My Present Age (26 page)

The music pounds. I strike a favourite pose of Mick’s, hand perched on hipbone, elbow flaring, head held arrogantly high, jaw thrust formidably forward in profile. A tubercular Mussolini. Then I saunter mincingly to the kitchen and back, slightly knock-kneed, kicking my heels out, swivelling my ample buttocks in imitation of Jagger’s insouciant manner.

I wail: “Start me up!” They’re going crazy in the front row, jumping up and down on the spot, breasts bobbling. I jackknife at the waist, lean out over the stage, primly squeeze my knees together, wag my forefinger naughtily at the munchkins vibrating like tuning forks. “You make a grown man crii-iiy!” I moan. They go nuts.

I retreat momentarily, prance spastically over to Keith, high-stepping it like the famed Lippizaner stallions of Vienna, veer back again toward my fans. My lips purse over the head of the microphone: “You make a grown man crii-iiy!”

“Mick! Mick! Mick!” they sob. My face is wet, my mouth is dry. I flounce around, offer them my back, wiggle my satin-swathed behind, cast a heavy-lidded glance over my left shoulder. They’re mine. “You make a grown man crii-iiy.”

When I spin to face them, I realize I don’t feel all that well. The room shudders with heat and alcohol; I feel unsteady strutting about on a patchwork quilt of light and darkness. I stumble, thrust my hand forward against a wall to save myself. “You make a grown man crii-iiy!” My undershorts are soaked. I pick at them, pulling them loose from my skin.

But I’m possessed. It doesn’t matter. I lift my hands over my head and begin to clap, pound my bare heels on the floor flamenco style. It feels good. I drive them down hard enough to make them ache. The right heel goes numb.

I’m whirling round and round, spinning, careening, smacking my palms together. The room blurs, light and darkness flash in my eyes, like flags unfurled and cracking in the wind.

“You make a grown man –”

It hurts. My elbow. I’ve fallen. Blood on my lip. I’ve bitten it. Legs don’t work. Shaking. I ought to crawl. Where’s that light come from? There’s too much light. My eyes don’t work in the light.

I glance up. The two figures in the open doorway are black cutouts, target men on a police firing range. The shock of seeing them makes something suddenly hurt in my chest. It feels like a muscle has ripped.

“Who?” A whisper.

One of them flicks a light switch. It dazzles my eyes. I blink, squint. I’m grunting too, panting. What is this? I’ve been hit in the chest with a brick. It’s smashed my sternum. I can’t lift my head; I’m staring into a slippery pool of polished hardwood. I hear footsteps.

“Who?” I say.

Two pairs of shoes stop. “He’s drunk,” someone says. Then: “Can you hear me?”

I can’t seem to talk. I reach for the shoe. It pulls back.

“There’s plaster all over my apartment.” McMurtry. I roll on to my back, press the pain in my chest with both hands, trying to hold it down, keep it from spreading. I look up two pairs of trouser legs; the faces hang over me. Rubacek and McMurtry.

Rubacek pitches his voice very high. “Can you hear me? Where’s my car keys?”

McMurtry’s feet give off an earthy odour. There’s a pee stain the size of a quarter centred in the crotch of his pants. He stoops down. The pull of gravity makes the loose skin sag away from the skull. He looks like death.

“Go through his pockets,” he says.

Rubacek shouts,
“Where’s my fucking car keys?”

I snatch at McMurtry’s pant leg. He pulls back, totters, almost falls.

“My chest,” I say. “It hurts.”

“What?”

“He’s drunk,” says McMurtry disdainfully.

“He doesn’t look too hot,” says Rubacek.

“My chest. Please. It hurts.”

“Now he’s crying,” says McMurtry. “Shame.”

“Y
ou’re still in your hospital gown,” observes the nurse.

I am sitting in a chair by the window, and balanced on my red, scurfy knees is the note pad I sent the candy-striper down to the tuck shop for several hours ago. I don’t lift my eyes from it. I’m making a list. My pencil hovers above the page and then scratches down another name.
James Agee
.

