“Think I’m going to take some time off school. Go back next year.”
“You sure? Where are you going to live?”
“You got a spare room?”
My heart does a little skip. A roommate. A second chance at being a father. We can watch Seinfeld reruns. Go to ball games. Repaint the house. He can stitch his broken heart together, internalize the lessons of sudden loss, learn to be a man. I can teach him things, things I never did before. We could listen to complex and inspired music, tease apart the harmonies, shine a light on the composer’s intent. I could buy a pair of motorcycles and we could head into the great California deserts, sniffing out histories and dashed hopes. We could cook, rifling through celebrity cookbooks, fine-tuning recipes, switching coriander for basil, carrots for radishes. We could go clothes shopping, like giggly teenage girls. And women. We could talk about them. Watch them. Dissect their curves. Go to clubs. Seek them out. Go girl-hunting together. Me, a dissolute forty-year-old and my handsome, robust, and youth-advantaged son.
Shit.
“You can’t sleep with any girl I date. And I get first dibs.”
“Eew, that’s gross, Dad. I can’t believe you just said that.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I can play keyboards in your band.”
He could, of course. He was always good enough.
“Nope.”
“Why?”
“Late nights. People who drink and do drugs.”
“Girls. Music.”
“Pitiful little money. Brawls.”
“The roar of the crowds.”
“No. Dads playing with sons is a no-no. Besides, it’s tacky. Like that awful family TV pop band from the ’60s. The Partridge Family. The blond, healthy-looking ones. Who probably indulged in cat sacrifice and incest.”
“Can I sit in with you occasionally?”
“Yes. Definitely.”
He nods. We walk for a while.
“I think Mom would have liked to see us play together in public.”
Innocent has no experience with grief. Back then, twenty years ago, when I slipped off into the night to do drugs and fuck strangers and find myself, he was too young for the grief of abandonment, I believe, somewhat hopefully. Certainly disadvantaged, even damaged by a fatherless upbringing. But that is a different matter than grieving—it is more dispersed, diluted by time. Grief is sharp and unyielding, like a dentist’s drill. Like now, where even as we dream up a new future for him, for us, the small furrow of sadness in his handsome brow remains obdurate.
Grief. Third cousin of dread. Once or twice removed. Same ancestral line harking back to the Last Universal Common Ancestor, which is Shit Happens. And now, a mere week from Grace’s death I find myself on equal footing with grief. We are standing toe to toe, I smell its fetid breath, its short sharp breathing, but I am still standing. I am Jake LaMotta—you can’t knock me down, you motherfucker, you can beat me, but you can’t knock me down. Against the ropes is as far as I am prepared to fall, at least this time. I used to love Grace, perhaps I would have again, you hurt my son, you took her away, you piece of shit, but this will pass. This will pass.
At least for me. Innocent is another story. He is without ballast. Perhaps there are reserves within him that are hidden. Losing a parent is hard, no matter what the circumstances. But Grace wasn’t a mom. She was his entire support system. Someone to whom he said I love you at the conclusion of every phone call. I am a mere Shakespearean walking shadow, strutting and fretting. It is time for me to step up and be a model for this broken boy.
“Innocent, remember Grandma?”
“A little.”
“You were ten when she died. She was a good woman, a fine mother. A protector, like Grace. Although not as pretty. She died slow and awful. We watched it creep over her like a rash. Starting with small things, a name forgotten, a key mislaid, an overflowing bath. And then accelerating to car accidents and burnt meals and confusion and bewilderment as her brain tangled all of its routes, leaving her in a strange and terrifying world. She cried all of the time, Dad tells me. And when I visited she mistook me for her father, an old boyfriend, an old boss. And then, bit by bit, her body sort of crumpled, physically. Her hands balled up, her neck disappeared, her spine bowed until, at the end, she just lay like a brittle and curled shell in the bed, unknowing.”
“Why you telling me this?”
