The Good Humor Man

by Andrew Fox

  Her stern expression softens. “Apology accepted, Doctor. We’re very proud of the quality of treatment we provide our patients. Is there anything else we can do for you?”

  “A few minutes ago, I checked my father’s temperature. He’s running a slight fever.”

  She retrieves his chart from his bedside and examines it. “Yes… his aide has made note of it. It’s not high enough to be of serious concern, though.” She flips through several more of the pages, then skips back to an earlier section of the chart. “Looks like your father’s been running this slightly elevated temperature for some months now. We’ve tried bringing it down with antibiotics. But none of our regimens has had any effect. Still, he hasn’t seemed to be any the worse for it. Minor fluctuations in basal body temperature aren’t that uncommon.”

  I consider asking her if I might examine the other patients’ charts for records of their temperatures, but then another idea strikes me. “I’d like to check one more thing before I leave, if it’s possible. Do you have a metabolo meter?”

  “Yes. We have one stored in one of the labs.” She gives me a sly little grin. “I can assure you we haven’t been having your father run any cross-country races.”

  I force myself to grin back. “I’m sure you haven’t. But I’m a doctor as well as a son, and I won’t be able to sleep unless I check out every little hunch. You’ll indulge me?”

  She smiles again. “I’d hate for you to lose any sleep, Doctor. I’ll see if I can get one of the lab technicians to bring the metabolometer over.”

  I return to my father’s bedside. He’s wearing a conspiratorial grin. “If you’re gonna play, son,” he says, “play to win. You get me?”

  “Uh, Dad, what is it we’re playing?”

  He scowls. “Christ, Louie, it’s a good thing I was around to teach you how to wipe your ass. Otherwise, you’d never have learned.” His face takes on that conspiratorial veneer again. “They’ve been coming ‘round to see me. Like bees drawn to honeysuckle. They really want it.”

  “Want what, Dad?” Suddenly the pit of my stomach goes sour. “Who’s been coming around to see you?”

  “Strange men. Foreigners. They want — y’know, what we’ve got. What you and me got.” He smiles up at me, his eyes brighter than I’ve seen them in a long time. “The Elvis.”

  Muthukrishnan. Damn him! How dare he come here and bother a helpless old man! “This visitor — was he an Indian? An Indian from India, I mean? What did he say to you?”

  ‘An Indian? Coulda been, I guess. But there wasn’t just one guy. There were two.”

  “Two men visited you together?”

  “No. At least — at least, I don’t think so. I think it was two different guys, on different days. It’s, ah… ah, Jesus, sometimes it’s so damn hard to remember —”

  “Can you tell me what they said to you?”

  “They — well, he knew all about what I’d done. With Elvis. He knew about, y’know, the souvenir I kept —”

  “‘Elvis-in-a-Jar’.”

  “Yeah. That’s what you called it when you were a kid, right?”

  I smile. “Go on, Dad. You’re doing great.”

  “He wanted to know if I still have it. Didn’t say I do; didn’t say I don’t. So he wanted to know if maybe you had it. I didn’t say anything then. But maybe… I dunno, maybe I grinned a little…”

  I’m stunned as it sinks in. He thinks I still have it. I never came out and told him that I’d sold it. But he must’ve suspected — with my practice melting away to nothing, and Emily’s health getting worse… He knew. I’m sure he knew. And now he’s forgotten.

  “I want you to take this schmuck for all he’s worth,” he says, squeezing my hand. “Fancy-shmancy French accent… he’s probably loaded. They all want a piece of America, these foreigners. And that’s what we’ve got — a real, authentic piece of America. But whatever you do, Louie, you’ve gotta promise me —” He pulls me closer, his eyes wide. “—promise me you’ll never let it go. You’ve still got your cannula, don’t you? Use it on a pig. Pig fat’s probably the closest to human fat. Fill up a vacuum jar with pig fat. Stupid fucker won’t know the difference. He’ll go back to India or wherever figuring he’s taking a piece of America back home with him. Well, he will be. Just not the piece he figured he had.”

