Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails: A Memoir

  Sweetwater Park teemed with families in full Fourth of July regalia: flag-printed shorts and caps and socks and shoes and blankets and coolers, shirts and backpacks and blankets. I couldn’t scan farther than three feet without being assaulted by some form of Old Glory.

  Jeff said, “Jesus, we don’t even have a flag to wave. We must look like communists. Why didn’t we think of this?”

  I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. I assumed no. Jeff still defined himself by Country and God. I’d mostly given that up after the Gulf War. And then I realized that it must have just dawned on him that this might be his last Fourth of July with his family, and why not go all out and show your pride in your country.

  Kelley and Christian wanted to play, so Melody and my sister took them to the swing sets and the jungle gym. Jeff and I decided to go for a walk on one of the trails. He wanted to do a three-mile loop.

  I said, pointing at the map, “Maybe we should start with one of these little milers, just to see how you’re feeling.”

  “I’m not an invalid yet, little brother. I can handle this. Last year this time I was jumping out of airplanes!”

  I wanted to say: Last year this time you didn’t have a constellation of tumors attacking your body.

  We stepped off at a brisk pace. Since the night in January when Jeff had told me he and Melody were splitting up, we had not talked about their marriage. My mother had told me that they had renewed their vows at a ceremony at a new church they’d joined, but Jeff had said nothing about this to me. It was as though our conversation about the demise of their marriage and his probable move to Sacramento had never occurred.

  I said, “So what’s going on with you and Melody?”

  “Things are great. We renewed our vows. The kids are getting along. We’re going to beat this cancer, and we’re going to remain a family.”

  “It would be tough to be sick and alone. I can’t imagine that. I wonder what my girlfriend would do if I got sick.”

  “Every man always wonders that,” he said. “What will this woman do if I lose my legs, get cancer, get my dick blown off at war? I always knew Melody would stand by me no matter what. All that trouble back there, it was a testing period. And then I got sick. Another aspect of the test. If we make it now, nothing will stop us. We’ve been together twelve years. That’s huge.”

  “Do you think you’ll be together forever?”

  “I want to grow old with her.”

  We walked for a while in silence. The blur of red, white, and blue mingled with the oaks and the warmth of the sun. Jeff was holding up, a bit of perspiration gathering on his forehead. I hadn’t noticed, but somewhere along the way he’d acquired a walking stick. I wanted him to say, I’ll grow old with you, too, little brother. Someday we’ll be frail men walking in the woods with sticks, our children behind us, thick as thieves.

  Jeff said, “Don’t rush into marriage, Tone. I did. It’s been tough.”

  “I’m twenty-seven next month,” I said. “I’m not rushing anything. You were twenty-two when you got married? I’ve already got five years of bachelorhood on you.”

  This struck a nerve with my brother.

  “I guess.” He paused. “That means you’ve probably slept with more women than I have. Than I ever will. Damn. That seems strange. You were such a little thin-lipped dork.”

  At this he jabbed me in the ribs, and we play-grappled there in the middle of the trail, other walkers looking at us as though we were two crazies come out from the woods.

  I said, “What did Dad tell you when you turned sixteen?”

  “To never drive drunk. And he gave me a box of condoms and said that Swofford men were blessed and cursed with a high-powered libido. And then he went back to tuning his Jaguar. What did he tell you?”

  “The same thing. How old were you when you lost your virginity?”

  “Seventeen. In the backseat of my Phoenician Yellow Mustang. No condom. Fifteen seconds, max. You?”

  “Seventeen. Cab of my pickup, a Datsun. I used a condom. I think I might have gone for thirty. I dropped the girl off and I rushed home and jumped in the shower and washed my dick with Ajax and Lysol. I got some crazy rash, obviously from the chemicals. I was sure I’d caught AIDS.”

  “You were one dumb kid.”

  We laughed.

  I said, “Why did you get a tricked-out Mustang for your sixteenth birthday and I got a jalopy pickup truck?”

  “I guess Dad liked me more.”

