by R. M. Ryan
“I always travel equipped for moments like this. It’s a life of accidents, you know.”
Then we all sat on the bumper of the Ford and bounced it a few times. The two cars, as if done with their business together, pulled apart.
We started south again. The old Ford keep steering to the right, as if the accident had frightened it and now it wanted off the road.
At a gas station outside of Keokuk, just before we left Iowa, my uncle answered the phone at our house.
“Hi, Uncle Gene,” I said. “I’m calling about this school civil rights trip.”
He heard me out and then said, “Your father’s just been diagnosed with lung cancer. You don’t have time for civil rights.”
When I walked back to the old Ford, I suddenly saw the whole scene—Dr. Stone, Steve Unger, the old Ford, and all the rest—behind a cloudy scrim. I was on one side, and my old life was on the other. I tried to reach across, but my attempt bounced back, as if I had tried to punch a trampoline. The scrim kept me on my side, all by myself.
I hitchhiked back to my little college. When my ride, a retired farmer, heard about my bad news, he drove me all the way to the campus.
“I’m so sorry,” he said when he let me off.
That was what Jenny said and what my teachers said and what my uncle said when he came to get me.
19.
It was a simple proposition. The doctor told my mother that if he called her an hour into the surgery, the news wouldn’t be good: the tumor would have spread too far, making it inoperable. He would close my father back up. If, on the other hand, he called two or three hours after the surgery began, why, then—then my father had a fighting chance. The doctor would dig the cancer out of his lungs.
I can see my mother in the kitchen the morning of the surgery, wearing an apron and a new dress, baking banana bread and doing dishes, as if becoming a perfect housewife would help my father’s chances. My brother is playing with sticks.
The truth is, my mother hardly ever wore an apron or a new dress. Dressed in an old housecoat with a washed-out design that looked like the memory of green-stemmed irises with purple blooms, she liked to sit at the kitchen table smoking Larks and discussing how the family fortune had been lost. She let the dishes pile up. She was really an intellectual who’d been trapped by family life. She’d written a novel—typed it on four-by-six-inch notebook paper and kept it in her little University of Iowa three-ring binder. When I was three or four, I scribbled drawings on the back of her work with my set of giant Crayola crayons, and then the notebook disappeared. She probably threw it away.
Ring. The sound of the phone came an hour into my mother’s kitchen chores. After that abrupt first ring, time slowed down. A second seemed to take an hour. The second ring went on forever, its sound broken into separate, jangling tremors, each one of them draining color from my mother’s face, as if a faucet slowly closed, turning off her supply of blood.
My brother came over and stood beside me. He held my hand.
“It’s probably my friend Brian Jeffrey,” I said.
In slow motion, each step covering an infinity of ground in an infinity of time, I went to answer the phone, which was in its own little nook built into the wall, with a dark wood shelf and a dark wood panel underneath that hid the connector for the wires. That nook was one of the few elegant touches in our tiny house.
My mother stands frozen in the kitchen, moving so slowly, as if through the slurry of partly frozen water.
“Hello,” I say, picking up the receiver.
The center of the phone dial has our phone number. It begins PL in oversized letters. The beginning of Pleasant. PL8-7810 is the whole number. When I was little, you didn’t have to dial it all—just 7810 was enough. Then it became 8-7810. By the time my father was sick, it was 758-7810. I look at those numbers as if they somehow will save my dad.
“Is Mrs. Ryan there?”
“Who’s calling?”
“Dr. Chen.”
Yes, Janesville’s first Chinese doctor, back there in 1965. I hold the phone out toward my mother in the kitchen. She steps toward me, the film in frame-by-frame slow motion. When I hand her the phone, she drops it, and it spins on the floor, like the turning arrow on Wheel of Fortune, pointing at me, my mother, nothing.
“Yes? Oh, I see,” my mother says after she picks up the phone. “Yes. Of course. Right away. Yes. Yes.”
My mother is taking off her apron as she speaks. She looks at her shoes.
