The surgery would be done on an outpatient basis at Cedars Sinai and I would be released a few hours after it was done.
“Nothing to it,” the doctor said. “I do it all the time. I’ve done thousands of them.”
But I was uneasy. I knew that Cedars had almost killed Lew Wasserman, one of their biggest financial benefactors, the venerable former head of MCA Universal, counselor to presidents from Kennedy to Reagan. A routine surgery and Lew Wasserman had almost died. I knew that the puppeteer Shari Lewis’s estate was suing Cedars, claiming that Lewis, in their care, had died choking on her own vomit.
I also knew that Julie Andrews and former California governor Pete Wilson had had this kind of benign polyp surgery in L.A. and Julie Andrews couldn’t sing anymore and Pete Wilson could hardly speak.
For some reason, I didn’t like the presence of all those platinum and gold records on my doctor’s walls, either. I wanted to be in the hands of a doctor who kept medical certificates on his walls.
The Cleveland Clinic, I knew, had an international reputation equal to the Mayo’s. Saudi kings flew there to have their surgeries.
“I’m not going to have these polyps taken out here,” I said to Naomi. “I certainly don’t sing as well as Julie Andrews did. But I still like to sing in the shower.”
“You sing horribly,” Naomi said.
“Yeah, I know,” I said, “but nobody can hear me in the shower. I don’t want some guy doing this who’s got gold records on his wall. There’s got to be some kind of limit put on starfucking in this town.”
“Fine,” Naomi said, “we’ll get it done in Cleveland.”
We drove our little boys over to Woodland Hills in the Valley to see the neighborhood which turned into a Christmas festival each year … and found the street we loved aglow with Christmas lights and blocked off by police crime scene tape.
A man was lying on the sidewalk in a pool of blood under a home-built papier-mâché float of Santa and his elves, shot to death less than an hour before by his girlfriend’s jealous husband.
To consider, too, as we contemplated moving to Cleveland, was the matter of my father.
He was ninety-three years old and living in the same house in Cleveland Heights which he’d bought with my mother in 1966. I’d supported him since 1978 and, since 1992, I’d hired around-the-clock nursing care for him as well as a Hungarian housekeeper.
He was bed-bound now, with a catheter, and was in and out, lucid one day and befogged the next. There was a time in my life, when I was a young man, when my father had been my best friend. That time had passed.
I loved my father but we were no longer best friends. I loved him, but I also loathed him.
When he was accused of war crimes by the Justice Department, I discovered a painful jigsaw of lies that went to the core of who I thought my father was. I started avoiding him and avoiding talking to him because I knew all I’d get were more lies.
I spoke to him periodically on behalf of the black nurses who worked so hard to take care of him. He’d screamed at them to serve him his meals, hiding cans of Coke from them under his bed. I spoke to him on their behalf but it did no good.
His nurses couldn’t take care of him anymore: he was too heavy to lift and difficult even to turn over. The Hungarian housekeeper made daily gastronomic extravaganzas of chicken paprikás and stuffed cabbage and my father, on a catheter and without teeth, somehow kept eating it all and getting bigger.
It was time finally, I knew, for a nursing home—the decision I’d been dreading because I knew how much being in his home meant to him. My father had always been there for me when I was a kid and an adolescent and as much as my feelings for him had changed through the course of the past decade … I didn’t want to do this to him … He still spoke the English language, after fifty years in America, with a thick, difficult-to-understand accent. To take him out of his home and to put him into an American setting where they’d have difficulty understanding him would probably not only be a death sentence but a sentence of torture.
It occurred to me that by forcing him out of his house, I’d be effecting the deportation which Gerry Messerman and I had stopped the Justice Department from doing.
But the nurses kept calling to tell me we had to do something. My father lay in bed staring off, vegetating, not even watching the big-screen TV I’d bought for him.
He had bedsores, the nurses said, which were getting worse. We had to do something … we had to do something … we had to do something.
