Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails

by Anthony Swofford

  I’m certain my father intended to perform repairs on his house with the proceeds from those loans. One night over Mexican food he drew on his napkin plans for attaching a second story, a penthouse of sorts that he planned to rent to businessmen. I’d grown up hearing my father’s remodeling and adding-on fantasies, and sometimes they came true: on Vale Drive in Carmichael he added fifteen hundred square feet to the house one year—two bedrooms, a bathroom, and a family room. My mother dubbed our home in Tachikawa, Japan, the Winchester Mystery House: every few months my father would knock down a wall and build out another room or hallway. But usually his large-format plans remained mere fantasy.

  Here in Fairfield he had replaced a toilet in the spare bathroom, and he ripped up the bathroom floor and he paid some day laborers to install a new bath and shower stall and a vanity.

  A few moments after I arrived for this visit I made the mistake of stepping into the second bathroom to take a leak and I almost fell through the framing to the earth below. I looked at the disused bathroom, the manufacturer’s labels still attached to the toilet and the vanity and the shower kit. My father had told me about this remodel months before. It’s the kind of project that, when I was a kid, he would have banged out over a weekend.

  On a Friday night he said to my mother, “Hey, Momma, how about we redo the kids’ bathroom?” After Dallas he retreated to his office and drew plans. I helped out with some measurements. He awoke me early in the morning and I joined him on the materials run to Lumberjack.

  The wet, woodsy, and thick smell of lumber and the pungent metallic bouquet of a box of nails will always bring forth for me the image of my father with a hammer in his hand, ready to build.

  We bought everything he needed to redo the entire bathroom: toilet, vanity, shower kit, tile and grout, mirror, and medicine chest. We ripped the bathroom apart with hammers and crowbars and then began the rebirth. By noon on Sunday my father was on his hands and knees, installing the tile. It was beautiful tile, Moorish in design. He skipped dinner. By the time Andy Rooney wrapped up 60 Minutes my father had completed the bathroom redo. He was a master craftsman. That bathroom is where a few years later I would hide the major volumes of my pornography stash and do most of the masturbating of my teen years. I can never look at Moorish tile and not think of that bathroom and the thousands of hours I spent on my back on that cold tile floor masturbating to Ginger Lynn and cheerleaders and other girls I’d never have.

  And here in Fairfield his bathroom had no floor. That my master-craftsman father had neither the strength nor the desire to finish the job distressed me. In fact it shamed me. Shouldn’t I complete the work for him? I am the son that the master craftsman raised—shouldn’t I have the skills to pick up my father’s tools and finish the job? I am nearly the same age he was the weekend he refinished my boyhood bathroom. If I were a complete man, I’d pick up my father’s tools and finish the job for him. But I am not a complete man. Once I sanded and painted a café tabletop two feet in diameter for the small terrace of my Manhattan apartment. That is the extent of my building experience in the past few decades.

  I say to my father, “Dad, do you need a hand finishing up that bathroom? We have a few days before we leave for Aspen. If you’ve got the energy, you can supervise and I’ll do the work.”

  He looks at me and laughs. “Ah, Tone, you used to be my best helper when you were a boy. But you got those soft writer hands now. I’ll pick up some guys at the Home Depot and have them finish the job.”

  I wanted nothing more than to help my father finish his bathroom remodel. But I didn’t push the issue.

  My father had no energy for dinner out so I left him alone at his kitchen table and he listened to KGO on the radio.

  There was not much to do in Fairfield. I went to a coffee shop and got online and tracked down a high school buddy who had been living nearby in Alameda for a few years. I finagled an invitation for tacos with his family that night.

  I knew the East Bay freeways like the back of my hand. When I’d lived in Oakland for a lonely year after my divorce I spent many nights driving the 580 and the 880. There were two women I regularly slept with, Marin County and the counter girl from my optician, freeway-close the both of them. The Mercedes 320 had been an old man’s car but still sleek and fast enough as I raced my libido around the East Bay trying to forget Sarah.

  I PULLED UP to Danny’s house in Alameda. Christa was home in New York, fourteen weeks pregnant, and Danny, a kid I had looked up to and admired all through high school, greeted me at the door, his wife and two daughters behind him, smiling.

  Their condominium was piled high with the matériel of raising children: plastic jungle gym and play kitchen and bouncy chairs, dolls and books and dolls and toys that made noise. Danny opened his arms and took me in for a big hug—he was a heavyweight wrestler in high school, I wrestled 154s. He might have crushed a few of my ribs, but that was fine.

  I had last seen him a few years before in LA. He’d drunk ginger ale and taken me around to music venues and later for chicken and waffles at Roscoe’s. I’d met his wife briefly, but never his two daughters.

  Danny prepared the taco meat and I drained a few beers while his daughters worked on homework at the dining table. I was forty years old and most of my cohorts had been at this parenthood game for a number of years, but my new wife was pregnant with our first child. This life Danny lived seemed like a television show I’d seen dozens of times, reels from a lifestyle I might never attain: Lifestyles of the Happy and Stable.

