Friday, April 22, 2005

 

ENTRY 174: LOVE AND DEATH AND LONG ISLAND


It was one of those mortifying public moments: last Saturday I was hurrying down a street on the Upper East Side, trying to circumvent a cluster of prepsters, and listening to a voicemail when I stumbled and fell to the pavement. Several people looked at me, startled. I didn't wait to see whether their startledness would metamorphose into laughter. I didn't care.


The voicemail was from my mother. She had called the day before to tell me that my grandfather, who had been in the hospital for a week or so being treated for congestive heart failure, was taking a turn for the worse and that I might need to come to San Antonio the following week. Now she had left a message saying that it didn't look good and asking if it were possible for me to fly there the following day.


I'd been running around all afternoon, trying to finish the photo project I'd begun for my grandfather's 80th-birthday party in March. I'd done more research and located additional buildings that were constructed in New York in 1925, and I was working my hardest to finish the photography and the factual accumulation while there was still time. When I got the voicemail, I was on my way to photograph the last building on my list. Disoriented and stunned, I stood across the street from the structure, waiting for traffic to clear so I could have an unobstructed view. Then I raced back to the Upper West Side, found a drugstore that would process the photos that evening, and returned home to pack and book a flight.


Mom told me to make a reservation on Southwest because my dad had a free roundtrip; buying a regular ticket on such short notice would have been insanely expensive. I already discussed my dislike of flying Southwest a while back, but of course I had no choice.


The only flight that wasn't full flew out of Long Island at 6:45 AM on Sunday, and I realized I would have to take the train out there that night and stay in a hotel. I threw all my essentials into a suitcase. Mom said to bring a suit. Rather than have it wrinkle in my luggage, I wore it.


So it was that I found myself at Penn Station in a navy suit at 10:30 on a Saturday night. On the way there I'd picked up some Japanese takeout, but there is really nowhere to sit and eat in Penn Station other than in one of the unpalatable fast-food restaurants. I rolled my suitcase into KFC, bought a bottled water, and seated myself at a counter near the entrance, next to a sign that read "No outside food allowed," where they might not notice me. Me, wearing a suit and using chopsticks.


My attire made me a panhandling magnet, and within less than five minutes I had given my change to a woman who had politely asked for it. I had the illogical thought that this act might chalk up a point in favor of my grandfather's health. Not long after, a guy tried to sell me one of those deaf alphabet cards, but I respectfully declined. Then, as I picked listlessly at the food which did not inspire my hunger, even though I'd hardly eaten all day, another ostensible vagrant wandered up and said, "Hey, looking sharp in that suit and tie."


"I'm on my way to my grandfather's funeral," I said.


He scowled darkly and backed away suspiciously, his palms held out in front of him. "Don't lie to me," he grumbled.


"I'm not lying," I said, but he kept walking away.


I threw my food in the trash. I just couldn't eat it.


###


On the hour-and-a-half train ride deep into Long Island, I ended up sitting near a loud group of drunk twentysomething Long Islanders who spent a great deal of time debating whether "cunt" or "twat" is the worse epithet. It took me a while to figure out what they were talking about, because they kept saying "See you next Tuesday" and "the week after this," and my mind had to come around to the notion that they were using acronyms.


The grandmotherly part of my brain tsk-tsked. Couldn't they see that I was on the brink of bereavement, that I wasn't just a surly businessman with a sorry weekend schedule? Of course I knew that no one around me would have any such notion. Like Emily Dickinson, New York cannot stop for death, or for any kind of unfortunate emotions. It is one of the relatively few things about this strange and fantastic place that enrages me and inspires my occasional hatred. I was falling apart under my thin investment-banker veneer, but people would still shove me aside in their rush and subject me to their inane softcore conversation. I wanted a little bit to throw up.


When a person is dressed for a funeral, headed into the heart of Long Island at 11:30 on a Saturday night with the locals, he needs to hear a friendly voice. It was three hours earlier in L.A.; I would call Peter.


He didn't answer, but he soon returned my voicemail, and he listened to the whole story and said the right things and distracted me with tales of what he'd been doing, and I was reminded that, despite the long distance separating us, I had picked the right best friend.


I didn't get to my hotel until almost 1:00. It was a run-down Econo Lodge near the airport, and as soon as I walked into the lobby, which smelled of dog (a grungy-white curly-haired mutt sat serenely on a discolored quilt near the Naugahyde couch) and cigarettes (hastily extinguished, no doubt, by the overnight clerk), my heart sank still further. But I would only be there a few hours.


