by Jason Good
“Do you think it’s going to work?” Dad asks. “I mean, did the guy in the movie really have more energy?”
“Yeah, but he drank a ton of it over the course of a few days.”
“Oh, okay. So we’ll have to get more after this,” he says, washing the beets as gently as he might a newborn.
“Are you going to cut all that shit off the top?” I ask.
“Did the shaman cut it off?”
“I don’t know. That scene was probably cut due to it being boring as hell. He just appeared with the juice in some log mug.”
“Log mug?”
“Mug, glass, cup. Whatever.”
“Well, I say we leave it on.”
The beets are looking almost presentable, like campers who managed to change their clothes, but couldn’t find a shower. I plug in the juicer, and Dad pulls out his pride and joy: a Japanese sushi knife. I don’t know anything about knives, but apparently this is a good one, since it comes with its own sleeve. Dad grins, a performer ready to take the stage. “You have to be gentle and use a limp wrist,” he says, displaying how to properly sharpen his sacred blade. He slices each beet into four pieces, and as their red juices seep onto the white countertop, the kitchen looks like a fresh murder scene.
He places them one by one in the juicer. It hums and whines as it liquefies each piece, the nectar dripping unceremoniously into a common two-quart plastic measuring cup.
Each beet yields only about six ounces of juice. Such a decrease in mass seems only possible if the beets are filled with air, but I suppose there are plenty of other weird science-y things in the world (pendulums, dry ice, and clumpable cat litter), so the fact that beets shrink to one-tenth their size when liquefied isn’t all that surprising. Then just as he did with the thick green syrup two years prior, Dad divides up the portions, eyeballing each glass to make sure they are equal. Mom has since joined us to witness the ritual, and I close my eyes and chug it.
After a gag and a few quick breaths, I open my eyes, and see Dad still drinking, taking slow, deliberate sips. He smiles at me.
“What? You’re sipping it?” I say.
“Yup. This is strong stuff, buddy.” He points to his glass, “That’s two beets right there.”
I am suddenly awash in a disconcerting fullness, the kind I imagine one might experience at the climax of a herbal colon cleanse. As my body serves the beets an eviction notice, I pace the kitchen, wondering: Should I assist by purging? Or tough it out in hopes that a lease agreement might be reached?
“Oh boy. Are you okay?” Mom asks.
I can only wave her off and give a meek thumbs-up, my brow and palms damp, lips quivering. Is this a reaction to the root bomb I firehosed into my GI tract? A somatic resurfacing of emotional wounds, maybe? I decide on garden-variety pre-barf anxiety. I am also slightly embarrassed—if either of us is to expel this juice, it should be the elderly man who’d received chemotherapy treatment that afternoon, not his healthy, middle-aged son. Fifteen years ago, I might have been taking my pulse after mixing Jim Beam with Percocet, but at forty-one years old, that same panic is driven by a fear that I’ve OD’ed on beets. How California of me.
I sequester myself in the small bathroom adjacent to the kitchen, continuing to pace like a caged animal: one step, turn around, one step, turn around. With few choices and little patience, I kneel at the toilet, hoping that the mere act of subjugation might encourage my body to put a rush on its plans. I try a jump-start, but I can’t get my engine to turn over. Something is going to happen, but it is not to be forced.
Eventually, I bid farewell to the toilet, as well as the panic and nausea. A few hours later, though, I return for what I anticipate will be a routine wiz. But, looking in the bowl, I see pink water. Panicked, I look around for witnesses before jogging back to my laptop in the den. I know what Google will tell me: internal bleeding, bladder infection, urethra lesion, dick cancer. Before scanning the search results, I remember an episode of Antiques Roadshow in which an appraiser informs the owner of a Navajo blanket that the tribe used beets to achieve the deep reds in their designs. Right. The beets! I can only hope that Dad doesn’t know this cool science trick. A little fear might prevent him from wanting to return to the Chinese grocery tomorrow for round two.
