Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride

by Sweany, Brian;

  The next year or so, from roughly May 1991 to now, was a bit more of a blur. There was Harper Donovan, a girl who had a crush on me in high school and has lately become my casual sex partner. Once even, when Harper was out of town, I think I had sex with her roommate, although I still can’t recall if there was actual penetration. There was Hatch’s red-headed cousin—man, he was fucking pissed about that one, although he did get a chuckle out of the fact that she told me the next morning I wasn’t that good in bed. There was the sorority girl—Kathy? Katie?—who was engaged the first time we had sex and then married the second time we did it. In my defense, she didn’t tell me about being engaged our first time in the sack, and I didn’t care to ask her when she was more than willing to make a follow-up visit. I even circled back around to Emily Kaufmann once. I fell back in love with her for about a week before I realized she still wasn’t going to sleep with me.

  “Hatch, what was Beth even doing in town last night?”

  “Just passing through, on her way to a gymnastics meet at Ohio State.”

  “She’s competing for Illinois, right?”

  “Yep, the Illini,” Hatch says just as the phone rings.

  “I’ll get that,” I say, standing up. Dad and I have been playing phone tag the last couple days.”

  “Can we continue this conversation later?” Hatch asks.

  “What else is there left to say? You like her?”

  “It’s like you’re not even fucking listening to me.”

  “What?” I say.

  “Beth is still into you.”

  “Call me old-fashioned, Hatch, but fucking my best friend isn’t the way to my heart.” I pick up the phone. “Hello?”

  “Hey, son, got a second?”

  “Of course, Dad. What’s up?”

  “You busy?”

  “Nah, Hatch and I were just shooting the shit.”

  “Finals going okay?”

  “Great. Just one more to go.”

  “What are your plans for next week?”

  “No big plans really,” I say this while noticing Hatch hasn’t left the room yet.

  “Dad, can you hang on a second?”

  “Sure thing,” Dad says.

  I put the phone against my chest. “Hatch, what do you want?”

  “I want to know we’re okay.”

  “Okay?” I ask. “You’re my friend, not my fucking wife. If you want to make a move on Beth, make a move. Regardless of what you think there is between her and me, that ship sailed a long time ago.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.” I start to bring the phone up to my mouth. I pause and then place it back against my chest. “But, Hatch?”

  Hatch is halfway out the door. He pokes his head back inside the room. “Yes?”

  “Thanks for asking,” I say.

  Hatch nods, leaves the room. I don’t know why I’m being so gracious. Truthfully, I don’t want Hatch to ask Beth out. I don’t give a shit that I’m selfish. There’s no rational reason for why my throat hurts, for why my heart hurts. In the words of David Coverdale, here I go again.

  “Hank? Hello? Hank?”

  The voice on the other end of the phone interrupts my contemplation. I rest the receiver on my chin. “Sorry about that, Dad. Where were we?”

  “Your plans for next week?”

  “Oh yeah. Nothing on the schedule. Just hanging out. Don’t start back at the box factory until the first week of June.”

  “You think you might be able to set aside next week for some time with your Dad?”

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “Your mother just called. Turns out she can’t get off work next week, last week of school and all. Says the guidance office is a madhouse.”

  “To be expected. So what are you saying exactly?”

  “What I’m saying is I can’t go on an all-expenses-paid Oldsmobile trip to the Bahamas by myself.”

  Chapter thirty-two

  I hand my father a beer. “Cheers, Dad.”

  “Cheers, son.” He takes a drink. “Good show.”

  I’m already halfway through my fourth beer since we boarded the ship. I’m tipsy and a little seasick. “Fantastic show,” I say.

  Dad and I have been getting drunk together all week. Our drink of choice is Kalik, “The Beer of the Bahamas.” Dad has been cool since the moment we landed in Nassau. After we got to our hotel room, he handed me a Kalik from our mini-bar and said, “Drinking age is eighteen here, son. Who am I to defy native customs?”

