“And you can quit your job and get back to playing music full-time.” She rolled over and kissed his cheek, then rolled back and adjusted her pillows and blankets.
Rodney kept the stuffed mouse against his nose, inhaling its spicy aroma. He kept smelling the mouse even after Rebecca had fallen asleep. If the microwave had been nearby, Rodney would have fired up Boho Mouse to reconstitute its bouquet. But the microwave was down the hall, in the shabby kitchen, and so he just lay there, smelling the mouse, which by now was cold and almost scentless.
2005
TIMESHARE
My father is showing me around his new motel. I shouldn’t call it a motel after everything he’s explained to me but I still do. What it is, what it’s going to be, my father says, is a timeshare resort. As he, my mother, and I walk down the dim hallway (some of the bulbs have burned out), my father informs me of the recent improvements. “We put in a new oceanfront patio,” he says. “I had a landscape architect come in, but he wanted to charge me an arm and a leg. So I designed it myself.”
Most of the units haven’t been renovated yet. The place was a wreck when my father borrowed the money to buy it, and from what my mother tells me, it looks a lot better now. They’ve repainted, for one thing, and put on a new roof. Each room will have a kitchen installed. At present, however, only a few rooms are occupied. Some units don’t even have doors. Walking by, I can see painting tarps and broken air conditioners lying on the floors. Water-stained carpeting curls back from the edges of the rooms. Some walls have holes in them the size of a fist, evidence of the college kids who used to stay here during spring break. My father plans to install new carpeting, and to refuse to rent to students. “Or if I do,” he says, “I’ll charge a big deposit, like three hundred bucks. And I’ll hire a security guard for a couple of weeks. But the idea is to make this place a more upscale kind of place. As far as the college kids go, piss on ’em.”
The foreman of this renewal is Buddy. My father found him out on the highway, where day workers line up in the morning. He’s a little guy with a red face and makes, for his labor, five dollars an hour. “Wages are a lot lower down here in Florida,” my father explains to me. My mother is surprised at how strong Buddy is for his size. Just yesterday, she saw him carrying a stack of cinder blocks to the Dumpster. “He’s like a little Hercules,” she says. We come to the end of the hallway and enter the stairwell. When I take hold of the aluminum banister, it nearly rips out of the wall. Every place in Florida has these same walls.
“What’s that smell?” I ask.
Above me, hunched over, my father says nothing, climbing.
“Did you check the land before you bought this place?” I ask. “Maybe it’s built over a toxic dump.”
“That’s Florida,” says my mother. “It smells that way down here.”
At the top of the stairs, a thin green runner extends down another darkened hallway. As my father leads the way, my mother nudges me, and I see what she’s been talking about: he’s walking lopsided, compensating for his bad back. She’s been after him to see a doctor but he never does. Every so often, his back goes out and he spends a day soaking in the bathtub (the tub in room 308, where my parents are staying temporarily). We pass a maid’s cart, loaded with cleaning fluids, mops, and wet rags. In an open doorway, the maid stands, looking out, a big black woman in blue jeans and a smock. My father doesn’t say anything to her. My mother says hello brightly and the maid nods.
At its middle, the hallway gives onto a small balcony. As soon as we step out, my father announces, “There it is!” I think he means the ocean, which I see for the first time, storm-colored and uplifting, but then it hits me that my father never points out scenery. He’s referring to the patio. Red-tiled, with a blue swimming pool, white deck chairs, and two palm trees, the patio looks as though it belongs to an actual seaside resort. It’s empty but, for the moment, I begin to see the place through my father’s eyes—peopled and restored, a going concern. Buddy appears down below, holding a paint can. “Hey, Buddy,” my father calls down, “that tree still looks brown. Have you had it checked?”
“I had the guy out.”
“We don’t want it to die.”
“The guy just came and looked at it.”
We look at the tree. The taller palms were too expensive, my father says. “This one’s a different variety.”
“I like the other kind,” I say.
“The royal palms? You like those? Well, then, after we get going, we’ll get some.”