  I smile weakly. “So you told him I have the Elvis…”

  “Not in so many words, no. But that doesn’t matter. What matters, what matters is…” I see the fierce light behind his eyes begin to dim; his brief spell of lucidity is waning, and he knows it. “Louie, what matters is that you never let it go. No matter how much they offer. It’s what made our family what we are. It’s what made you and me what we are. Promise me, son. Promise me you’ll never let it go…”

  Shit. “I… I promise, Dad.”

  His grip on my hand tightens. For a second, he’s as strong as he was when he used to lift me onto his shoulders. But then his grip fades along with the light in his eyes. A metallic clattering approaches from behind me. A lab technician rolls a cart with a metabolometer on it next to my father’s bedside.

  “This what you need?”

  I give the device a quick once-over. It’s not the newest or most advanced, but it should tell me what I want to know. “Thank you. This should do just fine.”

  “You know how to work it?” He’s a balding man in his midfifties, with a kind face.

  “Thanks, but I can manage.” He plugs it into the wall before he leaves.

  “Dad, I need to run another test on you.”

  “More… more thermometers?”

  “Not this time. I’ll need to put this mask over your nose and mouth for a few minutes. What I want you to do is breathe in through your nose and exhale through your mouth into the mask. Can you do that for me?”

  Confusion falls over him like a gauzy blanket. “Izzy? Are you putting me to sleep now? Is there something wrong with me?”

  “No, Dad. There’s nothing wrong with you.” I hope. “And I won’t be putting you to sleep. All this machine will do is measure how well you’re breathing.”

  My answer seems to calm him. He doesn’t protest as I place the mask over his mouth and the oxygen feed tube over his nose. An aide comes onto the ward as the metabolometer hums into life. “Oh! Hello!” she says. “I’d heard that Walter had another visitor.” She leaves her cart near the door and walks over to shake my hand. “You’re Walter’s son, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. I’m Louis.” I shake her hand. She’s attractive, in a plain kind of way.

  “Good to meet you. I’m Barbara. Your father’s one of my favorites. What a character! You should hear some of the things he says to me when he’s in a certain mood. Your father’s been exceptionally popular these past few days.”

  “Oh?”

  “He’s gotten as many visitors in the past week as most of the patients get in six months. There was that man from the government, then the other one — he was kind of rude, that one — and now you. I wish all my guys here had so many family members and friends looking after them.”

  Two men. Two separate men visited my father; he wasn’t lost in a fog when he recalled that. “Barbara? These two other visitors — did they come to see him together?”

  “No… that man from the government I mentioned — young guy, kinda good looking — he was here only two, maybe three days ago. The other one, the guy who acted like some bad-ass out of a movie… let’s see, he must’ve come to see your father sometime last week.”

  Why is the Elvis suddenly so important? “Every non-employee who comes into the building has to sign in, don’t they?” I ask.

  “Sure. No one from outside walks past that front desk without signing-”

  The metabolometer chimes loudly. I undo the straps from around my father’s head as the unit’s printer hums. “I’ll let you get back to what you were doing,” Barbara says. “Nice talking with you. You’ve got one hell of a dad. Come see him more often, okay?”

/>   “Thank you. I - I’ll try to do that.”

  She walks back to her cart. I look down at my father again. “Izzy, isn’t she something?” he says, eyes comically wide. “Look at the size of those tits! That gal must have saline implants the size of grapefruits —”

  “Dad! Please!” Even though she’s across the room, she obviously heard him. All she does is ruefully smile and shake her head.

  I hide my embarrassment by pulling the readout from the metabolometer. As soon as I see the number, all thoughts of shame vanish.

  Eight-point-seven Kelvinic units.

  Eight. Point. Seven.

  My hundred-and-two-year-old father, who spends all day lying in bed watching the nursing aides bend over, has the metabolism of a forty-year-old marathon runner.

  CHAPTER 4

  “Dad? I have to ask you something. Something important.”

  “Izzy? What?”

  I lightly grasp his shoulders, hoping the physical contact will help him connect to the here-and-now. “No, Dad. It’s not Izzy. It’s Louis. You have to help me make a decision.”

  “Oh —” His eyes focus on my face, and I feel him return to me. “Okay, Louie.”

