Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails

by Anthony Swofford

  No, that doesn’t work either. The only thing that works is this: my father was a coward. And so was I.

  By the time we returned to Jeff’s house the party had ended and the place was quiet and smelled of the dying: that humid, earthy smell of failing flesh. I went downstairs to apologize to Jeff for missing the party, but he was already so high on morphine he had no idea I was even there.

  A FEW DAYS after Jeff’s funeral Melody called and asked me if I could convince my mother to watch the kids for the night while the two of us went out for dinner. I was leaving the next day and she wanted to talk before I left.

  I dropped my mom off at the house for her babysitting duties. An animated movie of the Disney variety played on the TV. Melody always kept an extremely clean and tidy house, and the death of her husband had not changed this.

  We drove to a strip mall nearby and went to a chain restaurant. Melody ordered a massive drink, a quart of blue liquor, the glass festooned with fruit and umbrellas. Bad pop music blared from scratchy speakers. The server looked at us intently while reading the specials, though there was nothing special about the specials. I’m certain that I ordered enchiladas. I drank one beer. Melody ordered another blue drink, and a playful and mischievous drunkenness descended upon her. I saw why my brother had fallen in love with her.

  She told me stories about the years they lived in Munich. She talked about how sexy they had both been. They were gym rats, and everyone on base envied their bodies. Even after children, she said, they still had a sex life.

  “Even when we fought,” she said, “even then, we made sure to keep up a sex life. It’s important.”

  I didn’t want to hear my brother’s widow talk about their sex life. I changed the subject to the children, or the weather. But she kept coming back to sex.

  “God, he was a great lover. If it’s there, you think it will always be there. And then he got sick. And it was gone. Like that, in a day, gone. At first we tried some things. Alternate things. At one meeting for cancer spouses they even had a pamphlet for it. Cancer sex. Can you believe it?”

  She slapped the table hard enough to tilt and spill her drink a bit, the blue liquor cresting the levee of the glass.

  “But that didn’t work. I won’t lie. I thought about other men. But I never did anything. A few men from the church made advances, but I pushed them away.”

  This got my attention: some dirtbag hit on my dying brother’s wife? Where was he? I’d kill the bastard.

  “Once.” She paused. “I shouldn’t say this. But once I thought of you. It seemed—it seemed normal. My dying husband’s little brother. Isn’t that how they used to do things?”

  I didn’t know if I had heard her correctly. Had she just said that she had thought of sex with me and that it had seemed normal? That was not normal. My brother’s ashes weren’t even in the ground. None of this was normal.

  The waiter approached and she motioned for another round of drinks.

  “Melody,” I said. “You’ve had two huge drinks. That’s probably enough. Let’s get the check.”

  “I don’t want the check. I want another drink! My husband is dead and I want another drink!”

  Some heads turned and looked our way.

  “OK,” I said. “Have another. I just. I don’t know what to say. I really don’t.”

  “You’re such a child,” she said. “You will always be the baby. Your brother is dead but you are still the baby boy. As long as your father is alive you are the baby boy.”

  She told me that for many years she had thought the demons visited upon my brother by my father would never dissipate, but that they finally had when Christian was born.

  “One child,” she said, “was not enough for your brother to get out from under the sway of your father. But Christian did it. Christian was the magic bullet. Suddenly your father no longer haunted him. They became friends. I couldn’t believe it.”

  She pulled a box from her purse.

  “Here, it’s Jeff’s watch. It’s a cheap thing. But take it. Keep it. And I still want you to take the pistol. Give it to Christian when he’s eighteen. Will you do that?”

  “I’ll do whatever you ask.” I’d do anything to get out of the booth, out of the restaurant, out of this time zone.

  “Tell me about when you had sex with that girl in Jeff’s room.”

  Melody had once chased Iris out of the house. It was the first night we’d slept together, the first time I’d come out to visit Jeff after his diagnosis. We’d parked her jalopy in the driveway and it leaked oil all over Jeff’s pristine concrete. He’d been pissed. Melody had kicked at the locked bedroom door and told me to get the girl out of the house. We’d sneaked out the back and later in the day I’d spent hours washing the oil stain from the driveway.

  “I saw you come home late with her that night last week. I saw you sneak around the back.”

  “Yes. I snuck her in. I had sex with her on the floor of Jeff’s room.”

  She slapped the table again, harder. “I told your mother. I’ll tell everyone in the family. They’ll think you’re sick.”

  “Maybe I am.”

  I’d been caught. But I didn’t believe that she had told my mother or that she would tell anyone else. It wasn’t her style. Melody liked owning secrets.

  “Did he watch?” she asked.

  “I don’t want to talk about this. That was between Jeff and me. Maybe it was wrong. I don’t know.”

  “Yes. It was wrong.”

  She finished her drink and I paid the bill.

  I drove toward their subdivision.

  “Let’s get another drink somewhere,” she said.

  “I need to grab my mother and get back to Granny’s and sleep. I have an early flight and I have to work at the warehouse tomorrow night. I’m already two over my grief days.”