We’re quiet for a while, gazing over the patio and the purple sea. “This place is going to get all fixed up and we’re going to make a million dollars!” my mother says.
“Knock on wood,” says my father.
* * *
Five years ago, my father actually made a million. He’d just turned sixty and, after working all his life as a mortgage banker, went into business for himself. He bought a condominium complex in Fort Lauderdale, resold it, and made a big profit. Then he did the same thing in Miami. At that point, he had enough to retire on but he didn’t want to. Instead, he bought a new Cadillac and a fifty-foot powerboat. He bought a twin-engine airplane and learned to fly it. And then he flew around the country, buying real estate, flew to California, to the Bahamas, over the ocean. He was his own boss and his temper improved. Later, the reversals began. One of his developments in North Carolina, a ski resort, went bankrupt. It turned out his partner had embezzled $100,000. My father had to take him to court, which cost more money. Meanwhile, a savings and loan sued my father for selling it mortgages that defaulted. More legal fees piled up. The million dollars ran out fast and, as it began to disappear, my father tried a variety of schemes to get it back. He bought a company that made “manufactured homes.” They were like mobile homes, he told me, only more substantial. They were prefabricated, could be plunked down anywhere but, once set up, looked like real houses. In the present economic situation, people needed cheap housing. Manufactured homes were selling like hotcakes.
My father took me to see the first one on its lot. It was Christmas, two years ago, when my parents still had their condominium. We’d just finished opening our presents when my father said that he wanted to take me for a little drive. Soon we were on the highway. We left the part of Florida I knew, the Florida of beaches, high-rises, and developed communities, and entered a poorer, more rural area. Spanish moss hung from the trees and the unpainted houses were made of wood. The drive took about two hours. Finally, in the distance, we saw the onion bulb of a water tower with OCALA painted on the side. We entered the town, passing rows of neat houses, and then we came to the end and kept on going. “I thought you said it was in Ocala,” I said.
“It’s a little farther out,” said my father.
Countryside began again. We drove into it. After about fifteen miles, we came to a dirt road. The road led into an open, grassless field, without any trees. Toward the back, in a muddy area, stood the manufactured house.
It was true it didn’t look like a mobile home. Instead of being long and skinny, the house was rectangular, and fairly wide. It came in three or four different pieces that were screwed together, and then a traditional-looking roof was put in place on top. We got out of the car and walked on bricks to get closer. Because the county was just now installing sewer lines out this far, the ground in front of the house—“the yard,” my father called it—was dug up. Right in front of the house, three small shrubs had been planted in the mud. My father inspected them, then waved his hand over the field. “This is all going to be filled in with grass,” he said. The front door was a foot and a half off the ground. There wasn’t a porch yet but there would be. My father opened the door and we went inside. When I shut the door behind me, the wall rattled like a theater set. I knocked on the wall, to see what it was made of, and heard a hollow, tinny sound. When I turned around, my father was standing in the middle of the living room, grinning. His right index finger pointed up in the air. “Get a load of this,”
he said. “This is what they call a ‘cathedral ceiling.’ Ten feet high. Lotta headroom, boy.”
Despite the hard times, nobody bought a manufactured home, and my father, writing off the loss, went on to other things. Soon I began getting incorporation forms from him, naming me vice president of Baron Development Corporation, or the Atlantic Glass Company, or Fidelity Mini-Storage Inc. The profits from these companies, he assured, would one day come to me. The only thing that did come, however, was a man with an artificial leg. My doorbell rang one morning and I buzzed him in. In the next moment, I heard him clumping up the stairs. From above, I could see the blond stubble on his bald head and could hear his labored breathing. I took him for a deliveryman. When he got to the top of the stairs, he asked if I was vice president of Duke Development. I said I guessed that I was. He handed me a summons.
It had to do with some legal flap. I lost track after a while. Meanwhile, I learned from my brother that my parents were living off savings, my father’s IRA, and credit from the banks. Finally, he found this place, Palm Bay Resort, a ruin by the sea, and convinced another savings and loan to lend him the money to get it running again. He’d provide the labor and know-how and, when people started coming, he’d pay off the S&L and the place would be his.
