by Jason Good
“You don’t want to talk about this?” I ask, taking a bite.
“I’m fine talking about it. I just don’t have an opinion.”
I nod.
“Good sandwich, right?”
“Amazing.”
Lesson: “Help him bury his pet.”
Dad’s revision: “But not before it’s dead.”
Train to Wellville
It’s obvious to me now that Dad suspected something was wrong a couple years before his diagnosis. We could all see it: he started looking old and frail. Nearly all of us experience a discernible moment when a parent crosses over to being a senior citizen, but with Dad it was striking and sudden. His posture, though never good, became worse. His skin seemed looser, his face sagged. He’d fall asleep midday regardless of what he’d done or where he was sitting. I was always envious of that part.
Approaching forty, I was already finding it difficult to tell whether an ache, stiff joint, or general malaise was part of the normal aging process or a symptom of imminent organ failure. To solve this same riddle for himself, Dad conducted an experiment.
A year before his diagnosis and a week before he and Mom were scheduled to visit New Jersey, I received a large box from UPS, followed by a text message:
Dad
I’ve been doing yoga and 20 minutes of cardio on the elliptical three times per week. Find a class for us to take in Maplewood.
And then another:
Dad
Did you get the juicer I sent you?
And then an email:
Jace,
Keeping you in the loop. This is what I “juiced” this morning (see pic). I have been on a juice diet for three weeks. I have this or something very much like it every morning before I go to class or to the gym on days I don’t teach. Then I have one light meal, mostly vegetarian, and maybe a snack of peanuts or a hard-boiled egg for protein. I have been doing 30–54 minutes of cardio three or four times a week. This week, I’m gonna go below 200 pounds. I have lots of energy and feel great.
Attached was a lovely, color-enhanced photo of celery, kale, two carrots, a lemon, two pears, three apples, and what appeared to be chard—a meal fit for the zoo’s finest chimpanzee.
As he did with most health-related endeavors, Dad used over-zealousness to thwart any possibility of success. His harried transformation reminded me of an Intervention episode in which an opiate addict erases his dealer’s number after finding out his girlfriend is pregnant. But Dad’s addictions were limited to undercooked pork and Jessica Lange fanporn. Aside from moderate hypertension and a forty-inch waist, he wasn’t in bad shape for a sixty-seven-year-old.
I was pleased to see he’d started taking his health more seriously (and that this effort didn’t include beets), but I also feared the Bay Area might have gotten the best of him. Had he lost our shared disdain for New-Agey lifestyles? Since he hadn’t yet gone gluten-free, or taken up with a free-spirited mistress dressed in Chico’s fall collection, I gave him the benefit of the doubt, and I unpacked the juicer.
Then the morning after their arrival, Dad begged me to go to the gym with him. When I balked, he threatened me.
“Maybe I’ll just go jogging, then. Did you know . . .”
I cut in to finish the story I’d heard dozens of times: “. . . when you were at Ohio Wesleyan you used to run three miles every morning, and once you felt so good that you ran six instead?”
“Fuck you.” He smiled.
“You can’t just start jogging again.”
“Of course I can. What, are my legs going to break?”
“Possibly, yes. Let’s just go to the gym.”
I did not envision us in hooded sweatshirts, punching meat in a freezer, racing up the steps of the courthouse, and ending with a triumphant embrace followed by an awkward smile. I knew at the gym, I’d be more chaperone than “workout buddy.”
Dad’s personality is not that of a typical old person. He watches independent films. He loves Louis CK, and occasionally gets drunk on expensive scotch with people he just met. He might act young, but age is age, so I entered sixty-seven into the dashboard of his elliptical machine, which suggested a maximum heart rate of 135 (a number also reachable via operating a can opener). He was excited that the Yankees were on the TVs in front of us, boasting, “Hell, I could do this for nine innings.” Thirty seconds later, his heart rate was up to 141. We were both wearing headphones, so I motioned for him to lower the resistance on his machine. He didn’t catch on and did a sarcastic hand motion back at me. He lost his balance and nearly fell off.