“Death took my mother’s dignity. Grace had dignity until the end. It’s not much, but it’s something.”
He nods.
“Yes, it’s something.”
And it is.
CHAPTER 41
I DRIVE INNOCENT to the airport, the coffin bearing his mother being transported separately via cargo, courtesy of a lawyer we found on the Internet. The guy specializes in transporting bodies around the world. The rate card has the price directly linked to the awfulness of the destination country. A body to North Korea is apparently a bank-hemorrhaging exercise. Zimbabwe falls somewhere in the middle. I wonder whether the lawyer is proud of his specialty, in the same way an undertaker might be. His office, in a Beverly Hills building of impressive ostentation, was sumptuously decorated. I asked him how he got involved in this little sliver of commerce.
“I was assigned body-shipping duties when I was in Kuwait and Iraq.”
“How did that happen?”
“Previous body postman got killed. I stepped up.”
“Body postman?”
“Yeah, I made that up. Not bad, huh?”
“How did he get killed?”
“Coffin fell on him. Go figure.”
“So why you?”
“The other guys thought the job was cursed. I figured that I’d prefer to do the paperwork than get shot at.”
The chair on which I am sitting costs more than my car.
“So business is good?”
“Yes. Not everyone has the stomach for it. You get to be around bereavement a lot.”
“Did they teach this in law school?”
“If memory serves, they taught nothing in law school. At least not at the one I went to.”
“Huh. What can I say? Well done on finding a zero-competition niche.”
“Yeah, thanks. Zimbabwe, huh?”
“Yeah. My ex-wife’s family is from there.”
“Piece of cake. We route through Johannesburg, which is pretty First World. Then on South African Airways to Harare. Paperwork is not too bad, but your son may be asked to pay a little bribe to the guy who releases the body. I have arranged with a local undertaker to accompany him to the holding area, so the coffin can be transported from the airport.”
“So does he pay the bribe?”
“I would advise that he does. You don’t want to get all politically correct about bribes over there.”
“How much?”
“No more than fifty bucks, I guess. That goes a long way in Zimbabwe. Probably as much as he gets paid in a month.”
So here’s a guy who goes to law school and watches L.A. Law and dreams of defending the innocent or slaying the guilty, or becoming an acquisition king, or a congressman, or a professor. And then the quirks and peculiarities of fate deposit him happily in the rare atmosphere of the body postman business.
I wonder how many of us end up with the life we construct for ourselves in the fervid imaginings of our youth.
Not this lawyer and certainly not me.
I walk Innocent to International Departures.
“How you feeling?”
“Better, Dad.”
“Good.”
“You going to say anything at the funeral?”
“I think so. Not sure what, though. It’ll be as much for my grandparents as for anyone. I want them to know how great she was.”
“OK. You call me or email if you need anything at all.”
“Dad? We should spend more time together. We missed out before.”
“My fault. I wasn’t ready for you. I’m sorry.”
“It’s OK. You can make it up to me when I get back.”
“Yes. Careful over there. It’s full of people who hate Americans.”
“Nonsense, Dad. Love you, see you in a few weeks.”
I hug him, his large and frail young frame filling my arms. It is difficult to let go.
Innocent reaches Zimbabwe in one piece. He is not taken into custody for being young, white, and American. The coffin is unloaded without incident. His grandfather and grandmother meet him and they embrace. Their tears run unrestrained. I know this because even in that blighted dictatorship they have the Internet and Innocent emails me daily. Sometimes twice or three times. He pours it out. The language is pure, his voice sure, his internal monologues surprising and mature, his emotions uncensored. I am taken aback by his command of narrative, obviously nurtured by a lifelong diet of rich literature from his mother.
