Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride

by Sweany, Brian;

  Dad is crying. He puts his arm around me. “You and your Grandpa had some good times together.”

  “The best times,” I say.

  A third Army officer I hadn’t noticed, about thirty yards away standing amongst the rows of white and gray memorials, starts to play “Taps.” It makes me think of the two war stories Grandpa George would tell me over and over. One was about the time he was in charge of four German POWs—“a right decent bunch of krauts”—down at the Army Air Force base in Corpus Christi, Texas, and how they hid his rifle as a practical joke when he fell asleep under a tree. The other story was about when he served as a member of the honor guard that received the dead soldiers from overseas.

  With his horrible eyesight, Grandpa was forced to remain stateside with the United States Army Air Force for World War II. I usually lie and tell people he was an airplane mechanic or even a pilot, but the truth was he spent the better part of the war painting big-breasted pinup girls on the sides of bombers. As one of the base’s semi-permanent residents, Grandpa was in charge of the honor guard. One day toward the end of the war, he was intently listening to the bugler on the tarmac as they offloaded the flag-draped caskets from a C-47 transport plane. As the bugler started into “Taps,” only then did Grandpa realize he had listened to the same person playing for three years. For no other reason than the fact he could carry a tune on a hollow piece of brass, this kid was never sent to the frontline.

  “That’s when I knew your father would be a musician,” Grandpa said. “If I could get him to pick up a horn, maybe I could save him from ever having to pick up a gun.”

  “Taps” ends. The first two Army officers fold the flag and present it to my father. They thank him for Grandpa’s service “on behalf of a grateful nation.”

  I see Grandma Eleanor’s casket in the hole below Grandpa. I picture Grandma, a chain-smoking Methodist to the very end, chewing Grandpa George out right about now. Grandpa made sure they were buried in a Catholic cemetery. “Eleanor didn’t live Catholic,” he once said, “but she sure as hell is dying Catholic.” I imagine the late Mr. Shapiro handing Grandpa a potato pancake dripping with applesauce—just the way he liked it—and Grandpa saying something like, “See Eleanor, I told you they got into heaven, too.”

  The soldiers leave. Dad is still staring at the tombstone. “You know, your Grandpa chose this precise burial site.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, sir. He wanted to make sure he and Mom were in walking distance of the pickled pig’s feet and turtle soup at Barringer’s Tavern.”

  “That’s kind of gross, Dad.”

  I expect him to laugh here. Instead, he turns away from the gravesite. I reach for him. “Dad?”

  He grabs me in a bear hug. His body is sweating, shaking with grief. He mumbles into my shoulder. “Promise me something, son.”

  “Anything.”

  “Promise me, when I get old and worn down, that you’ll take care of me like we tried to care of your grandfather.”

  A flash of Dad’s youthful face morphing into the face of my Grandpa—a freckled, blonde-till-the-day-he-died Irishman, with a nose and ears too large for even his whiskey-swollen face and thick bifocals that exaggerated the size of his eyes.

  “Come on, Dad.” I hug him back. “Like you even have to ask.”

  Chapter thirty-five

  I’m on the couch in my apartment watching a well-worn VHS copy of The Outsiders. Cherry Valance and Pony Boy Curtis front a vintage Coppolla pink-gray dawn that consumes the whole scene. I can’t stop staring at Diane Lane’s eyes. I’m freshly showered and shaved, but the sex odors of the previous night—another limbs-flailing, drunken mistake with some Varsity Villas tramp whose name I can’t remember—still linger on my fingers, on my lips, on my cock. I want to say the girl’s name is Greek. Athena? Aphrodite? Medusa? Fuck it. Whatever her identity, she’s upstairs in my room right now, sleeping off her shame.

  The answering machine is flashing. I press play.

  “Hank, this is Monica…” Delete.

  “Hey Hank, Monica here…” Delete.

  “Hello, Hank? Monica again…” Delete.

