Four and Seven
Everybody's worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there's a really easy way: stop participating in it.
- Noam Chomsky
After a while, I started hallucinating, and developed a tumor. I believe the visions caused the tumor, and not the other way around.
- Brian O'Blivion in "Videodrome"
Standing on the beach
With a gun in my hand
Staring at the sea
Staring at the sand
Staring down the barrel
At the Arab on the ground
I can see his open mouth
But I hear no sound
- The Cure, "Killing An Arab"
A cancer is not only a physical disease, it is a state of mind.
- Dr. Michael M. Baden
This is who we are.
- Terry O'Quinn in "Millenium"
September, so they say, is the cruelest month.
It was a sunny Tuesday morning; I was driving to work. The old reliable Toyota Celica, dirt-brown, seats covered with discarded bank deposit slips, junk mail, chipped CD cases, grimy pennies, pens without caps. I was as usual running five minutes behind, and I had to pull off into a shopping plaza to mail some bills (late) before going to work. I drove up past the laundromat, the liquor store, the hobby shop. Found the mailbox. As I got back into my car it occurred to me that I hadn't turned on the radio yet. I sometimes get lost in whatever it is I'm thinking about, World War II battles in the Pacific or the elections in Russia or my favorite scene from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' brilliant Watchmen, whatever, my mind seems to possess a nigh-infinite capacity for dangerously vacant disgression, and so I drive twenty, thirty minutes in stark silence, then a gear in my head turns and it occurs to me with a static shock how horribly quiet it is.
I turned the radio on.
Another September morning. I hadn't been sleeping much for the past few days, weeks, months. I hadn't really slept all year. What had been solid, adamantine, immutable, was molten, crumbled, melted, dissolved, smashed, annihilated. I knew it was coming. We all knew. I gave up hope some time early that spring, I think...at least this is how I remember it, now, in retrospect. After my subconscious brain has had years to revise and edit and really sculpt the soft clay of my memories into shapes and contours more palatable and pleasing to preserve in perpetuity for posterity. It had been my birthday two days before, and I remember hearing my mother on the phone to someone, who knows who, that week, saying all she wanted was for it to not happen on my birthday, that I'd never be able to get over it if it happened on my birthday.
The night before it happened, I sat in the warm shadows of our living room. His bedroom, now. I was a TV kid; the warmth of the cathode ray tube was soothing, comforting. I didn't have many friends as a kid. [Hell, I still don't.] My mother and father seemed to have mostly complementary schedules and were seldom in the same room together. I don't have many real, Official Happy Family memories. Not that it was bad. It just was...there. An existence, neither good nor bad, at least to my childhood mind. So I spent a lot of time sitting on the couch in the family room, reading, watching TV, looking out the window at our unusually arboreal backyard. The family before us, or perhaps the one before them, had planted trees everywhere in our yard, and even after 14 years most of our backyard was denuded of grass, owing to the overhang of interlaced treebranches blocking out the sun. I'd look out through the sliding glass door and feel...content. Protected. Safe, sort of. Lonely sometimes...a lot of the time, to be honest with myself...but safe. It was like living in a big terrarium. And I was a big turtle. [no snickering.] Content to plod around and live inside the stories I was just starting to realize that I could create on my own. But then, it woke up inside of his brain, and started to eat his memory and his motor functions, and he couldn't climb stairs anymore, couldn't do much of anything, and he took over my safe TV room and it never felt the same in there, still doesn't to this day. I wasn't sure how much of it was from the tumor, which a surgeon had told us was the most persistent and malignant kind of brain tumor one could get, and how much was from the radiation therapy as they tried to sear it out of the tender flesh of his brain. But the right side of his body was limp and dead now, the arm dangling so low that it eventually became permanently detached from its socket, the leg swollen and unbending and useless. First we tried installing a motorized chair along the wall of our stairs, so he could go up and down to his bedroom and the shower and such...but he wanted no part of it, and the chair had a single inaugural elevation and descent and then sat there at the bottom of the stairs and we all tried to politely ignore it. To be honest, I think we were all happy to escape upstairs at the end of every day. We were afraid. I'm a little ashamed to say that I was so fucking grateful to get away from him at night. He was starting to sleep more and more during the day, and he couldn't talk anymore, and I was just so grateful, no more rambling conversations where he got angry with me because he couldn't string a complete sentence together, no more endless repetitions about a delusional summer vacation in North Carolina we were supposed to leave for any day now, no more blank, tearful looks that made me squirm. As the end finally caught up with us, all I could feel was gratitude for his rapid disintegration. I hated myself for that. But I couldn't take much more of it. I needed it to be over. We all did. And the guilt, for wanting that, was eating away at me. The night before it finally happened, I sat there next to his gurney, in front of the fireplace, and held his hand, and touched the waxy, cool skin of his face, and cried, and cried, and cried.