  As Danny cut and then cooked steak he fielded his daughters’ questions on California history and math. He interrogated them. A teacher himself, he wasn’t about to feed the answers to the kids, no matter how sweetly they asked. A few important homework matters were settled, and we sat for dinner.

  I remember that his girls were polite at the table, and that there was much laughter, and a lightheartedness that my childhood family table rarely achieved. Mother and father kidding with the children, the children kidding back. None of this was a show for me, the stranger. I ate too many tacos. I didn’t want the fun to end. The girls were sent off to ready themselves for bed, and Danny and I headed out for a drink.

  For Danny and his family I’d joined them for Tuesday Taco Night, no big deal, tacos, homework, and baths, but to me their routine resonated: This happy life is possible.

  At the bar in town Danny had a ginger ale and I took a Manhattan. He was excited about the imminent birth of my daughter.

  I said, “You have a beautiful family.”

  He said, “Growing up my family life was kind of a mess. I thought happy families happened elsewhere. But they happen wherever people want them to happen. My wife and I, we want a happy family, so we will have it, at all costs.”

  “It can’t be that simple,” I said.

  “Dude. Christa will have your baby and then you will have the knowledge. Capital K. You will see that baby girl and you will understand. Capital U. And you will know it is that simple. You know how men fuck up their families? With their dicks! You’ve had your fun, motherfucker! Where’d it get you? Last summer you were living alone in a cabin in the Catskills!”

  “That was my choice,” I said.

  “Don’t tell me you wanted to be there.”

  “I needed to live there. I nearly killed myself in the city.”

  “You spent nearly an entire decade living the life!”

  “You flatter me. You don’t want to know how many nights I spent alone, and how many mornings I awoke, staring at the Empire State Building from my bed, thinking about what an awesome height that would be from which to jump.”

  “But you didn’t jump! You wanted a wife to love and a baby. And you found the right woman. Just in time. She will have your baby daughter and you will have the knowledge. Someday you’ll tell me I was right about how simple it all became.”

  I dropped Danny at home and headed back toward my father’s house in Fairfield. I got lost trying to find my
way out of Alameda, and before finding the freeway I drove around the island for twenty minutes, at the posted speed limit of twenty-five. I inspected the neighborhoods. Many of the homes were grand, and if they were not grand they were modest in an orderly and respectable way. A man raising his family here in Alameda would feel safe and responsible. Simply driving the roads made me feel like a respected member of society.

  IN THE MORNING I awoke on my father’s couch with an aching back and the unshakable need to hold my wife. She’d flown home from our LA vacation four days earlier. Since our third date we’d never spent more than a few nights apart. I felt like a schoolboy separated from his summer camp love. In every other relationship I’d ever been in, other than my first marriage, this kind of distance and time away from the lover would have meant that I would be waking up with some other woman and telling the girlfriend lies about where I was and where I was going, what that noise in the background was, and even which continent I’d called from.

  What a pleasure to wake up at seven a.m., sober, and to call my wife in New York and tell her Hello, and Good morning, and I love you, and to tell her that my back hurt from sleeping on my dad’s shitty couch. We checked in about our day, the POD, we called it, military jargon, the Plan of the Day. I told her that today finally my father and I planned to depart. He’d put our departure date off a few times, but the day before, his fresh oxygen supply had arrived and he had no more excuses. And if we didn’t leave sometime today I’d have to cancel the driving portion of the trip altogether and fly to Aspen alone in order to attend the disabled veterans’ sports clinic.

  We talked about the baby in her womb. We’d been calling her the Baby Animal. The Baby Animal is hungry. The Baby Animal wants to disco. The Baby Animal wants to hear her favorite Wallace Stevens poems before she goes to bed.

  I said, “I love you, sweetheart, and I love the Baby Animal. I’ll call you from the road. Goodbye.”

  THE OTHER BIG RV trips had ended with me seriously considering patricide. Why on Earth would this trip be any different? The elevation? Why another trip at all? It was true I needed to be in Aspen to teach a writing class to injured veterans, but I could’ve flown. None of the other RV trips had accomplished what they were supposed to: the Reconciliation—an unbreakable bond between father and son, bygones becoming bygones. The stakes were higher than during last year’s trip because with my father the stakes increased every day his lung capacity decreased.

  He always played his medical cards close to his chest, but with enough reading about his disease, and the right laser-accurate questions, I surmised that his lungs were at 20 to 25 percent capacity, meaning that while most healthy breathers inspired and expired 150 milliliters of air per breath, what is called tidal volume, my father subsisted on about thirty milliliters. If my father challenged an Olympic sprinter to a fifty-yard dash it would be like a drag race between a 1970 riding lawn mower and a 2011 Ferrari.

  My father sat at his dining room table and tuned up his lungs: the terrible coughing, the inhaled medicines, the gurgling and spitting, the very prolonged and agonizing sound of his lungs opening for partial business.

  I loaded the RV with my suitcase and his clothing, and some of the prepared foods he subsists on: microwavable food-like items such as shells and cheese, and chili, and dry items like crackers with peanut butter paste and sweet buns. What exactly are sweet buns? I wondered. After reading the ingredients I decided it’s better not to know.

