Past Due

Chapter 6

I DIDN’T KNOW what it was about hospitals that pressed their weight upon me with a physical force the minute I entered one, whether it was the information lady with her perky smile, the doctors walking casually among desolation and death, the smell, the stuffy framed portraits of long-vanished healers, the sick, the really, really sick, the smell. Did I mention the smell? You know what I mean, eau de mortality, a fragrant mixture of rubbing alcohol, ammonia, green beans, false cheeriness, false hope, urine and sweat and lime green Jell-O. Whatever it was, I had the usual mordant sensation as I walked into the lobby of Temple University Hospital smack in the middle of North Philadelphia. Or maybe it was the fact that my father was on the fourth floor. Any building that housed my father, whether the decaying little bungalow in which I was raised or the sprawling multilevel inner-city hospital in which he now lay, had the same effect on me, something akin to dropping down down in the deep sea and feeling my chest compress from the weight.

He had collapsed on the steps of his home away from home, the grand and glorious Hollywood Tavern, in his sad suburban enclave of Hollywood, Pennsylvania. There was blood coming out of his mouth and his breath was wet, and in the ambulance they had enthusiastically pumped him full of drugs. By some miracle he had survived the trauma of the ambulance and, when he had been stabilized at Holy Redeemer Hospital, he had been transferred to Temple. The religious symbolism was deliciously inapt, but Temple was the only hospital in the area that performed the delicate yet brutal surgery his condition required. Now they were treating the pneumonia that had invaded his lungs and were waiting for him to gain enough strength so they could open up his chest and kill him proper.

“Hi, Dad,” I said with as much pep as I could muster.

“You’re back,” he said, matching my pep with his normal tone of bitter resignation. “You was just here. What, is your cable out?”

“Don’t be silly. I came to see you. But I do seem to remember the Sixers might be playing Orlando tonight. Do you want me to put it on?”

“What for? I seen enough gunners in the damn army to last me, I don’t need to see that Iverson bum.”

“He’s good. I like watching him play.”

He waved his hand in disgust. He could barely move, my father, lying on his bed, his face gray and drawn and unshaven, only sixty years old but looking like he’d already been buried twice as long. A clip bit into a finger of his waving hand, reading the oxygen level in his blood, now a paltry ninety-three percent. He barely had enough energy to breathe, sure, but he was never without enough energy to give the world a dismissive shove. “I seen Chamberlain play. Greer. Cunningham coming off the bench. After what I seen, he’s nothing.”

“So how are you doing?”

“I’m dying, how do you think I’m doing?”

“You’re not dying.”

“Yes I am, and it’s not such a bad thing neither. At least I earned it. I didn’t earn much in my life, but I earned this.”

I took off my coat, sat down beside his bed. “Nice to see you in a good mood for a change. What’s going on?”

“What the hell do you think is going on? I lie here and they stick things in me. Bloodsuckers, is what they are.”

“And you, of course, are being your normal, personable self.”

“You try smiling as they play voodoo with your body. If the sickness doesn’t kill me, they’ll do it themselves.”

I smiled indulgently. “Why so cheerful this evening?”

“They got this thing up my dick.”

“To help you pee.”

“Sixty years I didn’t need no help.”

“Want me to adjust it for you?”

“Stay the hell away from me, you bastard,” said my father. “So there’s that. And, I don’t know, I been thinking about things.”

“Oh, Dad, don’t do that,” I said. “That’s the wrong thing to do. Especially here. No good can come from it. We’ve both made it this far precisely by not thinking of things.”

“And look where we are.” He tried to shift in the bed, struggled to take a breath. His face enlivened brightly with pain. “Hell,” he said.

“Why don’t I turn on the game?”

“I been thinking about things,” he said. “I been thinking about… things.”

“The Sixers?”

“A girl.”

“Should I turn it on?”

“A pleated skirt.”

“Ah yes, pleated skirts. I’ve always liked them myself. Very flattering to the hips.”

“I need to tell you.”

“Sure, Dad. That’s fine. But how are you feeling? It looks like you’re in pain. Are you?”

“What do you think? Whenever I breathe. I haven’t slept in days.”

I jumped up. “Let me find a doctor.” Before he could reply, I was out the door.

“My father’s in a bit of agony,” I told the nurse behind the desk. “You think he could be given something to ease it for a time, maybe let him sleep.” The nurse told me to wait a moment as she went off to find the intern, and I stood dutifully at the nurses’ desk, playing the part of the dutiful son, glancing uneasily at the door to my father’s room, just down the hall.