  It took me a solid twenty-four hours to feel comfortable drinking in front of Dad, maybe twice that long before I felt comfortable power drinking in front of him. We saw Kool and the Gang live in concert last night during the Oldsmobile gala at Merv Griffin’s Paradise Island Resort. The band surprised everyone with their crispness and showmanship, reeling off an amazing set of their greatest hits: “Ladies Night,” “Get Down On It,” “Fresh,” “Cherish,” “Joanna,” “Too Hot.” As the evening drew to a close, this glistening embodiment of late-seventies funk segued finally into “Celebration”—the greatest song ever, although no one over the age of eight admits to liking it anymore—as I segued into a mosh pit of forty- and fifty-something car dealer wives groping me on the dance floor.

  Today is our last full day in Nassau. Oldsmobile chartered us a Spanish Galleon for the day. It isn’t a real Spanish Galleon, rather a diesel trawler sheathed in a not-even-close-to-authentic facsimile of a Spanish Galleon. The three masts are decorative—about half as tall as they should be—although a small sail is raised on the aft lateen rig advertising the charter company’s name and phone number.

  “Kool and the Gang aren’t the Commodores,” Dad says, “but they were fun.”

  In addition to being one of the few decent bands Dad likes, the Commodores have a special place in Dad’s heart because the priest at Grandma Eleanor’s funeral gave a eulogy in which he claimed Eleanor’s life was analogous to the song “Three Times a Lady.”

  Talk about a reach.

  “Hey, Pops, speaking of the Commodores, did you know Grandma Louise used to tell me black singers grew beards because all black men have bad acne?”

  Dad chokes on a swallow of beer, coughs, and hits his chest. “She did not tell you that.”

  “Oh yes she did.”

  “She was just raised in a different time, Hank.”

  I look around to make sure no one is within earshot. “Dad, the other night when we all went to her house for dinner, Grandma told me that NAACP stood for ‘Niggers Are Actually Colored Pollacks.’”

  Dad chokes again. “Hank, Louise’s sister married a Pollack!”

  “So that is the part you find offensive?”

  Dad pats me on the shoulder. “Take it easy on her, son. She took your Grandpa’s death pretty hard, same as your mother.”

  The taint of death still sticks to all of us. Grandpa Fred, my mother’s Dad, died in October. A retired Eli Lilly chemist, he had a hand in the development of Prozac, or at least I claim he did. I know Mom and Aunt Claudia were two of the first children in the country to get the Salk polio vaccine, which is almost as interesting.

  The doctors said it happened at about six thirty in the morning. Grandpa Fred finished his daily three-mile walk, his seventy-four-year-old swimmer’s physique easily mistaken for a man twenty years his junior. After his walk, he picked the last of his vegetables, at least the ones that had withstood the freak October blizzard earlier in the week. The vegetable garden—a half-acre plot of tomatoes, green beans, radishes, green onions, zucchini, and peppers—was where Grandpa sought refuge from my paranoid schizophrenic grandmother. Grandpa entered the kitchen through the backdoor and grabbed a cup of coffee on his way to the kitchen sink. In the middle of washing a giant zucchini, he was struck down where he stood by a pulmonary embolism. Gra
ndma called Aunt Claudia, Mom’s sister, first. She and her husband, Uncle Howard, showed up. Uncle Howard tried to administer CPR. But Grandpa was already gone.

  Dad puts his arm around me and squeezes. We let the moment dissipate. A steel drum band starts up aft of us near the helm.

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  “For what?”

  “For the trip, this time with you.”

  “You don’t have to thank me. Spending a week with my oldest son is a privilege, just as being your father for nineteen years has been a privilege.”

  “Laying it on a little thick there, aren’t we?” I create some separation, giving him the customary you’re-cramping-my-style push-off.

  “Hey!” Dad says.

  “What?”

  He pokes me in the chest. “You too old to give your dad a hug or something?”

  “No.” I grab his shoulder and squeeze, leaning in for a one of those awkward man hugs. I ease back. “There, you happy now?”