After composing himself and completing his twenty-minute workout without needing a defibrillator, Dad forgot it was the twenty-first century, and said he wanted to “pump some iron.” He was like a giant baby bird: still fragile but hell-bent on flying.
After doing a few bicep curls with eight-pound baby-blue barbells, his thirst for wellness was still unquenched. “So, did you find a yoga class?” he asked. I had, and I agreed to join him, not only to escape the cacophony of my toddler-ruled home, but also to ensure that Dad didn’t have a stroke. I chose a class at the gym because, while I generally like yoga, I don’t much care for the other people who like it. “Gym yoga,” as the diehards refer to it, isn’t “real yoga,” and real yoga wasn’t something my dad and I were interested in. Or so I thought.
We traded our egos for mats, blocks, straps, and blankets and set up next to each other in the back of the room. After positioning everyone cross-legged to “open our hips,” the instructor led us through a relaxation exercise aimed at “centering our third eye.” I could hear Dad’s open-mouthed inhales and long, purse-lipped exhales—the whole room could. I feared he’d watched “The Art of the Tantric Breath,” or worse, attended a retreat. Had he also been wearing shoes with individual slots for each toe, or a tight tank top made of recycled bamboo, my entire life would have felt like a lie.
Thankfully, there he was in his elastic-ankled gray sweatpants and XL T-shirt, replete with pit stains and a naked pale gut swaying beneath it. For him, yoga clothes were purchased at Costco, along with a Blu-ray player, an eight-pack of pies, and a bladeless fan. Deeper into the class, I found that each time he grabbed me to maintain his balance, or we inadvertently rubbed arms during a shift in poses, his perspiration, like mine, was the temperature of a raw oyster—our bodies always in a hurry to cool down so as to maximize post-workout TV watching. He was still the hilarious, left-wing radical who raised me, only softened. Grandfatherhood had changed him for the better, and I was beaming with pride, love, and anticipation. He was taking care of himself, but I also knew that this train to Wellville would be packed with stories I could use to embarrass him. Neither of us was aware that Dad’s bone marrow was starting to malfunction. After the class, when he said, “I’m feeling great and full of energy,” we both believed it.
When we arrived back home, Dad said it was “juicin’ time”—the kind that requires a lawnmower engine encased in a missile silo to turn celery, kale, chard, and apples into a briny tonic that one is expected to imbibe without weeping. The fancy Jack LaLanne juicer he’d sent us was the size of a European automobile, and along with the ten bags of fruits and vegetables he’d bought at a questionable farmers’ market, the whole shebang took up half our kitchen. If one of the kids wanted toast, he’d have to wait until BooBoo was finished liquefying his horn of plenty.
While pushing the chard, yellow peppers, and God knows what else through the cylinder with an untrimmed stalk of celery, Dad looked over at me in an effort to connect, but I was too busy centering my third eye, trying to psych myself up. The nectar limped, oozed, and plopped into the receptacle, resulting in a quart of algae-colored syrup. Bong water. The executioner’s poison. We clinked our glasses: he in earnest, me sarcastically.
I’m usually annoyed when people claim that food gives them energy. It nurtures the guilt I carry around about my excessive midnight Triscuit eating. But I must admit that this stuff infused me with energy. I
was hungry minutes later, mostly for crackers, but at least I understood the appeal.
In the year between then and his diagnosis, Dad continued to push himself, but his routine changed. He decided that yoga didn’t provide enough cardio (likely just a convenient excuse to stop) and juicing was a pain in the ass (agreed). Of course, he typically followed his juice with a decadent dinner, effectively counteracting any health benefits, anyway. It’s the “I jogged for twenty minutes this morning, so I can spend the rest of the day on the sofa” fallacy.
He kept up his gym regimen, though, training regularly with a “giant Tonganese man” at Bally’s who was “really kicking his ass.”
I imagined Dad, his shoulders hunched, belly rounded, meandering through a sea of soulless Pilates bodies—those 2-percent-body-fat cougars at Bally’s trying to look good enough to throw back a few Jager bombs at Applebee’s with twenty-four-year-old dudes wearing backward baseball hats. I was also worried that his overenthusiastic trainer might hasten Dad’s demise by demanding an excessive number of squats or giving him an overly enthusiastic hug.