I turned the radio on, to WBAI, a big old commie radio station here in the Tri-State Area that I listen to quite a bit. The person talking, I think it was Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman, sounded distracted and upset, and she was talking about some foreign disaster, a plane crash or an explosion or something. I thought that that was terrible, some Union Carbide-scale multinational fuck-up that no one was ever going to hear about, or care about. But I couldn't make out what exactly she was talking about, there was a lot of cross-talk [I think...again, memory plays tricks on you] and confusion, and the signal was a little weak, small community-owned radio station and all, so I decided to go as far away as I could on the dial, content-wise at least, and clicked on WXRK, New York's own K-Rock and home station of Howard Stern. And...much to my bewilderment...and dawning, creeping, horrifying realization...there hadn't been a disaster in Botswana, or El Salvador, or Turkmenistan. I heard bits and pieces of it. The World Trade Center. Both towers in flames. 8 passenger jets hijacked. The Pentagon has been blown up by a bomb, no, another plane hit it. The State Department building has been hit with a car bomb. There are still a dozen planes missing from all radar screens. Fires all over D.C. Mass hysteria in New York City.
And I was hearing about it, the biggest and most horrific event in my lifetime, from Baba Booey, Robin Quivers, and Jackie the Jokeman. If you can imagine a more bizarre and surreal fucking experience, then your powers of imagination far outpace mine, my friend. It would be like hearing an old radio broadcast about the attack on Pearl Harbor, delivered by fucking Abbott and Costello. Is this a joke? Are they shitting us? Howard Stern has just told America that we're at war, what the fuck is this...
Is this it?
Is this my Moment? The defining Moment of my generation? Is this the big one, the cosmic event, the instant which will forever after throw all memories past and future into sharp and remorseless relief? I shook my head. I laughed ruefully. I hit my steering wheel. I swore, furiously and aloud, to myself, to Howard Stern, to people in the cars around me. I looked over while sitting at a red light, and rolled down my window to hear what the fellow parked beside me was shouting. "Turn on your radio!" he screamed, a double-chinned latter-day Paul Revere. I nodded that I had done so, and he moved on to the car on his right, losing himself in his self-appointed mission of dissemination. The light turned green and I peeled out, turning left, driving north. The shock was starting to find the low ground of my mindscape, pooling up in the blasted craters of fury that pocked my brain here and there. I can almost see it now, pooling, swirling, liquid rage, not red, not black, but green, the sick green of neon and antifreeze. Green rage, sweating from every fold of my brain. The rage was my mind's means of keeping me moving, from falling over and sobbing and shouting out and having a major fucking freak-out right there on Route 9. That could come later.
So angry.