* * *
After we look at the patio, my father wants to show me the model. “We’ve got a nice little model,” he says. “Everyone who’s seen it has been very favorably impressed.” We come down the dark hallway again, down the stairs, and along the first-floor corridor. My father has a master key and lets us in a door marked 103. The hall light doesn’t work, so we file through the dark living room to the bedroom. As soon as my father flips on the light, a strange feeling takes hold of me. I feel as though I’ve been here before, in this room, and then I realize what it is: the room is my parents’ old bedroom. They’ve moved in the furniture from their old condo: the peacock bedspread, the Chinese dressers and matching headboard, the gold lamps. The furniture, which once filled a much bigger space, looks squeezed together in this small room. “This is all your old stuff,” I say.
“Goes nice in here, don’t you think?” my father asks.
“What are you using for a bedspread now?”
“We’ve got twin beds in our unit,” my mother says. “This wouldn’t have fit anyway. We’ve just got regular bedspreads now. Like in the other rooms. Hotel supply. They’re OK.”
“Come and see the living room,” my father tells me, and I follow him through the door. After some fumbling, he finds a light that works. The furniture in here is all new and doesn’t remind me of anything. A painting of driftwood on the beach hangs on the wall. “How do you like that painting? We got fifty of them from this warehouse. Five bucks a pop. And they’re all different. Some have starfish, some seashells. All in a maritime motif. They’re signed oil paintings.” He walks to the wall and, taking off his glasses, makes out the signature: “Cesar Amarollo! Boy, that’s better than Picasso.” He turns his back to me, smiling, happy about this place.
* * *
I’m down here to stay a couple of weeks, maybe even a month. I won’t go into why. My father gave me unit 207, right on the ocean. He calls the rooms “units” to differentiate them from the motel rooms they used to be. Mine has a little kitchen. And a balcony. From it, I can see cars driving along the beach, a pretty steady stream. This is the only place in Florida, my father tells me, where you can drive on the beach.
The motel gleams in the sun. Somebody is pounding somewhere. A couple of days ago, my father started offering complimentary suntan lotion to anyone who stays the night. He’s advertising this on the marquee out front but, so far, no one has stopped. Only a few families are here right now, mostly old couples. There’s one woman in a motorized wheelchair. In the morning, she rides out to the pool and sits, and then her husband appears, a washed-out guy in a bathing suit and flannel shirt. “We don’t tan anymore,” she tells me. “After a certain age, you just don’t tan. Look at Kurt. We’ve been out here all week and that’s all the tan he is.” Sometimes, too, Judy, who works in the office, comes out to sunbathe during her lunch hour. My father gives her a free room to stay in, up on the third floor, as part of her salary. She’s from Ohio and wears her hair in a long braided ponytail, like a girl in fifth grade.
At night, in her hotel-supply bed, my mother has been having prophetic dreams. She dreamed that the roof sprung a leak two days before it did so. She dreamed that the skinny maid would quit and, next day, the skinny maid did. She dreamed that someone broke his neck diving into the empty swimming pool (instead, the filter broke, and the pool had to be emptied to fix it, which she says counts). She tells me all this by the swimming pool. I’m in it; she’s dangling her feet in the water. My mother doesn’t know how to swim. The last time I saw her in a bathing suit I was five years old. She’s the burning, freckled type, braving the sun in her straw hat only to talk to me, to confess this strange phenomenon. I feel as though she’s picking me up after swimming lessons. My throat tastes of chlorine. But then I look down and see the hair on my chest, grotesquely black against my white skin, and I remember that I’m old, too.
Whatever improvements are being made today are being made on the far side of the building. Coming down to the pool, I saw Buddy going into a room, carrying a wrench. Out here, we’re alone, and my mother tells me that it’s all due to rootlessness. “I wouldn’t be dreaming these things if I had a decent house of my own. I’m not some kind of gypsy. It’s just all this traipsing around. First we lived in that motel in Hilton Head. Then that condo in Vero. Then that recording studio your father bought, without any windows, which just about killed me. And now this. All my things are in storage. I dream about them, too. My couches, my good dishes, all our old family photos. I dream of them packed away almost every night.”