  “How much do they pay you for a grief day?”

  “It’s normal pay,” I said.

  I realized she was toying with me.

  “Use your grief pay to buy me another drink. I need a grief drink. I need to feel normal!” she screamed.

  I continued toward their subdivision. As I pulled into the settlement Melody put her hand on my thigh and said, “Take me into the woods. Like your brother would have.”

  I slowed the car down. I felt a hollow sickness in my stomach, the vomitous stirring of my insides. I started to sweat and my field of vision sank down to a tunnel, straight ahead.

  She said, “You can’t. You’re not a man like your brother. You are still a boy. But you want to. I saw the way you used to look at me when I first married Jeff. I caught you once, playing in our laundry at your parents’ house, looking at my underwear.”

  This could very well have been true but I didn’t remember it.

  I said, “I was fourteen years old. I looked at any pretty woman that way. It’s called puberty.”

  “Your brother would laugh at you, just laugh. He said you’d never get laid, what a sad case. Your mommy still cut your hair. You were such a dorky kid. We had a bet. He thought you’d be a virgin until you turned thirty. You’re a boy. Still a baby boy.”

  I pulled into the driveway and turned off the car.

  I said, “Mel, I’m going to go upstairs and sit with my mom and your children. I’m going to sit there for as long as you need. You stay here in the car. You think about Jeff. You think about your children. Think about yourself. We’ll be up there playing games and laughing. You just sit here, and think about what you need from life. And I’ll be upstairs with my mother and the kids. And when you want to join us, come on up.”

  Half an hour later she walked in the door.

  Christian asked, “Mommy, where were you?”

  “I just went for a walk, honey. I needed a walk. Did you have fun with Grandma and Uncle Tony?”

  ON MY WAY to the airport I swung by the cemetery. There were already two Swofford men buried here, my grandfather and my uncle. I didn’t know when they were going to inter Jeff. The Swo
fford plot was at the top of the hill, at the deep right curve of the horseshoe drive. I knew its position well. When I was a boy, every time we visited Georgia my father took us to look at his brother’s headstone. I could find my way there in the dark.

  As I banked toward the plots I saw two cemetery workers in the Swofford grounds. One man leaned against a shovel and another man sat atop a small backhoe, working the blade into the earth, working out the dirt, making way for my brother’s ashes.

  YEARS LATER, WHEN I begin to try to write about my brother I sort through boxes of notes, years of notes and photographs. I find an official Army portrait of my brother when he must have been going for a promotion. He’s thirty or so and handsome in his rugged tough-guy-soldier way.

  I find my DD-214, the military discharge, and also the DD-214s of my brother and father. And I find a note in my mother’s perfect cursive script. The word Jeff. The words Nurses Station. And a phone number. I call the number. It is the VA hospital in Nashville. They instruct the caller to call the VA’s 888 suicide hotline number if it is an emergency.

  Well, is it?

  5

  Letter from My Father

  On October 10, 2006, my father mailed to me a nine-page handwritten letter postmarked Sacramento, CA. The missives are dated July 06; August 06; August 10-06; Sun, August 13, 2006 (a day after my thirty-sixth birthday); Oct 4, 2006; Oct 8, 2006. All the entries but the last are written on one side of college-lined white paper with one-inch margins and three-ring holes. The last entry is written on the back of the eighth page: at two and a half lines it is the shortest of the lot, a haiku of the epistolary fistfight:

  I have sat on this for much too long. The more I sit the longer it grows. It is well past time to shred or mail. So mail here it comes.

  With Love,

  Your Father

  With sickening clarity I remember removing this letter from my mailbox. It must have been the thirteenth or fourteenth of October. I’d had dinner at the apartment of my best friend, more a brother than a friend. Let’s say we’d eaten delivery of some pan-Asian sort, the kind readily available in Midtown. Once their two kids had gone to bed after fighting the sleep demons for a while, Oren and Yael and I would have stayed up for an hour or so talking and drinking more wine, listening to music, getting drunk but not wasted, just drunk enough for a weekend night when the next day everyone had work to do.

  Yael would have retired first, probably to sleep for a while with one of the restless children.

  I would have sought Oren’s counsel on the matter of my deteriorating relationship with Ava. We’d recently taken a number of breaks, meaning we’d cheated extensively on each other. From early on Oren had told me to leave her and he would have done the same thing again tonight. “Nothing good can come of this” is a typical Oren comment about my relationship with Ava. “Don’t you want a family and real love?” Yes, I wanted a family and real love; yes, I needed to leave Ava in order to have a family and real love.

  I walked home that night, twenty-seven blocks south and nine avenues west, a short city walk. At a bar or two along the way I beat the temptations of drink and women and kept on toward home. I called Ava and she didn’t pick up. I guessed she was in a dank bar in the East Village, snorting cocaine in the bathroom with a man she’d just met. I knew the bar and the bathroom, but not the man.