“Right away. Yes. Yes.”
She hangs up and stares off into space.
“How is he?” I ask. “How’d the surgery go?”
“We’ve got to leave now,” she says. “Be there when he wakes up.”
She wants to drive, and I let her, even though I haven’t passed up a chance to drive a car since I got my driver’s license.
Traveling Milton Avenue to the Main Street Bridge, we pass through downtown. The stores have been there forever, I think. Forever. Time slows again . . . slower and slower the stores go by. They never change. They’ll never go away, will they? Not the Clark gas station with its little plaque—On this spot in 1898, Carrie Jacobs Bond wrote “I Love You Truly.” Not Harrison Chevrolet, Wisconsin Bell, Woolworth’s . . . slowly, slowly going by. My mother bent over the steering wheel, looking straight ahead, hypnotized by the vaporous draw of an opaque future.
“Where’s my watch?” my dad says when he wakes up. “What time is it? Did he get it all?”
“There, there, Earl,” my mother says. A nurse propels the gurney my father’s lying on through the warren of hallways in the basement of Mercy Hospital. My mother and I trot beside it, trying to keep up. My mother tries to hold my father’s hand as we move along, but the nurse keeps pushing him out ahead of us, as if my father is on his way to an urgent meeting somewhere. A second nurse trots along with an IV on wheels. Its tube is hooked to my father’s arm. A clear plastic bag sits on the end of his bed, holding dark blood and tissue, the black, oozing detritus of his surgery.
“It’s kind of early, isn’t it?” my father asks the world, the heavens over him.
I look over at my father. He has fat tears in his eyes. Since he’s lying down, they don’t drain away. He shakes his head. “No.” He seems to be mouthing the word, “No.” His mouth quivers with his silent crying. My mother pats his hands as she trots along, saying, “There, there,” over and over. My father sobs, gagging on his tears.
20.
Time passed in a dream. Days, I worked in the Janesville Chevrolet assembly plant, earning money to pay for my last years of college. Nights and weekends, I took care of my father.
He never had a chance. He had barely recovered from the surgery when the cancer got him in its final grip. It squeezed the flesh right out of him. He must have lost a pound a day until, by early June, he looked like one of those who’s barely survived a concentration camp. He was all bones and tendons and ligaments. His skin hung like a loose-fitting costume over the wires and pulleys of his skeletal system.
We all tried to hope, but the disease just took everything out of him. His head was just this skull with giant eyes on his scrawny body.
We decided to take care of him at home and moved a hospital bed into my bedroom, which had slightly more room than his. By July the cancer was painful, and the doctor showed me how to give him shots of morphine. Even with this instruction, I sometimes missed the vein and hit the bone in his skinny arm or leg, and he whimpered, his large eyes tearing up with love and pity and pain.
He leaned on me as we walked to the bathroom. I could feel his joints rubbing together in his diminished body. I fed him and bathed him and, every couple of days shaved him. Pretty soon, he didn’t have the strength to walk, and I reached beneath his body and lifted him out of bed for his trips to the bathroom. He was light to carry. His body felt as though it were made of papier-mâché. The joints in his hips and knees looked huge next to his wasted legs and torso.
These were intimate
moments; I’d never been so close to my father. I could have learned so much, but you know what?—I was embarrassed. He creeped me out. He frightened me. His breath smelled rotten, and his face was sunken because he’d quit wearing his tooth bridge. When I carried him, his limp body felt as though it were made out of rubber hoses. I looked at him in horror. I could hardly bear to touch him, afraid that this fierce disease would somehow rub off on me. Never, ever would I be like that, I vowed.
I wanted to be out with my friends drinking beer and howling at the night. I wanted to sit in parked cars with girls, kissing them and feeling their breasts flop loose from their brassieres. But no, I had chores. In the evening, when I got home from work, I had to take care of my dad, while my mother, exhausted from being with him all day, sat downstairs in the living room watching television and smoking and drinking coffee.