I paid the usurious room charge, received my key, and rolled my suitcase to the room. It was decades-worn and depressing. I put my suitcase in the corner, carefully hung up my suit jacket, and sat on the ratty bedspread. If I had been my dad, I would have called my mom. If I had been my brother, I would have called my sister-in-law. It was one of the relatively few times lately I have really felt the loneliness of being single. Instead of calling a person who would have welcomed being woken up by me at this hour--there was, after all, no such person--I put my face in my hands and, in that desolate cheap hotel room in the middle of nowhere, I sobbed for everything that was happening and that was to happen.


###


I set the alarm clock for 5 AM, but I slept so fitfully (my mind would not quiet itself, and the air conditioner was blowing right on me, and I could not figure out how to deactivate either annoyance) that I got up on my own a few minutes before the hour, and rinsed out my raw eyes under the weak spray from the showerhead.


As the eastern sky reddened I rode silently to the airport, glad the taxi driver had his radio off. My eyes stayed dry until I was on the plane, where I could bury my face in a magazine. In a way I was glad to be so exhausted. I lacked the energy to emote as much as I might, and that seemed like an odd sort of blessing.


With dread, I checked my voicemail when we touched down in San Antonio. There was a message from my mother, and as I prepared to listen to it I was reminded of the silly-sounding-to-me question that had gone through my head during the flight: Is death faster than a 737?


She had called to tell me that my younger cousin would be picking me up from the airport along with my cousin Burt from Denver, who's my age. He and his brother joked in the front seat as I sat in the back, tired and quiet.


I changed out of my suit at their house before we proceeded to the hospital. When we walked into the waiting room, everyone was there: my grandmother, my mom and dad, my aunt and uncle, Marc, Cleo, and the Niece.


My mother's sister is a nurse, and I was quickly brought up to speed on the situation. My grandfather's congestive heart failure, in which fluid builds up around the heart, had required him to remain in the hospital while they drained the fluid from him. But then they had decided to install a pacemaker/defibrillator, an operation which, like many other cardiac procedures, requires the use of a dye that helps the surgeon to see the blood vessels more clearly. My grandfather has had 20 such procedures over the years, including several bypasses and any number of angioplasties, and this particular dye is hard on the kidneys. Since the pacemaker/defibrillator operation, his kidneys did not seem to be functioning much. The doctor on call on Saturday, who was not my grandfather's regular doctor, said that my grandfather wasn't a good candidate for kidney dialysis, that it would be too hard on his heart, and things didn't look promising. (The whole thing was a catch-22; the kidneys need fluid to function better, but they were trying to remove fluid to alleviate the congestive heart failure.) This was the point at which my mother had summoned me.


I walked with Burt and my grandmother to the ICU. When we entered my grandfather's room, I experienced an inevitable shock. He looked unbelievably thin and weak, and his frail arms were blackened with bruises from all the needles. He shivered under the thin sheet.


My grandmother explained that Burt and I were there to see him, and he mumbled through his oxygen mask. It was hard for me to make out what he was saying. I looked across the bed at Burt, who looked extremely ill at ease. I forced myself to appear upbeat and nonchalant as I greeted my grandfather, who didn't seem to have the strength to lift his head to look at me. I placed my hand over his, and Burt followed suit with his other hand, and my grandmother chattered away to my grandfather about something or other while I took in the contents of the room with casual glances.


It is hard for me to imagine the humiliation of such an illness, of being hooked up to a device that collects your own urine and deposits it in a clear container at the end of the bed for the whole world to see. (The fluid was a disturbing orange-red color.) The last thing I'd ever want would be to be hooked up to all those machines, machines whose presence I was unable to avoid because they were everywhere I looked, but especially prominent when I looked directly at my grandfather amid various tubes and IVs. I dumbly patted his quivering hand.


We returned to the waiting room, where the Niece was the center of attention. Cleo soon deposited her daughter in my lap, and she looked at me and made a face. I made a face back, and she guffawed and rested her head against my chest.


I walked down the hallway with my mother, who looked tired and careworn as I put my arm around her thin shoulders.


"I was talking to your aunt about it, and it's like we're both too numb to cry anymore," she said. "At some point it's like it's happening to someone else."


I knew what that was like, but it seemed inappropriate to say so. I just walked with her some more, feeling Brobdingnagian and clumsy and ineffectual beside her.


###


On Monday, we met at the hospital with my grandfather's regular doctor, who suggested that my grandfather could be a candidate for dialysis, and that it might be worth a try. So the procedure happened that day.


