But one weekend I’d had enough and I told her not to come up because I had a lot of work to do, and I never saw her again. She was a very pleasant girl and I am sorry that things ended abruptly. She sent me a few text messages accusing me of ruining her life, but I told her this was impossible, and that she was young and smart and pretty and by most measurements had a full and good life waiting in front of her.
I THOUGHT ABOUT suicide. I read Suzuki’s Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind again and again.
I rewrote, thousands of times, this quote:
A good father is not a good father.
2
John Howard Swofford
My father sat in a chair in the corner of his hospital room, upper body hunched over a brand-new government-issued aluminum walker. This was December 1999. The last time I’d seen him, in August, he’d helped load my U-Haul for my move from Sacramento to Iowa City. He’d lifted boxes and furniture, and he’d bought the beers and pizza, and later he’d treated my friends to a strip club, lap dances for everyone. Now he could barely lift his head to greet me.
“Hey, Bubba,” he said, deploying my least favorite of the multitude of nicknames he had for me: Tone. Old Tone. T-Bone. Pussy Hunter. Jarhead.
“Hey, Dad,” I said. “What’s the word? When can we wheel you out of this fleabag joint?”
“You ain’t wheeling me nowheres. The doc says walk. I’m gonna walk.”
“So let’s hit it.” I clapped my hands twice. I had a date that evening in San Francisco with my old college girlfriend.
A few days earlier I’d received a phone call from my sister Kim telling me that the Old Man had bit it hard in his living room—he’d collapsed, grasping for life, gasping for air. And whom did he call? Nine-one-one? No, he called a guy who performed menial labor for him. And the guy drove over in his pickup truck and heaped my father into the front seat, and here at the hospital his doctor told him to stop smoking or he would die soon.
When? he asked.
Now.
He’d smoked for forty-five years. He’d also spent twenty-two years in the Air Force, thirteen months in Vietnam, many of those months within the Agent Orange–tainted jungles and many other years breathing the fumes from the narcotics of war that drive the workings and skeletons of every military base.
Here we were on a military base, the same place I’d been born, Travis Air Force Base. In the late 1960s, while her husband fought in Vietnam, hippies spit at my mother’s car as she entered the base to take her children to the hospital or to buy groceries.
My father pointed out the window. “You see that building, that short building over there? That’s where you were born.”
“You tell me that every time we’re on base.”
“Well, Bubba, maybe it’s important to me.”
It would be many years before I could understand the importance of such a building to a man.
Right now all I wanted was to wheel the Old Man out of here. Hell, I’d fireman’s-carry him, if need be. I had a seven p.m. drinks date in San Francisco, forty-five miles away, and nothing would stop me from making it. I hadn’t been laid since moving to Iowa City. My father was alive and breathing. I needed to get him home and I needed to hit the road.
“Have some patience with me, Son. I’ll be slow a few days and pretty soon here I’ll be back up to speed.”
We stopped by the pharmacy and picked up a twelve-pack of meds. It took the pharmacist half an hour to explain the proper usage and the possible negative reactions and interactions. Other than to treat a bad batch of migraines in the 1970s, when he’d returned from Vietnam, my father had never been medicated.
He asked the pharmacist, “How the hell do you guys expect me to remember all of that?”
“We don’t,” he said. He handed my father a card with the pharmacy number on it. “Give us a call anytime.”
I carried my father’s meds and the overnight bag my sister had packed for him. My father slowly scooted along the corridors of the hospital—a working military hospital that also served the large retiree population in the area. Creaking GIs lurked everywhere. Many wore baseball caps from whatever unit they were most proud of serving with.
It took half an hour to get to the car.
He said, “Now, Tone, how about you take me grocery shopping? And I want to rent some movies. I think I’ll be bed-resting for a week.”
Within the confines of the hospital my father had not seemed out of place. Hobbling around were other addled men; whether it was from disease or old age or drink or smokes or government-sanctioned pesticide campaigns, the sick men belonged there in the massive sick bay of Travis Air Force Base. With a glance around I could easily find some guy worse off than my father: the blind, the amputee, the insane.
