By the end of July 1988, eight months past my deadline, I finished my novel. I wrote by hand back then and first had to deliver the manuscript to a typist, a woman. When she finished, I then mailed the book to my editor and immediately bought a cheap train ticket to Georgia because I couldn’t afford to fly. I was finally going to see my son, who was now over two years old.
The night before I was to leave for Georgia, I was on the phone with a friend and there was an emergency break-through by the operator. A doctor from Los Angeles was calling to tell me that both my parents were in critical condition after a terrible car accident— they had been hit head-on at sixty miles per hour by an out-of-control driver who jumped across to their side of the highway. They were in L.A. visiting my sister, who had just moved out there. My sister had also been in the car, but she wasn’t in critical condition, though she had serious injuries. My whole family was nearly wiped out, and the doctor told me that my mother was the worst off, that her liver had been crushed, that he wasn’t sure whether she would survive.
I called my son’s mother, told her what was going on, that my visit would have to be delayed; she was, of course, understanding and kind. Then I went immediately to the airport and got the next flight to California; the airline gave me some kind of emergency ticket. And as I sat on that plane I kept feeling as if the right side of my body was caving in. I didn’t consciously know it, but that’s where the liver is, and I kept holding myself there; it was like I was a chest of drawers, and the drawer there on my side had been pulled out.
I arrived in L.A. and went first to my mother’s hospital. (My parents had been taken to different emergency rooms so that there would be enough surgeons to try and save their lives.) I met her doctor before seeing her. “How is she?” I asked.
“She has a fifty-fifty chance,” he said.
I went into her room and her eyes were closed. She was surrounded by the necessary tubes, machines, and pumps. She was only fifty-one, but she looked like she was eighty. Her face had aged—it was white and shrunk and withered. She opened her blue eyes and she saw me and she smiled so radiantly, even through her pain. “Jonathan,” she said. “I love you,” she said. I put my face next to hers, careful not to hurt her, not to undo anything. “I love you,” I said. She held me, and she told me, in a whisper, that a prayer she had learned when I was in the hospital nine months before for drinking had saved her. It saved her while she was being cut out of the car, while the clothes were taken off her body on the side of the road while people stared, while all vanity was lost, while her body felt, as she later wrote in a poem, like “venetian blinds crumbling,” while she experienced the most grotesque pain of her life everywhere in her body. So she said this prayer over and over— thousands of times she thought she had said it; it was her only solace, the prayer she had learned to say to cope with the fact that her son seemed bent on killing himself with alcohol. It went like this: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
My mother survived and both my parents were eventually transferred, after a week, to the same hospital, Cedars-Sinai, where they spent three weeks. After Cedars, my sister and I had them moved to a nursing home in Santa Monica, where they spent another three weeks. It took about half a year, but they both made remarkable recoveries from a slew of devastating injuries. My mother lost her spleen, and her liver had been squashed, but was repaired with surgery—the doctor said that God had acted through his hands. All my father’s ribs had been broken, his lungs had collapsed, and he had nearly died from misdiagnosed internal bleeding. For the first three days at Cedars, they were unable to see each other because they were on different floors and neither of them was strong enough to get out of bed and into a wheelchair. At the time of the accident, they’d been married thirty-two years, and those ten days apart, first in their different hospitals and then at Cedars, was the longest they had ever been separated from each other. Then on the eleventh day, my father was stronger, and with his I.V. bottle I wheeled him over to my mother, and when she saw him, she said gleefully, “My hero!”
So while they were recuperating those first six weeks, I stayed in L.A. on the floor of my sister’s apartment. Then when my parents were well enough to fly, I moved back home with them to drive them to doctors, to cook their meals, to clean the house. My editor sent back my manuscript during this time for some small changes and I finished those quickly. The book was done.
By the end of October of 1988, I was able to leave my parents for a weekend—they could take care of themselves—and I flew down to Georgia.
