by Paul Rudnick
“What if you check your mirrors again, release the brake, and put the car in gear?”
“ARE YOU INSANE?”
Somehow my father managed to coax me and the car out of the driveway and onto our deserted neighborhood street. I drove incredibly slowly, with a death grip on the steering wheel, as if I were a dangerously shrunken senior citizen whose gnarled head could barely clear the dashboard. I drove the way I bowled. At our local alley, I would use both hands to send my ball rolling very slowly, as if in arthritic torment, down the lane, with a lulling, repeated thump. I had a system, as I was convinced that the ball’s torpor would force it to stay on course, and slowly but surely get the job done. Instead, the ball would meander into the gutter, or politely tap an unresponsive bowling pin, and then, acting as if nothing had happened, roll meekly away.
“You’re doing great!” insisted my dad, as I inched down the street. “Do you see that mailbox?”
“What mailbox?”
“Turn! Turn the wheel! No, the other way!”
After many more attempts, even my aberrantly patient father agreed that maybe someone else should give teaching me a shot. Many people tried, including friends and other family members, all of whom ended up screaming at me and then apologizing and running away. My high school driving instructor didn’t fare much better, but he had other things on his mind, as, during their one-on-one sessions, he’d been driving his more attractive female students to a nearby motel, and offering them a different sort of lesson.
I ultimately took my driving test six times, under all possible conditions, including amid regular traffic, on a closed track, and in a few neighboring counties. Each time, when I came home, my father would give me a big smile and ask, “So how’d it go?” Here’s why he was so understanding: he wasn’t asking if I’d passed, only if I’d failed less completely. He wasn’t embarrassed by having a son who couldn’t drive, merely puzzled, as if he couldn’t decide which piece of my brain was missing, and where I’d left it.
The last time I took the test I was doing pretty well, until the official from the Motor Vehicles Bureau, who was sitting in the front seat beside me, asked me to parallel park between four orange rubber highway safety cones. As I eased the car between these cones, I nudged one of them with my rear tire.
“You just killed a child,” the official said.
“I did not,” I protested. “I just killed a rubber cone.”
“Get out of the car.”
When I limped home from this final defeat, I felt almost vindicated—you see, I told you I couldn’t drive! I told you I had no business being on the road! What do I have to do, plow into a busload of schoolchildren? Then will you people believe me? My father saw that I was unexpectedly happy, and this confused him. “What happened?” he asked.
“I almost passed, I swear I did. But the guy giving me the test was anti-Semitic.”
Here’s why I loved my father: he agreed with me.
By the time his cancer was diagnosed, my father had already had a heart attack and a bypass operation, interspersed with brief periods of relative health. He remained stoic and uncomplaining, as he began to cough up blood. Each cough seemed to surprise him, as if his body was refusing to play fair.
After my brother and I left home, my parents had moved to Philadelphia, where they could enjoy city walks and restaurants, instead of suburban sprawl. They were having a good time with new jobs and new friends, so my father’s illness seemed especially cruel. At first my mother was desperate to keep my dad at home. She rented a hospital bed and other pieces of necessary equipment, and, as his condition deteriorated, she began to hire visiting nurses. At first I thought that she’d formed a romantic image of my father dying peacefully, in the living room, but then I saw how frantic she was. She believed that if she could just keep my father with her, he wouldn’t die.
My father’s cancer soon became unmanageable. His body was wracked, and he began howling in pain and convulsing. He was moved to a nearby hospital, which turned out to be a very good idea, because his pain was finally treated with a morphine pump, which is a device that allows a patient to monitor his own dosage, by pushing a button. Surprisingly, the doctor said that patients rarely overmedicate themselves. I instantly wanted one of these pumps for myself, just for dental work and certain cocktail parties.
