The Ringer

by Bill Scheft

  There are two laws of Parkinson’s Disease. Law 1: People who have Parkinson’s Disease fall. Law 2: There is nothing anyone can do to change Law 1.

  So far, during College Boy’s limited stint in the orbit of Parkinson’s, he had discovered two types of falls. Rather, Mort had discovered two types of falls. Until Friday afternoon, it had been one. The semi-regular “I know what’s coming and I can’t stop it” fall, where everything happens in such slow motion you can provide narration. Two months ago, College Boy was in the living room around four A.M., trying to watch enough TV to fall back to sleep after a particularly willful trip to the john with Mort. He landed on Comedy Central and saw this comic, Jeff Altman, somewhere in the early-’80s, do a bit about how old people announce when they’re going to fall. Altman, who College Boy recognized from Budweiser commercials, hiked his pants up just below his nipples and started rotating his arms backward and beginning his torturous final descent, complete with play-by-play. “Oh boy, look out, here she goes, going down, hang on, look out, coming down, look out, here we go, coming in, May Day….” College Boy’s laughter woke his uncle, who was angry for fifteen seconds, then suddenly grateful. He had to go again. College Boy, out of clean sheets and underwear, was grateful as well.

  There were plenty of those types of falls, and Mort was always extremely cautious after each one, until five minutes after the bruises healed. Then it was “Mort, where’s your cane?” followed by Altman’s act, followed by a thud.

  The fall on Friday was different. Its primary component was not the loss of equilibrium, but the glut of anger and frustration. In a pre-dusk “how to sit” argument, Mort followed up the “settle things like we did in the service” line by kicking College Boy in the balls. And not some accidental myoclonic jerk thing, either. A real rugby shot. College Boy rappelled off Mort’s collarbone and staggered back to where he could bend over and hold his knees. When he caught his breath, he spat, “But you are in the fucking chair, Blanche,” and left him there for as long as it takes a thirty-six-year-old to get ossified drunk for the first time in five and a half months.

  The thing about stopping drinking, which College Boy had done a thousand times, is the time it gives you to think of scenarios over which you might drink again. Might. And even after you notice that your life has gotten a little more manageable, those scenarios will still arise, but you’ll find yourself saying, “ah, no.” “Ah, no…ah, no…ah, no…well maybe, ah, no…ah, no…six months ago, sure, but ah, no…ah, no…ah, no…ah, no…” And just when you’ve traversed every contingence and emerged dry, the seventy-six-year-old man you’ve been taking care of kicks you in the balls. Literally, and on purpose.

  College Boy drove into the next town, Beverly, to the Tai-Waikiki, a Chinese-Polynesian restaurant just over the bridge. He hadn’t been there in almost nineteen years, or since he’d been legal to drink at better places. The Tai-Waikiki had let older-looking athlete-types do as much underage tippling as they wanted. Two rules: You must order at least one appetizer and No Horseplay. The Tai-Wai’s specialty drinks, Tiki Bowls and Headhunters, had been a sweet, easy introduction to the volumes that would follow. A few of those and a plate or two of pork strips would inevitably be offered in sacrifice before the porcelain god.

  College Boy knew better now. Just one plate of pork strips, ten Wild Turkey and sodas. It had been a while since he’d driven drunk. But you know the old saying: It’s just like riding a bicycle—into oncoming traffic with your eyes closed. That was all the excitement he needed. Seeing his sobbing uncle lying on the floor when he returned to Vinnin Estates, with a Mont Blanc pen stuck in his shoulder and his white broadcloth shirt looking like People’s Exhibit B in a film noir murder trial, that was gravy.

  Cleanup was pretty easy. Mort had been wearing the adult diapers for two weeks after a month and a half of intense negotiations. No number of midday accidents could convince the man he needed help in the field of waste management. The deal was made only after College Boy walked around the house for two days wearing his own diaper and pretending to defile himself in the middle of conversation. That was maybe the last great laugh they’d had.