  I was hired as a waiter at Fuddruckers the first week of school. I work Thursday and Friday nights and Sunday mornings, and it beats the hell out of the box factory. Dad calls it “Mother Fuddruckers,” pretending his world is the least bit profane or scandalous. Two weeks ago a coworker bet me I couldn’t sleep with the “next hot box to walk in the door.” Monica Ferguson was the next hot box to walk in the door, but she sat in the wrong section. I asked June if he’d trade sections with me so I could get her table, and he was happy to oblige. “June” is a gay man, my first gay friend. June is his stage name, but no one but his mother calls him Michael. When June and I go out for after-hours cocktails, I’m not above pretending to be bi-curious if it means a round or two of free drinks.

  Monica had a girlfriend, a sidekick who knew what I was up to, but that didn’t seem to matter. Monica ordered the Cajun chicken tenders. Six stiff rum drinks and a 40 percent tip later, she invited me to her friend’s place.

  We shared a cigarette on the hood of her Trans Am. She opened up to me. She had just turned eighteen, wanted to be treated like an adult. “Do I look mature to you?” Monica asked. She didn’t look a day over sixteen. I told her she could easily pass for twenty-five. She was on the rebound from a three-year relationship with her high school sweetheart. “I thought he was the one.” She was estranged from her parents. “They hate me, I hate them.” Your standard vulnerable teenage girl. I asked Ty Wilson, the guy who made the bet with me, to come along and run interference with Monica’s friend. Ty made a valiant run at the friend, working his way into her bedroom. His effort lasted right up to the point where she stopped him from putting his hand up her shirt, muttered something about “being saved,” and turned on her nightstand light to reveal a hand-knit facsimile of “The Lord’s Prayer” hanging over her bed.

  By that time, however, I was all over Monica in the family room. When it looked like there was a definitive line Monica wouldn’t cross, I forced a yawn with my mouth closed. It’s a grade school trick I learned to make my eyes water—guaranteed to illicit unbridled sympathy and compassion. Contrived grief flowing, I closed on my target.

  Monica noticed the tears. “What’s wrong, Hank?”

  “Nothing. It’s just…oh, you’ll think I’m cheesy for saying it.”

  “No, I won’t.” She grabbed my hand. “I can’t imagine anything you ever say or do being cheesy.”

  Let the record show I had known Monica for all of about ninety minutes and she had made a blanket, baseless judgment about the sterling quality of my character. Apparently her three years of high school-induced monogamy occurred inside a cave. Nobody was this easy.

  “You sure, Monica?” It was a preemptive question whose answer would be the presumed answer for the remainder of the night’s questions, and we both knew it.

  “Yes, Hank.” She lifted my hand to her lips and kissed my fingers.

  And that’s when I closed. “The worst thing about tonight is that we’ve just met one another. I feel so comfortable with you right now, and it breaks my heart to think this could be our first and last night together.”

  I entered Monica right there on the living room floor. Both of us were clothed save for our pants and underwear pulled down to our ankles. Monica cried real tears. She told me she loved me. She gave me her keychain, one of those little plastic telescopes with a picture inside that she bought on some tacky ocean boardwalk. The picture was of her posing on a beach in a bikini. She wrote her phone number in permanent marker on my hand. I returned Monica’s phone calls for the first few days, just to be nice. On day four I erased her number off my hand with acetone. I still masturbate to her bikini keychain, but I know I’ll never see Monica again.

  I fast forward to the next message on the answ
ering machine:

  “Hank, Dad here. I got an extra ticket for Stanford. I don’t think you work Saturdays at Mother Fuddruckers, so clear your schedule and don’t get drunk Friday night. Go Irish!”

  The last Notre Dame game we attended was versus Michigan three weeks ago. Hopefully this one goes a little better. Notre Dame didn’t lose that day, but they didn’t win either. It was a 17–17 tie. It was only the second tie in Notre Dame Stadium in the last quarter century. Some fans in the stadium, including me, booed Coach Holtz as he ran off the field. But not John Fitzpatrick.

  “Let’s give the boys the benefit of the doubt,” he said. “The way I see it, I’m standing in the parking lot outside Notre Dame Stadium on a gorgeous Saturday afternoon, surrounded by family and friends, and the Fighting Irish didn’t lose.”

