Bless Me Now with Your Fierce Tears
dear dad
i have to say this now because you might listen
dear dad
i’ve tried and tried to talk to you
about my life about your life about the world
Smog chokes downtown whiskey brown as I hit 610. The sulfurous smell from the pollution never quite goes away; it seeps into your clothes, forever marking you as a citizen of Energy City. Benzene and chloromethane coming off the bay cause eyes to burn across the sprawl.
The permanent haze leads to the sort of cheap jokes and lazy irony favored by the bottom-of-the-bottle-Bellow and four-beer-Beckett types who smirk about how “it’s no coincidence we have one of the largest collections of refineries and one of the best cancer centers.” Tonight, I’m not in the mood to chuckle at why the high school downwind from the frac plant needs Leukemia for a mascot.
Tonight, my father is dying. My aunt just called. Told me dad’s on life support. And she’s willing to pull the plug. My dad suffered some kind of attack and is in the hospital. He’s been there for twelve hours; she’s just now telling me.
Rage and sadness roil through my body while methane flares flicker-flash across the windshield painting the dented dashboard Apocalypse Red and the stained seats Nagasaki Orange. I know if dad survives, I’ll be pulled into a decaying orbit around him. It’ll be my job to take care of him, to pick up the empties, clean the vomit from the sink and scrub the piss out of the carpet. My job to tell my girl we’ll never get to see a face with my granddaddy’s eyes, her nose and my chin.
My job to move back in and live with dad. My job to lie to the landlord and see if we can slide until the fifteenth again. My job to decide which we can do without this month: food, lights or water.
My job to be a kid again.
dear dad
i don’t know if i can do it anymore
i don’t know if i can sit across that little plastic table from you
look into your face
a face covered in battle scars
from your war with addiction
watch you laugh about the good times
hear you say everything’s fine
while an armed guard walks by and says
we’ve got 45-minutes left
It was the day after Thanksgiving at the county jail out on Ransom Road, one of those days when every inmate got a visitor. More often than not, wearied wives, crows’ feet carving maps of heartaches and hard lives across their temples. If it wasn’t a convict’s old lady on the other side of the glass, it was his side piece showing off what he ain’t getting, or his mother — with eyes large enough to love the world — asking, “Why’d this happen to my baby?”
In the sixth-floor visiting room, where everyone leaned against cold concrete, and everything smelled like a bus stop on a bad day, families and familiars struggled to be heard through tin can mics mounted in cracked glass. The steady D-flat drone of conversation climbed towards a roar.
“Speak up, I can’t hear you in here,” dad said as he pressed his rust-colored face, a face that took a thousand sips, to the mic and shouted. The voice that had tumbled tree houses and twisted tenderness came out hollow and small.
He was two months into six months’ pre-trial detention for drunk driving. It wasn’t dad’s first time as a guest of the state. He was up for 18 months about five years ago for DWI plus possession. He’d wrapped the car around a fence post. The cops found him trying to walk home with an eight ball of blow in his pocket.
To ward off reality, we sought the solemnity of small talk. He asked me to call his lawyer; I lied and said I would. He asked about work; I lied and said it was good. He grasped at the frayed strands of freedom — bond reduction hearings, Breathalyzer calibration reports and medical abreactions.
“You know that tooth I got pulled,” he said, scratching at the malignant molar’s former home. “I think the anesthetic messed me up.”
“Didn’t you go to the dentist like a week before you got arrested?” The question was a jail break, honest. Truth overpowered the guard, the words escaped when my back was turned and now, they’re on a crime spree.
“Yea, but I’m pretty sure I’m allergic to Novocain or nitrous oxide,” dad said. “And I think some mouthwash got caught under my bridgework. That’s why I blew hot. And I wasn’t swerving, the alignment was off and there was this huge pothole I was trying to avoid. Also, your grandfather didn’t replace the tires when I told him to, so the car was slipping.”
He rambled on, telling me he was “being persecuted not prosecuted” and that he was a victim of circumstance and a prisoner of coincidence. He explained how the cop who arrested him had followed him “for like five miles.”
“That’s got to be illegal right? I mean they can’t just roll behind you the whole time. I wasn’t speeding, where was the probable cause? It was harassment I tell you.”
He didn’t even look to see if I bought it. He’d convinced himself; that’s all that mattered. And once he believed the bullshit, truth or consequences were like that town in New Mexico — pretty far from everything.
Seeing dad in prison blues, stranded behind the glass, made his reasons and rationalizations dark and ludicrous — like Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son with googly eyes — and turned questions into combat.
“Can you get your brothers to visit? Can you go see my old lady? Can you talk to your grandmother about my commissary? Can you write me?”