I was just going to see my son; I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, what role I would play in his life. He was two and a half years old now, and all he knew was that a friend of Mommy’s was coming to stay for a few days; he didn’t know that I was his father. I arrived there late at night, but he woke up and crawled to the end of his bed and peered out his door at me. He was beautiful. Bright red hair, porcelain-white skin. And the most amazing smile came onto his face when he saw me. I approached him and he immediately wanted to climb into my arms, although I was a complete stranger. So I held him and it was perfect. I’ve been his father ever since.
My Great-Aunt Pearl
IT WAS AROUND NOON and my fiber supplement, ingested at nine, was doing its job and I was sitting on the toilet. Next to my toilet is a mirror. I looked in the mirror and I noticed how tight the skin was on my forehead. I could really see the outline of my cranium and then I imagined my skull without its skin. I saw some Hamlet-like person picking it up out of a grave. Oh, God, I’m going to die someday, I thought. My body, my life will have no significance. I’ll be an empty skull.
It was all too depressing, and I flushed and got the hell off that toilet before it sucked me down to my grave. It’s so rare for me to actually be pierced by my mortality. I’m too busy being nervous and afraid about being alive to worry about dying.
I sat at my kitchen table, and to keep my life force going, I ate a banana; in these lean financial times I survive on bananas, oatmeal, peanut butter, carrots, and apples. I never thought of it before, but I practically have the diet of a horse. Halfway through the banana the phone rang. It was a woman and she asked, “Are you Jonathan Ames, Pearl’s nephew?”
“Yes,” I said, concerned. She was talking about my eighty-four-year-old great-aunt who lives in Queens.
“I’m with Meals-on-Wheels and Pearl didn’t come to the door today and she didn’t call to cancel. And she isn’t answering her phone. I’ve tried reaching her for an hour. You’re on our list to call in case of an emergency.”
This was terrible. My great-aunt always cancels her meals-on-wheels if she’s going to be out. “Should I call the police?” I asked.
“Don’t panic. . . . I’m just supposed to call you. Maybe try calling her for a little while. Let me know what you find out.”
I’m the relative who lives closest to my great-aunt, so I keep an eye on her. She never had any children of her own and she saw my mother as her daughter, and me and my sister as her grandchildren. She is very dear to me.
So first I called my great-aunt, but there was no answer, and she doesn’t have an answering machine. Then I called her neighbor Phyllis, but she wasn’t in. Then I called my great-aunt’s doctor— perhaps she had an appointment. The receptionist said she did have an appointment but that she had canceled that morning. This frightened me. For my great-aunt to cancel a doctor’s appointment would mean that she was actually sick and couldn’t get out of her apartment, because she lives for her doctor’s appointments—it’s her social life, her amusement. It’s where she gets attention, attention from men. She’s especially in love with her primary caregiver, Doctor Schwartz. And it was her appointment with Schwartz that she had canceled. I envisioned her passed out on her floor. Of late she had been complaining of pain on the left side of her head. I tried calling her again, but no answer. So there was only one
thing to do: 911. I gave the operator all the information and said that I’d meet the police at my great-aunt’s apartment.
“Am I doing the right thing?” I then asked the emergency operator, a woman with a hard-boiled phone demeanor.
“Oh, yeah,” she said. “We get calls like this all the time.”
I rushed out of the house and got a cab to Queens. I had about thirty dollars on me, just enough money to get out there. I looked out the taxi window and I was scared. Had my morbid thoughts before the phone call been an omen?
For the six years that I’ve been living in New York, I’ve gone to see my great-aunt at least once or twice a month. She cooks me a meal and then we play cards—Hollywood gin is our game.
When I was drinking again in the early nineties, I often went to see her on Sundays with terrible hangovers. One Sunday morning, after having debauched myself the previous night, I was standing on the platform waiting for the R train and I was in bad shape and I had a thirty- to forty-minute subway ride to look forward to. I wanted only one thing to soothe myself: a New York Times sports section to read. I said to God that if he gave me a sports section, I would believe in him and stop drinking. At that moment, an older gray-haired man joined me on the platform. He had a fat, Sunday Times under his arm. He didn’t look like a sports fan, too effete— his shoes had tassels.
