“Will you tell him we screwed in his car?”
“He’ll figure it out.”
“You are so bad.”
Later when I entered my dad’s house he was asleep on the couch. I awoke him and helped him back to his room.
He said, “Goddamn, Tone. As soon as you walked out the door I remembered her name. And now I’ve forgotten it. You have a good time?”
“We didn’t leave the driveway.”
“Dang. Something wrong with the car?”
“Nothing wrong with the car. We sat and talked.”
He looked at me with a sidelong glance.
“You’re bullshitting me, Bubba. You had sex with that girl in my goddamn car! Jesus. You better pay to get that interior detailed tomorrow. God knows what you did in my goddamn brand-new car. Thank god it’s leather seats.”
Was it cruel of me to invite a young, beautiful woman into my father’s house and parade her sexuality and her youth in front of the dying beast and then have sex with her in his car? Probably. But maybe it got him off.
The next day I mowed his lawn and made a few more pots of goulash before heading back to Iowa City. He stood in his driveway as my taxi backed away. He leaned on his walker. He hadn’t dressed. He wore the uniform of old sick men: white T-shirt and briefs. His legs were pale as rice and his forearms deeply sun-stained by decades of outdoor labor. The oxygen tube snaked down his body, a river, a story, a life. I waved to my father, not knowing when I’d see him again, or how long he might live.
3
Fairfield to Billings, the Joker Is Out of Breath, April 2009
One afternoon in April 2009, nearly a decade after his first collapse, I arrived at my father’s house and he greeted me in his driveway wearing white briefs with a T-shirt tucked in so that the look approximated that of a onesie. These days he wore dentures, but he hadn’t had a chance to put them in. He grinned at me, all gums, like a baby.
In the age-old tradition of crotchety and stubborn men, my father fought his diagnosis of COPD with abandon and verve. He held on to his job running a strip mall maintenance crew, even though a medical retirement coupled with his military retirement would have provided enough financial security for him to thrive and even head to Mexico for the winters.
I want to live, he screamed every morning as he cleared his lungs of muck and prepared for work.
Friends of his had gotten sick and died dozens of different ways, and the Old Man was still kicking. I’d been married and divorced, and the Old Man was still kicking. I’d lived in Iowa City, Portland, Oakland, and now Manhattan; I’d traveled around the world twice; I’d written and published two books; and the Old Man was still kicking. I’d been engaged and unengaged to two different women, and the Old Man was still kicking.
He did not say hello, he said, “Goddamn, Tone, we got a lot of work to do to get this rig road-ready!”
The next morning I’d enclose myself with my father in his forty-four-foot Winnebago to drive from Fairfield, California, to Billings, Montana, in order to attend my niece’s college graduation. Over twenty-five hours, twenty-three minutes, and 53.7 seconds we’d carve our way through 1,100 miles of the western United States. The physical sensation of driving a Winnebago at high speeds approximates that of sitting in a Manhattan studio apartment while a 5.5-magnitude earthquake revs unabated within your four thin walls.
My father had prepared a twenty-five-point pre-trip checklist.
During my middle school and high school years my father dictated my daily routine with a checklist he prepared every Sunday evening for the following week:
Brush teeth. (Daily. AM, at school after lunch, PM)
Floss teeth. (Daily, PM)
Eat three pieces of fruit. (3x daily: breakfast, afternoon snack, dinner)
Feed and water dogs. (2x daily)
Shower. (Daily)
Wash cars with Dad. (Saturday or Sunday)
Pick up dog poop. (Saturday, regardless of weather)
Mow lawn. (Saturday, weather permitting, check with Dad)
Perform pool maintenance. (Chemicals, vacuum, maintain flower planters)
Dust, straighten, and vacuum bedroom. (Saturday)
(All of these chores must be performed in order to receive the full allowance. Deductions will be made for failures. It is possible to receive Zero Allowance and to attain a Negative Balance. Further punishment is also possible: groundings from: TV privileges, phone use, and friend visitations.)
The allowance of a few dollars fluctuated. I think I topped out at $5.50 a week in 1986.