Shortly after New Year’s of 2001, I got a call from one of my father’s nurses telling me that he was failing and that we had to do something quickly about getting him into a nursing home. Naomi and I decided to fly back to Cleveland immediately to see him.
His hospital bed was in the middle of the living room and a nurse was changing his diaper when we walked in. I hugged him and he started to cry, held him as she tried to roll him over. I saw bedsores all over his back and body.
Naomi and I sat next to the bed and we tried to talk to him. He couldn’t hear very well. He refused to use the hearing aid which I’d bought him. I couldn’t shout because of the polyps in my throat and tried not to strain my voice because the doctors told me if I strained it, I’d lose it.
And Naomi couldn’t speak Hungarian, of course, and my father, even when he could hear, couldn’t understand English very well.
Naomi and I tried, as people do at moments like this, to joke, to brighten his life for a few hours, to talk about his grandchildren, whose framed photographs were all over his walls … to make him smile and laugh, to blot momentarily the grimness of his daily life, his catheter, his bedsores.
“Pop,” I said, “listen to this. Joey is my Arab son, always making deals to his benefit with his little brothers. Nick is my Italian son, flashing his temper, instantly ready to use his fists, John Law is my Hungarian son—he’s inherited our triple chins—and Luke, he’s my Russian son. He’s very charming but all he does is drink.”
My father laughed, as he was supposed to. Granting us our victory over his misery. He was happy. Smiling and laughing. And then he closed his eyes—eyes exactly the slate-blue color of Luke’s … and started to cry.
I held his hand.
He said, “I’ve never lied to you” and, knowing that it was a lie, I kissed his hand and held it. I was crying, too, and so was Naomi. We cried quietly for a long time, saying nothing, not looking at each other.
“Are you tired, Pop?” I asked him in Hungarian.
He couldn’t hear me. My voice, now that I’d been talking for a while, was much weaker.
There was a cruel kind of poetic irony at work here, I thought.
He couldn’t hear. I couldn’t speak. The only way we could communicate now was through Naomi.
I repeated the Hungarian words slowly to her. Naomi yelled them phonetically into my father’s ears.
“I am tired to death,” my father said.
“Are you bored?”
“There is nothing I can do,” my father said. “I can’t hear, I can’t see, I can’t get out of this bed. Some mornings I wake up and I can’t speak for an hour or so. I can’t read, I can’t write, I can’t watch the TV. My friends are all dead. You’re in California.”
I tried to joke again.
“Well,” I said in Hungarian, “the good news is that you can still eat. Margit”—his housekeeper—“makes great chicken paprikás for you.”
He couldn’t hear me again.
I repeated the Hungarian words slowly to Naomi again and she yelled them phonetically into his ear, again.
My father smiled at her.
“Very good,” he said. “You speak Hungarian perfect.”
“Thank you, Steffen,” Naomi said and held his hand.
My father’s eyes were suddenly frantic, his eyes like Luke’s when he woke up in the middle of the night and screamed for us.
“Isn’t there some way to make this go faster?” he asked me. “Isn’t there
some way I can die faster?”
I shook my head. I noticed he wasn’t crying now.
“How much longer will it take?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Nobody knows.”
He nodded and looked away and shook his head.
“Are you scared, Pop?” I asked him.
“No,” he said, “I am ready for the next adventure.”
He dozed off then as we were holding his hand. He startled awake as I was kissing his forehead, saying goodbye.
“You’re going?” he said, panicked again.
“We’ll be back tomorrow, Steffen,” Naomi said.
“Ah.” He smiled at her. “Good.”
“My son,” he said to her, “married a beautiful woman.”
“Thank you, Steffen,” Naomi said, kissing his forehead.
“My son,” he said to Naomi, “was always a very good bájgunár.”
“What is bájgunár?” Naomi asked me.
“Cocksman,” I said.
“You, Steffen,” Naomi said, “like your son, are a very bad man.”
“Very true,” my father said, and laughed. We laughed with him.
