Dad

by William Wharton

  We go down. He tells us there’s definitely been another attack but it doesn’t seem’s severe as the first one. He asks if there’d been any sudden shock or stress situation. I tell about the birthday party and Dad sleeping with her. He shakes his head.

  “We need to be more careful with her, Mr. Tremont. You’ve got to see she doesn’t overdo herself; she can’t take many more of these traumas, her heart’s not up to it.”

  On the way home, Joan and I stop for a pizza. We’re both depressed. We try to think out what we can do. Dad can’t keep her down any more than we can. I want to remove all the cleaning equipment from the house so she can’t get to it. I’ll lock the dirty wash in the garden bedroom. It’s like hiding razor blades from a potential suicide. Joan shakes her head.

  “Look, John, we’ve got to let her live her own life. She has a right to that, at least.”

  I can’t be so sure. It’s hard for me to let go.

  Joan says she’ll come twice a week and try keeping things impossibly clean. I volunteer to buy her a toothbrush so she can clean out cracks in the hardwood floors.

  We talk about my ticket; I’m almost run over the forty-five days. Joan says she and Mario will split the cost of the return ticket if I can only stay on. She knows I want to get home but what else is there to do?

  Next day I take Dad to see Mom. She’s conscious but still heavily sedated. She’s weepy. Dad’s crying, too, and in shock seeing her so low. He hadn’t seen her at the worst part the first time. Mother speaks in a thin, broken voice.

  “If a little thing like a birthday party is going to give me a heart attack, what’s the use of living? Just to stay alive I’m not going to be an invalid all my life.”

  I hesitate, then play my last trump.

  “Mother, that’s despair; the more you talk and think like that, the less confidence you’re showing in God. It doesn’t help your chance for recovery and you’re endangering your immortal soul. Also, it’s cruel to Dad.”

  I hate using this line, but it’s looking desperate to me. If Mother decides not to live, nothing in this world could keep her alive.

  Dad looks at me as if the local paperhanger had suddenly turned into an axe murderer.

  “Mother, when you talk this way, it’s sinful; false pride, an insult to God and his mysterious ways.”

  What the hell, it probably won’t do any good but it’s worth the try. Mom’s torn between spite and salvation, but gradually settles down. She doesn’t have many choices.

  Dad and I go back to our old routines. Dad begins perking up. We both enjoy the camaraderie we had before. With Mother home it was a rat race: scurrying around trying to please her; continually feeling inadequate.

  First, we build a handrail for the staircase from the side door to the patio. It’s healing to work with good tools and oak in the sunshine.

  Later, after we store the lounge chairs and turn the sprinkler off in the back garden, we stand staring at the lowering sun.

  “Johnny, what would you say if we go down to the ocean and watch that sunset?”

  I jump at the chance.

  “Sounds good to me; maybe get our minds off things.”

  Dad goes inside for his coat and I start warming up the car. Dad comes out with the motorcycle helmets.

  “No use dragging the car out, John; I thought we’d go on the motorcycle.”

  So we strap on the helmets and putt on down to Venice. At the beach, Dad takes off his shoes and rolls up his pants as we stroll along the edge of the sea. There’s a soft, slow sunset with red approaching purple. The ocean is calm; long, easy rollers. The tide’s out. Sunlight reflects on the wet sand as water slides back under breakers.

  There are other people walking along; a few joggers. Everybody smiles or says hello. An Irish setter is running and chasing with a young girl; she’s throwing sticks, stones or shells out over the breakers. It’s a magic moment; a chance to forget how hard life is sometimes.

  We don’t talk much. Stolen pleasure like this, undeserved, unplanned, you don’t talk about.

  It’s almost seven o’clock and we haven’t prepared anything for dinner. I suggest eating at a restaurant called Buffalo Chips next to the Oar House. It’s owned by the same people and has a similar general atmosphere. In fact, you can walk from one place into the other by a backstair passage.

