Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails Read online

  Melody cut a vaguely Mediterranean figure through the piney hills around Monterey. She, too, spent many hours a week in the gym and had the dark tan skin of a bodybuilder, though it came naturally. Later the two of them would laugh, in bed, when comparing their skins.

  But this first night they went off base to a bar in town and had a few beers. The bar fancied itself a roadhouse or honky-tonk of sorts, a stopping place for wayward urban cowboys posing as GIs.

  Jeff ordered cheap beers and cheap shots and they sat in a booth while all around them beer signs and country music and drunken GIs rioted.

  “So where are you from?” Jeff asked.

  “I was born on Long Island, where my parents ran an antiques shop. During the gas crisis they went bust. And we moved to Lanesboro and opened up another shop. We pulled into town, a caravan of crazy. Two vans, six children, seven dogs, fourteen cats, and two monkeys. That little town had never seen anything like it.”

  “Monkeys,” Jeff said. “Where is Lanesboro?”

  “Oh, right.” She laughed and ran her hands through her hair. “It’s in Minnesota. Bed-and-breakfast capital of Minnesota, they call it. I’m not sure why.”

  “Lots of bed-and-breakfasts?” Jeff asked with a smirk.

  “No more than any other town. Where are you from?”

  “All over. Military brat. Washington State. Seville, Spain. Tokyo. Vacaville. Sacramento. I guess Sacramento is kind of a home. My family lives there. I dropped out of college after two years.”

  “Why did you do that?”

  “Boredom, I guess. I lived in a football house off campus. I got a few tryouts with pro teams. I went hiking in Nepal. Did journalistic work in South America. There was talk of me doing some speechwriting for Reagan.”

  “But you hadn’t even graduated college.”

  “Neither did Andrew Jackson.”

  “Oh, geez,” she said, and he heard the Midwesterner in her and he liked it. “What kind of lies will you tell me on our next date?”

  “I’ll pick you up at your barracks tomorrow at six. Clint Eastwood is loaning me his Ferrari.”

  AT JEFF’S FUNERAL the elephant in the room was his lies. He had never been a drunk, so no one could talk about his drinking. A few times during his chemo he smoked pot to keep the nausea at bay, but I doubt he took drugs at any other time in his life. He wasn’t a womanizer. He didn’t beat his wife or children.

  But he lied. He didn’t tell small lies, he told monster lies, the kind of lies that the listener was incapable of refuting. The listener might be able to say, “Ah, man, you’re full of it.” Jeff would laugh right along, and blow some more heat into the lie.

  Thus, when he talked about having a walk-on tryout with the San Francisco 49ers football team, the first lie was a small one, a jest over a few beers one Sunday football afternoon, drinking with the guys from the church. Throw it out and see if anyone bites.

  “I once caught a few passes from Joe Montana,” Jeff says.

  “Yeah, right. Me, too,” his listener replies.

  “It was 1984. I was trying to figure out what to do with myself. I screwed up academically and lost my scholarship at Sacramento State. But I knew I was a receiver. I was a born receiver.”

  And here Jeff would force his hands into the listener’s face: he did have big hands, big strong football-catching hands. The listener would compare them to his own small hands and think, Well, shit yeah, this guy could catch some footballs with those hands.

  And Jeff says, “The Niners’ summer camp was up in Rocklin, you know, just twenty miles up the road from downtown Sacto. So one day I’m on my couch, trying to figure out my future, and I think, ‘Why don’t I try out for the Niners? What’s to stop me from walking on and catching some passes and showing them I’ve got juice? I run a 4.2 forty.’ ”

  And the listener whistles and says, “That’s fast for a white boy.”

  The fact is very few people on the face of the Earth can run a 4.2 forty-yard dash. This must dawn on the listener. Jeff moves toward the listener. He thinks he’s losing him.

  Jeff’s muscular legs are as hard as an oak. He stands. He flexes his legs, his quads and hamstrings taut, and he takes the listener’s hand and puts it on his leg and says, “Squeeze. All of that is muscle. That is how I run a 4.2 forty. Yes, I am fast for a white boy.”

  And the listener nods.

