Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails Page 5

  I said, “Please never tell me another story about cheating on my mother. It doesn’t make you cool. It simply makes you look like a jerk. Do you think I’m impressed? I’m not. I know about having a lot of women. I have done all of my screwing while unmarried. For every sex story you have, I have twenty. It’s no big deal. Some men fuck a lot of women. Others don’t.”

  “I’m not bragging, Tone. I thought I could talk to you like a man, I thought.”

  I interrupted him, “Do not tell me that when I was seven years old in Vacaville that you did not shove my face toward a pile of dog shit in the backyard. You did not put my face in the dog shit, I will concede that. But you dragged me across the yard by the back of my neck and you shoved my face within inches of the pile of dog shit that I had missed while performing my weekly chore. While doing so you yelled at me at the top of your lungs and accused me of being a liar. Tell me how you would feel right now if I grabbed you by the back of your neck and dragged you out of the RV and shoved your face in a pile of bison shit while yelling at you. I was seven years old. You were a thirty-six-year-old man. You had absolute physical power over me and you abused me. I will never forget that. On the day I die, in five or so decades, I will think of the day my father dragged me across the backyard to shove my face toward a pile of dog shit.”

  “We have different memories of that event,” he said, obviously shaken. “You were a young boy and you needed to be taught how to properly perform your chores. I will admit that I did things then that today people would consider abusive. It was the way I was raised, it’s what I knew.”

  “That’s bullshit, and you know it. You had a wife who told you that was not the way to raise a family. Didn’t you admire her parents? Did you not see that the way she was raised was superior to the backwoods Georgia way you were raised? I know you loved her father. Albert was the first grown man you admired and loved. You knew that he never abused his children. Why did you not use his model?”

  “Things might have been different if Albert was still around when you kids came along. I loved him.”

  My father looked away from me and out at the prairie. He quietly cried.

  After a few miles he cleared his throat and blew his nose into a handkerchief.

  He said, “Albert Warner was a very fine man. It crushed your mother to lose her father at such a young age. Hell, it crushed me.”

  Road sign for a Vista Point Ahead. I needed to pull over and get some fresh air. Luckily there were no other vehicles stopped. I walked out in my cowboy boots and boxers. Snow had begun to fall. I felt the cold in my dick. I walked to the edge of the parking lot and pissed in the grass. I looked out across the prairie. I saw bison and a perfect red barn, a white farmhouse in the distance. I wondered who lived there and how dark their lives had ever become. I knew that my childhood could have been darker than it was. I thought of something good from my childhood. I couldn’t keep beating my father up. I thought of the time we stopped in Yosemite and drank fresh water from a waterfall. I thought of spending summers driving through national parks. But then I thought of the time in the Grand Tetons when my father had reached through the doughnut hole that opened up the cab of the truck to the camper and grabbed me by the neck and bashed my head against the edge of the camper because I had asked a stupid question, probably about what time we were eating breakfast. It was on a cold morning just like this. I had to get that out of my head. I needed something good. I needed a happy memory. I loved my father, I knew this. And he must have known it, too. But there was so much dark shit. I was tired and strung out. I needed to settle down. I needed to exercise. I went into the RV and exchanged my cowboy boots and boxers for running shoes and a pair of sweats.

  My father said, “What the hell is going on? We need to get to Billings. This thing ain’t snow-safe. We’ll skid off the road and kill ourselves or the highway patrol will turn us around, one or the other.”

  “Give me ten minutes. I need to clear my head.”

  “OK. I’ll do an inhaler.”

  While my father administered his meds to his dying lungs I ran circles around the parking lot on the side of the prairie. I loved the man. I hated the man. I knew that he must love and hate me. I looked just like him. I wondered if that made it harder for the parent to separate from the child. It was impossible for him to look at me and not see his younger self. And for my father youth meant virility, Johnny Cash, the ladies. I was stealing his virility. Consumed by disease, he bequeathed to me all the power that had once been his. But he could not respect me because I had not yet fathered a child. He could not pass anything on to me because I had not yet had a child, but he had to pass it on to me because he had lost all his power and my older brother was dead. I ran for fifteen minutes and came down from my rage.

  Back in the captain’s chair I steered the beast toward the road.

  My father said, “It’s good for you to get this venom out. I don’t know how I can help you. But I’ll do whatever I can. I admire you, Son. I’d like to have a grown-up, adult relationship with you. I had problems with my own father. But in my twenties I realized the problems weren’t going to be solved and it was time to be an adult and recognize that he’d done the best he could given the circumstances, and to hold on to my anger would do more harm than good.”

  “I don’t understand what you mean by an ‘adult relationship.’ ”

  “Spend time together. Talk about life.”

  “Why suddenly do you want to talk about life? Why were you unable to talk to me about life when I was a boy? This inclination of yours would have come in handy for me when I was an awkward and lonely boy. I don’t remember one incident during my teen years when you asked me how I was doing, or what I wanted, or needed.”

