This was not the kind of conversation I usually had with my father, and yet against all expectations, the answer seemed to satisfy him. His restless probing of the incident ceased, and he seemed pleased not to have to dismiss his dream-bride as a figment of his imagination.
WE SPENT DAYS together with him in this state. It lasted the entire time I was there. Later, a nurse told me that thanks to the deficiencies in his kidney function, the lip balm they’d given him for a fever blister had caused him to hallucinate. At the time, though, all I knew was that he seemed to have dropped a very potent tab of acid. Lying in his bed, he’d see things flying through the walls. “Fligl,” he’d say, “little wings” in Yiddish, giggling like a child and nodding at me with a sort of conspiratorial nod.
Hurricane Katrina was on its way, and with newscasts unspooling endlessly into his room through the TV mounted on the wall, Dad became preoccupied with the story. One day, looking troubled, he said to me, “Now, if we can’t live on the land, and if we can’t live in the sea, then where are we going to live?”
Before I could address his mad concerns, a nurse entered the room, an African woman whose coal-black face seemed radiant and glowing. I thought Dad might lose his train of thought amid all the nursely commotion, but the question seemed too vital for him, too pressing.
“I know!” he said ten minutes later, snapping his fingers, as though he’d solved an abstruse mathematical equation.
“Yeah, Dad? What is it?”
“We can all live in Hyperspace!”
He grinned at me, lit up, like the Cheshire Cat. I didn’t know how to answer him. I didn’t know how what to say. This was not the father I remembered, the father who spent his mornings in retirement selling stock options, the father who, in a foreign city, preferred sitting in his hotel room to walking the streets, a man with no patience for philosophical speculations. That my father might use a word like hyperspace seemed as strange to me as had his speaking in Hebrew.
“Do you see?” he said to me now, lowering his voice.
“See what, Dad?”
“Look!” he whispered urgently.
“Okay, Dad, but what am I looking at?” I said, whispering as well.
“At the nurse!” he said, lowering his voice even further, gesturing discreetly towards her with his chin.
“Okay? Yeah?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” he said.
“Isn’t what obvious, Dad?”
“That she’s been swimming in Hyperspace!”
I looked at the nurse, and perhaps because of her tranquil expression and her graceful presence and the calm with which she seemed to be taking in the world around her, I sort of understood—no, I understood exactly what my father meant. By this time, I had verses of Song of Songs rolling through my head: Turn back, turn back, O Shulamit, that we may gaze upon you!
Ever the gentleman, Dad pulled me closer. “You don’t think I’ve offended her by saying that, do you?”
I looked at the nurse again, at her face as radiant and tranquil as the night sky.
“No, I don’t think so, Dad.”
“Good.”
He nodded, reassured.
DAYS PASSED, AND though I admit I enjoyed my father’s company in this state—we had never, in fact, gotten along so well—the experience was exhausting. It was like keeping up with a brilliant child who, obsessed with the subtleties of quantum physics, refuses to take a nap.
“Take a note!” he said one day, rocketing up straight in his hospital bed, the tails of his gown flying. I grabbed my notepad and my pen. “This is for the will!”
We had agreed, before I arrived, that together we’d write his ethical will, a document for subsequent generations. At last, he seemed ready to begin. “I sired Israel!” he exclaimed, dictating to me. “Twelve tribes, and a portion for each tribe, and a double portion for Ethan”—my brother — “being gay.”
Naturally, I was concerned for his well-being. What were these hallucinations? How worried should I be about them? Were they part of some larger medical issue? And so periodically, although a bit reluctantly—we’d never had so much fun together—I’d call in a nurse, and acting the concerned son, I’d say, “See here now . . . I think my father here . . . well, I think he might be hallucinating.”
“Hallucinatin’?” the nurse, whoever she was, and there were many of them during the course of my stay, said each time, and always, it seemed to me, with an unwarranted dose of skepticism.
“I think so, yeah. A little bit, I mean.”