My grandfather was clearly in a great deal of pain. He has had bad arthritis since the age of 12, and it has gotten considerably worse in the past year or so, leaving him depressed and quiet even before his recent health problems. Basically, the bones all over his body hurt him badly.


This condition seems to have been exacerbated by the long stretch of confinement to his hospital bed, as well as by the dialysis, which drains the body of both electrolytes (resulting in muscle discomfort) and any medication that the nurses had given him for pain. When we visited after the dialysis treatment, he was moaning and speaking somewhat incoherently of how much everything hurt. I turned my head, pretending to look at something, convinced that my mother did not need to see me cry.


When we were returning to the waiting room, she said to me, "He probably would have died 20 years ago, with all his heart problems, if it weren't for modern technology. But at a certain point, you have to consider whether the suffering is worth it. I want to go in my sleep. I want it to be quick."


"Yes," I said. "I understand."


###


The rest of the time was a succession of ICU visits, which lasted only a few minutes because my grandfather was always so tired, and listening to secondhand conversations about what this or that doctor had said or done, or talking to my mother about how little her father was eating and urinating.


As my grandfather prepared for his second dialysis, we watched the announcement of Pope Benedict XVI, and my grandmother went to tell the news to my grandfather, a devout Catholic. My dad, who is a born-again Christian with a pronounced dislike for Catholicism (he calls the Pope a "false idol"), joked with me about the images on the TV.


Pointing to a cluster of red-hatted cardinals, he said, "Always the bridesmaids, never the brides."


"Look," I said. "He's about to throw the bouquet."


That night, I tried not to think about my considerable disappointment about missing the WYSIWYG performance for which I'd spent so much time preparing. San Antonio was where I needed to be, but I felt guilty about the regret that I was not in New York. It felt like a too-human reaction to the unreal situation in which I found myself.


###


On Wednesday afternoon, I had lunch with my mother away from the hospital, and I was glad to see her eat an entire hamburger. For the first time we talked about what had been going on with me in New York. I did not tell her about the performance I'd had to cancel; she still doesn't know about my blog, and I didn't want her to feel guilty about summoning me when she had. She had, after all, expected her father to die at any time. I would not have thought of denying her my presence no matter what the circumstances.


Mom asked about my dating life, and I briefly sketched out a bowdlerized version of my ordeal with the comedian.


"It was too much drama," I said. "I'm not into drama."


Lingering over my French fries, I felt glad that we could have this sort of conversation. I was reminded, when observing my mother's interaction with my grandmother, that there were a number of things they didn't seem able to talk about. Maybe, with each generation, things really do get a little better.


Later that afternoon, Mom told me that my grandfather seemed to have stabilized, and that, though the situation still looked very uncertain, it could all drag out for weeks yet, and there was no point in my just sitting around. She had wanted me to see him, and I had, and that was enough. I changed my return flight. I would leave for New York on Thursday morning.


I felt bad about leaving, and relieved, and ashamed of that relief. But I felt tremendously compelled to get back to my suspended job search and my routine and email access and my relatively few but valued friends. And I was tired of feeling at loose ends, like I should be able to do something meaningful but was simply impotent.


That afternoon, while my grandmother and mother were at the hospital, I wandered out into my grandparents' backyard. There was the swing set on which Burt and I had spent so many hours playing during childhood summers. We'd clamber across the swings from one side to the other, pretending that the ground was lava and that we were each Indiana Jones. Set farther back from the house was a little playhouse that my grandfather had built himself for my mom and her sister. Burt and I and the rest of the grandchildren had played in there all the time, coloring in books and pretending to talk on the old-fashioned rotary phone and spraying the garden hose at the closed windows to startle each other, while my grandfather stood at a distance and laughed.


On Wednesday night I returned to the ICU for a final visit, well aware that this might be the last time I'd see my grandfather. That day he'd told my grandmother, after having had two rounds of dialysis, that if he were to remain in this much pain, he'd rather depart from this life and end the suffering. The hope that we all clung to was that, after a few dialysis treatments, his kidneys would kick in and start functioning again on their own. But the likelihood of that was anyone's guess. Deep down, I could not bring myself to believe it.


He was moaning again, and told my grandmother that he desperately wanted the nurse to shift him into a more comfortable position. My mother and I looked on while two nurses carefully rolled him onto his side. He moaned more loudly and muttered, "Oh God, oh God." My mother bit her lip hard, and I placed my hand on her shoulder again, knowing that my action was anything but enough, and that we implicitly shared the torment of that helpless frustration. This is the pain that comes from being someone's child.

