“Dad, I can’t make it over tonight. I have to work on my radio piece.”
“Oh?”
“I can’t make it until Wednesday. I’m so sorry.”
“That’s okay,” he said. “I know how busy you are.”
TUESDAY AFTERNOON the hospice rang me at work. The desks in the sales office overlooked the large garden of a home for the elderly. I was watching an old Chinese woman with a back so stooped she looked like an apostrophe watering a lush hydrangea bush, when the Maitri nurse informed me in flat, even tones that my father’s lungs had collapsed.
Without any cues from the nurse, I didn’t know how to take the news. “We’ve put your father on morphine,” she continued matter-of-factly. She did not sound alarmed. She did not say, “You should come to the hospice right away.” She did not say, “You may never see him alive again.” It just seemed to be something she needed to tell me, like “Your father cut his finger so we gave him a Band-Aid.”
“Okay,” I murmured before hanging up.
Right before the hospice phoned, I had received a call from an important client needing footage of the 1989 earthquake. It was a rush job. Remembering this, I moved to the filing cabinets in the corner. I was combing through printouts of monitoring sheets looking for the “V” our transcribers used to signify video footage. Mesmerized by the shuffling pages, I kept forgetting what I was looking for. I kept needing to start over from the top of the massive stack, always looking for “V-earthquake. V-earthquake.”
I pictured the earthquake t-shirt my father had sent me back in college. Shuffling, shuffling. That picture on the front of the t-shirt: the Bay Bridge, its upper roadway collapsed. As I knelt on the office floor, the industrial carpet chafed my bare knees and I forgot again what I was doing and then remembered: “V-earthquake. V-earthquake.”
Karin came in. “Who was that on the phone?”
“That was a nurse from the hospice. My dad’s lungs collapsed. They put him on morphine.” I parroted what the nurse told me in her same flat tones and looked to Karin for a response.
She blinked as she registered the news, and I returned to the stack of monitoring sheets on my lap and on the floor.
“What are you doing?”
“I have to find this footage for J. Walter Thompson. It’s a rush job.” It wasn’t yet five o’clock and I thought I could finish up before the day was over. “They need footage of the ’89 earthquake.”
“They can wait,” Karin said.
She asked if I needed her to drive me to the hospice. I answered yes, still not knowing why I should go over there. Still not understanding the significance of any of it.
On arriving, we walked upstairs to my dad’s room. I could feel the warmth as I approached, the ripe smell of his static body rooted in damp bedsheets. I went over to him.
“Daddy?”
He was sitting up in bed looking straight ahead. I moved very close to his face. But because of the morphine, he looked right through me as though he were looking at the large plant behind where I stood.
“Dad!” I repeated a little louder. And then I shrank back.
With Karin next to me I suddenly felt very uncomfortable, embarrassed. She had to know that this was not our relationship. This was not my father.
“This is not my father,” I told her.
And we left. Walking downstairs, I stopped and turned to Karin and, looking her squarely in the eye, repeated, “That was not my father.” I wanted to distance myself from the memory of whoever that was in my dad’s clothes, in my dad’s bed.
“That was not your father,” she answered.
The next day, I went back to work. I don’t know why. It was someplace to go. I wanted to be around people. I just went to work and sat at my desk looking out the window facing the garden.
Then I got a call from the nurse at the hospice. “This is it,” I remember her saying. Although she couldn’t possibly have said these words, her meaning was clear.
This time Jon drove me over. We arrived just after five. The room was already full of people. I don’t remember speaking with them at all—just being aware of their physical presence. Dad’s ex-roommate Sam was standing, reading, against the wall. His pink face looked more pink than usual, but his blond hair was neatly combed to the side. Bruce Boone was seated in a nearby chair, looking long-legged and distant in his small round glasses. Big-eyed Dan Fine sat against the wall and I think waved to me. Though everyone was close, no one seemed to interact. We were each in our own realities, experiencing our own versions of my father’s death.
The only force uniting us was the rhythmic wheeze of the breathing machine hooked up to my dad, a loud inhalation then a quick exhalation. It operated through a mask sealed tightly over his mouth and nose. I remember the room as uncomfortably warm. It smelled faintly sour, like Dad’s night sweats. His hair, which used to stand up in animated tufts, was matted down so that the shape of his skull was visible. His skin looked waxy, not like skin at all. His slight frame, looking shrunken next to the large machine, was propelled by the push and pull of the air through his lungs. In and out. Up and down. This is why we were assembled. In and out. Up and down. This sound and this movement reminded us that he was still alive.
Jon and I were in the room perhaps half an hour when I said I was hungry. We walked two blocks away, and I ordered a burrito but couldn’t eat all of it because my stomach hurt.
And then we returned. Everyone was still in the same positions against the wall. Attendants walked in and out of the room as though to check on my dad, but his state was unchanged. On a small table next to his bed I noticed a pile of letters and a boom box. I had this notion that my father, unable to see or talk, could perhaps still hear. Though he couldn’t reach me, I wasn’t convinced that he couldn’t be reached.