A New Pope
By March, four months after Dad’s diagnosis, I am going to California every six weeks or so. I hate leaving my family in New Jersey, but Lindsay always tried to send me off on a positive note. “Get some rest and try to enjoy yourself,” she’d say. Unfortunately, resting only makes me more tired. I regress to a teenager while at Mom and Dad’s place: escaping to my room midday in a foggy angst; reappearing only for meals, mandatory outings, or trips to Cigarette Max for peach flavored e-cig cartridges (açaí is the only other flavor, so I went with the less crunchy option). At first fueled by an obsession with the idea of Dad dying, I am now chugging along on unconditional love and melancholy. Dad’s illness isn’t constantly on my mind, but I know it is in there, under the surface, loosening screws and boring holes in the floorboards. Exercise would help, but I barely have enough energy to give Bozo his daily beating, much less drag myself to the strip mall Bally’s and con my way in using Dad’s ID. I think I understand the mindset of people who grow so obese that rescue workers have to cut a hole in their house to get them out.
But I’m not shirking all responsibility. I’ve anointed myself as the family’s resident armchair hematologist. Dad gets a blood test every week to determine if he needs a transfusion, and since the results are available online, I refresh my browser with a Pavlovian consistency. When I find his most recent results confusing, I call Dr. Levine. It’s daytime, but my room is dark. I’m wearing nothing but boxer shorts.
“I’m assuming you want to know what’s going on with your dad’s blood counts.” I think he knows I’m not dressed.
Feeling self-conscious, I stutter. “Umm, yeah. I think so. I mean, I’m not sure I understand why his . . .”
Dr. Levine interrupts me and launches into a spiel about how cancer works. When he says, “There’s this squishy stuff inside our bones called marrow,” I can’t quite roll my eyes far enough. But I remain silent and wait for him to finish. A man in his underwear has no business rushing anyone.
“Look,” he says. “I know it seems bad, but these are all based on samples. Since his total blood count is so low, we might be looking at only fifty cells. The margin of error on this is huge. These are really just ballpark figures.”
“Right,” I mutter, resisting the urge to ask if he means Wrigley Field or Yankee Stadium.
Dr. Levine continues. “His platelets are up, and frankly I consider that to be an indication that he’s responding to treatment. You shouldn’t be looking at these results every week. They’re unpredictable while he’s getting chemo.”
“Then why do you make them available?” I say, covering the phone with my hand.
After hanging up, I put on a pair of jeans to make an appearance in the living room. I find Mom playing Scrabble on her iPad, while Dad reads a Lyndon Johnson biography and sips a bottle of Arizona iced tea with a picture of a geisha on it.
“Okay, I just talked to your doctor.”
Dad chokes on his drink. “What? When?”
Mom whips her head around.
They’ve seen the results, too, and are just as confused and concerned as I am. They relax a bit when I relay the news. I hadn’t noticed how tense they were until they weren’t.
“I don’t know how to thank you for doing that,” Dad says. “I mean, Jesus Christ, Jason, you called my doctor?”
“What were you going to do? Sit here and stress out until next week?” I respond, feeling a bit snappy. “He’s just a human being.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“It’s part of his job to talk to patients. Want me to call him again right now?”
“Jace, please don’t.”
I pull out my phone, and Dad looks away.
“Wha
t’s the issue here?” I ask.
“It’s just . . . I’m sure he has more important things to do.”
“Like what? Research? Are you afraid I’m pulling him away from an important grant proposal?”
“Well, maybe . . .”
“Oh stop it.”
“Good for you, Jace,” Mom says. “I’m glad you got some answers!”
Just like that, I’ve accidentally become a hero; a fearless, shirtless, jeans-wearing savior with one-pack abs and the courage to use a telephone. Was it gauche of me to call? Don’t people play golf with their doctors? Why is Dad reacting as if I asked Faulkner to check out my blog? I hadn’t yet learned that doctors intimidate Dad. He speaks to them in the same obsequious way he does priests. Oh, hello, Father. It’s so very nice to meet you. You do so many wonderful things in the community. It has always irked me. We should be respectful of nearly all people, but Dad gushes praise in a manner that contradicts everything he’s ever told me about his views on religion. It seems unconscious, perhaps programmed into him by thirteen years of Catholic school. Maybe in the presence of clergy, Dad turns back into an altar boy.