  “Damn, Son. Give me a break. I wasn’t a great father. I should have been around more. I should have been more present in your life and asked you more questions.”

  “But you were too busy fucking your secretary, right?”

  “I can’t do this. Nothing will appease you. If you hate me, then you hate me. Why do you hate me?”

  “I don’t hate you for my childhood. I don’t hate you for having a zipper problem. You are a pretty cool guy. People love your company, and I see why. You tell good stories. You’ve got a good and hearty laugh. I hate you because eleven years ago my brother died and you didn’t go to his funeral. That is why I hate you. I hate you for that and for that alone. And I will never forgive you.”

  We drove in silence for about a hundred miles. They were good smooth road miles. The snow had stopped dropping and blew across the asphalt in psychedelic curlicues and paisleys of white. An SUV with Oregon plates, loaded down with ski gear, buzzed by and I was sure it was my friend Tom from Portland, but I called him on his cell and he said no, he wasn’t in Montana, as far as he could tell he was doing bong hits in his basement.

  Around Big Timber, my father said, in the quietest voice I’d ever heard from him, “I do not expect you to ever know what I felt when Jeff died. I hope you never experience anything like it. To lose my firstborn son was the most heart-wrenching thing that could ever happen to me. There is no other pain in the world that could ever compare. And I can’t promise you that if you die tomorrow I will have the strength to make it to your funeral. I have no idea how I would react. No one ever does. Please do not hold that against me until the day I myself die.”

  “I can’t promise you that.”

  AT BILLINGS I set my father up at the RV park and caught a cab to my hotel. My girlfriend was there, in bed, totally passed out at four p.m. after munching down three or four sleeping pills. We had a dinner for my niece that night, so I stayed away from the doctor’s collection of pills. For the moment.

  The dinner went well. It was the first time in five or six years that all five of us—me, my two sisters, and both parents—had been together. I largely ignored my father and mostly talked to my niece’s dorky boyfriend. Dez is a tall girl and this short little guy came up to her armpits, at bes
t. It was obvious that he did not like this height situation by the way he talked about the fast cars that his father owned.

  I said, “Dude, someday you’re gonna have to buy your own fast car.”

  The doctor passed me a pill under the table and I took it. A few minutes later everything began to float and I said I needed to get back to the room, that the drive from California had exhausted me.

  But the doctor and I went to a bar downtown filled with a bunch of hard mothertruckers. I was completely doped out of my mind on whatever muscle relaxant she’d given me. While we sat drinking Budweiser for two hours there were at least five fistfights in the bar, two of them involving massive Native American lesbians.

  Eventually we returned to our hotel room. The doctor and I had Ambien sex. I never loved her but I used those words when she did. Before I dated the doctor I had been engaged to a dancer who once threw away books from my bookshelves by female writers she suspected I might have slept with. I had in fact slept with only two of the ten accused. In contrast, the doctor, despite her pill use and urge to share, was a sea of total calm, the classic rebound after the chaos-producing dancer. The dancer had world-class beauty and a dancer’s body; the doctor had plain looks and the body of an overworked ER physician who ate a lot of takeout from Staten Island Italian joints. The doctor ended our relationship after she had worked three straight overnighters and broke into my phone and read e-mails about me having sex in the women’s bathroom at the Brooklyn Inn with a twenty-five-year-old hedge-funder while she saved lives in a crappy ER in Staten Island. There was also the e-mail about the one-night stand with the Australian academic.

  But here now in Billings the Ambien sex satisfied me in the way that Ambien sex always satisfies: you are having sex while on Ambien so what can possibly be wrong with the sex? Nothing. And you wake up in the morning as though it never happened.

  I was supposed to retrieve my father from his RV park at eleven in the morning in order to make certain that he made it to the graduation event, but he called me a few minutes before I planned to leave the hotel to tell me that there was no way he was going to make it, his lungs just weren’t up to it.

  I said, “Are you serious? I flew to Northern California from New York to drive you a thousand miles in order to attend Dez’s graduation and you can’t make the ceremony?”

  “I’ll try to make it to the party,” he said. I hung up.

  The doctor gave me a few pills.

  We made it to the massive sports complex for the graduation. I was sitting in the stands with my family when I realized that no one had any flowers for Dez.

  I asked my sisters, “Do you have flowers somewhere? Dez needs flowers. Look around, everyone has flowers to give their kids!”

  I panicked. A woman can’t graduate from college without a bunch of flowers. What on Earth were we thinking?

  I said to my mother and sisters and the doctor, “I’m going downtown to get some flowers. I’ll be back before it’s over.”

  In my pill-addled state I had trouble finding a florist. Eventually I did, after driving recklessly around Billings for half an hour or so. I made it back to the complex just as the show broke up. I’d procured two massive bouquets of flowers. I gave one to my sister and one to my mother in order that they could hand them to Dez. The photo session went off without a hitch. I’d saved the day!

