by Janet Capron
“I want to get home tonight,” she said, still afraid of losing me and being left stranded in the dark.
Maggie was sitting inside the motel room on the token chair in the corner, gripping the armrests and staring at me with a look of angry consternation on her face like I was someone she had never seen before. Her eyes were blown up to the size of hens’ eggs by the magnifying lenses of her bifocals. I couldn’t stand to look at those conspicuous eyes. They reminded me of how, practically overnight, she had stepped into the guise of old age, with a vengeance it seemed, as if this were her last great role and she was going to play it to the hilt. The purple muumuu she had on, plastered over with a chunky purple coral necklace, did nothing to dispel the image. It sent spasms of guilt through me just to look at her.
“Where were you all night?” she asked me.
“Your guess is as good as mine, but I can tell you where I found myself this morning.”
“Where?”
“On a boat, a fishing boat I’m pretty sure. Anyway, it certainly smelled like it. God, I was sick.”
“By yourself on a fishing boat?”
“Did I say I was by myself? There was a guy next to me, oh yeah, probably a fisherman,” I said, as if I had just deduced this.
“Janet, I’m sorry to have to bring this up now of all times, but I’ve been thinking a lot about it, and I believe it’s a question of survival—my survival. I can’t take it. I really can’t. I don’t want to see you anymore when you’re like this.”
“Fine, fine with me. Is that why you’ve been sitting here waiting for me, to tell me that?”
“No. Your stepmother called. She tracked us down out here. Janet, your father is back in the hospital. How awful—and I dragged you out here—of course I never would have if I thought there were any chance he would be going back so soon. He didn’t get much time at home after all. So sad. Poor Betsy. Apparently, you did tell her we were going to Montauk, but that’s all. Betsy said she spent the whole morning phoning one motel on the beach after the other...said she asked you before you left the name of the motel where we would be, just in case something like this happened, but you couldn’t remember. Obviously, you couldn’t be bothered to find out either. And you promised to call Betsy and your father when we arrived. Obviously, you forgot.
“Janet, are you listening to me? Really, Janet, under the circumstances, you’d think you would make a point...”
Suddenly, my mother’s tone changed, from one of stern reprimand to despair. Her anger, a feigned emotion to begin with, collapsed. Her face crumpled. No. She was crying. Not that. Pretend to be mad at me. It’s much better when you do. Out of nowhere she said, “Where is that adorable, elfin little girl running toward me with her wild hair blowing in the wind? Where did she go? Am I never going to see her again?”
I had a mad impulse: I longed to pat her fragile little head, to hold her hand again on the dark street, but gently this time. I wanted to hug her—my mother—and just be with her forever. I loved her that much. Too much. I was terrified I would disappear inside that love. Consciously and conscientiously I courted my fear, because if I lost it, I might tumble in for good. I would be like a stillborn, without a life of my own. So I held on tight and said nothing.
Maggie took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes with the heel of her hand. She put the glasses back on and tugged her muumuu farther over her knees. She stayed still for a minute just trying to compose herself. Then she recaptured her indignant posture.
“Well, never mind, forget it, Janet, your father is back in the hospital. Betsy says it won’t be long now.”
They had let Rayfield go home for a while, mainly because he refused to die. Under the circumstances, since he’d endured the maximum radiation therapy a person was normally allowed and there was nothing more they could do, they had to let him go. He actually rode his horse a few times that summer. Someone had to put him in the saddle, but once he was up there, he did fine, apparently.
One of the last times I had been to see him before he went home, I heard him whispering in his delirium, “Dixie, Sinbad, Clover...”
Alarmed, I moved my chair closer. Those were the names of former pets of his, the border collie and two Siamese cats. All three of the animals had died. In spite of the numerous wives, children, and wars, what did my father cling to in his waning hour but his dead pets. A strange man indeed.
“Don’t worry,” he said to me, coming to, “I know they’re dead.”
But then he slipped back into his doped reverie and continued to call out to them in his hoarse whisper: “Dixie, Sinbad, Clover...”