“Hm.”
Each time, the nurse leaned over my father’s bed. She’d put her face into his, and in a High Plains accent, with vowels as wide as open barn doors, she’d shout: “Mr. Skawbail, hew’s the prezidaint of the Yew-Knotted Staites?”
Dad would tell her, and then she’d say, “N dew yew gnaw whot dye is it todye?”
None of the nurses seemed to mind that, before answering this question, Dad always turned and checked the digital calendar clock hanging on the wall near his bed. I suppose it seemed a rational thing to do.
“N dew yew gnaw whar yew R?”
Sometimes Dad would make a complicated Texas joke, telling the nurse that he was in plain view—Plainview being a small town outside of Lubbock—meaning, of course, that he was right in front of her, but since he wasn’t in Lubbock, but in Oklahoma City, I’d have to explain the joke, a joke that indicated that perhaps Dad didn’t actually know where he was, after all, a point that seemed to get lost in the tangle of humor, and then the nurse would always turn to me and shrug. “Sames awl wrought t’ may.”
“You’re listening to the heart of the Republican Party,” Dad told one nurse, when she’d placed a stethoscope on his chest.
“Is that wrought?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Sames awl wrought t’ may,” the nurse said, shrugging, the stethoscope still in her ears. This time, though, when the nurse shrugged and said, “Sames awl wrought t’ may,” I told her, “Yeah, yeah, well, okay, I mean, he can answer all those questions—although he did look at the calendar clock for the second one—but you see that nurse right there?” I pointed towards the beautiful Shulamit who had, in the meantime, come back into our room. “Well, a moment ago, my father told me that he could tell that she had been swimming in Hyperspace, okay?”
The nurse took this in.
“In High-per spice?”
“In Hyperspace, yes,” I said, “yeah.”
“Daid he?” she asked her dark-skinned colleague. My word alone was insufficiently credible, it seemed. The beautiful nurse nodded, affirming my statement, her face as tranquil as ever.
“Ah, whale then,” the other nurse said, “I gaz we better do sumpen ’bout it then.”
IT TOOK DAYS for Dad to come down off his high, days and nights during which we continued our Irvin in Wonderland explorations of consciousness and meaning.
“Did a rabbi come in with you yesterday?” he asked me at one point.
“No, Dad. Why?”
“Oh, well, I thought I saw a little guy in a black suit and a beard look in the doorway right after you arrived.”
Another mystical vision, I assumed, but a day later a man fitting that exact description entered our room, introducing himself not as a rabbi but as a minister. Another one of the hospital chaplains, he and my father began chatting away like old friends—Dad was always good with people—and when Dad learned that the chaplain, though born in Honduras, had been to seminary in Germany, he began speaking German with him.
More or less fluently, it seemed to me.
Which was odd, because I’d never heard my father speaking German before.
IT MAKES YOU wonder: How much of ourselves do we really know? How much of ourselves do we hide, even from ourselves, behind the masks we wear? The lip balm had cleansed the doors of perception for my father, but which was the real man, the stern, straight-laced paterfamilias I’d known my entire life or the cosmic cowboy, this blissful rider of
the Purple Haze, tumbling along with the tumbling tumbleweeds of ecstatic consciousness through the fragrant bowers of the Garden of Pomegranates to a hotel in New York City where, radiant as a bride on her wedding day, his soul was trembling in anticipation of his arrival?
“What am I doing?” Dad said once into the phone when his brother Richard called him. “Joseph and I are talking about things that you could never understand because you’re just too much of a dipstick!”
The truth is: he hadn’t been the easiest of fathers. I was always a little bit afraid of him when I was a kid. He had an unpredictable temper and you never knew when you might set him off and find yourself the object of his wrath. At six foot two, he towered over us, and when he was angry, he’d set upon you with all the fury of an indignant prosecutor, his voice a booming, aggrieved growl. As an adolescent, my very presence seemed to irritate him. My hair was too long, my politics too liberal, my ambitions too unworldly. As I grew older, he seemed to place himself between me and everything that mattered to me. There were some very bad moments between us, which we never discussed or resolved, and as a consequence of this—or who knows why?—we never really developed a sense of intimacy. I never learned to speak truthfully to him. I never felt at ease in his presence, and whenever we were together we tended to hide from each other behind our careful masks.