Once my dad was more comfortable, my mom could relax as well. My older brother, Evan, also came to the hospital. Evan had a combative history with my parents, especially with my mother. As a teenager, and a child of the counterculture, he’d taken to telling my parents, in exhaustive detail, what was wrong with their conformist, capitalist values. Sometimes he would illustrate these lectures. Once, when my folks were out of town, he’d wheeled his motorcycle into the living room, and parked it on the wall-to-wall carpeting, and then he’d photographed this treason. He’d then wheeled the motorcycle back out, without leaving so much as a drop of motor oil behind, but a week later he left the Polaroids where my parents could find them. He was a passive-aggressive Che Guevara.
As the years went by, Evan continued to spar with my parents, over everything from his now waist-length hair, to his refusal to wear a tie to a cousin’s wedding. At Evan’s request, he and my parents finally went into therapy and vented, which helped, although Evan did accuse my mother of feeding her children unhealthy junk food like Drake’s Cakes and Froot Loops, and I was then forced to remind him that this was an example of not merely good parenting but great parenting.
Once my father got sick, a truce was declared, although Evan still upset my mother by appearing at the hospital dressed as himself, in torn denim and a battered motorcycle jacket, with his hair tied back with a rubber band. My mother has always believed that Evan’s wardrobe is a deliberate, rebellious insult, aimed at her, but she’s wrong, because Evan is simply a good-natured Hells Angel born into a home without dust.
As the morphine kicked in, my father began to hallucinate. When a young, blond, Caucasian nurse came into his hospital room, my father asked her, in all seriousness, “Are you Nell Carter?” Nell Carter was the short, round, African-American star of a sitcom on which she played a wise, sassy housekeeper, and I was surprised, not just by my dad’s question, but that he knew who Nell Carter was.
“No, I’m not Nell Carter,” said the nurse, laughing.
“Please don’t tell anyone he asked you that,” my mother begged, but then even she, along with my father and the rest of us, started laughing and couldn’t stop. My father’s mind began to drift, to mostly welcome memories, of vacations and car trips. He and my mother held hands, as they always did. I usually hate couples who hold hands in public, as if they’re advertising their storybook bliss, but when my parents held hands, the act seemed private and genuine.
Evan had read up on death and hospice care, perhaps a little too much, but Evan likes to do things his own way. When Evan was a child, an aunt once asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, and he said, “Retired.” He wasn’t kidding, as he’s fixed motorcycles and done construction work, but he’s mostly lived on air. He’s hardworking, in terms of chopping wood or planting an herb garden, but he thinks of actual employment as a government conspiracy. “Why should I get some ridiculous job?” he would say. “Just so I can pay for the president’s fancy shoes?”
But Evan has a New Age soft spot, and he kept kneeling by my father’s bedside, gently taking my father’s hand, and murmuring, in a low, insistent tone, “You can let go now. We all love you. You can let go.” He was completely well-intentioned, but after the first few attempts, it became clear that my father wasn’t following the manual, and that my brother, without meaning to in any way, was starting to sound impatient, like the Grim Reaper with a golf date.
“Evan,” said my mother, equally gently, “you’re being incredibly sweet, but I think Daddy will go when he’s ready.”
4.
My father died a few days later, and Evan and I were sent to the casket showroom, to choose a coffin
. The models ranged from basic pine boxes to an iridescent, candyflake, powder blue and chrome nightmare with a ruched, white-silk interior, which cost many thousands of dollars and looked like a country-western singer’s tour bus. We were both taken with the pintsized coffins for children, which the brochure delicately called “Shortees.”
The funeral industry, as Evan pointed out, is designed to make the bereaved feel as guilty as possible and therefore willing to spend more money, as if the dead are hovering nearby, jeering, “Oh, so I’m not worth the down-filled pillow with the matching silk-covered buttons. I guess I’m supposed to spend eternity with my decaying skull resting on foam rubber. Well, thanks a casket-load, cheapskate.” We settled on something mid-range, and at the funeral home, a few minutes before the service was set to begin, the funeral director asked the family if we’d like to see our father one last time, in private, before they closed the lid. Evan agreed to this, and went into the viewing room, but I held back. I was scared; and I didn’t want my final memory of my father to be that of a cosmetically enhanced dead person. Also, my father had a low-down sense of humor and a reverence for burlesque comics. He was a big fan of Vanna White, the letter-turning hostess on Wheel of Fortune, and he liked to remind people that “vanna” means “bathtub” in Yiddish. And so I didn’t want to see his body, and begin fantasizing about him abruptly sitting up, accompanied by the wooot! of a pennywhistle.