  I entered my building and checked my mail for the first time that week. I sifted through the various generic mailers and the other waste, tossed it in the recycling bin, and found among the remaining envelopes a thickish cream-colored one adorned with my father’s recognizable steep script.

  I thought, This is the letter you’ve been waiting for.

  My father wrote a curse letter to my brother when Jeff was twenty-three. When Jeff died twelve years later my younger sister found it among his effects, in a binder, in protective wrapping. She and I read the letter together and wept.

  We wept for our brother, our father, the death of our family, and the calamity in script we were experiencing, the father killing his son, the father backing his son against the stone firing wall.

  In his memoirs Elias Canetti writes that the most awful thing a father can do is curse his son. Cursing a son is an invitation to the destruction of the family. Canetti’s grandfather cursed his father and shortly after his father, a young and prosperous businessman, fell dead at the table.

  SO WHEN I held the envelope in my hand, kind of drunk, rather heartbroken over a beautiful and fucked-up woman, thirty-six and alone in New York City, I knew these pages contained a curse from my father. I put the letter, unopened, in my top desk drawer.

  AND ONE NIGHT a few weeks later I opened it.

  Dear Tony,

  July 06 [2006]

  I write this because your schedule makes it impossible to have a sit down conversation or a meaningful telephone conversation. There are a couple of reasons why I am reluctant to do this. First it is the type of thing I think should be discussed in person rather than one-way communication. Secondly if you decide to save it—years from now someone may find and read it—assume it is something; it is not. Just as you assumed my letter to Jeff was my reply to his attorney letter. I have never seen that letter. I gave you a pass on that. The divorce was between your mom and me. I tried to keep you kids out of it. Some way you and Jeff got involved but not by my doing. Had you wanted to know—? Why the letter—? Why not ask?

  My father is correct that at this point in my life my schedule made it tough for me to have a sit-down conversation. I lived in New York and he lived in California and I traveled often. And I was loath to have an important conversation about our relationship and my childhood over the phone. A friend of mine had recently been in therapy with her father in California, and I had for many months considered offering this option to my father: I’d fly out to California twice a month and we could sit with a psychotherapist to try to figure it out. But I spent enough time with my own therapist talking about my father that to add two more sessions a month might well have killed me. And my father is not exactly the therapy type.

  The “attorney letter” he speaks of is a letter that my brother wrote to my mother’s attorney that was put forth for the record in their divorce, wherein my brother outlined the various ways in which my father was verbally and occasionally physically abusive to his children, mostly my older brother and sister. I can’t imagine that my father never saw this letter, and in fact in the letter he wrote to Jeff he referenced it. In return for this letter my father sent my older brother a scathing letter attacking his character and his manhood and challenging him to a physical fight.

  The Cub/Boy scout thing was the first week or the first and second week. To that time you had only had overnight and weekend visits with buddies, a week would be your longest time away from home. This being your first summer camp I was sure you would be ready to leave after the first week. I explained it would be better to plan for two weeks the following year, which did not make it into your book. But you the big tough guy insisted on two weeks. I would have been an asshole to keep you from going two weeks. Turns out I was an asshole after all, trying to teach my young son that mature people keep their word or if not take responsibility for the convenience it cost others.

  This camp episode is addressed in my first book. I wanked out of Boy Scout camp a week early and my father insisted I repay him for the second week that I missed. I hated camp. I couldn’t tie knots, I was horrible at fishing, I had no friends, and I couldn’t, for the life of me, get my hands around that greased-down watermelon as it floated atop the pristine High Sierra lake.

  I missed my mother. Of course I came home early. So he was right. And maybe, years later, I was being a little punk to complain in writing about having had to repay him. But should twelve-year-olds be taught about maturity? Shouldn’t they just be welcomed home and given another chance the next year, no questions asked? Perhaps a father should offer a model of maturity rather than a lecture on maturity? If life is all lesson
s, when the hell is a kid supposed to have fun?

  But you the big tough guy. My father wastes no time getting straight to the gut shots and questions of manhood, even mocking the twelve-year-old me.

  So, he seems to be saying, you thought you were so tough when you were twelve, and how about now? I’ve got this pen in my hand, writer boy, and I’m going to kick your ass with it.

  In fact I hadn’t thought I was tough: I had thought I was a weak, cowardly little boy and my father was more than happy to support me in this conclusion.

  He doesn’t even suggest that a reason he may have wanted me to go for just one week was that he would have missed me. But maybe he wouldn’t have missed me at all.

  My friend Oren is a wreck when his kids are at camp. He can’t sleep. He calls it abnormal. He says, “You have children so they sleep under your roof, not to send them away to camp.” If my father had similar feelings, he might have just told me.

  There are other things you wrote that did not happen and others much different than the way you remember. Friends and family have inquired and said I must have been a real bastard. Which put me in the awkward position of explaining various parts of your book. Some of which I failed to recall, requiring a return read of the subject, which at times made me think you intentionally portrayed me as a “real bastard.” You get a pass on that.