“Can I have your sports section?” I asked.
“Why should I give it to you?” he said bitterly. Maybe he could smell the booze on my breath, and I thought, So much for God. Then at that precise moment the N train, not my train, went charging by. It slowed to a stop and the subway door opened in front of me. On the seat across the way was a thin section of the Times. It looked like the sports section. I ran like a wild man into the car. I rasped at the girl sitting next to the paper, “Is that yours?” She shook her head no, in a frightened way. It was the sports section! I grabbed the thing, spun around, and did a fencing leap off the train just as the door was closing. God had answered me! I couldn’t believe it. I immediately wanted to bear witness, but I was alone on the platform—there was no one to tell. The older man with the tassels had taken the N. I held my precious bit of newsprint in my hands. It was incredible. Of all the sections of the paper to be left behind, and of all the subway cars in the long train that the paper should be on the one that stopped right in front of me. . . . Was it God? Would I really have to quit drinking? It was only a sports section.
When I got to Queens, I told my great-aunt, with great excitement, what happened. She was unimpressed and she was annoyed with me. “You could have been hurt jumping off like that,” she said. “You should have stayed on the N to Queens Plaza and switched.”
Over the years, there have been several memorable misadventures with my great-aunt. For my graduation from college, she waxed her legs (in her day she had been very beautiful and vain and had several divorces; she was a tiny, gorgeous redhead), but somehow she overdid the waxing. She burned the inside of her thighs and genitals and had to be in a wheelchair during my commencement. She told all my friends that she had singed her privates.
And then a year later, on our way up to Boston for my sister’s graduation from medical school, we stopped at some restaurant on the highway, and my great-aunt ordered a foot-long hot dog. I counseled her against this: “It’s bad for your digestion, and it’s filled with bone marrow.”
“Don’t be crazy,” she said, and she ate the whole thing. I was horrified, and sure enough, she became stupendously constipated and was miserable in Boston. “It’s that hot dog,” I kept saying.
“Leave me alone,” she’d say. “You’re meshuga.” But she could hardly enjoy the graduation ceremonies. She was complaining the whole time about being bloated. Finally we took her to a drugstore and she bought herself suppositories. But she didn’t look at the package closely, and when we got back to the hotel room, she realized she had bought infant suppositories. They were the size of small pencil erasers. But she was very adaptive and she put all twelve of them at once up her tuches. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to dynamite out the hot dog, and she was bad company all the way back to New York.
So as I sat in the cab, I had terrible visions of what I might find in Queens. I wasn’t ready to lose her, and I was feeling guilty because I hadn’t been out to visit for several weeks.
I was dropped off in front of her building, and I didn’t see any police cars. I buzzed her buzzer and the door was clicked open. I took the elevator to the sixth floor, and when I got off, she was there, standing in the hallway. Beautiful and tiny. Her red hair now a whitish orange.
“What’s going on?” she said, her voice high-pitched and nervous. “The police were here. Such excitement.”
“Meals-on-Wheels called me. They tried to drop off your lunch. They made me think something had happened to you. . . . Where were you?”
“The chiropodist. I had my toenails clipped.”
“Well, thank God, you’re all right,” I said, and I hugged her to my chest.
Then we walked into her small, overheated apartment. “I’m not a shut-in, you know,” she said, scolding me. Her pride was wounded; she didn’t want me doubting her independence. “If I don’t answer the phone, don’t call the police.”
“It’s Meals-on-Wheels’s fault. They called me, alarmed me.”
“They’re always fouling up,” she said. “I called and canceled this morning. Now I’m all shook up.”
We sat down in her kitchen. “I’m sorry, Aunt Pearl. I was scared. I didn’t know what else to do.”