  Dad smiles. “We should do this more often.”

  “Hug?”

  “Well sure, but not just that.”

  “We should go to the Bahamas, get plastered, and play blackjack more often?”

  “No.” He slaps me on the shoulder. “And remember what I told you. This weekend—the drinking, the gambling—that’s between you and me.”

  “Got it.”

  “What I’m saying is we should hang out more—me and you. Father and son. Or at least talk more.”

  “We talk, Dad.”

  “Not enough. You’re your mother’s son. She knows things about you I’ll never know.”

  “It’s not like that, Dad.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “Oh, make no mistake. I’m a certifiable mamma’s boy.”

  “That’s my point.”

  “But it’s not that I don’t want to confide in you. You and I come from two very different worlds, and I think we’re just now trying to figure each other out.”

  “We’re not that different, Hank.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “No.”

  “You were raised poor by two alcoholic parents and shared a room with your grandma until you were sixteen. You’re the only kid from your fourth grade class to have a college diploma. You’re hardened, yet full of conviction and hope. You’re a good man.”

  “And you, Hank?”

  “I don’t even see myself as a good anything. I’ve had a great life handed to me, and I’ve crapped on most of my opportunities. I was drunk both times I took my SAT, I got arrested and suspended from the wrestling team, and I didn’t even attempt to fill out my Notre Dame application.”

  “You act as if you were born with a silver spoon in your mouth, Hank. We’ve had some lean, tough times, especially when you were little. Uncle Mitch could tell you some stories.”

  “Uncle Mitch could tell us a lot of stories,” I say.

  “What do you mean by that?” Dad says.

  Goddammit. Fucking Kalik. “Nothing,” I say. “I mean, uh, is Mitch doing okay? You talk to him at all?”

  “Not for at least a year.”

  “You miss him?”

  “I guess, maybe, I don’t know. Mitch is not the guy I grew up with anymore. Some things came out in the annulment proceedings, things that changed the way I looked at him.”

  My chest tightens. A small but noticeable panic attack. “What things?”

  Dad takes a long sip of Kalik. “Things I should have seen. Things maybe I did see but never chose to acknowledge.”

  Is it really going to be this easy? Am I just going to say to my father here and now, “Well, my memories of childhood are tempered by the sensation of Uncle Mitch’s hands cupping my balls. Are those the things you’re talking about?” Or maybe I’ll say to him, “My godfather used to molest me right in front of you and Mom under a blanket while we all watched The Muppet Show together on Sunday nights. Is that what you never chose to acknowledge?”

  “Uncle Mitch is gay,” Dad says.

  “What?”

  “He’s always been gay. I just never wanted to admit it. You remember us ever joking about Mitch serving the shortest tour of duty in the history of the Vietnam War?”

  “Vaguely. An accident during Army basic training or something like that?”

  “If by ‘accident’ you mean being caught in the shower in a compromising position with his staff sergeant.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “Yep.”

  “Dad, I…I don’t know what to say.”

  “What can you say?”

  “So that’s the reason Aunt Ophelia got the annulment?”

  “Because of the Army incident?”

  “Well, yeah,” I say.

  Dad takes another sip of beer. “Unfortunately, Ophelia has known from the very beginning about that. She got the annulment because Mitch has been having homosexual affairs behind her back for the last twenty years.”

  “Just affairs?” I ask, my question more of a challenge. Come on, Dad. Connect the fucking dots. I have to give Mitch some credit for the misdirection. He’s recast his role in our little morality play. He’s not a guy into little boys—he’s merely a gay adulterer. He outed himself to protect himself. Yeah, maybe Dad did detect the occasional furtive glance or maybe even an inappropriate gesture or two. But it’s still a whole lot easier to rationalize someone who’s lost and searching than someone who relishes being the predator.

  “I would think twenty years of affairs is pretty good justification, Hank.”

  Okay, so Dad isn’t connecting the dots. Time for a new approach. “What’s Mom say about this?”

  “She doesn’t know.”