And so I was grateful that Dad’s visionary trip coincided with my visit, and I was probably the only member of the family who could have entered into this alternate universe with him and rolled. My sister Cindy, for instance, coming on duty not long after I left, overheard Dad on the phone describing to a cousin how he’d come to be in the hospital. “It’s the strangest thing,” he said. “I was standing in front of a dual-prop plane when one of the propellers somehow lopped off my leg!”
Cindy went immediately to his bedside, and pulling back his covers, she demonstrated to him the irrefutable evidence of his two legs lying, visibly intact, before him.
“Damn!” was all he could say.
Cindy told me, “I’d been wondering why, at physical therapy that morning, he kept saying to his therapist, ‘Not bad for a one-legged man!’ ”
The psilocybinic lip balm had somehow liberated us both. The polite, wary distance between us seemed to collapse in on itself. Dad seemed funny and free, and for the first time, we seemed to be speaking a common language. For the first time, we seemed to be speaking to each other face-to-face, panim el panim, and for a while, even after the nurses resolved the issue and proscribed the lip balm, this increased sense of intimacy, this deeper knowing of each other continued. It resonated in our long-distance phone calls where the affection between us was palpable in a way it had never been.
“When are you coming back?” Dad said whenever I phoned. “I really want to see you again.”
But then, of course, time passed. The Garden of Pomegranates receded in the distance, the little winged creatures stopped flying through the walls, the air no longer crackled with verses from the Song of Songs, Katrina devastated New Orleans, and no one sought refuge in Hyperspace, the German and Hebrew words fell out of Dad’s conversation, his missing leg returned, he forgot all about the wedding in New York, the sixty days between Tisha B’Av and Yom Kippur fell off the calendar like leaves falling off a tree, and Dad, released from the hospital, returned to his normal state of consciousness.
Out of long habit, our old masks were restored. He and I returned to our old guarded positions, and the next time I saw him we were distant and correct with each other once again.
GET YOUR FEET BACK ON THE GROUND
I was standing in the lobby of the Südbahnhof in Vienna, waiting for Barbara. She’d stepped into the restroom to freshen up. It was a bright and ringing morning, the early light had a sparkling, crystalline quality to it as it poured through the glass walls of the station.
We were catching a train to Prague.
I was staring into space, entranced by the movement of people around me, and slowly I became aware that I was tapping out a rhythm on my teeth—an activity my dentist has continually warned me against—while a song played in my head.
I could hear a voice, in my inner ear, singing about living a little and being a gypsy and getting around with your feet back on the ground. Though these four bars of music go through my head periodically, I couldn’t remember where they were from at first, though I was certain they were being sung by Paul McCartney. I can hear his round-toned falsetto perfectly on my mental hi-fi, but is it from Band on the Run? Or Wild Life? These are albums I no longer listen to.
No, I realize, it’s a bit of Beatley nonsense from the end of a song called “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” on the album Ram.
I find the whole thing depressing. I’m forty-four, and I can barely bring to mind the sound of my mother’s voice. She’s been gone now for nearly twenty years. I can remember nothing of my high school Spanish and next to nothing of my college French. I had a hard time recently remembering an entire trip Barbara and I made to England. I can’t for the life of me remember the name of two women I was absolutely smitten with in college. I’ve forgotten entire episodes from every epoch of my life. There are people I was once close to who I might not recognize if I passed them on the street.
But somehow this piece of aural bubblegum, this pop nursery rhyme, this scatted little bit of Mother-Gooserai, which I heard for the first time nearly thirty-one years ago, plays faithfully in my head, probably—if the musicologists are to be believed—in the right key and at the right tempo, no matter where I am, even in a train station half a world away from home.