She took off her shoe. “I forgot to have the chiropodist bandage my toe. It’s killing me.” She had me get a Band-Aid from the drawer, then she put her tiny, misshapen foot on my thigh. From years of wearing high heels, she has bunions the size of elbow joints. She instructed me to part the little toe from the rest and then to wrap the Band-Aid around the nail. Her toes were yellow, from the chiropodist’s iodine, I think, and the little nails were embedded and ancient, but I was glad to hold her foot and bandage her toe. Then I rubbed her sole and she smiled at me. Then we had lunch and played gin. It turned out to be a good visit.
A Christmas Eve Sojourn
THE FIRST COUPLE OF YEARS of my son’s life, I was often low on money and so I was always looking for the cheapest way to get to Georgia, and this particular Christmas of 1989, I was getting there by train and bus.
I was living in Princeton at the time and I made the first leg of the journey with my new girlfriend. We took an overnighter on Amtrak from Newark to Charleston, South Carolina, which was where her family had recently moved. I had one little backpack with me and this big cardboard box that I had fashioned together with rope and a special handle; in the box were all my son’s toys.
My girlfriend and I had only been together a few weeks and we were in that early stage of making love all the time. We tried to do it in the train bathroom, but people kept jiggling the handle and this threw off my performance.
When we arrived in Charleston on the twenty-third of December, we were met by her big Catholic family. Both her parents, I knew, were a little suspicious of me—I was Jewish and an older man. My girlfriend was twenty-one and I was twenty-five, and this difference of four years was considered significant. But despite these suspicious qualities—my Jewishness and my age—her parents were also welcoming. Her mother kissed me on the cheek and her father crushed my hand—he was an ex–army man, an officer in the Vietnam War, and only recently retired. But despite her parents’ initial warmth and hospitality, my girlfriend and I thought it was too soon to inform them that I had a son, so we told them that I’d be going on to Georgia the next day to be with cousins.
That night after a lovely pre–Christmas Eve dinner, her father lent us the family van so that we could go for a ride. We drove around for a little while—my girlfriend didn’t know the area since her parents had just moved there—and then on our way back, near her house, we found a semideserted dead end where we thought we could do a litt
le old-fashioned parking. There was one street lamp and a few houses set back from the road. We started to make love— it had been nearly forty-eight hours, a long stretch for us at that time—and the van was rocking happily. The backseat was tilted down and we were on top of it and I was on top of her. It was a little awkward—she was a tall and leggy blonde—but we managed; I was more athletic in those days.
At some point in my efforts, I noticed that the shadow of her head in the back window seemed to be moving from side to side. How unusual, I thought, since we were loving one another in a north-south direction. I ignored this phenomena, but then I looked up again and it struck me as too curious that her head wasn’t aligning with its shadow. So without saying anything, trying to make it seem like an interesting gesture of affection, I moved her head a little to the left. But the shadow, now still, didn’t move accordingly.
My girlfriend’s eyes were closed and she was happily moaning. She was unaware that I was conducting an experiment, an experiment that I intuitively sensed was tinged with doom, and I moved her head to the right. Again the shadow didn’t move. Then it hit me—the doom revealed itself—the shadow was being cast by someone else’s head from the outside. Her father, the veteran! I screamed and made a hasty, wild coital retreat. She screamed. I pulled my pants up, which were at my ankles, quicker than I had ever done anything in my life.
“There’s someone out there!” I bellowed. “No!” she cried abstractly, and covered her breasts with her hands. Her father had found us and was going to shoot me with his old service revolver.
The car was lit with a flashlight. Of course, a military man would have a powerful flashlight. But then I saw an angry, contorted face pressed again the rear window. It was a scowling black man. “Get the fuck out of here! Fucking on my street!” he shouted, and then he slammed his hand on the roof of the car.
My poor girlfriend was shrieking. I got into the driver’s seat and I fumbled like a movie-ass with the keys—life is at its most horrible when you find yourself re-creating stock Hollywood scenes. Then I gathered some coordination, ignited the car, and pulled out of there.
What's Not to Love?: The Adventures of a Mildly Perverted Young Writer Page 13