In the Father to Son book, the section titled “Boys and Spirituality” contains so many edits that it’s difficult to read the original text. Dad graded it like a fed-up professor whose students never came to class.
Lesson: “Teach him to pray for his enemies.”
Dad’s revision: “Teach him to CARE for his enemies.”
I have never been a religious person. Dad made sure of that. But with Silas and Arlo, I choose to share my lack of traditional beliefs only when asked.
“Daddy, what’s God?” Silas asked not too long ago.
“Hmmm . . . ,” I said, looking around to see if Lindsay was available to field this one. She wasn’t. “Well, it’s the thing that some people believe created the universe, Earth, and people. All things.”
“God is a thing?”
“It can be, but most people think it’s a person.”
“Do you believe in it, or him, or whatever?”
“No! I mean . . . no, I don’t.”
“Does Mommy?”
“Mommy believes in karma.”
“What’s karma,” he asked.
“You’ll have to ask her.”
“Does Mimi believe in God?”
“Nope.”
“Does BooBoo?” I burst out laughing, and Silas wandered off. Mom and Dad are the most common type of atheists: Catholic-born.
I was raised to be suspect of, and preferably hostile toward, traditional religion. As a kid, though, I knew that my grandparents went to church, and we didn’t. I knew that Grandma Good had something called a rosary, which she’d occasionally fondle while watching Phil Donahue, and then later, Oprah. Following Dad’s lead, I sat silently with my hands on the table, palms down, as Grandpa Steiner blessed each meal. “In the name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen,” he’d say stoically while touching parts of his head and chest in some pattern I never memorized but frequently mimicked.
I would occasionally stay with either pair of grandparents on weekends while Mom and Dad attended anti-Nixon rallies and wind conventions, or whatever it was hippie socialists did in the late seventies. My grandparents saw these weekends as opportunities to calibrate my faith by taking me to church. When my folks returned—dazed but happy, smelling of body odor (both theirs and that of strangers)—they would ask me if I’d been “dragged to church.” My affirmation was always met with a booming “goddammit!” from Dad and a nervous, disappointed face from Mom. Of course, my grandparents might have brought me with them only because they had to: one cannot get a babysitter for a child he or she is already babysitting. Staying home wasn’t an option. Missing Sunday mass could reroute a comet toward Earth or spark a resurgence of the bubonic plague.
None of that excuses their decision to baptize me behind my parents’ back. And it wasn’t only my grandparents: Mom and Dad’s best friends baptized me, too. Evidently, any Catholic can perform one of these. It’s a little-known fact hidden somewhere in the footnotes of the Bible.
I wasn’t one of those troubled teens getting plunged into a pond while fully clothed. I was only two months old my first time. Ron and Noreen Carstens bought Mom and Dad tickets to see John Denver and suspiciously offered to babysit. If I was crying when they left, it was because I knew this was a setup. Ron went to graduate school with Dad, and despite being a Thomas Aquinas scholar and devout Catholic, Ron was a “true intellectual,” according to Dad. It didn’t hurt that Ron was a hilarious little man with elfish ears who became drunk easily and snorted when he laughed.
When Mom and Dad returned from the show stoned and singing, “Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy,” Ron couldn’t wait to share the news. “We baptized Jason for you!” he announced, proudly, as if he’d done them a favor by fixing a squeak in the screen door or shampooing our collie.
Flummoxed, Dad told his mother the story. She listened patiently and responded, “Oh, your father and I did that weeks ago.” Mom turned to her parents only to find that they had done me the same favor. Over the span of eight weeks, my tiny soul had been committed to Jesus three times: “In the name of the Carstens, the Goods, and the Steiners. Amen.” My very own Holy Trinity. It didn’t take.
I figured these kitchen-sink initiations would have driven Dad to picket the Vatican, but Mom says that when told of these baptisms, they laughed. It was a harmless act of well-intentioned zealots, and, in her words, “too absurd to get upset over. All they did was get your head wet.”