2:27 PM

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Tuesday, April 19, 2005

 

I'm very sorry not to be able to appear tonight. But here's what I would have read.


ENTRY 173: THE PIECE I WAS TO PERFORM AT TONIGHT'S WYSIWYG SHOW


When I was a Boy Scout, they always drilled the Scout motto into our heads: “Be prepared.” That’s why you wear a suit to a job interview: to look professional, like you’re ready to jump in there and save the company. And that’s why I’m wearing this suit tonight: because I’d like to think of this performance as an interview in which it’s my job, as a blogger, to gain your confidence.


You probably want to know a little about my work history. Since college I’ve spent more time looking for jobs than actually working in them, so I’ve got this down pretty well by now.


Here’s a good question: What’s the most challenging work-related situation that I’ve ever faced? I should actually break this answer down into subcategories.


First: the most challenging interview I’ve ever had. That would be my interview to be an editorial assistant at a major New York publisher. My prospective boss offered me porn. To be perfectly accurate, what he said was, “Feel free to take any of the books on my shelves home with you. I also have some porn. I don’t have any gay porn, if that’s what you’re into.”


I took a book.


And I got the job.


Probably my most frightening work-related challenge involved a certain unstable author who had sent an unsolicited, and terrible, manuscript. My boss would always transfer the guy’s phone calls to me, and I’d be forced to listen to some incoherent stream of consciousness. For example: quote: “I’m a small rich kid with a big dick. Last night at the bookstore I thought I saw Diana Ross dancing in the cookbook section.” End-quote.


In any event, his book was complete shit, and I wrote a pretty blunt evaluation of it in the rejection letter, which I signed with my own name—my boss didn’t want to have anything to do with it.


A few days later, my boss called me into his office. He had received three voicemails in the middle of the night, all from this same peculiar author. The messages were of some slight concern because the author threatened to, quote, “bust a cap in your ass,” end-quote. The scariest part, besides the fact that he shared the last name of a prominent Mafia family, was how he kept alternating between two different voices. We contacted the legal department and the security office, just in case. I actually made a tape recording of these voicemails, because I couldn’t possibly do them justice myself. But I need to warn you: this excerpt contains “language.”


[Following is a thirty-eight-second excerpt of a crazy foul-mouthed rant that just doesn’t translate the same in print as it does when you’re listening to it. Sorry.]


The author goes on to describe his credentials in some detail, explaining that, quote, “I got a bigger cock than you, I got more talent than you, I’m taller than you, I got a better body than you, I got better legs than you. I’ll piss in your mouth, cocksucker.” End-quote.


Did I mention that this guy had the same last name as a prominent Mafia family? And did I also mention that at certain points he mumbled my name, along with other indistinct words? For a while I became a little paranoid, and walked from work to the subway every night convinced that a hit man was following me.


This experience reminded me yet again that we can never fully anticipate all the things we have to do in order to perform our jobs—such as, in my case, entering the Witness Protection Program. But there are less dramatic, yet equally surprising duties that arise.


I’m thinking, for example, of my friend Kevin, who was a TDD operator. TDD, in case it’s slipped your mind, is a way for deaf people to talk on the phone. The operator types in what is said, and the words appear on a device that the deaf person can read and then respond to. It had never occurred to me, until Kevin mentioned it, that deaf people like to have phone sex as much as people who can hear. But I still can’t quite figure out how you’d transcribe an orgasm.


In college, when I worked in a bookstore, we used to get calls periodically from a guy who was both deaf and blind. I think his wife was just deaf, so she was able to—I don’t know—sign the words into his palm, like Annie Sullivan or something. We dreaded these calls, because TDD relay calls take forever—the operator has to type in each response, and then read the next response back, and type in your reply, and so on.


The worst part was that this guy never bought anything. He would have us put books on hold for him for months, usually stuff about old TV shows. Then he’d call and have us look up information for him in these books. One time our manager got one of these calls and said to him, “This isn’t a library. Goodbye.” But the rest of us were too kind-hearted to be that abrupt. Usually I would just “accidentally” hang up midway through the call without having identified myself by name. I guess it wasn’t the nicest thing to do, but, really, I mean, why the fuck would a deaf and blind guy give a shit about Flipper when the only thing he can do with a TV is feel the static?