  “I guess so.”

  More silence as we walked.

  Since Jeff had been diagnosed in February, our father had not visited him. I didn’t know what kind of pain, if any, this caused my brother. I considered my father’s willful absence completely unconscionable. But I couldn’t say so to my brother, for fear that that might cause him further anguish. He had cancer to worry about so why add a dose of absentee father to the wicked emotional cocktail he ingested each day?

  “I loved that Mustang,” I said. “You picked me up at school in it one day. I felt so cool.”

  “There is no other smell like the interior of a ’66 Mustang. It’s a drug.”

  We finished the hike and returned to the van. Jeff had been correct—he’d had no problem with the three miles. But by the time we made it home, after feeding the kids and gassing the car, he felt exhausted and needed a nap.

  The night was a festival of burgers and hot dogs and brats, firecrackers and bottle rockets and shrieking children. I flew home the next day. I wouldn’t see Jeff again until November.

  AS THE DREAD gray winter chill knocked leaves from their trees and the industrial pall of Nashville thickened, Johnny Cash lay in Baptist Hospital due to heart trouble. Nearby, at the Veterans Hospital attached to Vanderbilt University, Jeff lay dying. He’d recently suffered a number of grand mal seizures that led to the discovery of an apricot-size tumor on his brain.

  I thought of the apricot tree in the backyard of the California house where we’d lived as children, and I thought of the sun glowing behind its branches heavy with soft golden fruit, and I thought of my brother running through sprinklers with neighborhood girls, but nothing lifted my gloom.

  I’d flown in to be with Jeff and Melody and my sister Kim while Jeff’s doctors decided what to do. Eventually they chose to operate.

  The night before his surgery I went out to see some jazz at a club downtown: Joshua Redman performing with his band, including the legendary drummer Brian Blade. (Because of his talent he seemed to me decades my senior, but years later I’d discover he’s just three weeks older than I am.)

  I took a seat alone at the bar, drank a bottle of wine, and enjoyed my first live jazz show. I don’t remember a lot about Redman’s sax playing because I was so mesmerized by the drumming of Blade. He sounded to me like a maniac, a man totally in love with yet divorced from the sound and rhythms he made. Blade controlled the band and he controlled everyone else in the room too—the bartender took his cues from the drummer, as did the waitresses and every member of the audience. We didn’t drink until Blade said drink, we didn’t eat until Blade said eat, we didn’t shift in our seats until Blade told us to shift in our seats, and we didn’t clap like madmen in love with a daring religion until he told us to. It’s still one of the best live music shows I’ve ever seen. After the show I went to the bathroom and found Blade standing at the urinal next to mine. It felt strange to compliment a musician while pissing, but why not?

  I said, “Great show, Mr. Blade.”

  He said, “Thanks.” And he nodded and flushed and left.

  I made my way out of the club and into the musical chaos of downtown Nashville. In one bar I listened to a teenage girl do religious songs, way off-key and out of pitch. I could see she had the hunger, but hunger is never enough. I heard bad rockabilly and bad country and more bad country.

  Outside one bar I asked if there was a Waffle House nearby, and someone pointed me up the road. I made my way up a dimly lit lane, and from the shadows a man
called me over.

  He said, “Hey, Rockefeller, can’t you help a broke feller?”

  I was drunk or dumb enough to not be afraid.

  I looked at him. I said nothing. I thought about going for my wallet before he did.

  “Come on, brother,” he said. “I got two girls in my car. Take your pick or take them both.”

  He put his hand on my arm and squeezed. His fingers were scrawny and scratchy and cold. This guy was as hungry for something as the girl onstage singing Bible songs.

  “How about some crack? You smoke cocaine?”

  “I don’t smoke anything. I’m going to the Waffle House. I’ll buy you and your girls some breakfast.” Once I spoke, it sounded like an absurd and naïve proposition.

  He looked at me, suspicious. He seemed as if he was used to white men lying to him and to paying the price for the white man’s lies.

  “Seriously, man. I don’t want crack or your girls but I’ll buy you breakfast.”