“Dr. Keitel has signed your release. It’s one-thirty now. You’ll have to be out by two o’clock. All right?”

I don’t answer.
Dan Blocker
.

“If you have nobody to pick you up I can call you a taxi from the nursing station,” she offers. “Would you like me to call you a taxi?”

“No.”
Elton John
.

Out of the corner of my eye I watch her step into the hallway and beckon. Her legs, encased in white hose, are muscular chalk. She and her superior confer. “What do you mean you don’t think he’s going to leave? He’s been discharged. He’s
got
to leave.”

“Yes,” agrees the nurse, “of course, he’ll have to leave. But what if …?”

“What if what?”

“What if he won’t?” She’s coaxed me two or three times to get dressed and I’ve ignored her. The nurse says that in her opinion I’m scared to leave the hospital.

She’s right.

There I go, pressing too hard again. The lead has cut through the paper.
Mama Cass
.

“Well, damn it, give him fifteen minutes to make up his mind to get unscared. We’ve got a surgery to be admitted at two. If he isn’t out of there by then, call me,” she says grimly. “Where is he? In here?”

“Yes.”

She pokes her head in the door. “Okay, get your pants on. Shore leave at two, sailor.” She’s gone, her passage marked by a starchy whisper of garments.

Elvis Presley, Roy Clark
.

What the younger nurse said is true. I don’t want to leave the hospital because I’m afraid. At first I was afraid to be here, and now I’m afraid not to be here. Because this is the place they have the tubes that go up your nose and into your veins to keep you alive. This is the place that doctors and nurses stand alert, ready to fire a stalled heart with jumper cables, or hook up a respirator to inflate and deflate weakened lungs.

I can’t sleep. The first night, the day before yesterday, they gave me a strong sedative and a muscle relaxant, so I managed a little shut-eye. But I slept in fits and starts and could not stop myself from dreaming that it was my father who had had the heart attack. I would wake with a start, again and again, each time confused as to where I was, incapable of thinking anything but: He’s dead. My father’s dead.

Gradually I came to see this wasn’t so. I remembered it wasn’t Pop who had had the heart attack, but me. And then the truly awful realization took hold, that this was worse than the dream. Better Pop than me. Better anyone than me.

But slowly, gratefully, body and mind gave way to the drugs. Just at the moment the dream began again, I experienced a stab of
recognition; I tried to fight free of it, knowing what was coming, but by then it was too late.

The dream was the same each time.

It is a murderously hot day in Texas. I’m sure it’s Texas. My father is walking on the shoulder of a highway toting a gas can. My mother and I are sitting in the stalled car watching him approach. Behind him lie brown fields, a white sky.

My mother says, in a flat voice, “He doesn’t look well. He’s getting old.”

“Not Pop. He looks like a million bucks.”

I take my eyes from him for only a second, to light a cigarette. Mother screams.

My head jerks up. He’s gone. Everything is gone. Pop, gas can, everything.

My mother shrieks, “The angels came! The angels snatched your daddy away!”

The white Texas sky is full of fire, fire twisting and shaking and leaping. Why doesn’t anyone else pay it any mind? Cars continue to tear by us, in monotonous succession, with a whine and sizzle of tires barely audible above the windy roar of flame lapping at our roof and the broken sounds of my mother’s grief.

I’d rather make this list than think of that.

Arthur Ashe
.

Last night the duty nurse caught me talking to the other patient in my room, the stroke victim they moved to neurology this morning, Mr. Beattie, a gentleman my father’s age. He was brought in sunk in a coma, breathing deeply, pinkish eyelids fluttering, beaky nose tilted at the ceiling. For nearly sixteen hours he never moved.

About two o’clock this morning I heard myself speaking to Mr. Beattie. I had made an unconscious shift from thinking to talking. I was aware of the low murmur of words in the room and that brought me up short. I paused and listened intently. The ward was heavy with a suppressed kind of quiet, different from true stillness.
Far off down the corridor I could hear an old woman faintly calling, “Nursie! Nursie!” She’d been doing that off and on for most of the night.