I thought I could sense his spirit rise up and leave his body for a moment. Surely he was close. Instead, they sent him home a week later.
Now he was back, and I knew that if I didn’t hurry, I would miss the chance to say good-bye. I had to see him.
I wanted to be his daughter at least this once.
Maggie loaned me some cash, about a hundred dollars, which was surprisingly generous for her in those days. I threw my clothes in my suitcase over her protests (“That’s no way to pack, Janet”) and, without bothering to check the timetable, took a cab to the train station. It turned out I had an hour to kill, so I left the suitcase on the empty platform and walked over to the local gin mill, the Big Clam. The place was nearly empty. I did manage to catch the last train.
Foxhole
When I got to our apartment on East Sixth Street, I found that the frontdoor had been left unlocked, but Eddie was gone. The place was unbearably hot and airless, as if nobody had opened the back window in days. Not a good sign. His things and mine were there, though, strewn around the same as when I left. I figured he must have just stepped out to the corner or something, so I found a piece of paper—an unopened month-old Con-Ed bill—and wrote a short note:
10:30 P.M.
Dad back in hospital. Have gone over to visit for a minute. See you later.
Love,
Janet
I locked the door, wondering whether Eddie had bothered to take his keys. Well, serve him right. You’re not supposed to leave your front door open in New York City.
It was no cinch getting past first the man at the front desk, then the big-chested, old night nurse on duty on Dad’s floor.
“He’s fast asleep,” she said.
I repeated the speech I had delivered in the lobby: “Listen, I came all the way from the country as soon as I heard. I know he’s dying. I just want to say good-bye. I got to. It’s my pop,” I said.
“Yes, Mr. Chace doesn’t have long. All right then, for a few minutes,” she said.
He was alone, because the inordinately devoted Betsy was too sick herself to make the trip that night. He was not asleep. My father was sucking the air, trying to breathe. When he saw me, he mouthed, “Morphine, morphine,” over and over.
The tube trailing from his tracheotomy gurgled, and the air around his bed reeked from the excess of chemotherapy mixed with galloping cancer, from the foul odor of rotting, burning flesh.
The big nurse was reluctant at first. “I gave him his last shot two hours ago.”
“But he’s suffering. He’s in terrible pain. I know the guy, he wouldn’t be asking if he didn’t need it,” I said.
I was wild. What kind of country was this that you had to beg to relieve a dying man of his torture?
Finally, she agreed.
After the morphine took, I watched his drawn, sweaty face relax. I mopped his brow, but it scared me. His skin was so clammy and cold, it felt like touching a cadaver. His white hair, what was left of it, sprouted from the top of his skull like the hair on a shrunken head. I kept thinking, “Damn, if it weren’t for the chemotherapy, he’d still have his gorgeous mane. Rayfield wasn’t meant to go bald.” I almost wished, for cosmetic reasons alone, that people died the way I imagined they used to: quickly, naturally.
I sat with him in the semidarkness for as long as the nurse would let me. It wasn’t very long, however, before s
he came and stood in the door, her massive shape blocking the light from the hallway.
“You’ll have to leave now,” she said.
“Don’t worry. I’ll be here tomorrow,” he whispered. He patted my hand. “Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.”
As soon as I hit the street, it occurred to me that I had about seventy dollars cash on me. I meandered through Stuyvesant Square, pausing for a moment underneath the tall trees to listen to the leaves rustle and get my bearings before I walked over to the Monterey Bar and Grill on St. Mark’s Place. I figured Eddie would be there.
But there was no sign of him. I decided to wait, of course. Various regulars offered opinions about where he might be. Most of them suggested the shooting gallery on Seventh Street and Avenue B. It did seem likely. Meanwhile, I was pouring down shots of Jack Daniel’s and chasing them with short beers. Soon, Eddie’s whereabouts no longer seemed like a big deal. I had a place to crash; that was all that was important.