But in the parking lot of the strip mall near his house I registered just how incredibly sick he was. I knew this would only worsen. I removed his walker from the trunk and opened it at the passenger door. He needed help up. Hanging from the walker was a toy figurine of some cartoon character I vaguely recognized.
“What is this?” I asked my dad.
“The candy stripper gave me that, Tone.”
“Candy striper. Not stripper. But they don’t even use that term anymore.”
“Oh, right. That was one of them, what do you educated people call it? Freudian trips?”
“Slips.”
“Right. Freudian strip. Candy stripers. Well, they’d get more business if they hired some candy strippers, don’t you think?”
“I suppose the dirty old GIs would like that.”
“Who you calling dirty and old?”
“Who do you think?”
With his stripers and strippers and Freudian trippers, I could not tell if my father was playing with me. Probably so. But I did not have the patience for this. The time was now four forty-five p.m. and I had less than three hours before I needed to be seated at a bar with a girl, a girl who would definitely have sex with me.
“Dad, just tell me what groceries you need and what movies you want. I can do this in twenty minutes. We’ll be out of here.”
It was nearly the shortest day of the year and already getting dark.
Dad said, “Give me some patience, Tone. I want to be outside. I got stuck in that room a week.”
And so we took our time. I walked slowly alongside my father. The severity of his disease began to register for me. I noticed how people looked at my father: the Man Lugging an Oxygen Tank. I knew the first thought that came to my mind when I saw a person using oxygen: poor white riverboat gamblers in the Midwest or South chain-smoking the Social Security Administration and Medicare into oblivion.
I wanted to say to the people who stared: No, you’ve got it all wrong. He’s a veteran. He was in Vietnam. It might have been Agent Orange. But of course I knew it wasn’t Agent Orange: it was forty-five years of Marlboros.
This was not my first experience with feeling humiliation because of someone else’s dire medical condition: in 1997 and 1998 my brother, Jeff, slowly died of a cancer and I was always ashamed of his illness whenever we were in public.
Is this a moral weakness in me?
Perhaps, I thought, as a little girl stared at the cartoon toy hanging from my father’s walker and then looked in horror at the oxygen tube shoved up his nostrils. With a shriek the girl recoiled into her mother’s pants leg.
We bought groceries for one of my father’s favorite one-pot meals, something he called goulash but that was really just a mash of over-boiled vegetables and meat in canned tomatoes, massively dosed with paprika.
We rented a stack of Clint Eastwood and Arnold Schwarzenegger movies.
Back in the car Dad said, “You know, I’d like to have dinner with Clint Eastwood someday. Jeff met him down in Carmel, didn’t he say?”
“Jeff claimed a lot of things,” I replied.
“Maybe when I’m catting around again I’ll go down to Carmel and look old Clint up.”
“You should do that.”
“Other than Johnny Cash, Clint is my guy. When I was your age they used to say I looked like Johnny Cash. That’s what old Margarita in Texas used to say. ‘Johnny, you look just like Señor Cash.’ Damn that tickled me. Old Margarita. I’ll have to visit her, too.”
My father either did not grasp the immensity of the medical event he’d just survived, or he refused to recognize the totality of change it would bring to his life. This stubbornness or ignorance probably kept him alive for so many years while other patients might have just given up and died. His diagnosis was COPD, chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder. Others might call it emphysema. COPD sounds, I don’t know, snappier? Less trashy? Emphysema connotes poor white riverboat gamblers in the Midwest or South chain-smoking the Social Security Administration and Medicare into oblivion. COPD? It’s just an acronym. But the end result is the same: your lungs will quit working someday and you will die. The elasticity of the oxygen sacs in your lungs will eventually fail, the sacs will dry up and calcify, and eventually you will want to inhale but there will be no room. All around you, everywhere, there will be oxygen, but you will be allowed none of it.