The interrogation left me doubled over and bleeding. He’d beaten an “of course I will” out of me.
dear dad
why do you want to drink yourself to death
dear dad
i remember you saying that anything worth doing is going to be difficult
life is difficult is that worth doing
dear dad
i love you
please stop
Chaos greets me in the hospital lobby — aneurysms and embolisms line the walls, bullet wounds on gurneys stack the halls. With a voice faded from exhaustion, a fresh-out-of-the-box nurse tells me where to find him. The world’s slowest elevator takes me to the ICU.
dear dad
i was always afraid you’d leave and never come back
now i don’t know if i want to see you if you do get back
i’m not even sure i’ll be here when you get back
At his bedside the world stops. The deafening silence of the ward allows the EKG’s pianissimo sol dièse mineur to mix with the 2/4-time of the ventilator for a nocturne of phobias and lamentations. Guilt and shame come in, turning it into a semi-private performance.
Looking at him unconscious and helpless is discombobulating, like a hyena at a dog park. Everything is off; even the whiskey-cigarette cologne that oozed from his pores has been replaced with disinfectant.
I want to touch him, to pull the worm of the endotracheal tube from his mouth and let him know I’m here. But he’s still a gut-shot grizzly and I’m still worried I’ll be eviscerated.
dear dad
why didn’t you call my brother and leave 30-minute messages calling him
a faggotty-ass-limp-wristed-speed-addicted-cock-sucking poet
why didn’t you call my cousin at three, four, five, six in the morning
after a weeklong bender and say you’re a pussy-whipped-dickless-queer
why didn’t you call your sister
threaten to come over to her house
kick down her door
because she wouldn’t pick you up before closing time
why didn’t you call your mother
demand she sell everything she owned
so she could get you twenty bucks
before the liquor stores closed
why did you call me
A few months after I'd visited county, he caught a trey and went upstate, where he became a non-person. He wasn’t dad anymore. He was inmate 1222378. He was a fire hose of letters. They came three or four times a week, filled with hate and scorn for a world that had wronged him and plans to reclaim the life stolen from him. All he needed was an “I’ll get you if it’s the last thing I do,” to be some superhero’s nemesis — instead of just mine.
dear dad
is it normal to spend your life coming up with reasons not to kill yourself
the one i’m trying out this week is that i have too much to do
After a month, I quit trying to understand the reasoning behind the victimization or the logic hiding in the jailhouse lawyering. The letters went straight into a shoebox and when that was full, a milk crate and when that was full, a Jack Daniels box. I wrote him, once: a letter filled with false starts and fading hopes that begged for a change. His response wasn’t worth printing.
dear dad
it’s 8 a.m. now my roommate is making love in the next room
i can hear the girl’s moans over the reggae music
i don’t know why i mentioned that it’s not really important
dear dad
i did six readings this month three this week alone
i have two newspapers that want to publish my writing
and i was on the radio
why do I feel so empty
The Attending and The I’m-Too-Old-For-This-Shit Internist say dad was halfway through a handle when he collapsed. They ask if it was suicide. No, he doesn’t believe in suicide, but he does believe Old Wives’ Tales: after a bender he’d drink baking soda and water to get rid of the hiccups and stop vomiting.
The Attending and The Internist’s eyes widen, and brows climb. They’re on the verge of saying something like, “that’s the stupidest fucking thing I’ve ever heard.” They bite their tongues instead.
The Attending curses under his breath in Chinese while the I-Thought-I’d-Seen-Everything Internist takes off her cat-eyeglasses and rubs the bridge of her nose. The conversation turns towards jargon. Thanks to college biology and primetime medical dramas I can make out about every third word.
“Possibly a ????????? Transient Ischemic Attack with ??????? features,” says The Attending. Goddammit, I wish I’d paid more attention in science class.
“Additionally ??????? acute perforation of the GI tract ???????,” The She-Kind-of-Looks-Grandmotherly-In-This-Light Internist says. “Esophageal bypass ?????? colonic interposition ??????.”
Bypass? Interposition? What the hell?
“We’ll start him on ?????? for the TIA and schedule an endoscopy for the GI tract,” The Attending says. They tell me dad’s neighbor found him unconscious in the kitchen. They tell me he had a heart attack when he was brought to the ER. They tell me he was drug-induced into a coma.
“We’re going to have to keep him sedated for another day to get the alcohol out of his system. He should be awake tomorrow,” says The Internist.
dear dad
i don’t know where these roads we walk lead
i think they go nowhere
The Attending and The Internist shuffle off to their rounds. We’re alone when the tears come and my soul cracks. I can’t do this. I can’t take it. It’s too real. I need a drink. Why don’t they build more hospitals near bars? How do people cope with this shit without alcohol?
dear dad
i’ve forgotten happiness
This isn’t how it’s supposed to go; this wasn’t how it’s supposed to be. I told him how I felt. I begged him to stop.
love
your son