  “What?”

  “I’m not even supposed to know. The terms of the annulment were confidential, and Mitch and Ophelia were sworn to secrecy.”

  “Mitch told you the day after he was in our driveway, didn’t he?”

  “Closer to a week after, but how would you—”

  I cut Dad’s words off with a hard, chest-to-chest bear hug. I actually hug my father all the time—granted, less than he would like and more than I would prefer—but this hug is different. It’s desperate, it’s knowing. Dad hugs me back, like he always does, only now I’m the one who isn’t letting go. I’m holding on, hoping that I can somehow tell Dad about Mitch through osmosis.

  “You okay, son?”

  I can’t tell him. In a way, Mitch has died in Dad’s eyes. That has to be enough. I can hear Mitch in my head. “So that’s what this has come down to, son? You’re willing to break your father’s heart, just like that?”

  No, I’m not willing to do that. Uncle Mitch still wins.

  I let go and straighten my shirt. The steel drum band continues playing on the deck. Dad is marching, two fresh Kaliks in hand. He hands me my last beer on the island. “Cheers, son.”

  “Cheers, Dad.”

  “Hank?”

  “Yeah?”

  More questions? Has he finally figured it out?

  “You were drunk both times you took the SAT?”

  1992

  Chapter thirty-three

  I watch as Jack zooms down the hallway of St. Augustine’s Little Sisters of the Poor on his tricycle. He’s chasing Augie, a Border Collie mix and the resident nursing home mascot. Grandpa George used to be right out there with him, but not today. Maybe never again. Dad is over in the nuns’ office making arrangements to transfer Grandpa to hospice care.

  Our old rituals simplified drastically when Grandpa moved in with us. If I’m being honest, he was an old guy, and I had better things to do. But the one ritual we still enjoyed together was a Cincinnati Reds game.

  I was sitting with Grandpa in his bedroom, the expansive room in the corner of our first floor Dad converted into a cus
tom mini-suite for his father. We were watching the Reds play the Padres. It was a late afternoon game. Eric Davis had just hit for the cycle and drove in his sixth RBI of the game. “Man oh man, Grandpa,” I said. “Davis is on fire!”

  Grandpa didn’t respond.

  “Grandpa?” I asked, turning to him.

  He looked at me with fear in eyes, tilting his head as if to say, “What’s happening to me?” He couldn’t speak. I screamed for Dad.

  “He had a stroke,” the doctors said at the hospital, “likely even two or three of them.”

  Grandpa had an amazing, albeit incomplete, recovery. He could feed and dress himself. And while his gait and speech were slower, his mind was still sharp and his incontinence wasn’t any more pervasive than it had been. But Dad knew the stroke was the first domino in his father’s endgame, and so he moved him to St. Augustine’s Little Sisters of the Poor, a Catholic nursing home on the northwest side of Indianapolis. “I’m jealous, Pops,” Dad said during the family’s first visit up from Empire Ridge. “You’re right across the street from the new Shapiro’s location.”

  “Forget corn beef and cabbage,” Grandpa said back to my father. “Give your Grandpa some matzo ball soup and a potato pancake, and you got yourself one happy old Irishman.”

  Dad smiled when Grandpa said these words, but he couldn’t forgive himself. Dad believed he had abandoned his father.

  Grandpa George’s enthusiasm for living has never waned, but his hips didn’t share in the sentiment. First one hip went, then the other. He had his last big fall in March and has been bedridden for going on sixty days. It’s sad to see such a proud man go this way—too old to survive hip-replacement surgery, too stubborn to know when to die.

  Chapter thirty-four

  At the cemetery I notice Dad staring at his parents’ tombstone, the ‘1992’ yet to be etched next to the ‘1906’– below ‘George Fitzpatrick.’ Grandpa’s casket is draped in an American flag. An honor guard stands at attention on each side of the casket—two Army officers, a man and a woman, wearing olive-green uniforms and black berets. Both of them turn and salute the casket. They execute a couple more turns, saluting again.