When I thought of my father’s lungs I thought of an old hunk of white coral that I’d had as a kid. I knew that it was bad to have a piece of coral. I knew that the coral reefs of the world were diminishing, but I liked having this strange piece of the ocean. The coral sat on my desk next to the piece of lava from Mount Fuji.
Brazenly, my father wanted to stop by one of his drinking holes just to say hello to the guys. It was now six-thirty. My date in San Francisco would never happen. I called the ex-girlfriend and she agreed to meet me in Fairfield later that night. I took my father to his bar.
I never understood it then, because he never articulated it, but I guess my father was proud of me. I was his son who had gone off and joined the Marines and served in a sniper platoon and gone to war and kicked Saddam’s ass, and returned home and gone to college, and paid his way through it working in a warehouse and with a little help from the GI Bill. And now I was in graduate school in Iowa City.
He introduced me to the bartender, a woman in her fifties wearing ten pounds of makeup and thirty years of rough road. She looked as though she’d been drinking since the previous night’s shift ended. “This is my son Tony. He’s gonna be a famous writer someday. He’s studying it in Iowa. The Writers’ Warehouse, right, Tone?” He winked at the bartender.
“Something like that. Can I have a double shot of bourbon?” I asked the bartender.
“That all they teach you in writing college, how to drink?” he asked.
“That’s one of the rumors about the place.”
Writers’ Warehouse. Freudian strip. If I had paid more attention, it was a funny skit my father performed: the father playing redneck to his smarty collegiate son. But the animosity that ran through his commentary was so obvious, or obvious to me. Anyone else would just see a charming older Southern gentleman who liked flirting with the ladies. Now he was not only old, but sick, too. His virility and vanity had taken a mortal blow. The handsome dark devil, the Johnny Cash look-alike, the wild man, the ravishing lover, his lungs had failed him and he was down for the count. Everyone knows the dick needs oxygen in order to perform. He did not want to admit it, but this was a major loss. This was the major loss. My father lived for good times and he also lived for the ladies. My father took the ladies out dancing and drinking and he took them home. Good-Time Johnny. Good-Time Johnny might have to take a final bow.
I drank my bourbon in silence while my father talked with his bar friends. They were happy to have him back in the crowd. Everyone always loved my father and his Southern charm. He was a good fella, that John Howard Swofford.
I stepped out to make a call to the girl in San Francisco. Hell, why not meet here at this divey little bar? I gave her directions.
My father asked me what all the commotion was on my phone. “What are you planning? You got that look in your eye. I know that look. That’s the Pussy Hunter. Swofford libido. A blessing and a curse. Who is it this time?”
Did I like this? Did I like my father calling me Pussy Hunter? Yes.
“Marin County,” I said. When I’d dated this girl in college my father could never remember her name, only that she had grown up in Marin County, and so that is what he called her.
“Goddamn, Tone. Pulling out the reserves? Marin County. Nice girl.”
“I was supposed to meet her in San Francisco. But she’s coming here.”
“Right here? To the bar? Hell, Tone. Don’t do that. Take her out somewhere nice. Take her to dinner. Take her out dancing.”
Lessons from a pro.
He continued, “This must be a generational thing. You can just meet a girl out for a few drinks and call it a night? Just like that?”
“It depends on the girl and the night. We have known each other awhile.”
“I might know a woman awhile but still take her out on a Friday night. There’s a good steak house downtown. Take her there, for Christ’s sake.”
“She’s a vegetarian.”
“Jesus, Tone. Jesus. My own son. Meeting a girl at a shitty bar and gonna try to get in her pants. You gonna get a hotel room?”
“Nope. I’m going to fuck her in your Cadillac.”
“Goddamn, Son. You can’t do that. You’ll get you both arrested. And I’m not gonna bail your silly ass out. Fucking in a car. Jesus Christ.”
Marin County never showed.
I helped my father settle into his home, into this new lifestyle of sickness.