  Dad always had a way of putting things into perspective, especially under the watchful eye of Touchdown Jesus. That was all that mattered to him that day—being around the people he loved. Ever the loyal Irish fan, he wasn’t interested in second-guessing or criticizing the latest in a long line of infallible leaders of the University of Notre Dame Fighting Irish football team.

  “Our Lady of the Van” had its usual band of merry parishioners after the Michigan game. The only things Dad asked of them was to bring their faiths and their lawn chairs. The body and blood of Jesus Christ were served from white foam plates and red plastic cups. The body was a partial loaf of sweet Hawaiian bread left over from the spinach dip. The blood was a five-dollar box of white zinfandel, half of which my father and I had already consumed since the game ended.

  Our pastor that afternoon was a tall, bald man of medium height. His name was Father Ignatius, better known to his friends as Father “Iggy.” He was a bookend in my parents’ lives, graduating with Dad from Ben Davis High School in the mid-sixties right before he went into the seminary, and then later in the early eighties meeting Mom when they were both faculty members at Cardinal Ritter High School. Dad always sets aside one of his tickets for a priest. He asks for but a single concession from him—he must agree to preside over an afternoon mass in the Red West parking lot of Notre Dame Stadium.

  The “OLV” congregants stood. Father Iggy crossed himself. “In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit…”

  I notice a fifth message on the answering machine. It wasn’t there before I got in the shower, so someone must have just left it.

  “Hank, this is Hiram Gerwin at the dealership in Empire Ridge. Please call me as soon as you get this message. It’s your father. He’s been in an accident.”

  Hiram is the dealership’s longtime office assistant. He’s a paraplegic. I take his car for a spin whenever he brings it into the shop. It has this metal gearshift device that allows you to work the gas and the brake with just your right hand. It took me a couple tries to figure it out, but I became a better-than-average paraplegic driver.

  I pick up the phone and dial the dealership’s number. An operator picks up after four rings. “Fitzpatrick Oldsmobile-Cadillac-Subaru.”

  “This is Hank Fitzpatrick calling for Hiram Gerwin, please.”

  “Oh, hi Hank. I’ll get Hiram right away for you.”

  Hiram picks up almost immediately. “Hank?”

  “What’s up, Hiram?”

  “It’s your father. He was at the Indianapolis Auto Auction this morning. There’s been an accident. He got hit by a car around eight-thirty a.m.”

  “What?”

  “He’s been admitted to Wishard Memorial in Indy, off 10th Street. You know where that is?”

  “Yeah, I know where Wishard is. What happened? Is it serious?”

  “We don’t know too much here, Hank. Just get there as soon as you can.”

  I hang up the phone and tiptoe up the stairs to my room. I get dressed without waking up Cassiopeia, or whatever her name is. She turns over and mumbles something in her sleep. I see her face for a moment, before she buries herself in a pillow. I pull down the covers for a quick look at the rest of her. Dark hair. Pale skin. A smooth back knotted by the indentations of her spine. A small, somewhat bony ass. Long legs and long, high-arched feet. She’s a pretty girl, although skinnier than what I’m attracted to sober. I notice the soft pack of Marlboro Lights sticking out of the back pocket of her discarded jeans at the foot of the bed. I stuff the cigarettes in my jacket.

  Once outside the apartment, I start up my truck, a brand-new light blue Chevy C/K 1500 Dad gave me off the lot two months ago. The engine radiates a trace of heat from multiple runs to the liquor store a few hours earlier, and the gas gauge has dropped below a quarter-tank. The truck smells like a guy trying to impress some Grecian waif whose name he can’t remember—beer, cigarettes, cheap perfume. I peer out the back of the truck, almost too afraid to look, but there it is—a V-shaped indentation on the inside of the truck bed. What am I going to tell Dad? The truth? That Persephone, or whatever her name, was blowing me while I was driving and I didn’t see the red light until it was almost too late? That I slammed on the brakes and sent a pony keg hurtling across my truck bed and a girl almost bit my dick off? “See, Dad, it’s like this. We’re reading Irving’s The World According to Garp in my Twentieth Century Lit class, and I was just reenacting the, uh, climactic scene.”

  Yeah. Right.