I hate funerals. While my father’s service was brief and touching, it still did what funerals always do, which is to make death even more grim. Funerals are like birthday parties for dead people; everyone gets all dressed up, knowing they’re going to have a bad time. Funerals can also make grief competitive, as everyone eyeballs the various friends and family members to rate who’s the most stricken. My friend William told me that in the South, a mourner will often hurl him-or herself onto the coffin, weeping ostentatiously, and then teeter over the open grave, waving a tear-soaked hanky. “White trash love funerals,” he said.
About a year after my dad died, I went with William to the 1993 March on Washington. This was a gay march, to promote visibility, and to protest the government’s still atrocious record on AIDS funding, research, and care. People had been dying for years, and there was still only the most minimal treatment available, with no sign of the drug cocktails that would, years later, begin to keep those with HIV alive.
William and I took the train down and slept on a friend’s couch in Georgetown. The spring day of the march was sunny and warm, and while there were organized delegations, and marching bands and the motorcycle-riding Dykes on Bikes, there were mostly just hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people, walking toward the Capitol and the mall. There was true, infinite gay diversity, which meant that there were many people to admire, a more select group to ogle, and a copious supply of marchers dressed or undressed in ways that would embarrass the conservative gay politicos who yearned for timid respectability. My friend Candida’s ex-girlfriend was there, riding with her own motorcycle gang, which had held a naming contest. The finalists had included the Wombs of Doom and the Menstrual Cycles, but the women had settled on the more prosaic Wildcats.
As we marched, or ambled, William and I ran into people we knew, from New York or elsewhere, and we all compared our rainbow trinkets, which are the Beanie Babies of gay pride. At a bandshell, a warbly lesbian folksinger tried to get the crowd to join in on the well-mannered anthem “We Are a Gentle, Angry People.” William and I decided that this song was hopelessly wussy, and that the lyrics should include lines like “May I have the restroom key, please?” and “I’m so mad I could just…I’m sorry, you’ve caught me at a bad time.”
I saw my favorite couple on a corner, waiting to cross the street. This was a surly, dominant lesbian in jeans, boots, a leather vest, and a leather cap tilted low on her forehead, and she was leading her submissive lover on a chain-link leash. This leash went from a rawhide loop in the top woman’s fist, and then traveled about six feet into the open fly of her slave’s jeans, where it was anchored to a labial piercing. While I admired this couple’s confidence, all I kept thinking was, I hope no one jostles them.
Finally we reached the mall, which was filled with the AIDS quilt. For many years people had been sending along rectangles of fabric in honor of friends, lovers, and family members who’d died of AIDS. The panels were made from every possible material, from flannel and satin and bedsheets, and while some were only marked with a name, others were more elaborately painted and embroidered and pinned with high school yearbook pages and baby pictures and favorite T-shirts and Mardi Gras beads. I’d read that this was the first and, possibly, the last time that the quilt would be seen in its entirety. There were aisles, and people were walking among the panels, which seemed to stretch for miles, looking for someone they’d known, and considering the lives, and debris, of strangers.
People were divided about the quilt. Some found it an appropriate memorial, while others thought it was quaint and fussy, like a cemetery designed by the Ladies’ Home Journal. But on that day, the quilt was overwhelming. I don’t cry easily, and I hadn’t cried at my father’s funeral, or at any of the memorials I’d been to for friends who’d died of AIDS. So many people were gone, and so quickly, that tears had become a luxury, and endless grief seemed useless.