We had come here to cheer him, but the final joke, as we were almost out the door—bájgunár!—was my father’s and meant to cheer us.
It was still snowing as we sat in a bar a few blocks from my father’s house. I was drinking a double Tanqueray gin straight and Naomi, who hardly drinks, was on her second glass of wine.
“Well,” I said, “we’re in Cleveland. We don’t have a whole lot of plans here except to see him. Do you want to look at some houses in Cleveland?”
“I wondered if we were coming back here,” Naomi said, “partly to do this?”
I said, “Subconsciously, you mean?”
Naomi told me a story: “We were living in downtown Mansfield when I was little and the downtown area was changing. More crime. Fights. Cops patrolling. Fights at the bars down the street. My dad wanted to get his kids out of there. He found a lot of land near Mifflin Lake that had small summer homes and cabins. It was part of the state conservancy. They told him that he could build a home out there, but only if he became the conservator and took care of the summer homes. So my dad built a home for us with his own hands on that plot of land on the shore of Mifflin Lake. It took him a year. We had no one to play with except from June to Labor Day when the summer home owners would come. We were out in the middle of nowhere, just our family, on the shore of an amazing lake that turned into our own ice-skating rink in the winter. Then, when my older brothers got married and had kids, my dad and my brothers built houses for them across the street. It was the greatest thing that my dad ever did for us. He took us away from the influences he feared would hurt us and built a fairy tale for us with his own hands.”
That night I prayed for my father to die—he wanted to die; it was the best thing for him—and the next morning we went to a real estate office in Chagrin Falls, a picture postcard village outside Cleveland that I’d always loved.
The area around Chagrin Falls is hilly and tree-lined, horsey and woodsy country. The houses vary from Tudor to French Normandy to Colonial, with sizable acreage around them.
On this day, as we drove along the Chagrin River, the sun gleamed off the fallen snow and the air was brisk and crystalline. We looked at houses with indoor pools and ballrooms and racquetball courts, estates with guesthouses and stables and corrals. At each stop, the real estate agent got his snow shovel out of the trunk of the limo and made a path to the door.
We had lunch with the agent in the heart of Chagrin, right next to the falls—at a little place called Rick’s, which served great cheeseburgers and where I could smoke. We looked at a couple more houses after lunch—one in a tiny township called Bainbridge—and called it a day.
Just outside Chagrin, we saw a place called the Coyote Moon Café and stopped for a drink. We were on the way to see my father again and we were cold, too.
This time I had a double tequila. We liked the feel of the place—a bar where you could drink and smoke, a bar which served great nachos … a friendly bar with a vintage jukebox where, when I sneezed hard, a guy on the barstool next to mine said, “Hey, pardner, I just wanna tell you if you need any help, I’m close by.”
But as I sipped my tequila to get ready to see my father, Naomi said, “You’re not thinking of coming back here because—” She couldn’t finish the sentence. She was choked up.
“Because—”
I knew what she was thinking and finished it for her.
“Because when I’m gone, this will be a good place for you and the kids?”
“Yes,” she said.
“No,” I said, “I’m not thinking of that.”
“Do you promise me?” Naomi said.
“I promise you,” I said.
It’s not easy to find a good place open for lunch on Sunday in Cleveland and we wound up at an Irish pub called the Harp on 44th and Detroit Avenue, just a few blocks from where I’d grown up on Lorain Avenue.
We sat there watching the snow fall outside, ate a great Irish bacon quiche, drank a Guinness, and listened to Van Morrison and the Chieftains. A blazing fireplace nearby warmed us.
Neither Naomi nor I had really talked about it yesterday, but it came up here now in this warm and cozy place with the fireplace crackling … the house in Bainbridge Township.