I put on an audiocassette of his pianist brother, my other uncle David, playing a Mozart concerto, a cassette he’d sent my dad by mail. I began reading him letters from friends that had been arriving at the apartment. I spoke to my father as I went through each of these motions. “Now we’re going to play a cassette from Uncle David. Now I’m going to read you a letter from . . . Diamanda Galas! Isn’t that nice of her to write?” I narrated these actions much as I used to speak to my toys and stuffed animals as a girl.
When I tired of this, I pulled a chair up close to the left side of his bed. And, finally, I forgot everyone else in the room. I took my father’s left hand in mine, and stared. I could only look at his hands, because the rest of him was unrecognizable. I knew those cigarette-stained fingertips, and pressed them to my lips. There was hair on his wrist, which seemed to have crept down from his arm. Little blue veins formed a road map leading to each of his fingers and thumb. These hands were as soft as silk. I thought they might melt in the heat of my palm.
The hands still looked strong to me. I remembered them gently, lovingly, holding me on his lap. I remembered pulling on these hands when I was tired on walks home from Golden Gate Park. I remembered them tying double knots on my shoelaces when I was late for school, or steering the mesh-wrapped steering wheel of our Volkswagen bug. I remembered the hands opening cans of Campbell’s soup, stirring the dinner as the TV news blared in the background, and putting down the pot to take a drag on his cigarette.
I was studying his fingers when the mechanized rhythm of the breathing, which had been steady—and calming in its steadiness—suddenly paused. Everyone in the room stirred, the tension building as we waited for the next heaving inhalation.
It never arrived. There was no sound at all.
Then at once everyone’s voices rose up in a single chant:
“We love you, Steve. We love you, Steve. We love you . . .”
I collapsed over my dead father’s hands and wept. Exhausted and relieved.
MY FATHER DIED on December 2, 1992, two months after moving into hospice, four days before my twenty-second birthday, and three weeks before Christmas, the date I’d told him I wanted to move out.
I wore those boots every day. I loved the feeling of the thick leather hugging my shins and calves. I loved the heaviness of my feet as I trekked down Haight Street in long sure strides. I felt supported by these boots. Though military footwear was ubiquitous in early nineties San Francisco, I felt they particularly suited me. They grounded me in the street, in the city, in that moment in time.
I loved the weight of my steel-toed boots just as I enjoyed the weight of my father’s leather motorcycle jacket, which I now also wore everywhere, because at night, when I took them off, I felt perilously light. I felt as if I might fly away. Without my dad around, I didn’t quite know who I was. I didn’t know what to do now that I didn’t have him to look after or worry over. I never even gave him his t-shirts, which, never washed or worn, sat in my dresser for months until I finally donated them to the local Goodwill. I felt unmoored, like there was very little keeping me together. There was little that made sense anymore.
The only thing that did make sense was my grief. So I got drunk on it, literally. I took up drinking single malt scotch, neat. I liked the way it softened my brittle edges. I liked the way people looked at me when I ordered it in bars and I looked back, without blinking. Every night I lit candles throughout the apartment. I shut off the lights and played over and over the saddest music in my collection: Mozart’s Requiem, Carmina Burana, and REM’s Automatic for the People.
“Remember me!” commands the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and like that dutiful Dane, I remembered. I leaned delicate photographs and framed portraits of my dad all around our one-bedroom apartment, which now seemed impossibly large. Sitting with Karin and Jon, I read aloud Dad’s letters, his lively, humorous voice filling the room. I bicycled through the narrow paths into Golden Gate Park past Hippie Hill, where we used to play hide-and-seek, and over to Lloyd Lake, where we posed for the cover of his book Stretching the Agape Bra. I fingered the many IDs in his wallet, which pictured him with his lopsided leather cap, a hat I openly disliked but which he persisted in wearing. I caressed his round tortoiseshell glasses with the scratched lenses, things once so important but now valuable only to me.
In the time immediately following my father’s death, I reveled in my onlyness and clung to my grief like a birthright. Perhaps my father’s family, all living in Nebraska, would have come out in those final months of his life had I urged them. Perhaps, too, my father’s friends could have helped me sort the twenty-year accumulation of things in our apartment which I sifted through in the months following his death. But if anyone had been available, if anyone had entered the delicate two-step of our final year, I’d have had to share the noble light of caregiving. And if I was going to have to suffer through my dad’s death, damned if I was going to share that noble light with anyone.
It didn’t occur to me until after Dad died that the lack of a long-term boyfriend in his life was due, at least in part, to my overarching presence in our apartment as a teenager. I scowled. I was rude. I neglected to deliver phone messages and objected when my father kicked me out of his bedroom/our living room. Except for my close attachment to Dad’s first two boyfriends, the men that passed through our life were mostly useless to me. They could never replace my mom. All they could do was take my father from me, divide his precious love in two.
THERE WERE TWO memorial services for my father: one organized by his family in Nebraska and one in San Francisco attended by my father’s adopted family, his community of poets, students, intellectuals, and freaks. Within this second audience, as my father’s only attending relation, I held a singular position. I chose a large photo to display at the Buddhist ceremony in the basement of the Hartford Street Zen Center—a commanding black-and-white portrait of my father taken by Robert Giard that had hung in our apartment. I found an excerpt from one of Dad’s essays—the epilogue to View Askew—which I photocopied and distributed at the service. I picked a poem to read at the service’s close.