  My niece threw a party for a few dozen friends. We got some great family photos. I did not speak much with my father. The doctor chain-smoked cigarettes with my sister Tami’s drug addict parolee girlfriend, and at some point the girlfriend took me to a country-and-western store and I bought a massive belt buckle with a steer on it. It never occurred to me how wrong it was that during my niece’s graduation party I drove around town with her mother’s parolee girlfriend, a stash of pills in my pocket. Eventually the girlfriend would rob my sister blind, steal a church van, and pawn all of Tami’s jewelry in Spokane. We Swoffords have trouble finding the right women.

  I went out dancing that night with my niece and her short boyfriend and their friends. The doctor slept. We went to the most cutting-edge club in Billings. It was way out in the industrial part of town. On one side was a good old cowboy honky-tonk bar, and on the other side something approximating a massive Chelsea dance club in miniature. Bottle service here meant a six-pack of Buds.

  The doctor had loaded me up on pills and I was totally twitched out of my mind. But I could not betray this to my niece. Somehow I kept it together. I danced all night with her friends, all very nice young people. At some point, while on the honky-tonk side of the bar, and away from my niece and her friends, I kissed a cowgirl. Later I tangled limbs with the cowgirl in the cab of her boyfriend’s pickup truck.

  The next thing I knew I was back in Manhattan.

  I talked to my father a few weeks later and we agreed that the RV trip had been a success and that we should hit the road again together soon.

  4

  Brother, to Thy Sad Graveside Am I Come

  X-POP3-Rcpt: swoff@pop3

  To: ahswofford@ucdavis.edu

  Subject: Talk to me

  X-Mailer: Juno 1.38

  From: jswofford@juno.com (Jeff Swofford)

  Date: Fri, 23 Jan 1998 13:54:47 EST

  Dear Tony,

  I left a message on your telephone today at about 12:30 to call me ASAP.

  I’m planning a big party the end of next week and want you to be here.

  You can get discounted tickets to visit relatives who are facing impending death. I can tell you on the phone how to show proof, if required. I can help with the money. I know you just started school and I’m sorry to die at such an inconvenient time, but I really need you here little brother. There won’t be any gloom out here, just guitars, singing and lots of partying. Call me soon.

  Love,

  Your Big Brother

  Impending death. Upending death. How do you show proof to the airline that your brother is dying? Photographic evidence?

  See here, Mr. Airline Representative, this is a photo of my brother a year ago, the picture of health, a thirty-four-year-old father of two: notice the shine and elasticity of his skin, the sheen and splendor of his red hair; notice the bulky forearms, the wide strong chest; notice the two radiant children, notice the smiling pretty wife.

  Now, Mr. Airline Representative, here is a photo of my brother from last week: notice the sallow and hollow cheeks; notice the grayish pall of his skin; notice the hairless head; notice the thin weak body. Notice the children at the back of the frame, watching their father as death watches him, and notice the wife, turned away from the camera, eyes on the distance unknown.

  May I have a discounted rate? Sacramento to Atlanta?

  I don’t recall if I received a discount or not. I wouldn’t have asked of my own accord. There are those people you’ve just met who will give you their entire medical history along with the histories of their parents and lover and siblings: leukemia, heart murmur, childhood diabetes, heart failure, intubation, constipation, hernia, dementia, delirium tremens. I do not share such information with total strangers.

  MY YOUNGER SISTER Kim picked me up at the airport. At the time she lived in Atlanta and during the past few years, when she and my brother both lived in the city, they had become very close. Twelve years separated them so Kim barely remembered Jeff from her childhood.

  Over the last year while my brother was ill Kim had been a regular caretaker for the children and for my brother’s family in general—staying with the kids when my brother was at chemo with his wife, driving them to school, doing the shopping, performing all manner of errands.

  I jumped in the passenger seat and gave Kim a kiss on the cheek.

  “How is he?” I asked.

  “Dying,” she said morbidly. “They’re increasing the morphine. The hospice nurse is at the house now, with Mom and Melody. The kids are a mess.”

  She took us out to Camp Creek Parkway and drove the long, sloping road southwest toward Doug
lasville. As a kid I’d taken this route many times, always on happy occasions: a family reunion, my grandparents’ wedding anniversary, a summer vacation trip to Six Flags.

  We passed Six Flags, shuttered for the winter.

  Kim said, “Iris wants to see you again.”

  Iris was her friend and whenever I was in town we flirted and drove around the rolling hills of West Georgia in her beat-up car listening to the Velvet Underground and talking about living someday in New York City.

  We passed the chain stores and restaurants that signaled I was in another country: Piggly Wiggly, Chick-fil-A, Winn-Dixie.

  MY BROTHER WAS the only true athlete in our family. When it came to sports, I was a dilettante: a few years of unimpressive football play; four years of wrestling in high school where I was known more for guts and conditioning than moves, with one strong season my junior year; two seasons of rugby during which I scored one tri, received a concussion, and split my face open twice—causing my mother to faint at least once.

  Jeff ferociously played defensive back for the same school where later I’d founder. He received a small scholarship from Sacramento State College. He joined the Army, I’m still unsure why, halfway through his junior year of college.