So fucking angry...and at the same time...relieved. My father was not an easy man for me to live with; or, at the very least, I was not an easy son for my father to live with. I was, I know, a vague disappointment to the old man. Let's face, I'm just fucking weird most of the time. Quirks and idiosyncrasies that a paltry handful of women find "cute" and "interesting" [an exceedingly paltry handful, godfuckingdamnit], are considered "sissy" and "weak" and "fucking pathetic" by most fathers. And my father, I realize now with Epimethean afterthought, bent over backwards to try and accommodate my sullen introversion. He just wasn't the right person to do it, I guess, and I can only accept so much blame for being who I am until I just say, "Enough, fuck it, I'm not apologizing anymore." My dad used to tell a story, when he was trying to drive home a point on how I'd fucked up in a particular situation, that when I was a kid he used to play catch with me and I'd complain unless the ball was thrown right towards me. This, to him, was the first and ultimate demonstration of me being a poor son, I think. You know it never occurred to him that, hey, maybe I didn't want to play fucking catch, that it seemed pointless and stupid and not fun, a waste of fucking time. Hey son o' mine, let's sit down and tie our shoes, over and over and over again. For about an hour. Because it's fun. Even then I think I lived mostly inside my head, replaying stories, imagining them from different angles, different perspectives, rewriting the endings, changing the characters. I was precocious as fuck, and loved nothing more than to be left at the library for an afternoon. I didn't like other kids. Or adults for that matter. I felt complete, in and of myself, and I didn't particularly feel like I needed to play with anyone else.
[This completeness in and of myself evaporated like a rolling fog the moment that I first noticed girls. But, that's a whole 'nother post.]
I didn't want my dad to die. But now he was, and there was nothing to be done, and I started to consider what my life would be like without him. I had lived in fear of this man for as long as I could remember...needlessly, he had never really so much as laid a hand on me, a few vigorous shakes and knocks here and there notwithstanding, and actually for the longest time I was convinced that the tiny scar on my forehead was a result of his practicing a circus knife-throwing act on me when I was a toddler but I'm fairly sure that I dreamed that, but I once again digress...but he was so imposing, he so dominated our family and thus my early life that I simply could not comprehend our existence once he died. In fact, I was already there...he'd been dead to us for months already, we were just taking care of his body before it died. I'd basically dropped out of college to help Mom take care of him, stopped going to classes, just abandoned that part of my life. Mom had the double treat of dealing with Dad's cancer, and her mother's cancer, at the same fucking time, so I stayed home with Dad while she sat crying in a hospital room in north Jersey. [Just to drive the point home for us, two of our three dogs had to be put to sleep that summer as well, also because of cancer.] None of us wanted him to die. But...the idea of it just popped into my head one day, the slightest niggling notion of it. Of a life...without the Fear. Not any fear. But the Fear of him. The self-imposed Fear I couldn't remember not knowing, that had surrounded me all my life. The Fear of him. Soon, I'd be around, and he wouldn't. And I'd never acknowledge that desire, not consciously, no, never, that was impossible, I didn't want that, I didn't want him to die.
And then.
hmm.
Then.
Then I realized, or rather, I admitted to myself, that I didn't want to kill him, and I didn't want to see him die...but maybe, just maybe...I wouldn't mind being in a world, where he wasn't around anymore.
The shock of admitting that made me sick. Literally.
At first.
And then. I just. Got used to the idea.
And he got sicker and sicker, and the dread began to dribble away, to be replaced by a creeping, indifferent, intolerant...annoyance.
I didn't want to change his diaper anymore. My father was wearing a diaper, did I mention that? Yes, he was totally incontinent by that point. And he drooled. And he stank, because he barely washed anymore, not a full shower at least. He stank like a wino, like some subhuman homeless person, and he couldn't move without me holding him, and his fingers would clutch at me tremblingly and pull at my arm, and sometimes he'd try to say something and it was gibberish. He wasn't my father. My father was supposed to be strong, and take care of us. But he got cancer and he was leaving us and what were we supposed to do now, how could I go on, how could I wake up every day and go outside knowing that the strongest person I ever knew was rotting away? This happened to other people, this wasn't supposed to happen to us, it wasn't fucking fair, I wanted it to stop and it wouldn't stop and I didn't know what we had done for this to happen...there's just nothing worse in the world than to lie awake at night and hear your mother crying in the next room and knowing you couldn't do anything about it. That's about the lowest fucking feeling in all of creation.
He was tormenting us by persisting.
So.
Yes. I wanted him to die.