I imagine Dad saying, “Well, I hope you feel better about Jason’s chances of being admitted into heaven. Just don’t let him watch football or listen to country music. I don’t want him driving a pickup truck when he’s older.”
Years later, when I was sent home with a Bible from public elementary school, he responded by showing up the next day offering to hand out Humanist (atheist) literature. He wanted to highlight the political and ethical importance of the separation of church and state. The threat was effective.
I suspect Dad’s private struggle with religion is a bit sloppier than he would admit. His defiant stance often seems self-conscious. My grandmother was a gentle, sweet person and a seven-time world champion of passive-aggression. As the eldest, Dad felt a responsibility to live up to her standards, but intellectualized his way around having a pedestrian faith.
I’ve asked Dad if he experienced anything inappropriate during his Catholic school years. He responded, “No, Jason, I was never touched by a priest.” He paused. “Well, actually, there was one who used to come around and put his hand down our shirts, but we all liked it.”
The GPS is still suctioned to the dashboard, but Mom and Dad don’t need it anymore. Dad’s voice is less attentive and more acerbic than the synthetic computer voice, but far more entertaining. “Shit, turn left!” isn’t in “Samantha’s” vocabulary. This is their routine now, and I am only tagging along like I did so many years ago with my grandparents to church.
They know exactly where to find parking, and which elevator attaches to which wing of the hospital. They know that only Krista makes a halfway decent latte at the café, and to avoid the pharmacy line after 1 PM.
As a nurse inserts the IV into Dad’s hand, they discuss how her son might get into Stanford despite low SAT scores and a criminal record. “Have him write an essay about his crime. Hell, that’s better than good test scores,” Dad suggests. The hospital is now full of friends.
Mom is in a cheerful mood, too, and she greets the other nurses as they passed by our station.
“Hi, Liz!”
“Oh, hello, Mrs. Good.”
“Hi, Betsy!”
“Hi, Mrs. Good. Where’s your coffee today?”
“Ooops, looks like I forgot. I’ll go downstairs and get one right now!”
Alone, Dad looks at me and sighs. “You know, I’m a little scared about what will happen when this whole chemo thing ends. It
’s comforting to be in treatment, to feel like I’m being taken care of.”
“Really? I didn’t know you had issues with your mother,” I reply.
He laughs. “I guess I don’t really have a choice here, do I?”
“Nope, you just have to let go, so they can do their thing.”
“That’s what I like about it,” he says.
Dad’s always tried to be in control. In situations where that was impossible (car repairs, plumbing problems, youth soccer games) he seemed uncomfortable, hovering over the workers and referees, doubtful that they’d performed their services adequately. Now he is experiencing relief by abdicating control and resisting the urge to doubt. He trusts his doctor, and that’s good: like religion, medicine works best in believers. Asking questions meekly and accepting answers as gospel, I can see that the hospital is Dad’s church, and the social workers, nurses, and doctors its clergy. When I tell Dad my brilliant theory, he scoffs. Eventually, though, he agrees, but with one condition.
“It’s a religion based on science that attempts to provide vitality,” he says. “Not a faith that promises immortality. It’s a similarly contrived, but appropriate, worldview.”
A church of science in which a mysterious medicine is God and Dr. Levine is pope. In the oncology ward, Mom and Dad found the sense of community and belonging they have craved since leaving Italy over a decade ago. It’s not filled with witty expats and gesticulating Italians. The espresso is bitter, and politics is avoided, but those are true of any religion. Catholicism and medicine both provide hope to those who need it. Of course, when one leaves a church, the congregation is disappointed, whereas in a hospital people want you to go, and sometimes celebrate your departure with balloons and cake.
Zen and Other Side Effects
Before Dad’s marrow started firing blanks, he couldn’t understand what people meant by living in the moment; now he’s baffled by the idea of there being anything but. This new Zen outlook isn’t something he achieved, but rather a divine gift, a positive side effect of looming mortality delivered by a revered Jewish man in scrubs.
