William Wharton - Dad

Dad’s on the men’s side; so stupid to carry that farce to this point in life. He’s in a gigantesque kind of crib. He’s lying in the darkened room with the drapes drawn. His eyes are open, fixed on the ceiling.

There’s a roommate. The man is deaf and smiles at us. They chose him on purpose because sometimes Dad screams out in the night.

All together, Dad’s been in this place two weeks. He came out of the hospital again a week ago. He’d begun dehydrating.

I look down. He’s somehow dead already; yellowish skin but not a wrinkle. He’d lost so much weight, then gained some of it back; now he’s skeleton thin again.

We lean close over him. I say hello. He hears and turns his eyes but there’s no recognition. He stares at our eyes just as a baby or a dog does, not expecting anything, only seeming fascinated in a passive sense by the eye itself. He’s gripping and ungripping, twisting the blankets and sheets the way he does most times now. It’s a constant tight turning; nervous movements. Sometimes he’ll grit his teeth and bear down, pushing one side against the other, trying to make it all hold together. But right now he isn’t too active, only twittering with his fingers, maybe proving to himself there are still things; that he’s still here and alive. He looks past me and speaks through quivering lips.

‘I have to take a piss.’

This is so unlike Dad. He never used those words. It’s hard seeing Dad in this condition, saying ‘piss’ in front of Billy. If he knew what he was doing, it’d never happen; he wouldn’t even say that to me.

We pull a catch lowering the side rail to the bed, help Dad swing his legs out. I slip his robe over his shoulders; his slippers onto his feet. He’s wearing socks. He has no catheter yet. I’m hoping he can stay off one long as possible. He’s so privacy-conscious, a catheter makes him go downhill fast. Having nurses check and change it is degrading to him. When they do use one, it won’t be indwelling, only a condom you slip over the penis with a tube into a bag; at least it won’t hurt.

Billy and I lift Dad up and he grabs hold of us. His fingers, hands and arms, though shaking violently, are still strong. We help him slide across the gray asphalt-tile floor to the small bathroom. He’s moving one foot in front of the other, but only with enormous concentration. In the bathroom, he leans over the toilet with his hands against the wall. He’s not looking at us, only into the toilet. He spits into the bowl; but he can’t piss.

We stand there and nothing comes. Billy looks across at me. I flush the toilet thinking it might help but Dad only spits again. He never spit, I know of, or maybe he’s always spit in the toilet, a closet spitter. Actually, I never saw him even go to the toilet till these last months.

I figure we’d better maneuver him back to bed. But, when we try taking him away, he has a tight hold on the pipes over the toilet. He has such a tight grip his knuckles are white. I try unlocking them.

‘Come on, Dad. Let go of the pipe.’

He won’t. He won’t look at me either; he only bears down and grits his teeth. I try undoing his hand, opening one finger at a time, the way you do with a baby when it grabs your beard. Then, suddenly, he lets go and latches on to another pipe. This pipe’s the hot-water line; his hand must be burning but he holds on tight with manic fury. Billy’s pulling at his other hand.

‘Come on, Gramps; let go! Come on, let go now.’

I’m almost ready to give up, call for help, when we finally pry him loose. We turn him around. As soon as he’s turned away he seems to forget the pipes. We try working him through the doorway but he goes into his usual hang-up, checking molding, running his hand up and down as if it’s some new thing he’s never seen before. This is a man who built his own house from the ground up and has done carpentry work since childhood. These days, it’s almost impossible to move him past any doorjamb; but we manage.

We slide him to the bed, sit him down, take off his robe and slippers, then help him lie back. As usual, he’s afraid to put his head down. I cradle his head in my hand and lower him slowly onto the pillow. He’s deeply tense. He stares at the ceiling and his mouth starts moving, chattering, his lips opening and closing over his teeth, up and down with a quivering, uncontrolled movement.

Strangely, Dad still has all his teeth. Here he is, a seventy-three-year-old man and he has all his perfectly beautiful teeth, somewhat yellowed, long in the gum but not a filling. I’m already missing six, and Billy beside me has several teeth missing, three root canals, filled with gold and porcelain-covered. If anyone ever X-rayed Dad’s head and Billy’s, not seeing anything else, they’d think Dad was the young man.

He continues staring at the ceiling. I stroke his head, try to calm him. He holds my hand and squeezes it hard. He gives me a good squeeze as if he knows, and then squeezes again. I like to think of those squeezes as the last real message Dad gave me.

We go outside. I’m barely making it. For some stupid reason, I don’t want Billy to see me crying.

When we come out the door, who’s standing there leaning against a tree but Mom. She’s pale and breathing hard. We run over to her. She’s got that damned lunch box in her hand. We’d forgotten it.

She puts one of her digoxin pills under her tongue. She’s in a bad state, gray-white. She gasps out her story of how she’s worked her way up the street, stopping and popping pills so she can fight her way to us.

I can’t hold myself back.

‘Mother, it couldn’t be that important. It’s insane for you to run up here with a box of pills. You’ll kill yourself for nothing.’

But she had to come. She knew we were only up the street, here with Dad, and she wasn’t. She couldn’t stay away.

We help her into the car and drive home. I put her to bed, make her take a ten-milligram Valium. We go through the entire goodbye scene again.

I signal Billy to get in the car. I tell Mother, firmly as I can, I must go. I say goodbye, kiss her, turn around and leave. Joan has finally found somebody to come twice a week, and she herself will come twice more; still, I feel guilty into my very soul.

Our plan is to head straight toward Vegas, packing as much desert as possible behind us during the night. Summers, it’s damned hot out there even in an air-conditioned car.

We begin having trouble before we get near the desert. We’re twenty miles from San Bernardino when the voltage indicator starts flashing. The only thing is to turn back; we might make it to L.A. but that’s about all.

We pull into a garage I know on Pico Boulevard. The voltage regulator is shot, has to be replaced, a minimum hundred bucks, parts and labor. Damn!

I call AAA CON and tell them what’s happened. They tell me to call the owner, collect. I do that. After considerable shuffling around I get an OK. This means money out of pocket but we’ll get it back when we deliver. The garage says the car will be ready by morning. I get a few extra days’ travel time from Scarlietti, too.

We can’t go back to Mother’s. I don’t think I could sleep again in that back room, too many bad memories, bad nights. Marty, my daughter, lives near the garage so Billy and I hoof it over there.

Marty gives me two aspirins and puts me down in their bedroom. I can hear them, Marty, her husband Gary and Billy in the front room watching TV, a rerun of Mission Impossible .

I have a tremendous yen to cry. Twice I go into the bathroom, sit on the toilet, but the way Dad couldn’t piss, I can’t cry. I spread-eagle on the bed and it catches up with me; I’m gone.

Marty and Gary sleep on the floor and Billy sleeps on the couch. I have the only bed in the house all to myself. We sure have nice kids.