And when I held his hand that last night, and cried, I think I was crying for myself. And I hated myself even more for that.
I got to work and my mind was in a total fucking tumult. This was Big, Big, Big. Unfuckingbelievably BIG. We were being attacked. This was going to mean a war. I didn't know where we were going to attack, to be honest I think that I envisioned a series of Oklahoma City-type bombings across the country, and bloody FBI raids and shootouts at secluded wilderness hideouts. Maybe carpet bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age [short trip]. I think in one pale and shuddering moment I feared that Dubya would invade Iraq, but dismissed the notion as being too ridiculous even for him. Silly, naïve me.
My two bosses, Walter and Bill, were there, listening to a crappy little radio. We sat and talked. I felt like I was taking this far harder than either of them, but that's probably an unfair assessment in hindsight. The phone rang - our regional director for New Jersey, Dominick, my old boss when I first started working at the theater. Dom's never been what you'd call a drama queen, but this was über-Vulcan, even for him. Boy, how about these attacks. Yeah, well it'll probably be slow today so try and send some people home to save on payroll. Later. Christ, man. I didn't know whether to laugh or to cry.
Something occurred to me: Brian, my brother, had recently started working for the Secret Service, and he'd been working out of the Service's NYC field office at 7 World Trade Center, not one of the Twin Towers but part of the complex itself. [The building collapsed a little after 5pm EST that day.] I didn't talk to him much, but I started to panic a little, not knowing what to do, how I'd reach him...Mom was off in Ireland [again!] and I didn't think I had his cell number...I was fairly certain that he'd started attending Treasury school down in Georgia that week or the week before, but still. The uncertainty fluttered around in my stomach all day. Work was a friggin' ghost town, although the few customers that did stumble in seemed totally fucking oblivious, one of them even coming over to bitch about his popcorn being stale while we were listening to accounts of the first Tower collapsing, seeming to listen with us for a moment and then resuming his tirade about how the customer is king and is it so hard to have fresh popcorn really. Man. I haven't thought about that guy in years. What a fucking asshole. I wish I could run in to him again, just so I could punch him in the fucking jaw, seemingly for no reason whatsoever, but I'd know. I'd know and I'd laugh. I'd laugh, you fuck. hmm. Anyway. I begged off working that night, using Brian as an excuse, but I just went home and flipped from channel to channel to channel, trying to make sense of everything. Letting it wash over me, letting myself drown in it. The numbing quicksilver tide, sucking me down. I was....empty. Horribly, horribly fucking empty. I can't really describe it any better than that.
That's how I felt during his funeral services. Sitting there, surrounded by people who were almost all strangers to me. Caring, concerned, totally alien faces. Shaking my hand, hugging me, whispering bland clichés meant to comfort, but none of it made any sense to me. It was numbing, overwhelming. Like playing catch. To what end. What was the point. What was meant to be accomplished. Maybe there was no point at all. I wondered if my father had asked himself those same questions, while he still could, before the cancer chewed through his brain like a maggot, before it took his happiness and his dignity and finally his life. What was the point of it all. What was the fucking point.
I still don't know. To this day I don't. To this day, I wander around, aimlessly, without direction, still that scared little boy. A boy wearing the body of a man, like an ill-fitting suit. I feel like I'm in disguise. Like I'm faking it. Is that how everyone feels? Does that feeling ever go away?
It's still September 25, 1998, and my father lies dead in his coffin, looking like a mannequin to me, looking unreal, none of it is real. It's still September 11, 2001, and 3000 people have just been burned to death, and the world itself is on fire, and the flames won't be extinguished within my lifetime. It's September 2005, now, at this moment and forever, and I don't recognize the world, I don't recognize myself in the mirror anymore. I look at the face there and someone else stares back at me. He looks just as confused as I feel.
It's getting cooler out now. Soon the leaves will start to fall. In another 12 days I'll turn 31, for whatever that's worth. I used to really love this time of year.
- Noam Chomsky
After a while, I started hallucinating, and developed a tumor. I believe the visions caused the tumor, and not the other way around.