The funeral was held on December 11, 1992. I wore jeans, a black t-shirt, and my father’s leather jacket. I was small in that jacket, my frame shrunken from the stress of those final months. But the leather on my shoulders, so thick and stiff that it squeaked whenever I moved, made me feel safe and close to Dad, as though I were wearing his skin.
The resident monk, poet Phil Whalen, tall and bald and big in a long blue robe, performed the ceremony, chanting sutras and lighting incense. Smoke snaked through the air. The ceilings were low. The room seemed small. And in my father’s leather jacket, I felt warm. At first I stood along with everyone else in the cramped basement space, where my father and the other Zendo members sat zazen every week. Perspiration trickled down my neck and back. After Whalen completed the service, I took the stage.
I looked into the mass of bodies all standing at attention, awaiting my delivery. I recognized Kush and David Moe, both grizzled with age. Joyce Jenkins in her big glasses. Kevin Killian, Dodie Bellamy, Bruce Boone, and Bob Glück clustered together. I spotted Father Al Huerta in one corner, Karin and Jon in another, and Yayne with her dad, Mengeshe, who saw me and smiled. There were faces I remembered from the Café Flore and others from Haight Street, including many I hadn’t seen in years.
I held my father’s book, Stretching the Agape Bra, in my hands. On the cover we’re posed together: an unsmiling gothic father and his unsmiling ten-year-old daughter. He wears a pin-striped suit and two-tone spectator shoes and holds a long-stemmed white lily. I stand behind him in a high-neck white dress, with one arm to my side and one behind my back. He’d taken me out of my fifth-grade class so that I could pose with him that day in Golden Gate Park. We are standing in front of a grand marble-columned portico, the ruins of a Nob Hill mansion destroyed by the 1906 earthquake which was turned into a monument to that disaster called Portals of the Past.
I turned to the book’s last poem, “Elegy.” In the poem, my father imagines what it’s like to die. He imagines first losing his sense of sight, then sound, touch, taste, and, finally, smell. He liked to imagine his past lives in ancient history, and sees his spirit floating up after escaping the stake in the sixteenth century. Taking my father’s words in my mouth, I mimicked the rhythms I’d learned from accompanying him to scores of readings, the only child in the room. Commanding this audience to listen to me, I felt powerful. My voice never wavered, even when reading the lines he wrote about me:
“Babar’s mother was killed by a mean hunter and that makes Alysia sad even now.”
My father stares out from behind me in his black-and-white incarnation. In the photo, he is handsome, his face still almost plump in 1989. He wears his black button-down shirt and his Jesus bolo tie. He’s not smiling, but staring serenely at the camera’s lens with wet, light eyes, watching in a sort of knowing, affectionate way. I continue reading, sensing him there, saying to me:
“You. Yes, you. Who else could read this but you?”
ELEGY
The first timepieces were encased in delicate silver skulls
Memento mori. You may smile to hear this
since much of what we say is gallows humor. We would die laughing
but time encases us both as we are young & healthy.
It was not always so. I recall floating up
from one wrinkled corpse with total delight. It was maybe
the 16th century & I fled into exile to escape the stake.
First goes sight, then hearing, touch, taste, and finally smell:
so say the Tibetan monks who wrote their Book of the Dead.
Whether fire, loneliness or love hurts more than death I don’
t
know but I’m reminded of driving 14 hours to Key West
& lying beside you only to hallucinate your beautiful face
a grinning skull. I lost the poem that told of this.
When I lost my first lover, murdered by an AWOL Marine,
I drove round all night howling helplessly
yet no one could hear me. The windows were up. Before my wife
died, she dreamt of our fish tank breaking & all the fish
flopping into the street. No one would help her save them.
She was a psychologist & fell in love with a psychotic patient,
a kid who wanted to kill everyone in a small town. He was
fantastic in bed. Altho he hated queers he imagined me
coming toward him like Jesus with a garland of roses on my head.
I knew this boded ill fortune.
The dead
communicate to us in strange ways, or is it only because it is so
ordinary we think it is strange. I don a dark suit & wear a white veil,
pretend I’m a monastery prefect reading the Cloud of Unknowing.
The top of my head floats effortlessly into past or future perfect.
An ancestor of Virginia Woolf, one James Pattle, was put in a cask of spirits
when he died & thus shipped back to his wife. She went crazy. It’s difficult
to conceive what the black death meant to 14th century Europe. That Hebrew
tribes & Roman Legions massacred whole cities is generally forgotten
but then so too Auschwitz. Life is bleak enough
under the best of conditions. I wonder if a book of poems has ever
been written about murderers. If not, I’d like to write one.
Caligula, Justinian—one could do volumes on the late Roman Emperors alone.
But what is more terrible than the death of one child?
The last poem would be about Dan White, the Twinkie killer,
& his love for green Ireland, its terrible beauty.
When I learned my wife’s skull was crushed by a truck, my head
Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father Page 27
