“Move and grow,” I repeated weakly. I imagined Pops as a giant sea turtle and Derek his curator, working hard to create a bigger habitat with the adequate plant life and everything. I could see Pops submerged in his holding tank, watching, his fat lifting him to the surface like a glob of dirty foam. It made my throat hitch, as though I might cry or spit but I did neither. I coughed, to cover, and then coughed again.
“Maybe you can appreciate it as a project or a life’s work?” asked Derek, he turned to me, his butt pushed back against the sink, and threw a hand towel over his shoulder in a pleading way, looking to see what would make me bite.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Because it makes sense to me on some level, like a spiritual level.”
“How old are you?” I asked.
“How old are you?” Derek asked back, and we sat there for a minute thinking less of each other, a sad stalemate, a Mexican hate-off.
It was an awkward end to an awkward exchange; the whole thing petered out like orgasmless love, sweaty and accepting. He showed me his/my old room. It smelled like pot and sandalwood, like any boy’s. On closer inspection, he had a baggie of pot next to a huge Ziploc bag filled with brownish-colored powder, on the outside written in Sharpie: Henna Mix 6/09–DO NOT EAT. His computer was on to a screen saver of Robert Plant bare-chested and in mid scream. The pile of scrap paper next to the printer was a copy of Pop’s deposition from the car accident, which I’d never seen. On the top page he was talking a lot about Dr. Seuss, about how he was a communist. Then Derek showed me the thing he was most proud of, a white college-sized mini-fridge filled with sugar-free Red Bulls and Diet Pepsi and bottled water. He offered me something and I took a water. He knelt and patted the fridge kindly, like it was an old and faithful horse.
“It was a gift,” he said too mysteriously, as though maybe I wouldn’t guess who had given it to him.
I SAW POPS FOR SOMETHING LIKE SIX MINUTES BEFORE I WENT BACK TO Dad and Lisa’s; I crouched beside him. His breath was cabbage-y, compost-y.
“Well,” he said. “I’m not going to ask you to take care of yourself, because you won’t. I guess that I’ll say t
hat I’ll see you when I see you.”
“Yes,” I said. We did not hug or even touch. I shook Derek’s hand because he was standing in my way, because shaking his hand was the only way out.
10.
HARRISON AND I LAY AROUND A LOT MORE THAN I WOULD HAVE imagined. I’d never lived with a man, at least not in that way, so I had nothing to compare it with. I assumed it would be more sexual, I guess. It was appropriately sexual. We would shower (not together), brush our teeth (together), and settle into the darkness of our bedroom, where lovemaking would begin with all the trappings of an electrical fire, pops, sparks, flames. Then a nice amount of snuggling and a mutual roll over, turned from each other, connected at the backs like butterfly wings.
But during the day we hung out and listened to music. We got a record player from the thrift store, an actual record player that played actual records, and albums bought in a thick stack that we did not examine before buying. We spent our off hours laid out on the modest tan shag of the rug and listened to the records in their entirety, no matter how awful they might be. I guess you could say we were lucky for the most part, as many of the albums were well-known and had obviously been well-loved by their previous owners. There was the soundtrack to the movie Hair, and the soundtrack to the movie Grease, the cover of which opened like a yearbook filled with production stills. The Graduate was in there, too, right next to Graceland, and Jackie Wilson singing standards. But also Alvin and the Chipmunks singing the songs of Frank Sinatra, and an audio tie-in of Disney’s The Jungle Book. Those were hard listening, as was the offering from ’80s girl rap super-group J.J. Fad, but we settled in with an obscure collection of R&B covers—Stevie Wonder singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” and, best of all, the Four Tops singing “Walk Away Renée,” which began and ended with surrealism in which you could drown. The beauty of men wearing matching velour suits who did little dance steps and generally went around calling people sugarpie and honeybun singing mournfully about the empty sidewalks of their block not being the same never failed to make me cry, first in a controllable way and then in an ugly, snot-filled way. And when I see the sign that’s marked one-way: That’s how it started. That’s how the fucking song started.
She Came From Beyond! Page 12