  Jeff says, “So I’m in Rocklin, and I just walk up to the fence. I’ve got my gear on. Little kids press their faces to the wire, fathers are reliving their glory days, there is Jerry Rice, there is Montana, there are footballs flying everywhere, whistles blowing, grown men yelling, other grown men crying, doubled over in pain. I see a guy in coach shorts, a whistle around his neck. I say, ‘Hey, Coach. I’m a receiver. Give me a chance.’ ”

  The listener says, “Just like that, you tell a coach to give you a chance? You’re just a chump who walks up from the parking lot.”

  “But the coach,” Jeff says, “the coach is trained to spot desire and talent. And he sees both in me, he sees fire.”

  And at Jeff’s funeral, in the church foyer before the service begins, the listener walks up to me, the dead man’s brother; the listener is now the dead man’s mouthpiece, the carrier of the dead man’s lie.

  The listener says to me, “Man, your brother lived a crazy life. A full life. I just been in this little Georgia town my whole life. I admit I used to live a little through his stories. Can you imagine catching a touchdown pass from Joe Montana? I know it was just an exhibition game. But still. It was against the Raiders. Your brother caught a winning touchdown pass from Joe Montana against the hated Raiders. How many men can say that?”

  “Not many,” I say. “Not with a straight face, at least. Yeah, I guess I’d forgotten about that.”

  “How the heck could you forget that? I loved hearing him tell that story. A seventy-yard touchdown bomb from Joe Montana, fighting Mike Haynes off his back. Life don’t get better.”

  Lies don’t get better either. I look through the foyer to the front of the church, through the old ladies shuffling sideways across the aisles, through my uncles and aunts and cousins finding their seats, to Jeff’s closed coffin.

  The man dies. His deeds remain. And so, too, his lies.

  My younger sister Kim corners me, mortified. “Oh, Jesus Christ,” she says. “Some guy just told me about Jeff working with the CIA in Berlin. What the hell else will we hear?”

  We will hear about the time he sang with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

  We will hear about the time in Tokyo as a teenager when he practiced kung fu with Bruce Lee even though Bruce Lee died a year before we moved to Tokyo.

  We will hear about the time Clint Eastwood loaned him a Ferrari for a date with a married woman. We will hear that the married woman’s husband showed up at the hotel room carrying a shotgun and demanded that his wife leave the room; and somehow Clint Eastwood appeared, looking for his Ferrari, it would seem, and Clint Eastwood defused the situation, sent the married man home without his wife.

  We will hear about the time he danced in Michael Jackson’s “P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing)” video.

  Jeff’s son is at my side. He’s a cute little five-year-old boy and he looks just like my brother. He has no idea that all these people are here to say goodbye to his father forever. He has no idea what forever means. He knows that for some reason his father is in the metal box at the front of this room. He knows that the tie around his neck is constricting and that the suit pants are scratchy and that he had to take a bath early this morning. He knows that his mother and his grandmothers and his aunts and uncles and all the adults in his life are crying.

  Because my father has refused to attend Jeff’s funeral I am the only adult Swofford male in our line. I lead the death procession, little Christian’s hand in mine. We sit in the first pew, far right. Christian sits on my lap. He hugs my neck, and he cries, and he asks me, “Why is Daddy in the box?”

  I can’t answer him. I
don’t know how to say, “Daddy is dead.” The three words, they are too cruel for his ears.

  I kiss the boy on the cheek, and I smooth his pretty red hair.

  The preacher talks about the things that Christian preachers talk about: salvation, the spirit; the afterlife, God’s Army: this is garbage to me, smoke and mirrors.

  A man is dead. The man is my older brother. His five-year-old son sits crying in my lap. That is all. That is the everything and the nothing of this day.

  There was a military honor guard. They fired rifle blanks and I flinched at each report; they folded a flag and handed it to Melody. The corpse-laden hearse drove off to the funeral home, where later a worker whose name I’ll never know would incinerate my brother’s body.

  The February Atlanta day was crisp but not bitterly cold. Back at the house, in the yard, I threw a football with Christian. We did not speak of his father. We threw the football. We played catch with a baseball. We shot hoops in the driveway. I wondered if Jeff also had some pro basketball and baseball lies that he bandied about. I hadn’t heard them, but I wouldn’t put it past him.