“What happens to them?”
“Nothing. Just that nobody ever comes to get them.”
* * *
There are a number of medical procedures that my parents are planning to have done when things get better. For some time now, my mother has wanted a face-lift. When my parents were flush, she actually went to a plastic surgeon who took photographs of her face and diagrammed her bone structure. It’s not a matter of simply pulling the loose skin up, apparently. Certain facial bones need shoring up as well. My mother’s upper palate has slowly receded over the years. Her bite has become misaligned. Dental surgery is needed to resurrect the skull over which the skin will be tightened. She had the first of these procedures scheduled about the time my father caught his partner embezzling. In the trouble afterward, she had to put the idea on hold.
My father, too, has put off two operations. The first is disk surgery to help the pain in his lower back. The second is prostate surgery to lessen the blockage to his urethra and increase the flow of his urine. His delay in the latter case is not motivated purely by financial considerations. “They go up there with that Roto-Rooter and it hurts like hell,” he told me. “Plus, you can end up incontinent.” Instead, he has elected to go to the bathroom fifteen to twenty times a day, no trip being completely satisfying. During the breaks in my mother’s prophetic dreams, she hears my father getting up again and again. “Your father’s stream isn’t exactly magnificent anymore,” she told me. “You live with someone, you know.”
As for me, I need a new pair of shoes. A sensible pair. A pair suited to the tropics. Stupidly, I wore a pair of old black wingtips down here, the right shoe of which has a hole in the bottom. I need a pair of flip-flops. Every night, when I go out to the bars in my father’s Cadillac (the boat is gone, the plane is gone, but we still have the yellow “Florida Special” with the white vinyl top), I pass souvenir shops, their windows crammed with T-shirts, seashells, sunhats, coconuts with painted faces. Every time, I think about stopping to get flip-flops, but I haven’t yet.
* * *
One morning, I come down to find the office in chaos. Judy, the secretary, is sitting at her desk, chewing the
end of her ponytail. “Your father had to fire Buddy,” she says. But before she can tell me anything more, one of the guests comes in, complaining about a leak. “It’s right over the bed,” the man says. “How do you expect me to pay for a room with a leak over the bed? We had to sleep on the floor! I came down to the office last night to get another room but there was no one here.”
Just then my father comes in with the tree surgeon. “I thought you told me this type of palm tree was hardy.”
“It is.”
“Then what’s the matter with it?”
“It’s not in the right kind of soil.”
“You never told me to change the soil,” my father says, his voice rising.
“It’s not only the soil,” the tree surgeon says. “Trees are like people. They get sick. I can’t tell you why. It might have needed more water.”
“We watered it!” my father says, shouting now. “I had the guy water it every goddamn day! And now you tell me it’s dead?” The man doesn’t reply. My father sees me. “Hey there, buddy!” he says heartily. “Be with you in a minute.”
The man with the leak begins explaining his trouble to my father. In the middle, my father stops him. Pointing at the tree surgeon, he says, “Judy, pay this bastard.” Then he goes back to listening to the man’s story. When the man finishes, my father offers him his money back and a free room for the night.
Ten minutes later, in the car, I learn the outlandish story. My father fired Buddy for drinking on the job. “But wait’ll you hear how he was drinking,” he says. Early that morning, he saw Buddy lying on the floor of unit 106, under the air conditioner. “He was supposed to be fixing it. All morning, I kept passing by, and every time I’d see Buddy lying under that air conditioner. I thought to myself, Jeez. But then this goddamn crook of a tree surgeon shows up. And he tells me that the goddamn tree he’s supposed to be curing is dead, and I forgot all about Buddy. We go out to look at the tree and the guy’s giving me all this bullshit—the climate this, the climate that—until finally I tell him I’m going to go call the nursery. So I come back to the office. And I pass 106 again. And there’s Buddy still lying on the floor.”
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