  We head over and I find a parking place right in front. They’re already checking ID cards for the Oar House because it’s Saturday evening. These young guys must get a kick seeing a fifty-two-year-old dude riding a ten-year-old motorcycle with his seventy-three-year-old Dad hanging on back. A pair of them come over while I’m pulling the bike up on the kickstand.

  “I sure hope you two have your ID cards; nobody under twenty-one’s allowed in here.”

  Dad’s slowly taking off his helmet, his feet straddling the bike. He’s smiling.

  “Well, I’ll tell you something, sonny. I’ve been working on being twenty-one for years. This is the fourth time around but I just can’t get the knack of it.”

  We laugh and shake hands. They say they’ll keep an eye on the bike for us.

  The restaurant specializes in sandwiches, from pastrami to steak. The hot roast beef sandwiches are something special. We order two with a pitcher of beer. They serve the roast beef with a good dab of horseradish. Dad and I both love it. We talk about the Italian horseradish vendors in the streets back in Philadelphia.

  The crowd here is just as informal as the Oar House. There’s laughing and kidding around, flirting and counter-flirting. After we eat, we go through the backstairs into the Oar House. We luck out with two seats high on one wall where we can watch the dancing. I get another pitcher of beer and we sit there in the center of chaos.

  I see the ID checkers and bouncers drifting toward us. They’ve been picking on the younger-looking people and checking. They come up to us.

  “Ah, here they are.”

  It’s the taller one, a husky guy with a great bushy handlebar mustache.

  “I knew you guys went in the restaurant just to sneak in here.”

  He smiles.

  “OK, let’s see your ID there, fella.”

  Dad looks up, smiles, laughs.

  “You’ll have to throw us in the clink, sonny; we don’t have IDs. I don’t drive anymore and my son here lives in Paris, France.”

  It’s good hearing Dad so proud and assertive.

  They laugh and move on. We finish our beer slowly. It’s getting close to eleven; I figure we’d better be on our way. We go toward the door. Some of the crowd’s been tipped off about the motorcycle and come to watch us take off. I help Dad strap his helmet because his hands are shaking. I strap on mine, kick the starter and she turns over first time.

  It’s a cool, relaxing trip home. Dad’s getting to be a good rider; leaning on the turns, not fighting me.

  Next morning when he comes to breakfast, I see he’s not shaving again. I don’t say anything. We’re going to see Mom at two and by then it’ll be really obvious. Dad does the dishes and I sweep. When we’re finished, we go out to straighten up his shop.

  He has some of the finest tools I know. They’re fitted to the walls with painted silhouettes in white to signal when they’re not there. The tools which aren’t on the walls are in metal toolboxes with rollered drawers. His old carpentry box is there too, everything in order, including a wood-handled Stanley hammer and three Deitzen saws, two crosscut, one rip. Dad’s always been a toolman and knows how to use them. Dad’s tools are a biography and description in themselves.

  Out there in the shop, I ask Dad what he’s going to do about Mother and his beard. He can’t pull the mask routine again. He says he’s going to tell her he’s growing a beard.

  “Gosh, John, she gets her hair cut and dyed without asking me; why shouldn’t I be able to grow a beard if I want?”

  “But, Dad, it’ll kill her for sure.”

  He looks up at me from his bench.

  “You really think so, Jo
hnny? I don’t want to kill her.”

  The way he says it, it’s as if he’s thought it through and decided not to kill Mom after all.

  “OK, then, I’ll shave. I’ll wait till she’s in better shape before I tell her.”

  Afterward, we go inside and he shaves before we head for the hospital.

  7

  We’re still plodding along at a regular fifty-five. Dad seems to think he’s in France driving that tin-can Renault 4L of his.

  Actually, America’s too damned big. We should split into five or so countries. We could have an uptight country for Puritans and phony New England liberals in the Northeast. We could have a down-home farmers’ sort of country in the middle somewhere. The South could be an old-fashioned slave-based country for people who go for that kind of thing. Texas would be a militarist, Fascist country and California with parts of Oregon could be the swinging place.