Death had become deranged. A few months earlier Candida had gathered with a group to surround the hospital bed of a woman with a brain tumor. Everyone was instructed to join hands, shut their eyes, and visualize the tumor, and then concentrate on shrinking it. Candida told me, “And I really tried to focus and make the tumor evaporate, but we were all standing there for a really long time and my feet hurt and I suddenly realized that my mind had wandered and that I was trying to remember which subway I needed to take to get home. And then, later that week, the woman died. Do you think I killed her?”
“Of course not,” I said comfortingly, “you were there for her, and I’m sure that her friends and family appreciated it.” Then, under my breath, but making sure that Candida could hear me, I whispered, “Murderer.”
While I walked among the panels on the quilt, I saw that someone from New Jersey had died, and that their panel included a map of my home state. The panel was made from blue and gold felt, and it looked like a team banner, hanging from the rafters of a high school gym, maybe commemorating a basketball squad from a championship year. I didn’t know the person who was being remembered, but I started to cry, and I couldn’t stop. Looking around, all I saw were other people, in clusters or alone, sniffling and sobbing.
Later that night, there were parties all over the city, and I went to one being held in the cavernous lobby of a municipal building, a hall with soaring marble columns, mahogany-paneled walls, and burnished bronze railings. There was a top-flight DJ and a state-of-the-art sound and lighting system, and the place was thronged with all sorts of people, including plenty of staggeringly well-built, gyrating men, dancing with their shirts off and their jeans dipping low. It was like disco nite at the Lincoln Memorial.
I’d only just met John, back in New York, but we’d arranged to see each other at this party. We danced, and then, to prolong that early, hopelessly infatuated stage of our relationship, we went off to join our separate groups of friends.
Here’s what I know about death and grieving: None of it makes any sense, although I will always cherish the words of a woman who spoke at a friend’s memorial, and who began her affectionate remarks by saying, “God knows, Ed was cheap.” Here’s what I know about New Jersey: If you’re a citizen, be proud of it. I knew a guy from Piscataway who would tell people that he was from the far more posh Princeton, which was forty-five minutes away. I always wanted to tell him, Darling, you’re still from New Jersey. Who are you kidding?
And here’s what I know about love: Don’t let go.
I Shudder:
An Excerpt fro the Most Deeply Intimate and Personal Diary of One Elyot Vionnet
Mr. Christmas
Christmas is woefully misunderstood. Some believe that on Christmas we celebrate the birth of Our Lord Jesus Christ. This is ludicrous. Do you think that, year after year, Jesus wants to be reminded of how very old he is? Do you imagine that Jesus enjoys watching everyone else opening their own mammoth piles of presents on what’s supposedly his big day? Do you feel, after the way humanity treated him, that a gala annual blowout might comfort Jesus, by saying, “We’re all terribly sorry about that crucifixion business, but hey look, Jimmy got a catcher’s mitt!”?
Others insist that Christmas is a time for giving, a day to reflect on our blessings, and an opportunity to share our love with our families and friends. Again, this is beyond repellent. Christmas, as it is practiced in the United States, is a season of excessive, credit-heavy spending, painfully awkward get-togethers with people we never liked to begin with, and the torture of children by never giving them enough gifts to satisfy their amoral, venal natures. The only appropriate holiday tokens would be to give every member of one’s family a crossbow and a head start.
Christmas is, as any thoughtful person will concede, an occasion for absolute judgment, on each and every one of us. It is a day for the universe to decide, without prejudice, but also without pity, precisely who has been naughty, and deserving of, at best, nothing, and who has been nice, or who has at least pretended to be nice, by visiting the elderly or contributing to worthy causes, in the hope of using their faux-niceness as a bonus coupon, to be redeemed for Yuletide merchandise.
It has come to my attention that, in terms of strict and merciless judgment, Santa Claus has become, and there is only one word for it, sloppy. He’s grown grossly overweight, and he careens through the sky, dropping garishly wrapped packages onto people who should more correctly be receiving envelopes of anthrax, crates of soap and deodorant, and subpoenas. When it comes to making well-considered and unassailable judgments, I am far more qualified than Santa. I am, in fact, the only person or being equipped to administer Christmas properly, since the entire grisly phenomenon began.