The reward for completing the Winnebago checklist remained elusive. And how might my father punish me for failure?
In his kitchen I made a pot of goulash for the road. We’d shopped earlier at the commissary on Travis Air Force Base. As we passed the old hospital where I was born, now an administrative building, he’d pointed to it and said, once again, “Hey, Bubba. That building there is where you were born.”
I loaded the RV cabinets with bags of chips and crackers and cookies. The goulash-filled Tupperware went in the refrigerator. On the RV I checked the oil and transmission fluid and wiper fluid levels. I checked the water level on the batteries. I checked the oil level on the generator. I made sure the hydraulics worked. I made sure that the slide-out bedroom and living room worked. I popped a bag of popcorn in the microwave. I made certain the refrigerator and freezer refrigerated and froze. I flushed the toilet. I ran the shower and the sinks. I turned on the TV. I checked the slide-out stairs. I tied down ten cylinders of my father’s oxygen. I climbed on the roof and had a peek around, and everything looked attached. I stood tall on the roof. I looked up and down my father’s suburban street. I spread my arms wide. The sun beat down on me heavy and bright. I wanted to ride all the way to Montana on the roof.
BEFORE LEAVING NEW YORK for this trip I’d had a drink with my friend Oren, and he asked me, “What the hell are you going to talk to your father about for one thousand miles?”
I said, “He’ll piss me off by spewing a bunch of garbage about Mexicans and Arabs and Asians, and I’ll tell him he’s a stupid old racist fuck. And then we’ll drive for a few hundred miles in total silence. And simply to piss me off he’ll spew more racist shit he doesn’t even believe. And I’ll call him a racist fuck. And he’ll tell me that I’m young and stupid. And he’ll tell a story about his best friend when he was a young boy, the black kid whose mom worked for his grandparents, and how he was banned from playing with this best buddy of his in the front yard, and he never understood why, and it hurt his feelings that he couldn’t play with his best buddy in the front yard, so one day he just did it, he walked to the front yard with his best buddy, this black kid, and they played with their toys in the front yard, and it lasted a few minutes, until the black boy’s mother came running around the corner and snatched the boy up by his arm and dragged him to the backyard. And then the lady grabbed John Howard by the arm and dragged him into the house through the front door, where he was yelled at by an old blind aunt, and he never saw the black boy again. And he will say that that is the reason he left the South when he was seventeen and never wanted to return. And somehow this will stand as his defense against the politically incorrect shit he says. He’ll say that I know nothing about the South and nothing about race because I was raised in color-blind California, and that he went out of his way to raise me in an integrated and open community and that I had many black friends growing up and I should thank him for that. And I’ll say, ‘You are fucking crazy.’ ”
“Will you talk about your brother?” Oren asked.
“Only if I bring him up,” I said.
“That’s going to be a long one thousand miles.”
WE CRESTED WELLS, Nevada, the Winnebago whined, and I pushed us east on Highway 50. Above my head a cupboard jutted open and a dozen CDs crashed to the floor and scattered like playing cards.
We were on our sixth time through Merle Haggard’s Greatest Hits and our third stretch of t
otal silence after a fight over some racist and politically incorrect garbage that had come out of his mouth.
But my father wanted to talk. He said, “This is just between you and me. You take everything so serious. So I say something about Koreans eating dogs, and your little sister is Korean? What does that mean? It’s a joke from Vietnam.”
“Vietnam? A joke? Kim is not a joke. She is your daughter, my sister, our family. You don’t get it, man? It is not cool to say racist shit about Koreans eating dogs. Not. Fucking. Cool.”
“You know the Vietnamese eat dog. You told me you ate dog sausage in Vietnam. So what’s the difference?”
“It’s not a joke. It’s not funny. You sound totally ridiculous. Do you not understand that they are totally different countries?”
“We fought ’em both. It’s all Orientals to me.”
I deliberately swerved toward the right and hit the deep gashes in the pavement, which made a sound like a torso being beaten with a hose, and my father said, “Ho, Tone, keep her steady.”