  In the house my mother and sisters and Melody and a few of my aunts and uncles told stories about Jeff. Some of these stories would probably qualify as lies, or aberrations, but can you really lie about a dead man? The dead man is not present: he can neither confirm nor deny the reports. Death is the ultimate Fifth Amendment.

  I remember that we drank some wine that day. No one called my father and he didn’t call us.

  I wanted to call and shame him for not being there, but I did not possess the courage. I knew that while nearly a hundred members of his nuclear and extended family buried his son in Douglasville, Georgia, my father sat in a shitty dive bar in Fairfield, California, getting drunk with other sad men. I knew the bar. I knew the pungent smell of the place, the combination of booze and vomit and industrial-strength cleaning supplies. I know what it is like to waste months or years of one’s life drinking in one of these bars. Mine is on West Nineteenth Street in Manhattan.

  I called my girlfriend in Sacramento. I felt bad for not having invited her to the funeral. I’d boxed her out. We both cried on the phone. She said she loved me, and she did, but I was unable to believe her. Within months we’d break up.

  Later that night when enough wine had been consumed that we were all a little drunk, Melody asked me to follow her into the garage.

  “I want you to have Jeff’s pistol,” she said as she pulled the plastic case from behind a toolbox.

  She opened the case. It was a beautiful Czech handgun, a CZUB semiautomatic .45 caliber.

  She said, “I want you to hold on to this until Christian is old enough to own it. And then I want you to teach him how to shoot.”

  “I don’t want a gun around,” I said. “When I get back to California, I’ll figure out a way to have it shipped to me. And I’ll store it in a safe-deposit box. I don’t—”

  I stopped. The nearer truth was: I didn’t trust myself with a gun in the house. I might blow my brains out.

  “OK, fine. There’s something else.”

  She fumbled through the toolbox and retrieved an envelope and handed it to me.

  “Jeff would want you to have this,” she said. “It’s a thousand dollars.”

  “Why would Jeff want me to have this? I don’t need it. I have a job. What were you saving it for? And why was it stuffed in a toolbox?”

  “It was an emergency fund. That’s all. Or vacation. I don’t know. Just take it. Buy yourself something nice.”

  I felt like I was being bought off, but I didn’t know what for.

  I shoved the envelope in my suit pocket and returned with Melody to the dining room table, where my now-drunk mother cried uncontrollably, her head buried in her hands. I sat down next to her and rubbed her back.

  Somewhere in the house Christian screamed for his mother. We found him curled up in Jeff’s hospice bed, the green flannel Jeff wore when he died wrapped around his body.

  This was the same room where Jeff had, a few nights before, asked me to take Jesus into my heart and life. It would have been easy for me to tell Jeff that I’d do this for him. He was in and out of a morphine cloud. I’d been reading to him the Christian inspirational verses he’d requested.

  “Brother,” he said, “I want you to live a good life. I want you to have a family. You need God for a family. For cohesion.”

  I said, “You know I’m an atheist. I have been since I went to war. I respect your beliefs. I just don’t believe them.”

  “Pray with me,” he said.

  “I can’t, Jeff. It wouldn’t be right. It would make a joke of us both. I love you. I love your family. I love your children. I will do anything for your family. What do you need from me?”

  “Let’s pray for you.”

  “No prayers, Brother. Let’s talk. What will your family need?”

  “Mel has it covered. She knows. You’re just a kid. Make your own family. Someday you’ll find God.”

  I wanted, more than anything, to tell my brother that he was right, and that one day I would find God, but none of that would have been true.

  I did say, “I will have a family someday. And I will be a good husband and father. And I will tell my children about you and how much I loved you. I can promise you that.”

  I read some more from the verses, poorly written inspirational Christian drivel. Jeff stopped me. He needed to piss.

  He couldn’t walk on his own. He asked me to carry him to the bathroom across the hall. I cradled his body and I carried him down the hall. His skeleton pressed against my body. Where once there had been so much muscle there was now only bone and skin. His chin rested on my shoulder and I felt his faint breath against my ear.

  He wore the green flannel and gray sweats. I steadied him in front of the bowl and helped him shimmy the elastic-waistband sweats down his bony hips.

  “I am happy to piss on my own,” he said. “I need to keep pissing on my own. When I can no longer piss standing up I want this to end.”