After a month with the trainer, Dad had achieved his goal of 199 pounds. But not long thereafter, his health plummeted. “I was having trouble making it through a whole lecture. I figured it was probably anxiety over the kidney stone,” he told me. After having some blood work done as part of that kidney-stone procedure, they discovered the leukemia, and Dad promptly bid farewell to his giant friend.
I encouraged Dad to revisit yoga, but his instructor had moved away. Finding a new one was a “hassle,” and as he put it, was like “polishing the brass on the Titanic.”
Beetle Juice
After a week in California, I return home to New Jersey. My first night back, Lindsay and the boys are asleep upstairs, so I make the most of my alone time by browsing Netflix for a few hours. It’s after midnight when I finally pick something: a documentary that chronicles a group of sick people who follow a crunchy, soothsaying confidence man to the Amazon rainforest. He promises that somewhere in the jungle there is a cure for their illnesses, as well as a local shaman who can find it.
I expect to see the shaman of my youth—the bowl haircut, a bone in the earlobe, that leaf (or canvas flap) covering his private parts. But apparently, that image is from a bygone era, and I am at best old, and at worst terribly racist. What I see is a young man decked out in NBA garb, drinking Gatorade, and listening to a soccer game with his feet up on an old seventies-style metal desk. I trust he retained all his tribe’s ancient wisdom, but it’s obfuscated by the sad but comedic irony of how the Western world seeps into indigenous culture. How exactly does an authentic jungle healer come to feel so strongly about the Indiana Pacers? And shouldn’t he know better than to pair their jersey with a New York Knicks hat? Even shamans have to pick a side.
Nonetheless, dressed in his confused, yet colorful mix of gold and blue and blue and red, the shaman searches the rainforest for lifesaving ingredients. First, he makes a tincture for the woman with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS): a term so on-the-nose that I imagine a cartoonish, fussy, anthropomorphized bowel. In a battle of illnesses, IBS would likely stand on the sidelines complaining about its weapon.
It is a different cure-seeker who peaks my interest: a man in his midsixties, tall, thin, soft-bellied, and dying of leukemia. Though eager for a chance at beating his illness, he rarely, if ever, leaves the comforts of rural Wisconsin, and he struggles to find his groove in the jungle. Nor are the others settling in easily. Images of the rainforest are picturesque from afar, but the HD video cameras display all too well what it’s like to be in one. I can almost feel the humidity and the giant bugs crawling on me. Factoring in the bumpy truck rides, lack of air-conditioning in huts, and hammocks made of banana peels, I decide Dad and I wouldn’t last a day. The last thing either of us wants is to feel hot, damp, and itchy.
Sadly, the Wisconsin native dies in one of those hammocks from an embolism. Before that, though, the shaman had some success alleviating the symptoms of his anemia with large quantities of beet juice. I nearly gag watching him drink it from a hollowed-out log. Given that the group had been drinking from plain plastic cups until that point, I find it suspicious that they’ve switched to some ceremonial mug carved from a brazil nut tree. I figure this was the director’s idea. Fearing his film might come off as inauthentic, I imagine him yelling at a miserable, sweaty production assistant, “Hey you, whatever your name is, go find a more jungley cup he can drink that red shit out of!”
Before I doze off, a chill races through me, the kind one might experience after snorting cocaine, only unpleasant.
“Beet juice, beet juice, beet juice,” I mumble to myself, sinking into a dream state.
Standing before me is a miniature Michael Keaton, dressed in a dirty pinstripe suit, looking like a homeless illusionist. He flashes me a meth-mouthed smile:
“Hey there, bud!”
“Oh, hi, Beet Juice,” I reply glumly.
“Whaaaaaaaat? You ain’t happy to see me? You don’t like me?”
“Not really, no.”
“All’s ya have to do is drink me!” He cocks his head and hits me with another brown smile.
“I guess that’s true.”
“Pleasure doin’ bidness wit ya, kid.” With that, Beet Juice disappears, and I wake in a cold sweat.
Maybe I’m still high.