Paul McCartney probably doesn’t even remember these four bars—they sound like something he improvised in the studio—but I’ll be humming them, I know, for the rest of my life and probably on my deathbed, when I can remember nothing else, my teeth worn down to their nubs.
ABSOLUTE ELSEWHERE
A riot of blue and red filled the interior of my car, pulsating against the dashboard. By the time I pulled over and rolled down my window, the cop was already standing there.
“Your registration is expired,” he said.
“Expired?”
“And I’m afraid that’s an offence I have to impound your car for. Please step out of your vehicle, sir.”
I was only twenty-four, and though I’d been living in Taos for a couple of years, I still had Texas plates. By reflex, I moved to get out of the car—it would never have occurred to me to disobey a policeman—but then I thought about how disagreeable getting home was going to be, not to mention the bureaucratic hassle of getting my car returned the following day.
“Really?” I said, sliding back into my seat. “You have to impound the car? I mean, isn’t that a little drastic?”
“Okay,” the cop said, “I won’t impound the car, but I have to give you a ticket, and these tickets can be very expensive, probably like a hundred dollars.”
“A hundred dollars?” I said.
He nodded. He was a tall, skinny Spanish guy.
“Really?” I said.
“Yes, sir.”
In 1984, my monthly rent for the house I shared with Barbara in Arroyo Hondo was only ninety-seven dollars.
“Isn’t that a little steep?”
Mild protest had worked the first time. Why not, I thought, go for broke?
“Steep?” the cop said.
“I mean, don’t you think?”
“Well, there’s nothing I can do about that,” he said.
“Okay,” I said.
“But here’s the mayor’s name and his phone number.”
He wrote the name Floyd Montoya on the back of the ticket, along with a telephone number.
“Floyd Montoya?” I said.
“You can call Floyd. This is his home number.” He turned his wrist and looked at his watch. “It’s only ten. He’s probably still up.”
“This is the mayor’s number?”
“His home phone, yeah.” The cop smiled unhappily. “I mean. He’s th
e only one that can do anything about the fine.”
TAOS, I HAVE to say, wasn’t like the rest of America. It wasn’t like any place I’d ever lived. Even in the Reagan eighties, long after the hippies surrendered their hold on it, Taos was absolute elsewhere, not quite Mexico, but not really the States. You could feel it as soon as you crossed the Texas border: you were someplace else, your feet, high up—over seven thousand feet—in the mountains, your head higher up still in the thin desert air. The place was like a Sandplay therapist’s toy box, filled with Jungian archetypes: artists, swamis, gurus, cowboys, Indians, satyrs. I knew a woman who lived in a chicken coop with her three young children. I knew a guy who played his wooden flute all day by the Rio Grande. Victor, a white-haired poet, sold his poems out of a little box under the eaves of the plaza, while Miles, a silent guy with a blond Prince Valiant haircut, practiced tai chi with a wooden sword every morning in the plaza’s gazebo, his muscular thighs bulging in tight tight shorts, no matter how cold it was. Everything in Taos was slightly askew. There was even a mime called Klein the Mime who talked during his act.
The culture was tripartite: the Anglos controlled the money, the Spanish ran the government, while the Indians worked the spirit of the place.
It wasn’t for everyone. Taos Mountain, according to the locals, either accepted or rejected you.
I looked down at the ticket in my hand and read the name again: Floyd Montoya. Floyd Montoya was a barber with a shop right on the plaza. I could see it from where the cop and I were standing. The words FLOYD MONTOYA, OWNER, were painted in red on the white-washed adobe wall next to the door. Despite the cop’s urging, I didn’t feel I could call the mayor at home in the middle of the night and ask him to reduce my traffic fine.
Instead, the next morning I called my father.
My Father’s Guitar & Other Imaginary Things: True Stories Page 7