As we entered Wells my father said, “Wells, Nevada, home of the famous Cottontail Ranch. Wanna get some tail?”
My father is a self-proclaimed joker. I’ve used the word antagonist to describe him more than once. He likes to, as he puts it, “get under your skin.” He likes to “stir the pot” and “keep it interesting.” But maybe he’s serious this time? And for a minute I thought about it. I thought about those stories of French fathers taking their sons to visit a prostitute when they turn sixteen or twelve or whenever it is that Frenchmen start frequenting brothels. We could swing in, just have a beer, and take a look-see at some girls. I thought, I admit, that it would make a good story, and I could write an essay about drinking beer in a Nevada whorehouse with my father, sell it to a slick magazine, pay for a trip somewhere.
But I said, “No, thanks.”
At age eighteen while a marine in the Philippines it was one thing to walk into a bar and let a girl sit on your lap while listening to Duran Duran or New Order. But at age thirty-eight, outside the depressed town of Wells, Nevada, traveling at sixty-five miles per hour in a metal earthquake with my oxygen-depleted father, hanging out with prostitutes was an entirely different concept.
“Obscene,” I said to my father. “That would be obscene.”
He yelled, “It’s legal!” And he laughed. “Hell, Tone, you’ve turned into a little pansy. Ain’t you a marine? Don’t marines live off beer and whores? I never met a marine didn’t live off beer and whores.”
If life were so simple as beer and whores we’d all be drunk and laid.
Silence.
Twenty miles later he said, “I guess that’s what happens when you go big-time. Now you gotta be a gentleman.”
I ignored him. It was midnight and I’d been driving for about eight hours. I’d stopped for gas and a candy bar in Winnemucca and otherwise I’d been at the wheel trying to keep this traveling earthquake between the lines.
I’d never been a headache man but my head throbbed; it felt as though power drills had split my temples open, the pain bled down into my jaw, into my teeth, so bad my tongue hurt and the roof of my mouth stung. I thought about calling the physician I was dating in New York and asking her to call in a prescription to a pharmacy in some shit town in the middle of nowhere in Nevada or Idaho, in the middle of the night, for something big, something strong to knock me out—an antipsychotic, that’s what I needed. A buffalo tranquilizer. I needed to get so high that my father would have to drive the rest of the way and I could sit in the seat next to him, drooling, pain-free.
I THOUGHT OF how easy it would be to end this trip: first yank the oxygen tube out of his nose, then just keep driving. He’ll wallow a bit in pain, he might grasp for me but I’ll easily swat him away: if I must, I’ll beat him away, I’ll beat him with my closed fist; he’s a small man now and I weigh two hundred pounds, my forearms are as muscled as his legs and I will crush him, I will watch him slowly expire. I’ll drive all night in splendid silence and pull into a gas station, say in Whitehall, Montana, I think I have enough gas to get there, and I’ll walk in and ask the nice lady behind the counter with feathered and unevenly bleached hair if she’ll call the police because I think my father has died in his sleep in the passenger seat of his RV.
I’ll walk outside and sit on the curb with my head in my hands, wait for the sheriff to arrive; the sheriff will be a real cowboy. He’ll wear a sheepskin-lined denim vest with his badge pinned near his heart, he’ll wear cowboy boots caked with horse shit and hay, he’ll wear on his hip the biggest pistol east of Butte. And I’ll tell the sheriff the story of how my father and I went to the Cottontail Ranch in Wells, Nevada, and how my father watched me fuck a prostitute and just after that said to me one of the last things I heard him say: Tone, that sure was fun, we’ll have to do it again someday. And then he fell asleep and I kept driving and he seems to be out of breath.
“He’s expired,” the sheriff will confirm after a brief investigation. And he’ll console me the way cowboy sheriffs do: squeeze my shoulder, say he’s sorry for my loss, and tell me to keep on truckin’.
And when he realizes I don’t understand, he’ll say, “We don’t got a morgue here, son. Whyn’cha take ’er on down the road.”
And this is how I will come to drive around with my dead father next to me in his RV.