I arranged his meds by day and dose. I plugged in the oxygen system that had been delivered to the front stoop that afternoon and cut a hundred-foot length of medical tube. I cut up the veggies and the meat and threw it all in a large pot with a few quarts of water, four chicken bouillon cubes, canned tomatoes, and a cup of paprika. We watched Hang ’Em High and my father fell asleep next to me on the couch. His oxygen tube hung from his nostrils like a clear snake and the oxygen machine howled.
The next afternoon a guy from the company that would service his oxygen came by. He was a big burly dude with a goatee. He said that his own father had succumbed to this disease.
“My old man,” he said, “he did what most people do when they get the diagnosis. He sat on his ass and got fat and stayed lazy and he was dead in two years, right there in the chair he sat in when he got home from the hospital. I couldn’t tell you if he ever moved once.”
“I plan to stay active. I plan to keep my job. This thing won’t take me down. Not soon, anyway,” my father said.
“Sir, I can’t say it’s a pleasure to meet you. It’s never a happy occasion when I meet a new customer. But I do hope we’ll have your business for a very long time.”
I couldn’t help but think that someday this big burly dude with a goatee would show up to deliver my father his oxygen and instead find him dead.
I SPENT THE rest of my winter break from grad school kicking around Northern California, crashing on friends’ couches or floors or in the bed of some former girlfriend or another. Every few days I’d drop in on my father and run errands for him or complete chores around his house.
One night Marin County met me at my dad’s house.
“Good to see you, darling,” my dad said, extending a hand and making a slight bow. “It seems like it’s been years.”
“Only months, Mr. Swofford. I saw you in August when we helped Tony load his truck for Iowa.”
“Right, right.”
I had not reminded my father of her name and I saw his brain working hard to retrieve it from his cloudy memory bank. And I knew he would not. Throughout my boyhood he never remembered my friends’ names. He referred to them by the names of the streets they lived on: Boyd, Marconi, Walnut, Lillian Lane.
“Your folks still live over in Marin County?” he asked.
“They do. And my younger brother.”
“Right. Right. Your father has a younger wife, and a son??
??
My father could not remember this woman’s name but he recalled that her father, a man his own age, had a wife in her late thirties and a young son.
“So, Dad. How about I make dinner?” I offered.
“There’s goulash in the fridge!”
“I’m not feeling the goulash. I picked up steaks. I’ll throw them on the grill.”
My father looked lewdly at Marin County off and on throughout the evening. She was seven years younger than I and possessed a freshness and innocence not yet fractured by the bigger world. She worked as an intern with a radical publishing company and her father paid her rent in the Mission. She made bad art with crushed eggshells, and she wanted to change the world. And she was gloriously open in bed, or wherever we had sex.
For a few months while we dated in college she had lived at home and I would drive to Marin from Sacramento. We’d head into San Francisco for a date and then later return to Marin. We’d drive to the top of Mount Tamalpais and have sex in my truck, and then I’d drive her home. I’d park my truck around the corner from her dad’s house and sleep in the cab, and in the morning we’d reconvene. Sometimes I’d do this for three days straight without a shower.
I cleaned the dinner dishes while they watched a Clint Eastwood movie.
“Hey, Pops,” I said, interrupting a gunfight. “We’re going to head out for a drink. You mind if I take your car?”
“No problemo. Just don’t drive her drunk.”
“We’ll only have a few. Back at your local.”
“Tell them you are Alabama John’s son.”
We didn’t make it to the bar. We didn’t leave my dad’s driveway. We jumped in the backseat of his car and turned it into our own little sex dungeon.
During a break, Marin County said, “I like your dad. He’s a sweet guy. I like his accent. Is he going to be OK?”
“I don’t think that being on oxygen is OK. But he plans to stay active, and he seems to have a pretty good attitude right now. He’s not overly depressed and he’s not giving up; he’s not talking about where he wants us to bury him, so maybe he’ll hang on awhile.”