  I looked at my brother’s dick. It was shaped like mine, a natural bend toward the right. It was about the same size. He had no pubic hair. His piss was dark yellow with a faint trace of blood: the water in the toilet bowl looked as though a teaspoon of saffron had been dropped in.

  “I haven’t fucked in so long,” he said. “I don’t even know what sex is. Or what it means. I wish I could fuck my wife once more. No. I wish I could live and keep fucking her for the rest of my life.”

  I helped him back to bed. My mother and Melody came into his room. They administered another morphine patch and Jeff floated away.

  I called Iris and met her at the Waffle House by the interstate. We ate the usual greasy mess of food. I didn’t want to eat, though. I wanted to fuck. I wanted to fuck for my brother.

  We jumped in her car and drove around for a while, our usual trip, the Velvet Underground our musical guides, from old church to old church, from cemetery to cemetery. It was late now, past midnight. I asked her to drive to my brother’s house. We’d had sex here before, in the spare room, on the ground floor where Jeff now slept in his hospice bed. We entered the dark and quiet house through the downstairs patio.

  I held Iris’s hand and I walked her into Jeff’s room. A reading light at the side of his bed lit his wan face. She stared at him for a moment and then she followed me down to the floor.

  I heard my brother’s soft breathing.

  Iris giggled. “What are you doing?”

  I took her shirt off. And her bra.

  “Jesus,” she said.

  Yes, Jesus, I thought. I kissed her and took her breasts in my mouth.

  “Jesus,” she said.

  She slid down my body and took me out of my pants. I looked at my brother. I thought his eyes were open but I couldn’t tell. I thought I saw a smile, but I couldn’t tell. I wanted him to watch.

  I pulled her on top of me. I had never had sex in front of someone else before a
nd here I was inside a woman in front of my dying brother. I was usually a fairly attentive lover but this time I was not. I was hard and I was deep inside Iris and I pulled her hips roughly against mine and all I thought of was my dying brother: his gap-toothed smile as a carrot-topped little boy; his high school football number, twenty-two; I thought of his Phoenician Yellow ’66 Mustang; about playing catch with him in the yard, the way he taught me to use the laces on the football; I thought of his once-powerful body and I thought of women riding him, I thought of my brother fucking Iris; I closed my eyes and I saw him under the sexy young Iris and I saw myself dying in his hospice bed.

  THE NEXT DAY occurred the party Jeff had summoned me for. And for the first time since Jeff had become ill, my father traveled from California to visit his dying son. I know that Jeff and Dad spent some time alone. I don’t know what was said.

  I do know that while a number of my aunts and uncles and cousins hung out in Jeff’s living room and played guitars and sang songs, just as Jeff had wanted for his Dying Party, my father had cajoled me into joining him in a search for a bar that served his brand of scotch. I knew nothing about scotch at this point. Later I would know that other than a sexy ad campaign, this particular scotch had little going for it. But it was my dad’s drink and in these dry and half-dry and downright parched counties of the South, a man sometimes had to work hard to find a bar with his particular brand of scotch.

  “Goddamn,” my father said as we left yet another sports bar, out of luck. “I know when I was back here in ’92 those guys had my Chivas. You can get a pot of black-eyed peas on every corner but they’re damn near to kill you looking for your scotch. I got another idea.”

  I wanted to say, I have an idea. Why don’t we go back to Jeff’s house and hang out with him and the rest of the family, since he’s going to die in a matter of days, and the reason we are here is to spend time with him before he dies, not in shitty roadside bars all over Douglas County looking for your scotch?

  To my great shame I did not say this. I spent the afternoon and into the evening driving around the hills and towns of West Georgia while my father looked for a bar that poured his scotch. We’d pop into a place and have a beer, or a lesser scotch, and then head back out on the road. I suppose that if I worked hard I could turn this search of my father’s into something symbolic, epic even. But it was neither symbolic nor epic. The search was sad and pathetic, my father’s sick and deranged attempt to stay away from his dying son and his family. But wait, I could make this day about me and my father, my father’s choice to bond with me, the living and thriving son: the father choosing to hunker down in the cave with the young, healthy son while out in the wilderness animals devoured the older son.