- Brian O'Blivion in "Videodrome"
Standing on the beach
With a gun in my hand
Staring at the sea
Staring at the sand
Staring down the barrel
At the Arab on the ground
I can see his open mouth
But I hear no sound
- The Cure, "Killing An Arab"
A cancer is not only a physical disease, it is a state of mind.
- Dr. Michael M. Baden
This is who we are.
- Terry O'Quinn in "Millenium"
September, so they say, is the cruelest month.
It was a sunny Tuesday morning; I was driving to work. The old reliable Toyota Celica, dirt-brown, seats covered with discarded bank deposit slips, junk mail, chipped CD cases, grimy pennies, pens without caps. I was as usual running five minutes behind, and I had to pull off into a shopping plaza to mail some bills (late) before going to work. I drove up past the laundromat, the liquor store, the hobby shop. Found the mailbox. As I got back into my car it occurred to me that I hadn't turned on the radio yet. I sometimes get lost in whatever it is I'm thinking about, World War II battles in the Pacific or the elections in Russia or my favorite scene from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' brilliant Watchmen, whatever, my mind seems to possess a nigh-infinite capacity for dangerously vacant disgression, and so I drive twenty, thirty minutes in stark silence, then a gear in my head turns and it occurs to me with a static shock how horribly quiet it is.
I turned the radio on.
Another September morning. I hadn't been sleeping much for the past few days, weeks, months. I hadn't really slept all year. What had been solid, adamantine, immutable, was molten, crumbled, melted, dissolved, smashed, annihilated. I knew it was coming. We all knew. I gave up hope some time early that spring, I think...at least this is how I remember it, now, in retrospect. After my subconscious brain has had years to revise and edit and really sculpt the soft clay of my memories into shapes and contours more palatable and pleasing to preserve in perpetuity for posterity. It had been my birthday two days before, and I remember hearing my mother on the phone to someone, who knows who, that week, saying all she wanted was for it to not happen on my birthday, that I'd never be able to get over it if it happened on my birthday.
The night before it happened, I sat in the warm shadows of our living room. His bedroom, now. I was a TV kid; the warmth of the cathode ray tube was soothing, comforting. I didn't have many friends as a kid. [Hell, I still don't.] My mother and father seemed to have mostly complementary schedules and were seldom in the same room together. I don't have many real, Official Happy Family memories. Not that it was bad. It just was...there. An existence, neither good nor bad, at least to my childhood mind. So I spent a lot of time sitting on the couch in the family room, reading, watching TV, looking out the window at our unusually arboreal backyard. The family before us, or perhaps the one before them, had planted trees everywhere in our yard, and even after 14 years most of our backyard was denuded of grass, owing to the overhang of interlaced treebranches blocking out the sun. I'd look out through the sliding glass door and feel...content. Protected. Safe, sort of. Lonely sometimes...a lot of the time, to be honest with myself...but safe. It was like living in a big terrarium. And I was a big turtle. [no snickering.] Content to plod around and live inside the stories I was just starting to realize that I could create on my own. But then, it woke up inside of his brain, and started to eat his memory and his motor functions, and he couldn't climb stairs anymore, couldn't do much of anything, and he took over my safe TV room and it never felt the same in there, still doesn't to this day. I wasn't sure how much of it was from the tumor, which a surgeon had told us was the most persistent and malignant kind of brain tumor one could get, and how much was from the radiation therapy as they tried to sear it out of the tender flesh of his brain. But the right side of his body was limp and dead now, the arm dangling so low that it eventually became permanently detached from its socket, the leg swollen and unbending and useless. First we tried installing a motorized chair along the wall of our stairs, so he could go up and down to his bedroom and the shower and such...but he wanted no part of it, and the chair had a single inaugural elevation and descent and then sat there at the bottom of the stairs and we all tried to politely ignore it. To be honest, I think we were all happy to escape upstairs at the end of every day. We were afraid. I'm a little ashamed to say that I was so fucking grateful to get away from him at night. He was starting to sleep more and more during the day, and he couldn't talk anymore, and I was just so grateful, no more rambling conversations where he got angry with me because he couldn't string a complete sentence together, no more endless repetitions about a delusional summer vacation in North Carolina we were supposed to leave for any day now, no more blank, tearful looks that made me squirm. As the end finally caught up with us, all I could feel was gratitude for his rapid disintegration. I hated myself for that. But I couldn't take much more of it. I needed it to be over. We all did. And the guilt, for wanting that, was eating away at me. The night before it finally happened, I sat there next to his gurney, in front of the fireplace, and held his hand, and touched the waxy, cool skin of his face, and cried, and cried, and cried.