A few weeks later, in January, I return to San Leandro to accompany Dad for his monthly chemotherapy treatment. I tell him about the documentary, the shaman, and the juice. Though Dad prefers “adequately funded research conducted by people with medical degrees,” he agrees to get a little holistic. “Well, it certainly can’t make me any sicker,” he says.
Dad’s youngest brother, Paul, and his wife, Gayle, are naturalists who entrust their wellness to kinesiologists, chiropractors, naturopaths, and whoever is working the counter at the health food store that day. They mind their chakras, eat tempeh, and evangelize probiotics. Like many people of that ilk, Paul and Gayle are as suspicious of modern medicine as I am of people who believe in ghosts and alien visitations. No doubt, they would approve of our experiment in food-based healing.
“Ok,” Dad says, “if we’re gonna do this, the only decent place to get vegetables is the Chinese grocery in Hayward. The soil isn’t shot to hell in China yet.”
I resist the urge to point out that the beets probably aren’t imported and that the soil is far worse in China. If they put lead in children’s toys, I doubt they’re meticulous about vegetables.
Pulling up to the store, I see the produce on display outside, which seems like a rather risky practice. Why would such easily damaged goods be left without any security? We could have simply picked out a few beets, paid, and left, but visits with Dad to rustic food emporiums always involve some browsing. Dad gazes lovingly at the glistening whole roasted pigs and doesn’t so much as flinch when a clothesline of lifeless ducks sways inches from his thick gray hair. I believe Dad’s excessive love of ethnic meats might be a reaction to Mom’s vegetarianism. She hasn’t chewed anything with a heartbeat in nearly forty years—long enough for Dad and I to find the idea of her eating a burger absurd, almost surreal.
“Papa, tell me of the last time you saw Mama eat a hamburger.”
“Well, son, it was a crisp fall day in nineteen seventy-six. We were at an Orange Julius around the corner from our apartment.”
“Papa, did you know this would be her last one? Did she know this would be her final hamburger? Did Mama put mayonnaise on it? Was it juicy? Did the blood run down her hand on first bite?”
“Yes, son, it did. But it is only a dream to me now.”
“Thank you, papa. I will carry this memory forever.”
Mom’s not self-righteous about her diet. It’s not motivated by politics, but instead by something far more frustrating to Dad: she simply doesn’t like the taste. “How can you not like meat?” he’ll ask, seasoning a raw rack of lamb next to Mom’s face. Sometimes I w
onder if he’s a sixty-eight-year-old anti-foodie, but I suspect that his zealotry for strange delicacies from the Far East has more to do with romanticizing the Chinese culture and sending a beacon of camaraderie to its working class.
On our way back to the apartment, with a bouquet of beets and five bags of frozen pork shumai in his lap, Dad seems tense. “We have to stop at Home Depot.”
“Really? Why?” I ask.
“We need new water filters for the refrigerator.”
I ask if we can do it later, but he becomes agitated. When pressed, he admits to having a disturbing dream the previous night in which the old water filters gave the entire family leukemia.
“Jesus, that’s heavy,” I say.
“Tell me about it. Can we get the damn filters now?”
“Totally. Let’s stop and get a blood test for me, too. I’ve been pounding that fridge water.”
He smiles softly and stares out the window.
Mom is waiting for us at the apartment. She’s done some research of her own on this whole beet juice thing and seems excited. Beets are listed as “challenging” in the juicing book, which I should have recognized as a code for “NO!!!” These aren’t neat and tidy Martha Stewart beets: they are the filthy, unbathed hippies of root vegetable society. I pull each shrunken mummy head out by its hair and place them one by one on the sink: Thump . . . thump . . . thump.
I can’t help but wonder why the hell we’re bothering. It’s not as if we’re going to pull off a Lorenzo’s Oil miracle here. Dad senses my apprehension. “Nope! You’re doing this with me. It was your idea.”
“I know, I know. Will you wash them and do all the juicing and cleanup, though?” I ask.
“Yeah, sure.” He laughs. “They look like Wookiee balls, don’t they? You know, like Chewbacca?”
Mom chimes in from the living room, “Jace, do your Wookiee imitation!”
“Hilarious. You guys are fucking with me now. Just wash the damn things and let’s get it over with.”