  After he sussed me further he agreed to the meal and said he’d meet me up the hill in five minutes.

  The Waffle House is a Southern staple. The food is generally awful and always bad for you. I can’t imagine it’s possible to escape a Waffle House without ingesting 1,500 calories and a million grams of trans fats. If a food is vaguely Southern and at least partially deep-fried you’ll find it on the menu. They might as well serve a shot of deep-fryer oil with your meal the way Russians do vodka. All of this said, I’ve never not been satisfied after leaving a Waffle House at three or four in the morning.

  I settled into a booth and told the waitress that I had a few friends on their way. The restaurant brimmed with the youthful well-heeled of Nashville. I imagined a few lawyers in the bunch, some IT guys, and they were with their girlfriends, professionals as well, lawyers and human resource VPs, and they all put off the slight odor of Greek brotherhood and sisterhood from their college days at Duke or Vanderbilt or Southern Miss.

  I’d been out of the Marine Corps for almost five years. The next semester I’d transfer to a respectable university after a four-and-a-half-year slog through community college. These handsome folks, a few of them younger than I, reminded me of the complete and utter failure my life had been. I was twenty-seven, lived with a roommate in a four-hundred-dollar-a-month apartment in downtown Sacramento, and worked the swing shift at a grocery warehouse.

  The crack dealer/pimp barged into the Waffle House with his ladies. The harsh fluorescent light did none of the trio any favors. Their clothes were dirty and I could smell them from where I sat. The odors were of the body: sweat, urine, and vaguely, shit. The ladies and gentlemen of the white Southern upwardly mobile were shocked and appalled.

  The waitress stepped forward to stop my new friends from advancing farther but I called out, “They’re with me.”

  The waitress, an African American woman in her late thirties who probably held two other jobs and supported a large extended family, was too exhausted to argue with me, but the look on her face was one of complete puzzlement, as if to ponder, What in the hell is this stupid white boy doing with this crackhead and his hos?

  I don’t remember their names but I remember their vacant eyes and the desperation of their breathing and the pure insanity of their minds. I didn’t know what crack did to a person’s psyche. Did they know, I wondered, how completely gone they looked, how much like ghosts?

  The Southern ladies and gents whispered just below audible levels but I knew they were joking about me and my companions. I stared at a blond girl, the VP of something, and mouthed obscenities. She turned away and mumbled at her date.

  The dealer said to me, “Don’t mind. Ain’ nothing new.”

  One of his girls—she wore tight jeans and a blue-and-gold plaid shirt tied up like a bikini, braless—threw her menu down and said, “I don’t know what I want but I want it smothered and covered!” That meant with cheese food and onions. She let out a cackle, and her friend, in a dirty black Snoop T-shirt, snorted loudly.

  Only then did I realize our somewhat awkward seating arrangement: it was a small booth, and the three of them sat mashed together on one side with me on the other. I wondered if they were afraid of me or simply wanted to keep their distance and if at some level I wasn’t, because of my whiteness, just like those fucking crackers in all the other booths. I offered to scoot over and have one of the women sit next to me but the dealer, sitting between them, leaned back and put his arms around them both and said, “My girls stick close.”

  At the time I didn’t realize, or didn’t want to realize, that I wasn’t simply buying breakfast for a trio of down-and-out drug addicts: this man was a pimp and his girls were strung out on drugs; in fact he’d probably strung them out himself, and they had sex with men in order to get more drugs, the drugs that allowed them to blow their minds away and not think about the fact that they were having sex with men for drugs.

  SACRAMENTO IS THE capital of West Coast homelessness due to its climate and the numerous public and private relief agencies, and the downtown air is always aflutter with the sound of shopping carts flailing through alleys. Being generous to homeless people seemed like part of the culture. I shared food on my porch with homeless guys, and more than once I gave my couch for the night to a homeless guy we knew as Mr. Incense because he sold incense, and another guy named James Brown because he did spot-on renditions of James Brown songs for all the young, drunk hip kids stumbling from the three bars worth drinking at.