  Within an hour, Mort Spell was wiped down, re-Depended, pajama-ed, bedded with a heating pad on his sore lower back, and shaking in the first bites of a BLT, one of College Boy’s kitchen specialties. He was asleep by nine, which left College Boy the rest of the night to throw up, pass out, and think about calling Sheila and asking her to FedEx the rest of the Valium. Oh, right. He had changed the locks.

  When College Boy came to at seven-thirty, he realized two more reasons why he had stopped drinking. The hangovers, and how difficult it was to help a seventy-six-year-old man, any seventy-six-year-old man but especially a seventy-six-year-old man with Parkinson’s, to the bathroom at four o’clock in the morning with a hangover. Just as quickly, it occurred to him that there had been no bathroom run in the night. Odd…

  And that’s when College Boy heard what sounded like a moan. Or bad singing. He was right both times.

  Mort was lying on the bathroom floor next to the toilet in a pose not unlike the one College Boy had struck eight hours before. He was singing “Here Comes that Rainy Day,” Sinatra-style, trying to cheer himself up and distract himself from the pain in his lower back, which is where the moaning came in and fucked up his already poor pitch.

  “Mort, how long have you been there?”

  “Ninety choruses.”

  College Boy’s headache, which had been ratcheted up to nuclear level by guilt, was not helped when his uncle played the good sport and told him, “Okay, you win. Best two out of three falls.” Why couldn’t the guy go back to being an unappreciative prick? Still, no combination of heat, ice, massage, Tylenol, or Halcion could help. He drifted in and out but woke for good early early Saturday morning, screaming.

  “Bathroom, Mort?”

  “No kid, hospital.”

  They made a bathroom stop anyway. And the hour it usually took College Boy to dress his uncle was shaved to fifty minutes when the spasms just above Mort’s hip made him strangely compliant. The man must have been in agony to let himself put his arm around his nephew and be helped to the front steps. Those fucking steps. Two 12" x 30" x 12" stone landings that might as well have jutted from the side of one of the cliffs those idiots dive from in Acapulco. For the last three months, more often than not, the steps had inexplicably stopped Mort cold. He would purposefully stride out the door and get to the edge of the all-weather welcome mat, the only one in NATO airspace embossed with “Holmenkohlen 1978” (the Norwegian ski-jumping championship Mort had covered in three decades), and no further. This was the “freeze” Graham the neurologist had mentioned. The Parkinson’s freeze. When the brain, even the formidable brain of Morton Martin Spell, temporarily ends its broadcast day to the arms and legs. Many restaurant reservations turned into take-out, many full-length feature films became forty-five-minute denouement, many visits to his sister Dottie’s house distilled to “You’re looking awfully well” over the phone because of those fucking steps.

  “We’ll go to Hawthorne Hospital. It’s closer. We’ll be there in five minutes, Mort.”

  “That’s not enough time to thank you, kid. Good God!” He arched his back in full writhe. “Let’s go to Mass General. I have a locker there.”

  “No, this is easier.”

  Within the hour, he was sound asleep. The emergency room had been empty and the doctors and nurses on duty worked on Mort like he’d come into the pits under green. The last line Mort got off was as good as anything he’d dashed since, well, at least since the Holmenkohlen.

  “We’re going to give you something for the pain, Mr. Spell.”

  “Great. I’ll take all the stuff Koufax turned down.”

  The real trick is, of course, not letting that be your last line.

  College Boy stopped by twice Saturday and midday Sunday before telling the nurses to give him a call when Mort was up and demanding. Saturday night was
the first time he’d slept alone at Vinnin Estates. He thought about setting his alarm for four A.M., waking up and pissing in his pants just to give himself something to do. He didn’t, but he woke up anyway and led himself to the bathroom, where it went quite well.

  He was back at Hawthorne Sunday night around eight to see if Mort was retroactively verbose after almost thirty hours lolling in the arms of synthetic morphine. He found Mort. Arms outstretched to greet no one, mouth waiting for somebody to release the emergency brake, eyes looking ahead at you. Dead ahead.

  “How long has he been like this?”

  “A couple of hours,” said one of the nurses.