The Monterey Bar and Grill was a misnomer: there was no grill. The bar itself was a thing of beauty: wide, semicircular, and polished to a high gloss. The Ukrainian owner obviously cherished his place, but he was too practical to try to discourage the onslaught of kids that had taken over the joint. In fact it was he who had renamed it after the famous music festival in the hopes of attracting them. He didn’t protest either when they offered to fill up his old jukebox with the Stones, the Sex Pistols, Television, the Talking Heads, and Elvis Costello, along with a fine selection of rock ’n’ roll oldies, like Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away” and “The Girl Can’t Help It,” by Little Richard. It was a hip jukebox, cutting edge, a philosophical statement, evidence of a shared worldview. But this guaranteed that his once-loyal customers would desert him, which they did; friends and neighbors of a lifetime cleared out forever, preferring now to hang at small taverns, such as the Blue and Gold, on the side streets.
Sometimes in the late morning, I would catch a glimpse of the old man through the window. He’d be sitting alone at the end of the bar with his head bobbing on his sunken chest, snoozing. The nights were too much for the poor geezer. Still, he didn’t dare leave the place alone, because he thought, and rightly, that everyone working for him was a thief. He was always there, dressed in old-fashioned suit pants, hitched high on his waist, and white nylon short-sleeved shirts, through which you could see his cotton undershirt. He winced when Sid Vicious hit a particularly raucous chord, the wonderfully hideous noise of it blasting over the crowd. For hours, he would pace slowly up and down at the back of the room, looking sadly to me like a fish flopping on the sand.
Now the old grandpa made his way through the small cluster of people at the bar and tapped me on the shoulder. “I tink your boyfriend has got trouble,” he said.
“What else is new?” I said, throwing back a shot. “Have a vodka, Doc.”
We all called him Doc.
“No, no tanks, later maybe. But you listen what I tell you,” he said, shaking his finger.
“OK. I’m listening,” I said.
“Some colored boys was in here asking for him. I tell them I don’t know nothing. They go away, but they say I should tell Eddie they was looking for him. I don’t like it,” he said.
Doc lived in fear of the black and Hispanic population. No matter that his saloon catered to second-story men, dope dealers, and every other kind of lowlife vermin. The point is they were white.
“Thanks for telling me, Doc,” I said.
Fat Jack sidled up next to where I was sitting on a tall barstool and pushed his good-sized belly, which hung out over his jeans, into my thigh.
“You look gorgeous with that tan, Janet, like a Penthouse foldout. Since Eddie is nowhere around, Red and I was just wonderin’ if we could turn you onto some rock, dynamite stuff. We’d be perfect gentlemen. Whaddya say?”
Fat Jack pursed his pudgy cupid’s bow mouth, then he licked his lips. His jolly, open face, with its quizzical expression, might lead you to believe that here was a nice guy, until you witnessed one of his bar fights, during which Jack would think nothing of breaking a beer bottle against the wall and then going after his victim with the ragged edge.
Fat Jack had been a mail carrier on Long Island before he got busted for the sauce. Once upon a time, he had total health benefits, a little bungalow in Malverne, the promise of a life. His buddy Red was an albino who was as tall and stringy as those punks from Queens, the Ramones, but without their charm. How he got his nickname was a mystery to me. I thought the two of them were loathsome as toads, beneath contempt. For the past month, they had been breathing down my neck, traipsing at my heels, staring after me when I walked along St. Mark’s Place.
“That’s a fine woman,” they said to Eddie.
“You shoulda seen her before I got to her,” Eddie said.
“Where’s Eddie? He isn’t shtupping someone else? C’mon, Jack, tell me the truth,” I said, suddenly seized with dark suspicion.
“Nah, Janet. You know better. Eddie don’t care about pussy enough to fuck around. You know what he’s into,” he said.
“Dope.”