I turned the radio on, to WBAI, a big old commie radio station here in the Tri-State Area that I listen to quite a bit. The person talking, I think it was Democracy Now! host Amy Goodman, sounded distracted and upset, and she was talking about some foreign disaster, a plane crash or an explosion or something. I thought that that was terrible, some Union Carbide-scale multinational fuck-up that no one was ever going to hear about, or care about. But I couldn't make out what exactly she was talking about, there was a lot of cross-talk [I think...again, memory plays tricks on you] and confusion, and the signal was a little weak, small community-owned radio station and all, so I decided to go as far away as I could on the dial, content-wise at least, and clicked on WXRK, New York's own K-Rock and home station of Howard Stern. And...much to my bewilderment...and dawning, creeping, horrifying realization...there hadn't been a disaster in Botswana, or El Salvador, or Turkmenistan. I heard bits and pieces of it. The World Trade Center. Both towers in flames. 8 passenger jets hijacked. The Pentagon has been blown up by a bomb, no, another plane hit it. The State Department building has been hit with a car bomb. There are still a dozen planes missing from all radar screens. Fires all over D.C. Mass hysteria in New York City.
And I was hearing about it, the biggest and most horrific event in my lifetime, from Baba Booey, Robin Quivers, and Jackie the Jokeman. If you can imagine a more bizarre and surreal fucking experience, then your powers of imagination far outpace mine, my friend. It would be like hearing an old radio broadcast about the attack on Pearl Harbor, delivered by fucking Abbott and Costello. Is this a joke? Are they shitting us? Howard Stern has just told America that we're at war, what the fuck is this...
Is this it?
Is this my Moment? The defining Moment of my generation? Is this the big one, the cosmic event, the instant which will forever after throw all memories past and future into sharp and remorseless relief? I shook my head. I laughed ruefully. I hit my steering wheel. I swore, furiously and aloud, to myself, to Howard Stern, to people in the cars around me. I looked over while sitting at a red light, and rolled down my window to hear what the fellow parked beside me was shouting. "Turn on your radio!" he screamed, a double-chinned latter-day Paul Revere. I nodded that I had done so, and he moved on to the car on his right, losing himself in his self-appointed mission of dissemination. The light turned green and I peeled out, turning left, driving north. The shock was starting to find the low ground of my mindscape, pooling up in the blasted craters of fury that pocked my brain here and there. I can almost see it now, pooling, swirling, liquid rage, not red, not black, but green, the sick green of neon and antifreeze. Green rage, sweating from every fold of my brain. The rage was my mind's means of keeping me moving, from falling over and sobbing and shouting out and having a major fucking freak-out right there on Route 9. That could come later.
So angry.