The world is strange, though, and is full of strange and humiliating jobs. At the age of 17, when I had a summer job at a pizza place, I would climb a shaky ladder to the roof and inflate the giant pink gorilla that we used to advertise our lunch buffet. You may think that pink looked pretty bad, but my own uniform was worse: a hat the color of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s recent art installation in Central Park, a green-and-white striped shirt, and—most ignominiously of all—khakis with sneakers. I lived in mortal fear that Mr. Blackwell might spot me the next time he came in for the $4.99 all-you-can-eat special.


I eventually decided that a minimum-wage job wasn’t worth the time it took away from my schoolwork, but I actually had a job around the same time that paid even less than that. A year or two before, a woman named Jackie had moved into the house across the street with her husband, their two-year-old female twins, and Jackie’s twelve-year-old daughter from her first marriage.


Jackie was a party girl in her mid- to late thirties—you know, way too tan and way too blonde. My father, who’s a religious conservative, didn’t really approve of Jackie, but wanted to be neighborly. He attended a couple of her parties, including one where a woman sat in the bathtub flashing her breasts at anyone who was using the restroom.


Eventually Jackie discovered that her husband was molesting their twin daughters, so she threw him out and began divorce proceedings. My parents felt bad for Jackie, and they asked me if I would babysit for her, even though she could only pay me $2.00 an hour for three kids. Mom and Dad said they’d pay me more themselves on top of that, so I agreed.


It wasn’t the easiest job I’ve ever had. The twins were clearly traumatized by what had happened, and one of them was mentally retarded, or, as Jackie always put it, “a little slow.” The twins screamed bloody murder every time Jackie left the house, but she would just say, “Oh, they’ll stop after a while. I’ve got to get out of here.” Sure enough, they did stop—after about half an hour. The twin with unimpaired mental development once told me about her daddy’s “really long toe.” I had no idea how to respond to that.


More often than not, Jackie would come home visibly inebriated. Once she didn’t get back until 5 or 6 in the morning. I had fallen asleep on a pile of laundry, but I woke up when she staggered into the kitchen, crying.


“How could my husband do this to me, Frank?” she said, holding onto my arm for balance. “How could he molest my kids?”


I was just a high-school student. What was I supposed to say? In that moment I absorbed what a truly hard job it must be to be a mother, and I was grateful to have a sober one.


The next year I went away to college, but my mother kept me informed of Jackie’s exploits. Jackie started dating a lawyer, and then they got engaged, and then they broke it off. Jackie got drunk, went to the lawyer’s office, walked in on him while he was with a client, and said, “I still love you, even though you have a small penis.” So, of course, they got married, and moved to a nice big house in another town.


Then Jackie and her new husband separated again, and then decided to reconcile again. It was during this period that Jackie mixed liquor with a prescription medication one night, and found herself struggling to breathe. She asked her eldest daughter to call 911, and when the ambulance arrived, Jackie walked toward the sirens and the lights and crashed through a second-story window to the pavement below. She died a couple of days later.


I still think about Jackie, after all these years, and about how easy it would be sometimes to crumble under the pressure. I think about a phone conversation I had with my father when we were both at work one day, and how he sounded close to tears because he’s so miserable in his job. Sitting there, listening to my father’s voice cracking, I was reminded of what I think is the most poignant aspect of working life: the knowledge that, as in our personal lives, we are all ultimately left to manage for ourselves, no matter how gregarious we are at office parties or how good our networking skills are or how many personal assistants we have. And then it really sank in that so many of us, and so many of our parents, have put up with insanity and long hours and daily humiliation just to take care of loved ones, and to give them the things we want them to have.


Naturally, that ability to provide is one of the things that’s most difficult to lose when your job disappears. I’ve been laid off a couple of times now, and I’m sure I’ll probably be laid off several more. I think the first layoff will remain the strangest, though. My boss told me he had two pieces of bad news: A) I was losing my photo research job, and B) he may have given me gonorrhea.


True story! It’s in my blog archives.


I’ve never been one to feel humiliated by unemployment, or bitter about my situation. But what I have felt at those times is a kind of loss, not for material things but for a sense of solidarity. When I lived in Austin and had to commute in morning traffic, I would look out my window at the sea of cars all around me, blazing with reflected sunlight, and at the drivers who were yawning at the wheel, and I felt inspired. I felt like I was part of something bigger than myself, like in some weird way we were all driving to work together. I remember the electric charge of my first months in New York, when I walked through Midtown to my office, past all the skyscrapers and honking taxis, and felt the thrill of having made it that far, of having come here with almost nothing to start all over. If I were Mary Tyler Moore, I would have thrown my hat in the air. Unfortunately, I wasn’t Mary Tyler Moore. And I wasn’t wearing a hat. But it seemed close enough.

3:33 PM

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