I didn’t want to hear that he had been thinking of things, my father. I didn’t want to hear what he was thinking about. And I really really really didn’t want to hear about the girl in the pleated skirt that had suddenly popped into his consciousness as he stared un-blinking at his own mortality. The girl who got away, the girl who broke his heart, the girl, that girl, the girl, the one. It was all too sad and ordinary. It didn’t take much to imagine it all in one sad swoop. The shy glances, the sweet romance, and then the cheating, his or hers, it didn’t matter, the cheating and the recriminations, and then the breakup that left him sad and wounded, that left him weak and unguarded, like a boxer ready to fall into an exhausted embrace with the first girl who came along, even someone totally unsuited to him, even someone certifiable, someone like, well, like my mother, from which all his ruin and misery had come, including his only begotten son. No, I didn’t want to hear how with the girl in the pleated skirt everything would have been different, how with the girl in the pleated skirt life would have been more than a sad burden to be shouldered through to death. Because it wouldn’t have been different, my dad’s life, and we both knew it. My father was someone who trudged through life while others floated, a man who set a course of low expectations for himself and then mercilessly failed to meet them, a man who chose bitterness and anger because they just came naturally, dammit, and what do you know anyway, you little bastard.

“Are you Mr. Carl’s son?”

I pulled myself out of my self-absorption to see a set of scrubs and a chart and a woman wearing and holding them both. She was young and thin and her eyes, though tired, were very blue. And she was a doctor, Dr. Hellmann.

“Like the mayonnaise,” I said.

She smiled thinly as if she hadn’t heard that more than a thousand times before and then went right to the chart. “You said your father has been in acute distress, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“We don’t give opiates to COPDers.”

“Excuse me?”

“Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. It’s what your father has, it’s why he’s here. But there is something maybe I can prescribe to ease his pleuritic pain. It won’t put him to sleep, but it will let him sleep if the pain is keeping him up. I’ll need to talk to him first.”

“Sure,” I said as I followed her down the hall. “How’s he doing?”

“We’re waiting for the antibiotic to work.”

“Maybe you should pump in some Iron City. That’s his usual medication of choice.”

She looked at me with her eyes narrowed. “Is that a joke?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Try harder next time.”

“How long have you been on duty?” I asked.

“Thirty so far.”

“Maybe after thirty hours nothing is funny.”

“Maybe,” she said, as we reached my father’s door, “but I couldn’t stop laughing at the evening news. That Peter Jennings, he was just cracking me up. You, on the other hand…” She gave me a jolt of her baby blues as she backed into the room. “Wait here.”

I waited. She spoke to my father for a long while and came out, writing on the chart. “The nurse will be back in a moment with the Toradol,” she said. With a toss of her hair, she walked toward the desk without giving me another glance. Hellmann, Dr. Hellmann. Like the mayonnaise.

I stuck my head in my father’s room. “Good news, the nurse is going to bring you something for the pain.”

“It won’t do nothing,” he said. “Whatever they give me, it won’t work. Nothing works. It’s just something else to charge the insurance company.”

“I’m going down to the cafeteria to get a bite. You want anything?”

“Get me a beer.”

“I tried,” I said, “but the cute doctor said no way.”

“She ain’t that cute.”

“Remember old Doc Schaefer you took me to when I was a kid?”

“With the nose hair and the mole?”

“Well, she’s cuter than him. I’ll be right back.”

I went down to the cafeteria, bought a cup of coffee, a soggy egg salad sandwich, a bag of chips. I sat down at a table and had my dinner. I took my time, I was in no hurry. I chewed the egg salad very carefully. I ate the chips one at a time instead of in handfuls. I spent a long while deciding on which color Jell-O for dessert.

When I slipped back into my father’s room, he was lying peacefully, asleep, his wet breaths rising and falling softly like the waves of a distant ocean. I spoke to him and he didn’t respond, but I didn’t want to leave him just yet. I turned on the television. The Sixers’ game was in the third quarter, they were up by three. It looked to be a pretty good game, a game I couldn’t get on my currently cable-free TV. I sat back in the chair, propped my foot on my father’s bed, watched the telly, wondered when Dr. Hellmann might check back in so I could flirt a little more.

It was turning out to be a rather nice visit with the game on and my father asleep and Mrs. Parma’s signed contingency fee agreement in my briefcase. It had worked out just as I had hoped when I went to the nursing station to complain of his pain because I didn’t, I didn’t, I didn’t want to hear his story about the girl in the pleated skirt. There are some things a son just doesn’t want to hear from his father, and his story of the girl who got away was, I was sure, just such a thing.

And I was right, yes I was, right at least about it being a story I didn’t want to hear. But I was wrong when I thought I had dodged it, because my father, for some perverse reason of his own, which I was only to discover much later on, was determined that I hear it, every damn breath of it, and I would, yes, yes I would.

And in its own peculiar way, his story told me everything I needed to know about the plague that had reached out to kill Joey Parma, the plague of slavery to the past that had doomed Joey’s life, and maimed my own life as well.