So fucking angry...and at the same time...relieved. My father was not an easy man for me to live with; or, at the very least, I was not an easy son for my father to live with. I was, I know, a vague disappointment to the old man. Let's face, I'm just fucking weird most of the time. Quirks and idiosyncrasies that a paltry handful of women find "cute" and "interesting" [an exceedingly paltry handful, godfuckingdamnit], are considered "sissy" and "weak" and "fucking pathetic" by most fathers. And my father, I realize now with Epimethean afterthought, bent over backwards to try and accommodate my sullen introversion. He just wasn't the right person to do it, I guess, and I can only accept so much blame for being who I am until I just say, "Enough, fuck it, I'm not apologizing anymore." My dad used to tell a story, when he was trying to drive home a point on how I'd fucked up in a particular situation, that when I was a kid he used to play catch with me and I'd complain unless the ball was thrown right towards me. This, to him, was the first and ultimate demonstration of me being a poor son, I think. You know it never occurred to him that, hey, maybe I didn't want to play fucking catch, that it seemed pointless and stupid and not fun, a waste of fucking time. Hey son o' mine, let's sit down and tie our shoes, over and over and over again. For about an hour. Because it's fun. Even then I think I lived mostly inside my head, replaying stories, imagining them from different angles, different perspectives, rewriting the endings, changing the characters. I was precocious as fuck, and loved nothing more than to be left at the library for an afternoon. I didn't like other kids. Or adults for that matter. I felt complete, in and of myself, and I didn't particularly feel like I needed to play with anyone else.
[This completeness in and of myself evaporated like a rolling fog the moment that I first noticed girls. But, that's a whole 'nother post.]
I didn't want my dad to die. But now he was, and there was nothing to be done, and I started to consider what my life would be like without him. I had lived in fear of this man for as long as I could remember...needlessly, he had never really so much as laid a hand on me, a few vigorous shakes and knocks here and there notwithstanding, and actually for the longest time I was convinced that the tiny scar on my forehead was a result of his practicing a circus knife-throwing act on me when I was a toddler but I'm fairly sure that I dreamed that, but I once again digress...but he was so imposing, he so dominated our family and thus my early life that I simply could not comprehend our existence once he died. In fact, I was already there...he'd been dead to us for months already, we were just taking care of his body before it died. I'd basically dropped out of college to help Mom take care of him, stopped going to classes, just abandoned that part of my life. Mom had the double treat of dealing with Dad's cancer, and her mother's cancer, at the same fucking time, so I stayed home with Dad while she sat crying in a hospital room in north Jersey. [Just to drive the point home for us, two of our three dogs had to be put to sleep that summer as well, also because of cancer.] None of us wanted him to die. But...the idea of it just popped into my head one day, the slightest niggling notion of it. Of a life...without the Fear. Not any fear. But the Fear of him. The self-imposed Fear I couldn't remember not knowing, that had surrounded me all my life. The Fear of him. Soon, I'd be around, and he wouldn't. And I'd never acknowledge that desire, not consciously, no, never, that was impossible, I didn't want that, I didn't want him to die.
And then.
hmm.
Then.
Then I realized, or rather, I admitted to myself, that I didn't want to kill him, and I didn't want to see him die...but maybe, just maybe...I wouldn't mind being in a world, where he wasn't around anymore.
The shock of admitting that made me sick. Literally.
At first.
And then. I just. Got used to the idea.
And he got sicker and sicker, and the dread began to dribble away, to be replaced by a creeping, indifferent, intolerant...annoyance.
I didn't want to change his diaper anymore. My father was wearing a diaper, did I mention that? Yes, he was totally incontinent by that point. And he drooled. And he stank, because he barely washed anymore, not a full shower at least. He stank like a wino, like some subhuman homeless person, and he couldn't move without me holding him, and his fingers would clutch at me tremblingly and pull at my arm, and sometimes he'd try to say something and it was gibberish. He wasn't my father. My father was supposed to be strong, and take care of us. But he got cancer and he was leaving us and what were we supposed to do now, how could I go on, how could I wake up every day and go outside knowing that the strongest person I ever knew was rotting away? This happened to other people, this wasn't supposed to happen to us, it wasn't fucking fair, I wanted it to stop and it wouldn't stop and I didn't know what we had done for this to happen...there's just nothing worse in the world than to lie awake at night and hear your mother crying in the next room and knowing you couldn't do anything about it. That's about the lowest fucking feeling in all of creation.
He was tormenting us by persisting.
So.
Yes. I wanted him to die.
And when I held his hand that last night, and cried, I think I was crying for myself. And I hated myself even more for that.