  Every instinct screams at me to yank my father out of this place. But with who-knows-what stalking the Elvis, I have to wonder whether I’d be placing Dad in greater jeopardy by taking him home with me. Muthukrishnan certainly didn’t seem dangerous, but there are too many unknowns — particularly with another mysterious party involved, someone Muthukrishnan warned me about. Also, this place has become home for Dad; at his age, suddenly changing his environment could possibly push him into the grave faster than an elevated metabolism could.

  “Last night, you told me that you wanted me to take you away from here. To take you home. Is that still what you want?”

  “Take me home? But, but Louie… this is home — my friends are here… Besides, you’ve got your own life. Look, son, I don’t want to be schlepped around like some old suitcase. Just leave me be.”

  His eyes are clear. He’s all there, for this brief instant. “Okay, Dad.” I guess that makes up my mind for me. At least for now. “Okay.”

  At first, Nurse Posely refuses to believe the results of the metabolometer test. Until she runs it again herself. Threatening to exercise my rights as my father’s legal guardian, I convince her to put him on a regimen of high-calorie powdered dietary supplements, the sort usually prescribed only for AIDS Complex 8 or 9 sufferers. He’ll start receiving an extra fifteen-hundred calories a day, on top of his normal meals.

  I sit at my father’s bedside for a few more minutes, holding his blue-veined, fragile hand. I can’t be an absentee son anymore. I can’t let months slip by without seeing him.

  The afternoon is fading into evening. I’ve got a ninety-minute drive ahead of me; considering the shape I’m in, it’ll feel more like a tenhour haul. “I guess I need to be getting home,” I say. “But I’ll come back to see you soon. I won’t let so much time go by. I promise.”

  “Good.” He cocks his head and stares at my face. “You take care of that shiner, okay?”

  I smile and pat his hand. “I will. Thanks.”

  “And remember what I said about the Elvis, okay? Jew a good price out of them. But don’t you dare let it go. Okay?”

  Why does he forget the things I wish he’d remember but remember the things I wish he’d forget? “I’ll, uh, remember, Dad.” I kiss him on the forehead.

  He grabs my wrist. “Louie? Son?” He’s staring at me very intently now. “You look different. You look like you’ve lost some weight.”

  I have to laugh. It’s the perfect end-note to this insane symphony of a day. “I’m fine. I’m the same as I’ve always been. You take good care, all right? And don’t cause Miss Barbara any trouble.”

  But he’s gone again, his attention recaptured by the video screen. Despite everything, this has been the best visit I’ve had with him in years.

  At the front desk, while the receptionist is distracted by a phone call, I leaf through the visitors book. Two days back, I find Ravi Muthukrishnan’s signature. He signed in as Division Director, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and he listed my father as the person he’d come to visit.

  I leaf back through the previous three weeks’ worth of names, searching for another foreign signature or another listing of my father’s name. But there are no indications in the book of anyone else having come to see my father.

  God, I hate this drive.

  It’s like a midnight walk through an eighty-mile-long graveyard. These eighty miles of Orange County between my father’s convalescence home and Rancho Bernardino used to be some of the most densely populated land in California. All the concrete and steel and stucco are still here. The only thing missing now are the people.

  I’m out of my depth. A good doctor knows when to turn to his colleagues. I personally know only one colleague who’s anything of an expert on regulating human metabolism… Harriet Lane. But so far as asking her a favor, she’s got two strikes against her. One, she’s worked her entire career for the MannaSantos Corporation. And two, fourteen years back we came within a hair’s breadth of being lovers.

  Night’s fallen. I roll down my window and turn the radio on. The voice that pours from the speakers is a familiar one. “How Great Thou Art,” sung by a middle-aged, bloated, drug-addicted, but still gloriously gifted Elvis Presley.

  I was only four-and-a-half when Elvis died. I remember President Carter’s brief eulogy. I remember my father’s black, volatile mood, which lasted for what seemed like months. One of my earliest memories is of going to the airport to see my father board the jet to Paris. It was 1976, the Bicentennial year. My father won the opportunity to become the first American physician to study under Dr. Yves- Gerard Illouz, the great French plastic surgeon who had invented the technique of liposuction. And it was this distinction which brought my father into the orbit of Elvis Presley.