  The nurse mumbled something about a possible reaction to the pain medication he’d received. Mort finally fell asleep around eleven. But only for a few hours. By 2 A.M., College Boy got to witness this macabre mime from the beginning. Shaking, okay what’s new, but shaking with arms outstretched, pleading for—something he couldn’t say. Morton Martin Spell was at a loss for sound. His mouth now moved furiously, like a kid had a hand up his head and was working his jaw, but nothing emerged. The mouth never stopped, devouring the silence.

  “Jesus, he’s much worse than before,” College Boy said to whoever was standing behind him.

  “Yes, he is,” said Mrs. Garrity.

  Evelyn Garrity, the hospital administrator, the name of every 2 A.M. hospital administrator, had come by to do two things. ’Fess up to the possibility that this reaction to medication might be Hawthorne Hospital’s fault, and recommend that College Boy call his mother and have her get down there immediately. He made the call at the nurses’ station. It was remarkably brief and unemotional. Dottie Sussman would be right there. College Boy was grateful. Some guys just live right.

  “Thanks for clearing all this up.”

  “My pleasure,” said Mrs. Garrity.

  “One more question.” College Boy had several, but this was the one he really wanted to ask. “What kind of pig fuck are you running here?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “So far, you and your people have tossed out phrases like ‘some sort of reaction’ and ‘neurological episode.’ Could you possibly be a little more vague as you lead me on this turd hunt?”

  “Ah, the doctor on call didn’t realize your uncle was on Sinemet.”

  “Really? And how did that get by him?”

  “He didn’t know Mr. Spell had Parkinson’s.”

  “FUCKING LOOK AT HIM!” Mrs. Garrity started to look back toward Mort’s room.

  “NOT YOU! AND NOT NOW! He doesn’t look like he has Parkinson’s now. Now, he just looks like an old man who’s going to die.”

  “Well, Mr. Sussman, we don’t know that yet.”

  “That’s right, Mrs. Garrity. You just had me call my mother to come down here in the middle of the night and sign the ‘no heroic measures’ proxy because you thought things were going awfully well.” (College Boy figured at the very least he might be able to keep Mort alive by imitating him.)

  “Why don’t we wait until Mrs. Sussman gets here?”

  “Great. You do that, and I’ll start taking depositions for the big lawsuit against Hawthorne Hospital. Can I borrow your pen?”

  “Certainly.”

  College Boy had only one gear when he was frightened. Righteous anger. Righteous anger, boldly seasoned with self-doubt. Why hadn’t they gone to Mass General? Why had he dumped Mort at Hawthorne, this intramural facility just up the street here in Salem? Was it because it was just up the street? Great. He’d saved a half hour of driving. And that was the important thing here, wasn’t it? That he had been saved. Nice going, College Boy. You really dope-fiended I-93.

  He should call Sheila. Let her know what was happening. And here’s the beauty part. If he called now from Hawthorne Hospital, 2:30 A.M., he’d wake her and she’d be so disoriented it would take her at least a minute before she hung up on him. At least.

  “Harvey, is it true? Mort had a seizure?”

  “Yeah, Mom.”

  “I told you not to give him liverwurst.”

  Dottie Sussman was half-kidding. Actually, 49 percent kidding. The other 51 percent believed that food was at the root of any sudden physical tragedy. Her uncle had bled to death in the mid-fifties at the dinner table after eating a baked potato that was too hot, passing out, falling backward, and cracking his head against the floor. One of her mother’s card-playing friends, Silvy Dine, had fallen face first into a bowl of bridge mix and suffocated while the others were in the kitchen getting cake. And there were a million other stories which began anything but innocently: “Well, they’d been out the night before and he’d had béarnaise sauce….” The liverwurst reference was a cause of death call-back to Bob Zamcoff, a neighbor who ate a pound of the stuff during Super Bowl III and died of a heart attack a week later while watching the Pro Bowl. “The doctors said he never digested it fully,” Dottie Sussman would epilogue.

  “Mom, he fell, the pain got worse, I brought him here yesterday, he had some sort of reaction to the medication.”

  “What do the doctors say?”

  “They say it was the liverwurst.”

  Mrs. Garrity began to hover with forms. College Boy, Mr. Sussman, said he and his mother would be looking in on Mort first, then ghoul out with her.