BACK IN THE RV, in the middle of the night, my father said, “Can’t I joke a little? You sure are high-strung.”
This is the most ironic statement in the history of spoken language. My father calling me high-strung. The man was so tense and angry when I was a kid that I cowered at the mere mention of his name.
“Just guy talk, Son. Don’t be so goddamn serious. Locker-room talk.” He said this as though I’d hurt his feelings. He stared out the window. Silence. The Joker was hurt.
AT A PARTY back in New York I told a friend the story about my father asking me to become a paying customer at the Cottontail Ranch. The friend was disappointed when I told him that I said no. He thought I’d ruined a perfectly good story.
I said, “Can’t the story be not going?”
“That’s no story,” he said. “Writer doesn’t go to whorehouse with father. That’s no story!”
With a few keyboard strokes I discovered that the Cottontail Ranch had been closed since 2004. It was on the market. I found Web images of the old ranch. It looked like a bleak place where dark men did bad things to women. Though some women probably put themselves through college working weekends at the ranch, and some girl probably bought her daddy a gold Cadillac, and some girls probably raised a family and paid a mortgage, and some girls probably made a party out of loving.
AT TWIN FALLS we stopped to change drivers, not a simple matter of switching seats. Each time my father exerted himself he was challenged to fill his lungs with oxygen. The man wanted to breathe easily; he simply couldn’t. The man wanted to live, he worked hard at it, but he didn’t have long: eventually his lungs would simply quit. In the ten years since he’d collapsed his lung capacity had slowly diminished and the number of meds he was on had increased.
At the side of the road in Nevada he had to dope himself up. I realized that he’d been lying subtly to me for a few years. He’d always told me that there was a schedule for the inhalers, and that made sense to me and I paid no attention to his timing and it made me think that he was somewhat healthy, or healthy enough to be medicated on a schedule, but alongside the desert in Nevada I realized that he took the inhaler whenever he exerted himself and that at this point moving meant exertion.
He stood at the RV’s kitchen sink and administered an inhaler. At some point in his treatment he’d discovered a system for the inhalers; a respiratory therapist had told him that he shouldn’t immediately stack the meds but rather take a break between the two inhaled medicines in order to increase their efficacy, ten minutes—and so he took one and then he stood at the kitchen sink of his RV, and he breathed heavy for ten minutes, bent at
the waist.
He set a kitchen timer shaped like an egg. He hadn’t unwrapped the timer, it was still in its packaging just as it had been when he’d bought it, likely on a military base: in the store you’d give it a spin and see if the sound of the alarm agreed with you. Apparently it satisfied my father.
I walked outside. I pissed. I thought I saw the eyes of a coyote in the brush. The moon hung thin in the sky like a silver splinter in the universe’s thumb. The desert smelled like my piss and dirt.
Back in the RV, on his second inhaler, my father gargled water and spit it out. I found this disgusting. I’d spent my childhood listening to my father, each morning, coughing the smoker’s phlegm up from his lungs. I’d sit eating Wheat Chex and drinking Sunny Delight with my siblings, and down the hall he’d gag on the by-products of his own body. Gargling, spitting.
But now that he was sick the gargling and spitting were part of his treatment: the sick person must wash his mouth of the medicine after it has been inhaled—the remains of the medicine, for some reason my father can’t articulate, must not stay in the mouth. And so he gargled and spit: and again my father disgusted me.
He took the wheel.
I USED TO say that my father was a builder. In reality he was a handyman. He fixed a fence, he threw up some Sheetrock, he fixed your plumbing, replaced your toilet, rewired your electricity, added a new living room, converted your garage into a place where your drug addict nephew could crash for a few months. If he needed to, he’d hire a guy or two for the serious labor, ripping up the earth or tearing down a wall, mixing and pouring concrete, hauling broken appliances out of a kitchen or mudroom.
But I never told anyone this. I wanted my father to be a master of the universe. This is the wish of every boy. But what I really wanted was for him to master love: I wanted my father to love and protect me forever, until the day I died: an impossibility.