  Elvis’s handlers were planning his third great comeback. The only problem was, by 1977, their boy was in pretty sad shape: addicted to a pharmacy’s worth of pain-killers and other drugs, and inflated to a bloated caricature by years of lavish living. Crash dieting could only accomplish so much. Elvis needed to lose the jowls, he needed to lose the paunch, and he needed to lose both before he lost the spotlight.

  That was where my father came in. He’d been back from Paris barely four months when the call came from Colonel Parker. Not long after their conversation, my mother and I took my father to the airport again. This time, he was flying to Memphis. He told me he was leaving to help a very important, very famous man. After this, my father would be famous, too, and we could all live in a bigger house in a better neighborhood and I would have more friends than ever.

  Years later, in bits and pieces, I found out what had happened in Memphis. The planned liposuction procedure on Elvis was guarded as carefully as the blueprints for a nuclear bomb. Functionaries rented clinic space in Oxford, Mississippi, utilizing one of the many false-front corporations which Colonel Parker had set up for shady contingencies. Elvis’s handlers booked him into a concert in Syracuse, which he supposedly canceled at the last minute due to a bout of food poisoning.

  My father was completely confident he could handle the operation, in superb style, and he lost no opportunities to impress this upon Colonel Parker and Elvis himself, who was understandably nervous. Actually, Elvis was the first patient my father was to perform a liposuction procedure upon by himself, unsupervised; all of his earlier procedures had been performed under the direct supervision of Dr. Illouz. My father never revealed this fact to his clients. Had there been no complicating issues, there is every likelihood that my father’s first solo procedure would’ve been a total success; he later proved himself to be a very careful and skilled surgeon. However, three factors mitigated against success. The first was my father’s understandable jitteriness. The second and third were on Elvis’s part. The King was indulging in an orgy of legal and
illegal drug-taking, which made his body’s reaction to a major surgical procedure unpredictable. Also, my father instructed Elvis to eat absolutely nothing during the twenty-four hours before the procedure. However, eating, along with drug-taking, was one of the major ways in which Elvis dealt with stress. Suffice to say, when Elvis went under my father’s knife the next morning, he did not do so on an empty stomach.

  My father told me the removal of excess fat from Elvis’s neck and jawline went flawlessly. It was when he tackled the King’s beltline that he hit trouble. Under guidelines established years later, my father wouldn’t have attempted to remove nearly the volume of fat that he did that morning. But Elvis certainly had no shortage of belly adipose, and my father went at it with gusto. Too much gusto, as it turned out. Forty minutes into the procedure, the volume of blood traveling through the suction tubing increased dramatically. And it was mixed with a plethora of foreign substances which my father at first failed to recognize.

  His sharp-edged cannula had accidentally punctured Elvis’s stomach cavity. The fatty lipid tissues and blood which filled the vacuum container were quickly mixed with the partially digested contents of Elvis’s midnight snack and his large, furtive breakfast. My father caught his mistake very quickly, immediately halting his liposuction procedure and opening up Elvis’s abdomen so he could suture the hole in the King’s stomach. The emergency repair seemed successful. Elvis was brought out from under anesthesia shortly thereafter, and he spent the next week in hiding, convalescing in a rented antebellum mansion in Oxford.

  Unfortunately, my father’s specialty wasn’t gastrointestinal surgery. He had done a workmanlike job, but he wasn’t completely confident that he had stanched all the internal bleeding, or, even if he had, that it would stay permanently stanched. He strongly recommended that Elvis see another surgeon for exploratory surgery on his abdomen.

  But Elvis was in no mood to risk going under the knife again. Cosseted in his numbing blanket of pain-killers and other drugs, he was feeling no pain. And once the bruises and scarring of the operation began to fade, he was extremely happy with the results of my father’s procedure. He was so grateful that he showered my father with gifts, including an engraved gold ring which he’d worn throughout many concert tours; a gem-studded belt with a massive gold buckle; and an autographed copy of the famed photograph with President Nixon.