  Some nights James Brown made hundreds as kids flush with student loan money threw tens and twenties at his feet while he thrashed through a rendition of “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.” Before Brian Blade he might have been the only musical genius I’d seen in person.

  BUT MAYBE I was just a fucked-up cracker and I thought it was cool and enlightened of me to buy a crew of drug-addled and sex-selling African Americans waffles and fried food at three in the morning in this yuppie town. Does it even matter? We all ate, and we ate well, and we laughed at the yuppies in their blue oxford shirts and khakis and penny loafers. Maybe that’s all that mattered: as my brother lay dying a few miles away, his stomach empty for pre-op, his lips chapped and dried and yearning for an ice chip while he waited to be kicked behind the curtain of consciousness by a friendly anesthesiologist, I sat around a trashy, fluorescent-lit, and orange-laminated restaurant and ate like an animal with a few other people, in the middle of the night in Nashville in Tennessee.

  We ate waffles and eggs and biscuits and bacon and sausage and fried chicken fingers and fried catfish and French fries and hash browns and fried whatever and most of it arrived smothered and covered with gravy, and we were happy, or I was, and I assumed they were, too, because they laughed with me and we high-fived and we laughed some more at the yuppies.

  And then the show closed, a glaze came down over their eyeballs, the night darkened, and they needed to get high now and they needed money now and they needed to exit.

  The man said to me, “Sure you don’ want a girl?”

  Both of the girls stared through me. Did they picture me in the backseat of the Olds, as they’d seen so many other men, sweaty dirty men on top of and inside them, whimpering because they couldn’t get it up? Or just stupid, stupid men sleeping with prostitutes in the backseat of a broken-down car, ruining further these already broken-down lives?

  “Nah, man,” I said.

  To pull the girls from their daze he squeezed them on the shoulders. They all three dragged themselves from the booth. It seemed as though they weighed a thousand pounds each, such was their effort to move their bodies.

  The girls walked on ahead and out of the restaurant without saying goodbye. Some of the yuppies stared but most didn’t care anymore. They were drunk and smothered and covered and that’s exactly why they’d come downtown tonight.

  The man looked at me and said, “Can you help me out?”

  I pulled sixty dollars from my wallet and put it in his dry, scratchy palm.

  H
e said, “Thanks. And for breakfast. I ain’t eat that much in a long time.”

  He shuffled out. I sat for a while in the booth, looking at the detritus of our feast, looking at the glare and shame of the restaurant, the beckon to eat cheaply and to eat a lot and to not care about what goes in your body. I thought about the crackhead and his prostitutes and what they’d soon be putting in their bodies, what they’d been putting in their bodies for years.

  I looked at my watch. It was four in the morning. In an hour my brother would be awakened by a nurse and wheeled from his room toward the operating room. He might die in there: they were opening his skull and extracting a ruined piece of brain.

  I wandered around the city and attempted to grab a cab but there were none. It wasn’t so far to my hotel and the hospital, so I walked. Along the way a man approached me from a side street. It took me a moment to recognize the same man I’d just fed.

  His eyes as glassy and pocked as the full moon, he said to me, “Hey, Rockefeller, can’t you help a broke feller?”

  MY BROTHER FELL in love with Melody in the way that all Swofford men fall in love with beautiful women: madly and passionately, screaming down the street at three thousand miles an hour with their jockstraps on fire.

  They met at a talent night on Fort Ord Army Base in Monterey, California. She’d arrived with a date and she left with my brother. Jeff sang a song—let’s say it was “More Than a Feeling” by Boston. Because the event occurred on base no booze was served, but the GIs knew how to get around this, filling their soda cups from the mess with whiskey.

  He had been with only two women in his life. He was a twenty-one-year-old enlisted dental hygienist. He’d dropped out of college a year before, after losing his football scholarship. His hair was as red as the core of the Earth and he’d ripped his physique down to 3 percent body fat. The freckles all over his white skin looked like small suns.