“Yeah, he managed to get into a real jackpot during this last week while you were away. I don’t think you should ever leave him alone, Janet. He started working for these young kids on Fifth Street and Avenue B. Got some kind of a super deal going down, where they fronted him ounces, and he was supposed to step on it once more, break it up, and sell it off, bag by bag. Imagine, he conned those niggers into fronting him, a white guy, ounces of smack. A good thing, a really good thing, but he’s already blown it.”
“What do you mean, blown it?”
“Janet, Eddie is such a fuckup. Thinks he can get away with anything. Thinks he’s so sly and so tough. The kid’s heading for a big fall. Believe me. Not only is he lifting huge amounts of smack off the top and cutting it to nothin’, but he’s braggin’ about it all over the place. Worst of all, he’s trying to beat those black kids. Hasn’t paid them a cent so far. What’s his problem, anyway?”
“Is that what’s going on?” I asked, grateful it wasn’t a woman and horrified, too.
“You better not even go home tonight. Those niggers are looking for him all over. They’re pissed. Come upstairs with Red and me, why don’t you?” he said.
“OK,” I said.
Once upstairs in his nearly empty railroad apartment, I almost regretted my decision. The floors were so thick with dirt, there was a path worn onto it where Jack walked from room to room. The furniture consisted of a claw-footed bathtub in the kitchen, a bare mattress in the far room, and a few foam pillows scattered around. Red got out a new set of works and mixed up some cocaine with water. We took turns getting off. I was too drunk to be uptight about doing myself; I didn’t miss. I even booted it the way Eddie would have done. The steady drip from the faucet in the sink began to ring, to chime like bells. The world stopped moving. Everything got very clear and still and made perfect sense. Bam, I booted it one last time. The air sang, the floor dropped out from under me. I reeled. A hand caught me.
“Drink some of this whiskey,” Red was saying. At that moment, he looked to me like a holy man, bathed in an eerie white light, wearing shades.
We sat on the pillows and passed the bottle for a while. In spite of my drunkenness, in spite of the lingering effects of the cocaine, I was so disgusted I felt physically ill. It occurred to me suddenly, as I closed my eyes, that this was no fun anymore at all. In fact, it had not been fun for a long time now. I had sunk much lower than I could have imagined. My dissolution had taken on a life of its own. I actually experienced the sensation of gravity pulling me down at an accelerating speed, deeper and deeper. “Fuck it, too late to care. You’re under the rock now for good,” I told myself. “Only a matter of time now... Don’t fight...just go with it...All over soon,” I thought, as I turned my face into the dirt-black foam pillow behind my head.
After a few more minutes of this, I insisted the three of us return to
the Monterey Bar and Grill. I was starting to miss Eddie.
“He been here looking for you,” Doc said.
I knew I better go by Sixth Street, in case he was stuck outside with no key. I ordered one more shooter for the road, on Fat Jack, and spun out into the crystal-still street, still buzzing from the coke.
Sure enough, Eddie was waiting there, sitting at the top of the stoop of the brownstone next door, his elbows on his knees, his chin resting in his hands. He came down the steps quickly when he saw me. We met under the streetlight. He was very high. His face was chalky, with black shadows underneath his eyes that made him look like a sad Pierrot. His face was not unlike my dying father’s, I thought, haunted looking, and his pupils were tiny black dots. When Eddie’s pupils contracted like that, it always seemed to me as if he were concentrating on something, as if his mind were far away, but he took me in his arms, held me, smothered my hair with kisses.
“Oh, baby, baby doll, I missed you so much,” he said.
“I missed you, too,” I said.
He kissed my hands. “My little monkey, my little monkey. Don’t leave me again,” he said.
Eddie was really stoned.
When we got inside, I asked him why he left without his keys, without locking the door. I sounded belligerent because I was pretty drunk, but Eddie was way beyond me, in a dope-chilled world of his own.
“There was business to take care of. I was in a hurry,” he said.
“Fat Jack tells me you’re in some kind of trouble,” I said.
“Yeah, which reminds me. When I came around there, Doc told me you left with Fat Jack and Red. What were you doing with those two scumbags?”
“They had a little blow. We just went upstairs to get off,” I said.