I sat inches away from my father’s gaunt and yellowed face, pulling his razor through the lather on his sunken cheeks. At first we talked, but then he stared at me as if I were a stranger.
He was like a man slipping down the face of a mountain. I tried to stop his fall, but I could just feel his touch as he slid out of my hands, see the stunned terror in his eyes as he slid farther and farther away.
Every morning I drove off to the Chevrolet assembly plant, where I stood on a riser made of steel grating. I wore a heavy rubber apron and stiff, unwieldy rubber gloves and washed down the passing bodies of Chevy Biscaynes, Bel Airs, and Impalas with dry cleaning fluid so they’d be free of dirt and dust when they went into the spray-paint booth. One primergray-covered automobile body a minute jerked by on the squeaking and clanking assembly line.
Arch McConnell, my coworker, caught fire one afternoon. Or the naphtha fumes did. He stood there with his arms out in flames, the fire burning a few inches all around his body, fueled by the chemical fumes. He looked like the painting of Blake’s Glad Day.
“The fuck . . . the fuck . . . the fuck!” Arch screamed.
He wasn’t burned. The fuel somehow protected him; the flames burned a few inches away from his skin and then simply went out.
At the end of my shift, I drove home, listening to WLS in Chicago, where the hit of the summer was “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” by The Rolling Stones.
When my father’s bowel movements turned black from internal hemorrhaging, we took him to the hospital. The cancer was now eating through his guts. Just before he died, he looked up at the crucifix on the wall of the Catholic hospital and announced, “That’s Don Quixote.”
My father—incomprehensible as the coordinates he left in his surveyor’s notebook—must have known something about Cervantes. And yet he hardly ever read and was not, as far as I knew, a literary man, and I have puzzled over his remark for years. It was so far from what he seemed to know and said so close to his death that his announcement seemed to contain knowledge from beyond the grave.
My father died on July 23rd, 1965, the day after my twentieth birthday. On one day, I left my teenage years behind and on the next I lost my father. The last sight I had of him he was a yellow-green corpse with a slight smile on his face, as if Don Quixote had finally told him the punch line to a joke.
“Daddy dead,” my brother said when we told him the next morning. “Daddy dead?”
As if he couldn’t quite grasp what we were telling him.
Gary, my brother, died almost exactly a year later in 1966, as if he wanted to search for my father.
After we put my father’s hospital bed in my room, I moved into his room. I hung my clothes in his closet and slept in his bed. I felt as though I was somehow impersonating him, trying to live in a space that was properly his.
On Saturdays and Sundays, I would quietly go there and try on his clothes, which were exactly my size. They didn’t quite fit me, though. The wrinkles and the break points of the fabric were suited to his body, not mine, and the clothes hung on me with the memory of someone else.
The day after my father died, I was so depressed and anxious that I walked quietly upstairs, went into his room, closed the door, and lay on his bed. Even after a month of sleeping there, the smell of the bed, of the pillow, even of the room itself were foreign to me. I lay there that day, rubbing my genitals, and then began masturbating with a furious energy and suddenly was looking up through my tightly closed eyes at the heavens and in a hole between the clouds I could see the faces of the dead I knew—two of my four grandparents and my father. They stared at me, as if they’d opened up a manhole cover in the streets of heaven and now looked down at the subterranean world of the earth below and into the house at 863 East Memorial Drive, where I lay rubbing my cock.
I was so surprised that my left hand stopped its flurried up and down stroking. I let go, and my erect penis waved back and forth as if greeting them.
“Damn,” I said aloud, embarrassed, like a kid who’s been caught. Then I got annoyed. I wasn’t going to give up this therapeutic pleasure.
After a moment, I looked up at them in my dream.
“Get used to it,” I said. “Just go on and get used to it. You’re going to see this every day I’m alive.”
The little halo of their faces vanished.
21.
In the fall of 1965, I went back to college covered by the gauzy folds of my grief. Jenny and I went on dates and held hands as we walked around campus, but I felt as though I was an actor in the staged version of Rick Ryan, reading someone else’s lines. Only when Jenny sang some of the folk songs with the anguish of their terrible solitude did the inmost core of my soul reply.