  As befits a former Southern Baptist turned lapsed Catholic, my father liked his rituals. He also respected machines and the process of prepping the machine. This machine, this massive Winnebago, needed a lot of mojo, and oil and fuel, and as far as I could tell from the trips I’d taken with him, an infusion of good luck.

  My father would not allow his Winnebago to budge an inch without preventive maintenance.

  I knew that it drove my father crazy that I was not as attuned as he to the finer mechanical details of the vehicle. He thought of the Winnebago as his castle. After logging in my two thousand plus miles I considered it a dilapidated blue tarp on the fringe of a homeless encampment. It’s true that the beast had cost nearly two hundred thousand dollars. But to me the RV trips seemed like very expensive camping excursions. I’d done the math and we’d have been financially better off in a Prius, stopping every night at a roadside budget motel for a shower and some actual sleep. We could have bunked in the occasional Four Seasons or Ritz and still maintained a tighter budget. But RVs and boats share this: only the owner of the vessel can truly understand its beauty and perfection. And RVs, just like boats, are always breaking down.

  But I needed this trip. I wanted something: I wanted that Reconciliation.

  I began to think of the RV as a truth machine, a narrative machine, like a photo booth but better—a story booth. The story of my father. And I realized that he, too, must feel this way: story equals truth and truth equals forgiveness. Driving along America’s roads on each trip we talked, and our mouths were spades, digging toward truth. He wanted me to forgive him and he wanted to go back to the beginning of time. It was naïve of me not to have recognized that part of my father’s RV dream, his desire for constant motion, was the wish to slow life down inside that machine, to stop time, to stop the decline of his health, to stop his aging, even to stop his own death and the death of his family.

  “Drive faster, drive farther, and you will cure all that ails you,” I can hear him telling himself. And “You might even bring Jeff back to life.”

  He handed me the maintenance list:

  Install and secure oxygen tanks.

  Check engine oil.

  Check coolant level.

  Check transmission fluid level.

  Check water level on house batteries.

  Check house water (shower and toilet).

  Check generator oil (vehicle must be level).

  Install and secure oxygen tanks.

  My father didn’t notice that he’d listed the oxygen tanks twice. If I had needed those things in order to breathe I’d have listed them three times.

  I performed the duties mostly as directed and a few hours later we hit the road. We decided to take the southern route because a storm was heading straight toward the Sierras.

  There is much American romance made of the Road. And I have driven much of that romanticized American Road and I’d say that if you are not on coastal Highway 1 in California, or certain blank desert stretches of Utah, or a length of coast along Biloxi, or certain mountain roads in Colorado and Montana, most of what greets you on American roads is intended to bore you with mind-crushing familiarity.

  Other than about twenty miles of the Tehachapi Pass, where the southern Sierras and the Tehachapi Mountains meet, the distance of road on the southern route between Fairfield, California, and Las Vegas, Nevada, is so boring you must bang your head against your steering wheel in order to remain awake.

  We left Fairfield so late that we arrived at the Tehachapi Pass in darkness. I knew that beyond the windows existed a rather awesome landscape that I’d miss on this trip.

  I was tired, and I said to my father, “I need some jalapeños.”

  “Some what?”

  “If you want me to keep driving I’m going to need some jalapeños to stay awake.”

  “That’s just plain crazy, Tone. Whatever happened to a cup of coffee?”

  “Coffee won’t do it. And I’m nostalgic. It’s how I used to stay awake when heading back to base late at night on a Sunday from a long weekend in Los Angeles.”

  “Well, let’s load up on fuel and jalapeños,” he said.

  We did just that and pushed toward Vegas.

  MANY HOURS LATER as we drove through town and saw the city throwing its garish light against the sky, my dad said, “Vegas. That’s a place where a man can find some trouble.”

  I nodded while doing my best to keep our massive metal coffin on the road. I thought of my week in the hotel suite and the various kinds of trouble and des
truction I had invited along for the party. I shuddered.

  I said, “I came very close to killing myself there once or twice.”

  “How’s that, Tone?” he asked, and sat up in his seat. My father was always game for a good self-destruction story, especially if the self was mine.

  “You don’t need to know. In the same way that I never needed to know about your sexual exploits in Vietnam and Taiwan, you don’t need to know about my adventures in Vegas.”

  “Goddamn, Tone, you brought it up. My son says he almost killed himself somewhere I want to know the story. Ain’t that fair?”

  “I have no idea what is fair and what is not. I don’t care about fair. Fair means nothing.”

  “Hell, what’s the wrong with me trying to live vicariously through my own son? I don’t got the plumbing anymore. You do. You can screw all the gals you want.”

  “No I can’t. Nor do I want to. I’m married.”

  “You got a nice wife, Tone. But you can at least tell your papa some of your old carousing stories. Someday you’ll want to relive them.”

  “You’re wrong. That’s the difference between the two of us.”

  “You like to talk about our differences, don’t you?” he said.

  From the tone of his voice I knew I’d hurt him, and a part of me enjoyed it. I couldn’t beat the old man with my fists but I could rough him up with words.

  He said, “Look in the mirror, Son. There are very few differences between us.”