I started to talk again. I don’t know how long I’d been speaking to Mr. Beattie when he gave me a fright. Suddenly his long, bony hand sprang off the bedclothes and gripped the railing on his bed so violently that the bars shook with the vehemence of his grip.

I broke off, waited. There was nothing else. He didn’t move again. The hand clung fiercely to the bar, the knobbed arthritic fingers I’d noticed earlier in the day twisted clumsily around the chrome. I thought he might be waiting too, waiting for the sound of my voice before he summoned his strength to pull himself upright.

I raised myself up on my elbow and continued. “Ain’t this a solemn night a-layin’ on our backs admirin’ them stars? Ain’t it still? And looky at that town up high on that black hill, just looky at them bully winder lights! Lord, looky at the lights on that hill, Jim!”

The nurse in the doorway behind me said: “Is there something the matter with Mr. Beattie?”

I threw a look over my shoulder. I couldn’t make out her face because she stood solid and dark against the soft night lamps of the corridor. They outlined her figure in an aura of ragged, spiky light.

I didn’t know what to say. The best I could manage was, “I think he moved.”

She went past me to his bedside.

“His hand,” I said, pointing.

She prised his fingers loose with some difficulty. “There,” she said, “there, Mr. Beattie.” The nurse forced it down along his side, stuffed it like wadding between his hip and the bars.

She turned to me. “Can you sleep?” she asked. “Do you want something more to help you sleep?”

“No,” I said, “I can sleep.” I was afraid of the dreams of the night before.

“Try not to pay him any attention. They often talk gibberish,” she explained to me. “Try and ignore him if you can.”

She left our room. I listened for the squeak of her crepe soles to fade away. When they did I propped myself back up. “Listen to that water,” I went on, “ain’t it soft? Cain’t you smell the mud in the river? Ain’t it good?”

And up, up from the pale coverlet the thin arm levitated, up through the darkness it rose, until his fingers found the uppermost bar and closed gently.

Peter Sellers?
He must have had the first one before he was forty-five.

My list is lengthening. I didn’t know I’d squirrelled away in my mind such a dreary roll call of trivia. There are a lot of them, aren’t there? Famous People Aged Forty-Five and Younger Stricken With Heart Attacks. I actually scribbled that heading at the top of the page. It’s a sign of mild shock, I suppose, doing this. Keeps control of my thoughts though, focuses them. The word
stricken
is an indication of my state of mind. I wouldn’t normally use such a word. Hate it in headlines and news reports: Family Stricken With Grief.

A really surprising number of the famous are stricken, which leads me to wonder how many ordinary folk of the same age must have keeled over, unremarked, because of defective pumps. People I wouldn’t hear about because their coronaries aren’t news. It’s apparently not as unusual to have a heart attack at thirty-one as I once would have thought.

I catch myself listening to it now. If you’re really worried about the condition of your heart, there’s no need to fiddle for a pulse. It’ll interrupt a conversation. Take my word for it. It’ll thump so loudly for attention you won’t hear a word being said to you; sitting on a hard chair you can feel it chock-chocking in your buttocks. I’ve learned all this in the past thirty-six hours.

I’ve been waiting for a warning twinge. This morning, after my third EKG since I was admitted two nights ago, I caught myself shuffling down the corridor, leaning on the railing bolted
to the wall, taking it easy. I sometimes even have a picture of my heart in my mind – tender, bruised, the tissues empurpled and livid with strain.

I’m a maniac. Whatever possessed me? I know better. A sedentary fat man shouldn’t leap around his living room in a frenzy. A sleepless, stressed, sedentary fat man especially shouldn’t leap around his living room in a frenzy. Top it off with the blood-pressure problem you’ve had since you were twenty-five, Ed, and your stupidity stretches the bounds of credulity. Not to mention the liquor. You’ve read about the strain alcohol puts on the heart, how it constricts arteries, restricts the easy functioning of valves. Christ.

The pain. It felt as if a wedge were being pounded into my breastbone with a mallet, as if I were splitting. I sat up, it didn’t help. I lay down, it didn’t help. I groaned, it didn’t help. I gave up groaning, no change.