He emails me of his tightening relationship with his numbed and dying grandfather, who he has started to call Gramps. He observes his surroundings minutely, with affection and care. He gently describes the few remaining sad and weathered family acquaintances who cluster around the grave as his mother is put to rest under the soothing and thickly accented oratory of a black minister, who comforts Innocent in ways in which I could not. He writes to me mercilessly and endlessly, his commentary rich and profound. He writes to me of the eulogy he delivers. It is bold, confident, respectful, and uplifting. He writes to me as though his entire life has led him to this point, in a distant African land, surrounded by menacing politics and breathtaking vistas and poverty and the kindness of strangers, a place in his mind where everything he was, and is, and will be suddenly fits, makes sense.
And then I get this.
Dad,
I have been here only a short time, under warm skies and among strangers who are becoming friends. I find Gramps staring at me often, not because I am his newly met grandson, but more because I seem to be a totem of sorts, a way for him to gather his strength before he dies. He is not really all that ill—just old, and tired of the many battles of life, which in this country are numerous and frequent. He is a kind man, but Mom’s death has emptied him, and I suspect he will go quickly now. His few remaining friends tell me of heroic and charitable acts quietly carried out over decades. I like him. I like Gran too, but she is just lost. I see her confusion when she looks at me. I think that she has started the slide toward dementia, but she definitely knows that he is dying, and she won’t let him out of her sight. I am something new for her. I don’t think she wants to deal with the new. Gramps talks often of Mom, a tomboy growing in the safety of another time in the heartland of this country. Wild, barefoot, guileless, curious. I wish I knew more about her African youth. The photos of her sear, a young girl whose shy and eager smile deserved a longer life.
This country tugs at me. Beyond the obvious, which blares from US newspapers you read, beyond the corruption and larceny and lack of law and torture and oppression and rigged elections is something else, something difficult to articulate, but something about the faces and gentle kindness and laughter of many who I meet here, from waiters to shopkeepers to out-of-work teachers. It sounds clichéd as hell, I know, but there is a spirit of something here, and perhaps I am simply a naive observer with a bleeding heart, but I feel an immediacy that I need to obey.
So I have decided to stay here, at least for a while. An indeterminate while. I can teach or something and it is not expensive to live here. I can comfort Gramps before he goes, keep Gran company, provide what little solace I can. Mom would have liked to know that. I can get distance from behaviors I was not proud of. I can reset, recalibrate, reanimate.
I was looking forward to living with you, having a dad and all. I’m hoping we can still do that one day.
Play easy.
Love,
Innocent
P.S. Let me tell Isobel. I’ll write to her.
CHAPTER 42
IT TAKES ME three or four readings before the impact of Innocent’s email really sinks in.
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME? YOU ARE MOVING TO SOME FUCKING HELLHOLE OF AN AFRICAN DICTATORSHIP AND LEAVING ME HERE, ALONE?
I look for something to throw. I need to cause pain to a blameless and inanimate object. There is an ashtray on the table, usually kept for Van’s proclivities. It is glass, with the name of a Milanese hotel embossed under a logo of indeterminate symbolism. Clearly purloined by a visitor to this hotel, it has found its way to my coffee table, the origins of its journey to this spot unknown. It now flies through the air, propelled by an arm that used to be known as “Mach V” during my baseball career at high school. Even in the passion of the moment I have taken care to aim it at a spot on the wall, not too high, not too low, and a tiny, tiny part of my brain has already wondered whether the appropriate tools for repair still nestle in the hardware cupboard in the basement.
Alas, muscle atrophy and excessive rage have altered my mastery of physics and the projectile veers off the trajectory I had planned and careens into a power switch on the wall, which buckles and sparks, before ricocheting off toward my beloved floor-to-ceiling plate-glass window, my Hollywood-sign-contemplating window. I watch, fascinated in a Charlie Brown zigzagged smile sort of way, as the window bows and then starts to crack and crackle and spread, before explosively shattering and cascading noisily and gleefully down the hillside outside. All of it. The ashtray falls to the floor, on its edge, and in a final act of retribution rolls lazily back to me, clattering into place near my foot. I notice that the graphic for Hotel Dolce Italiano, Milan, is a lemon, I think. This strikes me as mildly amusing until I realize that the TV, which had been silently vomiting up a soap opera, is now dark. I seem also to have fucked the power supply.