  On our map, we’re hardly making any progress at all. Dad points his finger to a town called Glenwood Springs and decides this’ll be a good place for us to stay tonight. Tomorrow we’ll be going through Vail, a big ski resort where Ford used to hide when he was supposed to be President. It’s beautiful country around here: pinkish rock outcroppings with shades of purple; even some blue rock, almost black.

  We push hard the rest of the afternoon. Once, believe it or not, he actually cracks sixty.

  I get thinking about school again, maybe preparing myself for the big knock-down-drag-out discussion.

  UCSC; “UCK SUCK,” we called it. All the students seemed so dull, placid, weirdly naïve. At the same time, I was continually running into karate black belts or champion archers or chess champions. I played tennis with some schmuck from my biology class and he pounded balls past me so hard I couldn’t touch them. It was enough to give anybody a permanent inferiority complex.

  In classes, though, I thought I was way beyond the rest. I’m asking the only intelligent questions and the professors are talking directly to me. But then, when we take exams, these freaks wipe me out. Those California robots are tough competition; I almost failed that first quarter. I’d no idea how hard I’d have to work. In their laid-back, casual, California way, they were learning like crazy.

  What they knew was how to take exams. They were expert learners for examinations. They didn’t bother shit learning anything not likely to be on a test. Also, they were absolutely psychic figuring what would be asked. They’d learn only this stuff, not thinking too much about it, then give it back in blue books.

  In the beginning, I’m trying to understand. I’m asking questions and trying to think. But there’s no room for questions or thinking at UCK SUCK. No way! It takes all your brain power passing exams. Maybe some of it’s supposed to stick to the sides of your mind when you pour it back, like making pots with slip in a dry plaster mold.

  Anyway, I don’t want any more. I don’t know what all that forced feeding has to do with survival. What good is it having a piece of paper saying you went to college, licked ass and crammed for four, six or eight years?

  I can say I went. Who checks? I’ll say I graduated, say I have a Ph.D. Who knows the difference? Nobody will call up and ask. Most times you take a job and fill out an employment form. I’ll say I have a Ph.D., two Ph.D.s, what the hell, do it right. I have a Ph.D. in physics and another in chemistry.

  There aren’t enough people in the world who can ask an intelligent question in those areas. Hardly any physicists could even trip me up. They all get specialized so soon, none of them know what the other guy’s doing. One peon’s off tracking down a wee bit of charm from a quark falling off the side of a neutron and doesn’t know from hell what an optical physicist might be into. None of them remember anything about general physics. I’ll just say, “That’s not my area.” I’ll spend three days memorizing twenty or so of those constants and I’m home free.

  I’ll get myself a good printer to mock up a beautiful diploma and dingle some names to sign on it. Rupert Crutchins or Part Faley. Or I’ll make friends with somebody working in a registrar’s office at a university; have them mail off a set of photostat bogus credentials and records for me, give myself a 4.0 average; make it impressive, scare everybody.

  Most likely, I’m only going out to work in industry anyway; help Exxon make another billion or two, what’s the difference.

  The whole thing’s so phony. If you can do something, you can; if you can’t, you can’t. School and papers don’t change much.

  Up in Oregon I passed myself off as a choker. I faked the name of an outfit and said I’d worked there. They didn’t dash out and check.

  Sure, I made some booboos the first few days; they must’ve thought I was a raving idiot. But by the end of a week I was making it, same as everybody else.

  The trouble is, choking’s one bitch of a dangerous job. You earn that seven bucks an hour. The third week I was knocked cold. When that cat pulls back and those logs roll, you’d better be quick getting out from under; you can wind up smashed into a pancake. Two days later I was floored again. I went in to cash out. But already I was a good enough choker so they offered me more money to stay.

  You can get by with anything. I worked as a boatbuilder in Portland. I told them I’d built boats in L.A. I looked up a boatbuilding outfit in the L.A. phone book at the library.

  I’ve never even built a model boat. I get seasick watching a boat. But I landed the job. They set me to sanding mahogany pieces of wood and filing rough edges off fiberglass. Then I was promoted to cutting forms out of plywood using a jigsaw. An hour at any of those jobs and you’ve learned all there is to know.