I got to work and my mind was in a total fucking tumult. This was Big, Big, Big. Unfuckingbelievably BIG. We were being attacked. This was going to mean a war. I didn't know where we were going to attack, to be honest I think that I envisioned a series of Oklahoma City-type bombings across the country, and bloody FBI raids and shootouts at secluded wilderness hideouts. Maybe carpet bombing Afghanistan back into the Stone Age [short trip]. I think in one pale and shuddering moment I feared that Dubya would invade Iraq, but dismissed the notion as being too ridiculous even for him. Silly, naïve me.
My two bosses, Walter and Bill, were there, listening to a crappy little radio. We sat and talked. I felt like I was taking this far harder than either of them, but that's probably an unfair assessment in hindsight. The phone rang - our regional director for New Jersey, Dominick, my old boss when I first started working at the theater. Dom's never been what you'd call a drama queen, but this was über-Vulcan, even for him. Boy, how about these attacks. Yeah, well it'll probably be slow today so try and send some people home to save on payroll. Later. Christ, man. I didn't know whether to laugh or to cry.
Something occurred to me: Brian, my brother, had recently started working for the Secret Service, and he'd been working out of the Service's NYC field office at 7 World Trade Center, not one of the Twin Towers but part of the complex itself. [The building collapsed a little after 5pm EST that day.] I didn't talk to him much, but I started to panic a little, not knowing what to do, how I'd reach him...Mom was off in Ireland [again!] and I didn't think I had his cell number...I was fairly certain that he'd started attending Treasury school down in Georgia that week or the week before, but still. The uncertainty fluttered around in my stomach all day. Work was a friggin' ghost town, although the few customers that did stumble in seemed totally fucking oblivious, one of them even coming over to bitch about his popcorn being stale while we were listening to accounts of the first Tower collapsing, seeming to listen with us for a moment and then resuming his tirade about how the customer is king and is it so hard to have fresh popcorn really. Man. I haven't thought about that guy in years. What a fucking asshole. I wish I could run in to him again, just so I could punch him in the fucking jaw, seemingly for no reason whatsoever, but I'd know. I'd know and I'd laugh. I'd laugh, you fuck. hmm. Anyway. I begged off working that night, using Brian as an excuse, but I just went home and flipped from channel to channel to channel, trying to make sense of everything. Letting it wash over me, letting myself drown in it. The numbing quicksilver tide, sucking me down. I was....empty. Horribly, horribly fucking empty. I can't really describe it any better than that.
That's how I felt during his funeral services. Sitting there, surrounded by people who were almost all strangers to me. Caring, concerned, totally alien faces. Shaking my hand, hugging me, whispering bland clichés meant to comfort, but none of it made any sense to me. It was numbing, overwhelming. Like playing catch. To what end. What was the point. What was meant to be accomplished. Maybe there was no point at all. I wondered if my father had asked himself those same questions, while he still could, before the cancer chewed through his brain like a maggot, before it took his happiness and his dignity and finally his life. What was the point of it all. What was the fucking point.
I still don't know. To this day I don't. To this day, I wander around, aimlessly, without direction, still that scared little boy. A boy wearing the body of a man, like an ill-fitting suit. I feel like I'm in disguise. Like I'm faking it. Is that how everyone feels? Does that feeling ever go away?
It's still September 25, 1998, and my father lies dead in his coffin, looking like a mannequin to me, looking unreal, none of it is real. It's still September 11, 2001, and 3000 people have just been burned to death, and the world itself is on fire, and the flames won't be extinguished within my lifetime. It's September 2005, now, at this moment and forever, and I don't recognize the world, I don't recognize myself in the mirror anymore. I look at the face there and someone else stares back at me. He looks just as confused as I feel.
It's getting cooler out now. Soon the leaves will start to fall. In another 12 days I'll turn 31, for whatever that's worth. I used to really love this time of year.
posted by Patrick at 8:37 AM
1 Comments:
WOW! Bravo! Excellent post. I go away for a few days and your post have taken an evolutionary leap.
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