  A plump but sweet-looking old black nurse at the receptionist’s desk ushers me forward after I tell her my name. “Come with me, Mr. Fitzpatrick.” It’s the third time anyone’s ever called me “Mister” Fitzpatrick.

  My trip up Highway 37 annoyed the fuck out of me. I got stuck behind a combine just north of Bloomington. All the traffic lights were out in Martinsville, perhaps the last town in which I’d ever want to be stuck in traffic. Then, once I was on the interstate, I-70 was one lane all the way into downtown Indianapolis. A trip that should have taken me forty minutes and three cigarettes was more like ninety minutes and a half pack of smokes.

  The nurse escorts me through swinging double doors beneath a sign that reads emergency room. The doors open wide on the hallmarks of suffering: white coats scurrying around in comfortable shoes, the rattle of gurney wheels on dirty tiled floors, machines that go ping but not in a funny John Cleese way, a piney, gin-smelling antiseptic scent that tries to mask the odor of human excrement and who knows what else.

  The nurse takes a sharp left and points me to a door marked e.r. waiting room. “Have a seat in there, Mr. Fitzpatrick.”

  Again with the “mister.” “When can I see my father?”

  The nurse smiles, walking away and saying over her shoulder, “The doctors will be with you shortly.”

  I enter the waiting room. An unexpected sight greets me. Six people, three of whom I know, sitting in chairs along the walls. My Aunt Claudia and Uncle Howard huddle together on my far left, holding hands.

  Aunt Claudia is Mom’s younger sister, a loud and obnoxious pink-haired English teacher prone to gossip, overeating, and making my mother’s life a living hell. Picture Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? reimagined in a sleepy Midwestern suburb with Mrs. Garrett from Facts of Life as Baby Jane Hudson.

  “Thank God you’re here, Hank.” Aunt Claudia waddles across the room and hugs me, smothering me in perfumed cellulite. Her skin is red and splotchy from crying. “They’re not telling us anything, but it’s going to be all right. Okay, honey?”

  “Relax, Aunt Claudia.” It’s all I can think to say. “I’m sure everything is fine.” I nod at Uncle Howard. “Uncle Howard.”

  He nods back. “Hank.”

  Uncle Howard is the quietest man I know. The number of cigarettes he smokes in the course of our annual Thanksgiving Day dinners more often than not exceeds the number of words that come out of his mouth. I’ve known the man all my life, and all I can say about him is he chain-smokes, he hunts, he fishes, and he pretends to be a good golfer.

  Standing across the room with his back
turned to me is Saul Gorman, Uncle Howard’s kid brother. Saul is an IPD officer, tall and lean-bodied compared to his older sibling and in plain clothes due to his recent promotion to detective. Saul is one of the few people I know who’s had his fifteen minutes of fame, and then some. Back in ’86 he was cast as an extra in Hoosiers. It was a non-speaking role in which he nonetheless had a solid ten to fifteen seconds of onscreen time as the gaping-mouthed newsman taking a knee during the Hickory–South Bend Central state final. Just last year he was the lead detective in the Mike Tyson rape investigation and subsequent conviction, something I didn’t know until a few weeks ago when Dad blurted it out during one of our many late nights spent watching boxing on Univision, the Spanish channel. El Mundoooooh del Box!

  Saul raises his right hand to his mouth, says something into a handheld radio. He’s half-listening to the two guys seated in the chairs behind him. One of the guys scribbles on a yellow notepad, while the other makes wild hand gestures. I catch every third or fourth word of the conversation.

  I try to move closer to listen in, but another man dressed liked Fred Rogers steps into my path. He reaches out to shake my hand.

  “Are you Hank?”

  I don’t reciprocate the gesture, barely even making eye contact. “Uh, yeah.”

  Mr. Rogers leaves his hand hanging there for a moment, still hopeful, but then drops it. “I’m Ike Lewis, a volunteer chaplain here at Wishard.”

  “Oh, sorry, Father.” I extend my guilt-ridden hand.

  He shakes it, smiling. “Please, Hank. Call me Ike. No title is necessary. While I am a recently retired Baptist minister, we are all just humble servants of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.”