It was the last house we had looked at before our talk about death at the Coyote Moon. It was a white colonial with a porch and a screened indoor gazebo room. It was 8,900 square feet. Its basement ran the length of the house, perfect for four little boys to raise havoc in. Its skylighted attic ran the length of the house, too, a perfect room for writing. Six bedrooms, formal dining and living rooms, a large kitchen, and, best of all, five acres surrounded by woods, ponds, and a private lake with a large private dock. It was out in the country, but only ten minutes from the town of Chagrin Falls, only forty minutes from downtown Cleveland on the freeway.
As we talked about it, Naomi and I could hear screen doors slamming, inner tubes hitting the lake, crickets chirping. We could see little boys free to ride around the neighborhood cul-de-sacs on their bikes, free to jump into the lake, to explore the woods for treasures.
“Let’s go back to see it again,” Naomi said.
“I thought we’d decided against this.”
“Let’s go back and see it anyway.”
We called the real estate agent, who very graciously canceled his plans, and we went to see the house again. It was everything that we had remembered from the day before and more (the lake was stocked with bass and the snow on the ground was covering two sweeping lawns that led to the lake and an outdoor, red-brick patio).
We thanked the agent when we were finished and told him we’d get back to him. My feeling was that he was beginning to think that we were lunatics, but liked us anyway. We were given photographs of the house in winter, summer, and fall and took them with us.
We talked about the house and the effect on our family if we moved here—until we got on the plane to California the next day.
What we kept getting back to, over and over again, was the house itself. We were housebound, home-oriented people. I wrote and read much of each day. Naomi loved to cook and I favored her cooking over Wolfgang Puck’s. We hung out at home much of the time in the kitchen and this house had a stunning kitchen with its own breakfast nook overlooking the dock and the lake. We didn’t go out much at night. After seven years of marriage, we were still crazy in love and wanted to spend nighttime with each other, not with others.
So the truth was that if we moved to Cleveland, we’d really be moving to this house, this cocoon, this fortress.
Our family would be our community. With four growing boys and with my two grown children and with work and with our love for each other, we wouldn’t have much time for too much else.
That night I had a dream that I was jogging down a street that led through thick black woods. It
was a bright, sun-kissed, clear day, and as I jogged I was exhilarated and happy.
When I woke from the dream, its memory made me smile: I didn’t and couldn’t jog. I even had trouble hurrying through an airport to catch a flight. Thanks, no doubt, to the four packs of Salems I smoked each day.
As we pulled into Cleveland Hopkins International Airport heading back to Malibu, the last thing we saw before we pulled into the terminal was a factory, its torch afire in a leaden, gray sky.
Looking at it in horror, I whispered, “No way we’re moving here.”
As we got on the plane, I was wearing a brown fur Hungarian peasant hat my father had given me before we left his house.
But in exchange for the hat, I reflected, my father had taken my voice. I had shouted into his ear so often during this visit, straining my polyped vocal cords so badly, that I couldn’t speak at all.
Struck dumb in Cleveland by my own father!
As we pulled onto the Pacific Coast Highway and saw the sun glistening off the sea, I said, “We can’t ever leave here!”
I noticed that Naomi had the photographs of the house in Bainbridge Township in her lap.
As we resumed our Malibu routine, we found that the house in Bainbridge Township had snaked its way into our brains. We kept thinking and talking about it.
“It’s exactly like where I grew up,” Naomi said, “the house on Mifflin Lake that my dad built. There’s even a road you can see in the distance across the lake. The kitchen even faces the lake like my mother’s kitchen did.”
We talked about how happy our little boys would be there, fishing in the lake, sledding down the hill that led to it. Bainbridge Township, Ohio, we agreed, was the real America. High school football on Friday night, not a party at Kenny G’s house. Burgers and hot dogs in the backyard on Sundays, not a walk down the bluff, boogie board in hand, to the beach. A wasp’s nest on Show and Tell Day in kindergarten, not Dad’s Oscar.
But … Ohio instead of Malibu? Thermal underwear instead of bikini shorts? Maple syrup instead of soy sauce? Pancakes at the high school gym instead of sushi at Nobu? Lake Erie perch and walleye instead of Santa Barbara mussels?
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