Four strong winds that blow lonely . . .
I’ll look for you if I’m ever back this way.
“What ever happened to Eurydice? Who remembers Eurydice?” a professor asked in one of my English literature classes. “The precious stone of her life lost, tumbling down and down. Lost. Irretrievably lost.”
One strange little bright spot that fall was the Student Talent Show. My God, were we ever so innocent that we put on a talent show? Is it possible, living as we did in the eddying streams of irony, that we could take a skinny white boy with an unbuttoned button-down shirt singing “Ol’ Man River” seriously? Or how about the pale girl singing “The hills are alive with the sound of music,” her fingers grappling with the air in front of her as if she were turning knobs the audience couldn’t see. Or maybe this was the beginning of irony—as we recognized how talentless most of us really were, maybe this was the moment when we decided to make fun of everything. Maybe this was the moment when irony became the only value.
But here came this mop-headed boy, his hair dark brown and his grin infectious, playing the Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass song, “The Lonely Bull,” bending into the notes as if looking for the air of his music in every nook of his body. What pleasure he got from our applause and look at how he spun the trumpet like a six-shooter and then blew across the mouthpiece. A gunfighter, finishing up after shooting. Grimes Poznik, the new gun in town.
22.
By the end of 1965, there were 184,000 American troops in Vietnam, and men were being drafted at the rate of 40,000 a month. But I didn’t know any of that then. I don’t think I was paying attention.
I don’t think I’d recovered yet from the death of my father—maybe, in fact, I’ve never recovered. I remember walking around in a haze most of the time, only half hearing what my professors and my friends said.
Somewhere in that haze I heard myself asking Jenny to marry me. I thought she could save me from the iron loneliness of my life.
It was a sweet dream, our getting married was. We planned the date for the end of 1967, when, we were sure, the war in Vietnam would be over and the future would be filled with radiant possibilities.
“Are you kidding?” Steve Unger said. “The war’s never going to end. It’s getting more dangerous every day. I’m quitting school now so they can draft me. It’ll be worse than ever in two years.”
“That’s crazy.”
“What—you
think you’ll escape? We’re all going in the army. I just want to get it over with. Get on with my life.”
The last I saw of Steve, he was slouched on a bench in the waiting room of the Greyhound Bus Terminal, cradling his guitar, strumming “It Ain’t Me, Babe.”
Later, somebody heard that Steve was drafted and sent to Vietnam. Someone else said he was performing in a Boston coffeehouse. We also heard that he was a drifter—homeless and living on the streets in Minneapolis. He’d been seen wearing a thin nylon jacket in the middle of winter on a street corner begging, his hands shaking so badly he couldn’t hold the change people gave him.
Grimes Poznik kept playing. He played everywhere. He’d sit on tree limbs, pop out of bushes.
“All the world’s my stage, man,” he’d tell you if you asked what he was doing. “I’m giving melodies to the air you breathe.”
You’d be walking along, and he’d jump out from behind an acacia tree to play parts from a Mozart horn concerto. He’d be sitting in the far stall of the men’s room in the commons playing Miles Davis. The muffled tone of his horn echoed through the whole building. How strange those moments were, how they’d catch you, on your way to your bit of business, there’d be Grimes, that slice of hair down over his forehead, bending into the notes of his song, a reverie right through your day.
“I bring you the night; I bring you the day,” he said.
Who could guess that Grimes would die, homeless, of alcohol poisoning, on a street in San Francisco in the harder years that came after the 1960s.
In spring semester of 1966, I took European history with Professor Kleinholder. I remember the day he brought this ancient record player to class. It had a detachable horn on the top and played these thick 78s.
“Ja, Ja,” he said as he put the contraption together. “I am very interested in this American business of powdered foods, of taking water out of things. I think this is how history is— little shiny crystals, and we must put them in water, return them to the life they once had. Here is such a crystal from the past.”
