I ate a plate of apples and had a few spoonfuls of peanut butter for dessert. I finished off four cans of Golden Anniversary and didn’t feel a thing.
My mom had called three times today. The first two messages were the same litany—how’s the job hunt, did you visit your grandfather, we’d really like you to come to dinner soon. The third however, was different.
Mickey, your grandfather’s awake.
Grandpop was staring at me.
His eyes would focus for a moment, then turn away, as if he was too tired to maintain eye contact. Then they’d roll, and he’d move his tongue around his dry mouth like he was preparing to speak. But no words came out. He couldn’t move his arms or legs. The only movements were in his eyes and lungs—gently inflating and pushing up against his ribs, and then deflating a moment later.
“Hi, Grandpop.”
The old man focused on me for a brief moment, and then his eyes rolled elsewhere.
My mom was in the room with us. She’d left work early that afternoon when she received the call from the hospital, and waited here until I showed up. Now it was my turn, she said.
Turn for what, exactly?
There was little love lost between my mother and her father-in-law. She felt obligated to invite him to family events—and my grandpop almost always accepted, perhaps out of the same, misguided sense of obligation. But they rarely spoke, except to say “Merry Christmas” or “Yeah, Happy Easter” or my grandpop to ask where my mom was keeping the beer, or my mom to ask Grandpop if he wanted more potato salad. Sometimes I thought she kept up the charade for my benefit, that I shouldn’t be deprived of my Wadcheck heritage.
She reached out to hug me.
“Why don’t you come for dinner later?”
I only half-hugged her back—mainly because I had shoved my dead right hand into my jeans pocket. Letting it hang loose would be suspicious, and putting it up in my scarf sling would seal the deal. Mom would frog-march me down to the ER in seconds.
“We’ll see.”
“We have to talk, Mickey. About your grandfather. And what to do with him.”
He was staring at us.
“Mom, he’s right here, you know.”
“I know that. Anyway, try for six. You can just walk up Oxford…”
“I know where you live.”
“Funny, you don’t act like it.”
“Yeah, Mom. Bye.”
Another five minutes passed before I’d worked up the courage to start asking questions. Grandpop, limited to eye contact, seemed to encourage me. He’d shoot me a stare, as if to say Well, get on with it before giving up and rolling his eyes and taking another labored breath.
“Grandpop, I found the pills.”
This got his attention. Dead stare.
“I’ve used the pills. I’ve walked around in the past, just like you must have.”
Dead stare.
“I also looked through your papers and found the files about my dad.”
Dead stare.
“I also know who used to live downstairs.”
That finally provoked a reaction. Grandpop’s eyes narrowed. His mouth moved like he was trying to pry a piece of bread from the roof of his mouth, but he couldn’t.
“What were you trying to do? Were you trying to prevent dad’s murder?”
Grandpop’s chest rose more quickly now. His eyes darted to the door, then back to me. He opened them wide, and then they rolled away again, like he was lost in exhaustion.
“What were you going to do?”
There was a rumbling in his throat now—an animal growl that started low and gradually increased in volume. His right hand trembled and began to close in a loose fist.
“Grandpop? I need to know what you were going to do.”
His eyes opened again and locked on mine. His jaw dropped a fraction of an inch.
Then he slowly turned his head and there was nothing.
After another twenty minutes, I left the hospital and walked back to the apartment.
I’d had enough.
Enough of the pills. Enough of the calls. Enough of the past. I put the plastic bottle of pills back in the medicine cabinet and, after a few minutes of deliberation, I slipped the padlock through the steel eye on the medicine cabinet and snapped it shut.
There were more calls from my mom but I ignored them. No, I would not be joining my mom and her boyfriend for dinner in Northwood this evening. I would be staying home and dining on apples, peanut butter and a new six-pack of Golden Anniversary I’d purchased just for the occasion. Which pretty much broke the bank, but so what.
I’d had enough of the past.
The only music I had in the apartment was my father’s old albums. My CD player was in storage, and the disk drive on my laptop was broken. But I didn’t want to listen to any of my father’s music. Nothing old. Not now.
The only books I owned were musty old crime paperbacks and collections of classic journalism—most of them picked up at that mystery bookstore on Chestnut Street. I used to walk in with twenty bucks, and the proprietor, Art, would send me out with a small shopping bag full of beat-up paperbacks. The appeal was simple: the novels acted like little portals into the past. I’d had enough of that to last me for a while.
The journalism and memoirs, too, were vintage: Hunter Thompson. Charles Bukowski. Joan Didion. John Gregory Dunne. Pete Dexter. Ancient history. Journalism was dying.
Everything around me was drowning in the past. The scrapbooks, full of old photos.
Like that scrapbook, full of images of my father as a soldier in Vietnam.
What’s embarrassing is how little I know about my father’s time there. I know he served two tours. I also know he volunteered for the army to avoid the draft—he was able to pick a better spot. My mother would make vague references to my dad shooting machine guns from helicopters and running through the jungle while tripping on acid. Then again, she also swore that my father had a secret Vietnamese half-family, and one day, they’d show up fresh from Saigon and demand to live in our house and eat our food.
It was the “eating our food” part that seemed to worry my mom the most.
I remember exactly one Vietnam War story, which came right from my father’s lips. I was in the basement, and a cockroach skittered across my leg. I was about five. At that age, roaches terrified the shit out of me. I screamed and bolted upstairs, and my face smashed right into my father’s hard belly. “Roach! Roach!” I was yelling.
“Hey, cool your tool,” my dad told me. “Cockroaches are nothing. In the war we had scorpions, and they’d climb in your boots when you weren’t looking. If you didn’t shake them out of your boot, you were in trouble. One guy I knew stuck his foot inside his boot, turned white, then started yelling. He died a few minutes later.”
That’s my one Vietnam story.
Now that I thought about it, our longest conversations—consider that a euphemism—were about dying or death.
My first ever memory of my father was the two of us walking next to an in-ground pool. I must have been two or three years old. No idea where we were; nobody in family could afford a three-foot vinyl pool, let alone the in-ground version.
But the pool had a cover on it, weighed down with decorative stones at the edges. I must have started to walk near the pool, because my father’s hand clamped down on my shoulder. Uh-uh, he’d said. You go in there, there’d be no more Mickey.
No more Mickey.