  The thing I don’t understand is how guys stick all their lives with these jobs. No wonder they wind up stoned, or glued to the boob tube.

  We pull into Glenwood Springs before dark. The Rockies stand up in front of us like a wall. The sun, coming from behind, looks as if it’s trapped, totally blocked, on this side of the mountain. From here, you’d think it’s dark on the other side, all the way to the East Coast.

  We find a hotel built into some foothills. It’s an old-time place, not a motel. There’s a foyer with worn-out rugs, an oaken check-in desk and a punch bell. There’s even a regulation-size pool table. The price is about the same as a motel, so we splurge. I can’t remember ever staying in an American hotel before.

  The room is old-fashioned, with twin beds and paint-thick, cast-metal steam radiators under the windows. This place must be freezing cold winters. In the bathroom there’s a genuine bathtub sitting up on lion’s paws. We take turns in the tub and there’s all the hot water you could ever want. I usually take showers, but there’s no shower. I fill the tub till it’s at the edge, then let myself float. I make the water hot as I can stand, then gradually cool it off to cold.

  I dry myself at the window while Dad takes his bath. It sounds as if he only puts in about three inches and doesn’t stay in more than five minutes. He’s always in such a hurry about everything.

  Downstairs we rent cues for the pool table. I played some in the rec room at Cowell in UCK SUCK; I’m no shark but I’m reasonable. We play rotation. Dad’s awkward as hell, looks as if he’s going to drive the damned cue straight through the table, but he puts them in. I hardly get to play at all. When and where the hell’d he learn pool? Maybe in the army.

  Neither of us can face another pizza. There is a Pizza Hut across from the hotel but we find a steak house on the far side of the river. With the steak, we have hash browns and corn on the cob. You hardly ever get corn on the cob in a restaurant. But the mother’n bill comes to almost twelve dollars. How in hell can a person live with food costing like that?

  Dad’s barely holding up his head as we go back to the hotel. He puts on his crazy sleeping-running suit and climbs into bed. He goes right out, snoring like a train till I push him over on his side.

  I’ve snitched a Mad magazine from a table in the foyer, so I stretch on the other bed. I turn on the TV in the corner, low. There’s only one channel and it�
��s a cowboy film to go with all the cowboy music. I’d go nuts if I lived around here. In ten minutes I’m bored; I’ve read the Mad before, it’s two years old. I think of going out and wandering around town, maybe investigate the river, but I’m too tired.

  I wish I could figure out just what the hell I’m going to do.

  8

  The next morning I’m in the kitchen making breakfast when Dad comes in still wearing his pajamas.

  “Johnny, something’s wrong in here; would you step into the bathroom and have a look?”

  I go back to see what it is and the toilet bowl’s full of blood! I turn to him.

  “What happened?”

  I’m looking to see if he’s cut himself somewhere. He stares into the bowl.

  “I don’t know. When I peed, it came out like that.”

  I’m scared. Big quantities of blood always set off my adrenaline.

  “Geez, Dad, we’d better get you in and have this checked. All this worry and everything maybe has you mixed up inside.”

  He looks at me.

  “You don’t think it might be cancer or something like that, do you?”

  Dad has an absolutely deadly fear of cancer. His father died painfully from liver cancer; two of his sisters from breast cancer; it seems to run in the family.

  “I’m sure not, Dad. But just to be safe we’ll make an appointment to see a urologist when we go visit Mother this afternoon.”

  At the hospital, Mother’s more reconciled to things. She promises she’ll do as the doctors say and she’s really going to take care of herself. She’s glad I talked to her and she hadn’t thought of it that way.

  “Besides, Jacky, I have to live for his sake.”

  Afterward, I take Dad down to the urology clinic. We don’t tell Mother. Down there they give us a bottle and point out a bathroom. I show Dad how he’s to pee in the bottle, then attach the paper on the outside with a rubber band. He’s nervous, but says he can do it.