I grab my keys and head out the door.
Van is reading War and Peace when I get there. Next to his bed is Ulysses.
“What the fuck you reading those for?”
He shrugs.
“Trying to better myself.”
“You’re rich. Why d’you have to better yourself?”
“I don’t know. So that people of quality want me for reasons other than my trust fund. Want to get high?”
“Yes. Grab a joint and let’s hit Pacific Coast Highway.”
“You never say yes. What’s up?”
“Fucking Robert Mugabe.”
“Robert Mugabe?”
“Yes, Robert Fucking Mugabe.”
“That was going to be my second guess.”
“Yes. Let’s go.”
I pull out my iPod and plug it into the sound system in his car. Steely Dan. A song called “Babylon Sisters,” from way back when. “Drive west on Sunset …” the opening lines, as we do, indeed, drive west on Sunset. Slow, spare funk track. Close harmony voices in the back. Big empty spaces in the arrangement, bracketed by short sighs of incongruous and lustful horns, pregnant with the promise of sex, with these two girls in the car, the Babylon Sisters, on a perfect Southern California day. Like this.
But it isn’t. I feel like shit.
“Do it.”
Van lights up the joint, an old pro, eyes never leaving the road.
Marijuana is a multilevel marketing scheme, at least for me. A Ponzi scam. There is a series of plateaus. A lovely soft buzz and then the wonder of music and food, as if discovered for the first time. Moving on to a predilection to laugh at everything—the less funny the more we laugh, and then to debate, anything at all. And then to fuck, anything at all, at least anything with an orifice and a skirt. And then to sleep, anywhere at all. And finally, if I get there, the growling paranoia of all sound and movement, all out to get me. At that point, it is like dread on steroids. Which is why I don’t generally smoke, because it rarely ends well. I take a niggardly puff.
“So, Meyer, how you doing?”
“Been better.”
“How’s Innocent doing?”
“Better. He’s gone to Zimbabwe.”
“Hell, you say. Why?”
&nb
sp; “To bury his mother there. Meet his grandparents.”
“Ah.”
“Yeah.”
It takes about twenty seconds for the first threads of MJ to interfere with my neurotransmitters. I switch off the music. I smile goofily at Van and sing the first few bars of “Moon River” to Van. He glances at me, alarmed.
“What’s up?”
I switch midstream to “It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing).”
“You making me nervous, Meyer.”
I segue into “Ave Maria.”
“Stop it, Meyer.”
“Got anything to eat?”
“Check the glove compartment.”
There is a candy bar in the compartment. Half eaten and with some considerable miles on it. My saliva glands go into overdrive. I gobble it down. It has peanuts embedded in sweet goo and covered in chocolate. I die and go to heaven.
“My dog licked that.”
He starts giggling, falsetto and weird.
“Don’t care.”
“I wiped my butt with that.”
Now he really starts laughing. So do I. The falsetto thing is contagious. We are both cackling around high C. He pauses for long enough to get another sentence out.
“Then I wiped my dog’s butt with it.”
Now we start laughing so hard that it is hard to breathe. Van’s face goes purple and he pulls onto the shoulder of the road and beats his steering wheel with his hands.
We fall out of the car, which is perched next to a beach somewhere on the Pacific Coast Highway between Santa Monica and Malibu. There is a lone surfer in the water and few waves. Our laughter slowly subsides in smaller and smaller explosive bursts. We are now silent. The surfer, who has been lying in the languid water waiting for action, suddenly starts paddling furiously as a hopeful and pathetic little swell emerges behind him. The swell catches up to him, now looking prepubescent. It raises him up and he tries to scramble to his feet, only to continue a full rotational movement, his legs suddenly airborne, somersaulting gracelessly backward into the water, arms oscillating wildly for imaginary purchase.
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