  Mort looked like any other knocked out seventy-six-year-old in a private room. Not pretty. But still. Finally. They came back into the hall and College Boy had to describe to Dottie Sussman with zero medical syntax what her brother had been doing for the last few hours.

  “Mom, he was like this…” College Boy leaned back next to Mort and flailed arms and mouth. Dottie Sussman snorted a laugh, the only way she knew how to respond to her son. And the one time he wasn’t looking for it.

  It was just after three now. Technically Monday morning. Dottie Sussman had signed the “no heroic measures” proxy and gone off to cry in a vacant room. She really let herself go—five, six minutes—and then emerged to tell her son to drive to the house in Lynn, sleep in his own bed, and come back to relieve her no earlier than noon.

  “Harvey, he’s my brother. You’ve done too much. There’s not enough time to thank you.” That line again.

  College Boy would do his crying in the car. Really let himself go—forty, fifty seconds. He found the Buick Century station wagon in the blue darkness of March with surprising ease. It was under one of several nonworking lights in the parking lot, next to a payphone.

  ….

  ….

  “Nnnn…hullo?”

  “Sheila?”

  “Fuck you, College Boy!”

  17

  Before things changed, then really changed, the only ritual Sheila had observed occurred around nine-thirty A.M., Monday to Friday. That was when Live with Regis and Kathie Lee would break for its third commercial and she would point and say, loud, “Now that. That’s a whore.” She would permit the show to finish its broadcast into whatever living room she was cleaning, especially the end, when Mrs. Gifford tried to cram in her last sincere syndicated good-byes, but by then it was usually drowned out by the vacuum. Which was about right, considering Sheila had already consumed her minimum daily adult requirement of irony.

  There is no big story about why or how Sheila Manning retired from her lucrative part-time work in the exciting, fast-paced field of making nice-nice. No Neighborhood Watch sweep of 301 East Sixty-fifth. No twentieth anniversary retrospective of Klute at the Film Forum. (Sheila always thought her world was better captured in the movie Night Shift, where the hookers did their servicing at the New York City morgue.) No disease ribbon-worthy or penicillin-honored. One day, she was telling her client list, “The dick smoking lamp is no longer lit,” the next day, she didn’t have to tell anybody anything anymore. It ended when it ended and when it ended, nothing much changed, except maybe the vacuum went on after Regis and Whatshername.

  That said, the changing of the locks at Mort Spell’s apartment might have had something to do with it. Or
at least with Sheila getting out of the College Boy business.

  During that first month at Vinnin Estates, when he was mostly just a prostate surgery survivor with Parkinsonian tremors that could still be described as adorable, Mort and Sheila had talked on the phone at least twice a week. College Boy served as the emcee, but his time on the front and back ends increased with each call. Somewhere around Week Three, when Mort barked, “Get your own girl!” College Boy and Sheila realized they would have to hold their conversations elsewhere. The payphone in the parking lot of China Sails after Jeopardy became a popular spot. College Boy would work the “I have a collect call to Harvey Sussman from a Mr. Sirhan Sirhan, do you accept the charges?” grift on the operator, they would have their laughs and he’d be back just after eight with dinner.

  The phone calls were equally divided. College Boy would lead off with a Mort Update, which was always funny, then Sheila would do her Mort Phone Call Wrap-Up, which was always funnier. Her impression of him was getting better, even if it was just her doing College Boy doing Mort. They would end with a minute or two of Mort improvisation (“Okay, Mort in Scarface: ‘Say hello to my little friend. By the way, my little friend is looking awfully well….’”) and schedule the next call.

  The only time they ever talked about themselves was the week after Labor Day, when College Boy asked if she’d come up for a weekend. The tremors and the shuffling had gotten worse. It would be another month till the first Freeze, so Mort still ventured out somewhere every day. Even when he had no place to go.

  “It would really cheer him up if he saw you.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yeah. Uh, me too.”

  “Well then,” Sheila said, “how about next Friday?”

  The Wednesday before, in the China Sails parking lot, College Boy decided to prepare Sheila for exactly how excited his uncle was.

  “What do you mean?”